Chapter 5

Small solar lightslit the path leading to her mother’s treasured gazebo. Kayla’s mind wasn’t on the tidy pebbles beneath her feet, but on the gorgeous, perplexing man she’d left inside.

Everything about her brief encounter with Ash—Cameron—had been off. From his ridiculous effort at flirtation to his odd stillness to his attempt at getting her alone. She didn’t buy his lame reason for needing a private audience with her. She would be the very last person he would go to for an opinion on art.

But damn, he looked good in his evening finery. Dark hair smoothed into place, clean-shaven, black tie, tailored suit molded to his broad shoulders and powerful hips.

How many nights had she lain awake pretending her hand was his as she pleasured herself until her aching cry pierced the shadows of her lonely bedroom?

She would never forget that infinitesimal moment of raw connection they’d shared when they first met. The moment before her friend Liv Westcott had introduced them. The moment his admiring gaze had taken in every inch of her.

His desire had penetrated her armor and hadn’t stopped until it reached her very core. Not before Asher Cameron Blackwell had entered her life, and definitely not after, had she experienced anything so powerful, so exhilarating, so pulse-pounding with another man.

Etched even more permanently in her memory was when his desire had blinked out as soon as he heard her name. She would have given away her entire fortune to have been anyone else but Kayla Krowne, in that moment.

His insistence that she use his FBI alias hurt. She’d sat in on intense BARS meetings and hilarious Blackwell family dinners. She wasn’t a stranger, dammit. Yet she couldn’t say the two of them were friends, either.

What they did have, no matter how hard he tried to scowl it away, was sizzling attraction.

She pushed away thoughts of Cameron—hell with it, Ash—and his odd behavior to mentally prepare for whatever awaited her at the end of the path. Getting a text from one of her aunties wasn’t unusual. In fact, the trio had made a habit of checking in on her. Almost as if they each had entered “Text Kayla” on a specific time and day in their individual calendars.

But tonight’s text from Vicky had a clandestine quality to it.

Meet me at the gazebo in ten minutes. Alone.

Did the governor want to update her on HB821, away from prying ears? Why? She’d been surrounded by trusted souls. What had been so earth-shattering that she couldn’t speak of it in front of her friends?

Or did Vicky want to speak to her about something more personal? Maybe she wanted Kayla to act as an intermediary again with her estranged daughter.

Four years separated her and Linda. Kayla had been like an older sister to the girl, even pulling duty as a sitter when her teenage schedule allowed.

When Vicky decided the time was right to run for governor, Linda had been right there, doing what she could to support her mother’s ambitions. However, not long after Vicky’s husband died in a tragic accident, Linda’s adulation of her mother slowly devolved into something venomous.

Where once mother and daughter had finished each other’s sentences, now Linda seemed to despise everything her mother stood for. Maybe even her mother.

Kayla didn’t understand her friend’s shocking transformation. In many ways, Linda was the same. Her favorite color was still orange, she still had a soft spot for abandoned dogs, and she still measured every sci-fi horror flick against the classic Aliens film.

Yet her politics colored her worldview in such a way as there was no room for gray. Only pitch-black and stark white.

If not for Vicky’s pleas of assistance, especially now that Linda was expecting her first child, Kayla would have distanced herself from Linda long ago. But for Vicky, she kept trying to reconnect with that teenaged girl who had adored her mother and loved spending Saturday afternoons browsing art museums with her friend.

As far as Kayla knew, Vicky had kept Jillian and the aunties in the dark about the severity of her fractured relationship with her daughter. For all her many positives, the governor was a proud woman and her failed relationship with Linda wasn’t an area of her life she’d want dissected.

Nearing the gazebo, Kayla frowned when she realized the interior lights were off. Her mother always lit up the structure, inside and out, for guests who needed to escape the crush.

She could have sworn the lights illuminating the gazebo’s dome had been on when she’d stepped off the veranda. Wariness slowed her steps and her pulse kicked up a notch. Her attention left the path and skittered from shrub to tree to endless shadows.

With each step, she questioned her memory. Maybe she hadn’t seen the dome lit up at all. Maybe she’d mistaken the gazebo for their neighbor’s back patio. They used similar party lights on their ginormous pergola.

The more she thought about it, the more she convinced herself of the mistake. Feeling ridiculous, she crossed the structure’s threshold and reached for the switch.

“Leave it off, please,” a familiar female voice said from the depths of the wooden structure.

“Aunt Vicky, why are you lurking in the dark?”

The governor peeled away from the shadowed back wall. “Kayla, thank you for coming.”

“Of course. Is everything okay? Where are Glenn and Ford?” The governor’s security detail was never far away.

“They’re taking a long bathroom break.”

It wasn’t unusual for Vicky to dismiss her bodyguards in order to have a private conversation, but they generally just hovered farther away.

“This must be serious.”

“There’s something I need to tell you. Something you must keep to yourself. For now.”

Kayla moved deeper into the gazebo. “I would never break a confidence. You know this.”

“Promise me.” She hesitated a moment. “Not even your mother.”

Kayla’s heart gave a hard beat. What could be so sensitive that Vicky would cut out her friend? Something inside her warmed at the thought that Vicky, the governor, trusted her with the information above all others. “You have my word.”

A small smile appeared on Vicky’s face, and she reached for Kayla. “Thank you.”

Kayla rushed forward to take the older woman’s trembling hands. “Of course?—”

The pointy toe of her silver stiletto caught beneath the floral outdoor rug that covered much of the gazebo’s floor. She stumbled, but managed to break her nosedive by grabbing the arm of a nearby chaise longue.

Righting herself, she lifted her gaze, amused embarrassment stretching across her mouth.

Until she spotted the perfect hole drilled into the center of Vicky’s forehead. A trickle of dark blood oozed from its center.

The governor—her godmother—crumbled to the floor, as if every bone in her body had turned to dust.

Kayla screamed.