Pursuit

by Elizabeth Jennings

Genres: Romance; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

With a powerful voice and unstoppable suspense, Elizabeth Jennings makes her Forever debut. A shocking betrayal...her father's murder...and a life-threatening accusation...Heiress Charlotte Court has walked into a waking nightmare-one that sends her running from her wealthy home to anywhere she can hide. Across the border in Mexico, Charlotte creates a new identity and finds refuge in the battle-torn arms of Navy SEAL Matt Sanders. Fleeing his past, Matt yearns to protect her and replace her pain with pleasure. But Charlotte can't trust anyone, not even someone she's starting to love. She knows she's a target-and out of sight, a soulless killer is zeroing in on his prey...

Release date: April 1, 2008

Publisher: Forever Yours

Print pages: 340

Sample

Warrenton, Upstate New York

February 20

Eight billion dollars.

All that was standing in the way of $8 billion was an old man dying of pancreatic cancer and his cold bitch of a daughter. Once Philip and Charlotte Court were dead, he could cash in. In about an hour, it would be a done deal.

Robert Haine ran his finger over the preliminary contract with the Pentagon. The figure was written in letters and digits, simple laser-produced strokes of ink on paper, but he found it impossible to lift his hand from the document.

Haine wasn’t a fanciful man—indeed, being a cold-eyed realist had taken him far in life—but it seemed to him that the letters grew warm under his fingers.

Eight billion dollars. On May 30. He’d be a billionaire in three months’ time. True, the money wasn’t, strictly speaking, his. Strictly speaking, it belonged to Court Industries, or rather to Philip Court and his beautiful daughter, Charlotte. It would have been his by rights if Charlotte had married him. That had been the plan. But his careful courtship of her had gone nowhere. The tasteful expensive gifts, the flowers, the dinner invitations—all turned down.

Still, he was CEO of the company, and the Proteus Project was his. His baby, his idea, rammed through over the objections of the Courts.

Haine was now a mega-rainmaker. Billion-dollar contracts were the stuff of legend, and he’d suddenly become a man who could bring in ten digits, a man who had the power to move so much money it would take a train convoy to ship it in cash.

There was no going back. He couldn’t lose this.

He was rich now.

He was good at being rich, too. He knew how to do it right. The Courts, both father and daughter, sucked at it. Fuckers had had money for more generations than he’d had hot meals as a child, and you’d never know it. Philip dressed in old, comfortable clothes and ancient shoes made by an English cobbler a thousand years ago. He’d once boasted that the ragged old tweed jacket he had on had belonged to his father. Robert had nearly gagged.

They had a huge three-hundred-year-old pile of bricks along the river that hadn’t been renovated in fifty years. Everything in it was shabby. “Comfortable” they called it. There was no sense to it, either. Charlotte’s watercolors were hung right next to the two Winslow Homers her great-grandmother had bought from the painter himself. The Homers were worth a cool $2 million, and Charlotte’s watercolors were worth exactly zero since she didn’t exhibit, but there they were—together on the same wall. Charlotte could have had all the jewelry she wanted, but all she ever wore were her mother’s and grandmother’s rings.

And Charlotte herself… with those cool gray eyes studying him, finding him wanting.

If she had accepted him in her bed, he’d have showered her with Bulgari rings and Damiani bracelets, but the little bitch wouldn’t give him the time of day. Nothing he could do would catch her attention for more than a minute. He might as well have been a neutered dog. Here he was, saving her company for her, and she couldn’t look at him for more than a minute without yawning.

There was nothing he could do to impress her. She didn’t seem to give a shit that he’d taken the company from the brink of bankruptcy and had turned it around in five years. No matter that instead of a slow slide into bankruptcy, the end of a company that had been in the Court family since 1854, Court Industries had been turned into a leading-edge provider of precision equipment and that he’d worked eighteen-hour days for years to do it. He’d saved the Courts’ asses, and they weren’t even noticing. Philip Court was on a respirator, dying, and Charlotte Court didn’t care about anything but her father.

What the fuck did she care if the company went under? She probably had enough socked away for life. Charlotte had a rich aunt in Chicago who’d left her a bundle she hadn’t even touched. There was enough crap in that musty old mansion of theirs to keep her for a hundred years. No, Miss Cold Bitch would never know poverty and degradation, would never live in a trailer park. She had no idea how low you can fall and never would.

Well, she’d asked for it.

Charlotte had no clue that when she refused him first, then the Pentagon contract, she had suddenly made herself into a roadblock, a wall to his ambitions.

All his life Haine had been able to see the next step and the one beyond that and channel his energy in the direction he wanted events to go. It always amazed him that people could be so blind to consequences, not see. Haine could. He could war-game it so easily.

Philip Court was about to die—Haine checked his watch, the slimmest of Huguets—in about twenty minutes. Wasn’t even murder, really. Just a little speeding up of the natural schedule.

Haine had outsourced that task to his chief of security, Martin Conklin, and his team. Conklin was scheduled to call in half an hour to say that part one of the mission was complete. Philip Court was dead in his intensive care unit. That was easy—who was going to do an autopsy on a guy dying of pancreatic cancer, wasting away in some elegant private clinic, listening to Mozart? Conklin—who was good at impersonations—would place the call to Charlotte. Ms. Court, this is Sebastian Orvis at Parkwood Hospital. I’m afraid I have some bad news. He’d then drive to the dangerous curve on Overlook, where Charlotte would lose her life.

Haine started rehearsing the solemn tones he’d use at the club, lamenting the tragedy over a vodka martini.

Well, you know how distraught Charlotte’s been lately. Practically living in that hospital room. Beautiful young woman like that, it’s not natural, spending all her time with a sick man. There had to be a reaction. Such a loving daughter, but she was exhausted. And you know what the road is like just above Overlook. That’s a really tricky curve. Why just the other day, my car slipped and almost bounced off the guardrail at that exact point. Charlotte’s never been a good driver. The car just spun out of control. What a tragedy. What a waste. Court Industries? Why I guess I’ll just have to carry on without Philip. That’s what he would have wanted. Charlotte, too.

Haine trusted Conklin to run her off the road. He’d been trained and trained well in offensive driving.

The phone rang and Haine frowned when he saw the caller ID. It was way too soon for Conklin to be calling.

“Yes?” Haine answered. As always, no names. Not on cell phones, not on landlines.

“We got a problem.” The cell-phone connection was lousy, crackling and hissing. Was Conklin panting?

“What?” Haine’s voice was calm, but the hairs on his neck were standing up. This was supposed to be easy. It was just a thing that had to be done to get to the other side of the road, without any fuss.

“She was there already.”

Every hair on his body was standing up.

“Bitch whacked me with the IV tree. A nurse got in the way, and I had to take her down, too. But I winged Court. Through the shoulder, I think. She’s bleeding, I followed her trail out of the hospital, but she’s gone.”

Shitshitshit!!!

And then it came to him complete, like a storyboard.

“I’m going to have to go down to police headquarters. Can you meet me there?”

“Yeah. There’s going to be fallout, though. The old guy’s room is a mess, and there’s a dead nurse outside.”

Haine was thinking fast. He had ten men in CI’s Security Department to deploy. He’d hired well. They were loyal to him, not the company.

“Don’t worry about that. You’ll be meeting up with Vaneyck, Oakley, and Ryan outside police headquarters. Stop Charlotte from getting into the police station. Use any means you want, but make sure she doesn’t get through. No matter what.” Conklin would know exactly what he meant. “Send the rest of the men to the Court mansion. Don’t let her get in. The gun you shot the nurse with—is it untraceable?”

“Of course.” Conklin sounded shocked.

“What is it?”

“Smith & Wesson 908.”

Perfect, Haine thought. It only weighed twenty-four ounces and had a small grip. The kind of gun a woman would choose.

“Wipe it down. Did you load the magazine like I told you?”

“With latex gloves? Yeah.”

Okay. There would be no fingerprints on the weapon traceable back to Conklin. Now they needed Charlotte’s fingers. With or without her hand attached.

Haine war-gamed the new version. For the benefit of Chief Brzynski and that new anchorwoman on WRCTV, the cute one with the tight ass, what was her name? Anna. Anna Lorenzetti.

Poor Charlotte, I guess she finally just… broke down. Maybe I should have seen the signs. She told me a couple of months ago she felt hunted, there were enemies everywhere. She even told me she’d acquired an illegal weapon. A Smith & Wesson, I think she said. She’s been acting very erratically, Anna. Said she hadn’t slept well in months, and she was looking very poorly.

Who on earth could imagine it would come to this?

I sent my head of security to check on how Philip was doing in the hospital. We miss him very much at the office. Conklin said he caught Charlotte smothering her father with a pillow. I guess she just couldn’t stand to see him suffer anymore.

I’m sure she wasn’t herself when she shot that nurse. The stress was just too much for her.

Here a slow sorrowful shake of the head. Sad, pensive expression.

What a waste, Anna. What a terrible waste.

Wonderful story. Played very well. It would play particularly well with Chief Brzynski. A month ago Haine hinted that Brzynski could count on a 200K-a-year job with Court Industries after retirement. It was all in place.

Now all that was missing was a dead Charlotte.

“Take her down, Conklin. I want men around her house and in a perimeter around police headquarters. Tell your men to shoot on sight. Make sure you get to the body before the cops do and plant that gun on her. Fold her fingers around it. Say she was drawing on you and you shot in self defense.” Haine stopped and did some calculations. The amount had to be just right. Enough to be a strong motivator but not so much they’d be too eager to take precautions. “Tell the men there’s a thirty-thousand-dollar bonus for the one who bags her.”

Haine disconnected and started dressing to go out. It was snowing. He hesitated a moment. The cashmere Armani overcoat would get soaked. Better to go with the Shearling.

Warrenton, New York

February 20

Fill it up!”

Charlotte Court buzzed down the window of her maid’s SUV and shouted over the howling wind at the gas-station attendant. She was shaking with shock and pain and grief, huddled in her down jacket against the icy sleet pinging against her face.

Underneath the jacket, blood was seeping out of the makeshift bandage she’d packed against the bullet wound. Her heart was also bleeding grief for her father, still and dead on his hospital bed, murdered by one of Robert’s minions. Of the shocks of the past two hours, that was the worst—knowing her father was dead.

She needed a safe place to hole up. Robert’s men had been at the police station and had surrounded her home. The profile of an armed man outside the gates of her home had been visible against the dying light. Whatever was going on, she needed to get away from Robert, get medical attention, then call in the murder of her father and the attack on her life to the FBI.

A motel was a possibility. She was driving her maid’s SUV. Moira had even left her brand-new American passport in the glove compartment, so she could check into the hotel as Moira Charlotte Fitzgerald. Then from there she could call…

Charlotte jumped as a face with a straggly moustache plastered itself against the passenger-side window. “That’ll be seventy bucks, ma’am,” the man screamed against the wind.

Charlotte bumped her left shoulder against the door in turning toward her purse and nearly blacked out from the pain. She had to breathe slowly through her nose until the worst had passed. Thank God she was wearing black. Blood from the wound had seeped slowly through the down jacket and left a red, wet sheen on the left-hand-side door.

No credit card. Whatever Robert was up to, he had the resources to track credit-card payments. So she handed most of the small amount of cash she had over to the attendant and drove around to the side of the station.

The restrooms were way in the back, past rows of shelves with junk food, soda pop, maps, and movie magazines. Were there any OTC medications? A couple of aspirin might just dull the pain a little. Or even better, ibuprofen.

She heard her father’s name mentioned and another stab of grief nearly brought her to her knees. Her eyes welled, her heart thumped painfully at the thought that she’d never see her father again.

Then another name caught her attention.

To her horror, someone was calling her name! Charlotte cringed, ready to run, when she realized that except for a very bored young teen bopping her head to the beat of an iPod, she was alone in the shop.

What…?

Her name was being blared from the TV fixed to a bracket high up on the wall. There was a big-hair female anchor. A photograph of Charlotte was in the upper-left-hand corner of the screen.

Police are on the lookout for Charlotte Court, heiress to Court Industries. She is wanted for questioning in the death of her father, Philip Court of Court Industries at Parkwood Hospital and the shooting death of Imelda Delgado, a trauma nurse at the hospital. Police warn that Ms. Court may be armed and must be considered dangerous. Anyone sighting Ms. Court is warned not to approach her but to contact the authorities at…

Oh my God! She was wanted for murder! Not only did she have to escape Robert and his goons, she had to avoid the police! Armed and dangerous. They’d shoot her on sight. And worse—Robert was friends with the chief of police. If she were in custody, he’d find a way to get to her.

Charlotte made it back to the SUV, gasping with panic. She pulled out of the gas-station lot as quickly as the ice on the road allowed and headed west, hoping to make it across the state line before she fainted.

By nightfall, Haine was pacing, impatiently waving away his housekeeper’s offer of dinner.

The bitch had gotten away. He didn’t know how she had done it, but she’d disappeared off the face of the Earth.

She couldn’t get far, though. She hadn’t been back to Court Mansion, so she wouldn’t have much money. The instant she used her credit card, they’d be on top of her.

He’d spent the day at police headquarters, and an APB had been put out for one Charlotte Court, suspected of murder, considered armed and dangerous.

The state police would be alert, but Haine trusted Conklin’s men more than he trusted the police. Conklin’s men were good—they were fast, and they were ruthless. They’d find her first and deliver a corpse.

It wouldn’t be long. Charlotte was wounded and on the run, the object of a manhunt.

No, Haine thought with a slow smile. A womanhunt.

Somewhere in Kansas

Crest Motor Court

February 24

Charlotte Court stared at her pale, exhausted face in the cracked, spotted bathroom mirror. Her skin was paper white, except for the patchy red fever flags on her cheekbones. Whatever her temperature was, she didn’t want to know. All she knew was that it was high. Fever floated in her veins, making her light-headed, slightly hallucinatory. For a moment, there were two white-faced Charlottes reflected in the dark-spotted mirror with the backing nearly completely eaten away on the left-hand side.

The only good thing about looking like someone about to circle the drain was that she bore no resemblance whatsoever to the photograph that until two days ago had been broadcast over every TV station on Earth, it seemed. The photograph had been taken at the Red Cross charity ball, and she’d spent an entire day at Elizabeth Arden’s in preparation. The white-faced woman staring back at her in the mirror bore no resemblance to the polished, coiffed, bejeweled, heavily made-up woman in the photograph.

Right now, she looked ten years older, ten pounds lighter, and $10 million poorer than in the photograph. Last night, somewhere in Illinois, she’d washed her hair one-handed. The motel’s hairdryer didn’t work, so she’d fallen into bed with her hair wet. It was a universe away from Pierre’s frothy coiffure, which had taken him all afternoon to concoct before the charity ball.

The Red Cross ball photograph had migrated all over the newspapers over the past four days. It had been front-page, above-the-fold news the first day. Then it had slipped to below the fold, then onto page three, from color to black and white, and had finally disappeared altogether while several other news cycles cranked their way through the public consciousness.

The story of Charlotte Court, double murderer, had become a low background hum by the time she made it to Chicago.

That was good because she didn’t have the strength to do much more than keep her head down whenever she saw a security camera. And she’d run out of money.

She’d almost run completely out of cash and had coasted to her Great Aunt Willa’s street on fumes. Great Aunt Willa, bless her heart, had passed away at Christmas, leaving everything she owned to Charlotte, who had been unwilling to leave her father to settle the estate. Great Aunt Willa had been rich and, even better, crazy as a loon. One of her eccentricities was to always keep vast amounts of cash on hand. What she called “walking around money.”

Charlotte had the keys to Great Aunt Willa’s house—technically her house, now—because she’d been meaning to take a quick trip to Chicago when her father’s health allowed it, and it never had.

After a morning’s search, she found Aunt Willa’s stash. A little under fifty thousand dollars in cash in four shoeboxes in Aunt Willa’s walk-in closet that could have housed a family of four.

As she closed the door of the big mansion behind her, she vowed that she would one day return, with a cleared name. Her next step was a Western Union wannabe in a poor part of town, where migrant workers sent their wages back home to their families. She chose the scruffiest remittance counter she could, with the most bored-looking employees.

They didn’t even question it when Moira Charlotte Fitzgerald sent nine thousand to Moira Charlotte Fitzgerald in Warrenton, New York. The same for another remittance agency several blocks away. In all, she sent Moira eighteen thousand dollars, which is what her SUV had cost her.

She’d made off with Moira’s pride and joy. Moira had saved two years for that black monster. Charlotte couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t pay Moira back.

Once she’d wired the money, she put the two receipts in an envelope and mailed them to Moira’s home, disguising her handwriting. The process exhausted her.

Her only consolation was that, after buying a second-hand huge, shapeless, hooded down coat in a Goodwill that reached to her ankles, a black wool watch cap and enormous sunglasses, her own father wouldn’t have recognized her.

Security cameras were everywhere these days, she knew. So if by chance she was on film somewhere, the camera had caught images of a woman moving so slowly she could have been eighty years old, dressed in a shapeless coat, with a hood and sunglasses. No one could ever have recognized her as Charlotte Court.

Time and distance from Warrenton were taking her farther and farther away from immediate danger. And the shoulder wound was making her look less and less like Charlotte Court, heiress and socialite.

That was the good news. The bad news was that the wound had become infected, and the infection wasn’t showing any signs of going away.

Exhaustion made her sway slightly. She clutched the dirty edges of the washbasin for balance. One look at the moldy Fungus City pad in the plastic shower stall had her opting for a sponge bath. The faucet yielded up a reluctant gurgle of yellowish, warmish water. By the time she finished cleaning up, she could barely stand.

Oh, God, she missed her father fiercely. Of course, he wouldn’t have been much help in this particular instance. Philip Court was—had been—notoriously impractical. He wasn’t too good at dressing bullet wounds or evading cops, but he knew how to comfort. Her father seemed to have had a book to recommend for every life event. She couldn’t count the times she’d felt better just by having him hug her and fix a cup of tea.

A single tear ran down the pale, drawn face in the mirror. If she dwelled on how much she missed her father, she’d lose the last of her reserves, and there was still one more task to face before she could sleep, though bile rose in her throat at the thought.

She stood naked in the bathroom, feet curling on the cold, damp tiles.

Charlotte stared at her shoulder, at the bloodstained gauze that had been pristine white that morning, hating what was coming next. The first time she’d tried to tough it out, tearing the bloody packing off in one decisive, painful rip, she’d woken up half an hour later on the bathroom tiles with a huge bump to her head.

Still, experience told her that it was better to do it in one go. Her right hand lifted to her left shoulder and with a decisive, painful rip, she tore the bloody packing off and clenched her teeth to stifle the scream. The fiery pain made her head swim and her stomach clench. Luckily, there was nothing in her stomach to throw up.

It was worse than yesterday. She leaned forward and examined her shoulder carefully in the mirror. Yes, it was definitely worse. The wound hadn’t closed completely yet. It still suppurated sullenly, blood leaking out at a slow but constant pace. Part of it had scabbed over, but she could see pus at the edges of the scab. The skin was raw and red, inflamed and painful to the touch. To her horror, she could see a small streak of red angling downwards.

So far she’d managed without stitches, but the infection was getting out of control. At a loss for antibiotics, she’d remembered going to a farmer’s supply store when her collie, Yeats, had caught his paw in a hunter’s trap. The store hadn’t blinked at selling her antibiotics over the counter. So Charlotte had stopped that morning in one of the thousand anonymous small farming towns in Illinois and had bought antibiotics for a nonexistent collie weighing sixty pounds. That way all she had to do was double the dosage the friendly man behind the counter had given her.

She’d stopped at a supermarket to buy candy, fruit juice, bandages, and the largest size possible of Ziploc bags. Opening one of the bags, she filled it with the first of the three plastic bottles of hydrogen peroxide she’d bought at a drugstore.

Gritting her teeth, she raised the hydrogen peroxide-filled Ziploc bag until it was slightly higher than her shoulder, leaned forward into the sink, and punctured a corner of the bag with the sharp end of the pencil the hotel provided. Immediately, a gush of liquid poured out, hissing and bubbling at contact with her skin, irrigating the wound. Charlotte wanted to scream with pain but didn’t dare. She didn’t dare do anything that would call attention to herself.

It was like being stuck through the shoulder with a red-hot poker. It actually hurt more than when she’d been shot. Then she’d been filled with adrenaline, so enraged at witnessing her father’s murder, then so panicked at realizing that Conklin was trying to kill her, too, that she’d barely felt the bullet going through.

Right now, though, it felt as if all the pain in the world had rolled into a fiery ball that had found a home in her shoulder.

Her left hand, slippery with blood, slipped on the rim of the dirty washbasin. She clenched harder, until her shaking knuckles turned white. It would have helped to use both hands to squeeze the bag, in order to increase the water pressure, but she had to hold on to the basin or fall to the floor. She filled the bag again and lifted it. The face looking back at her in the mirror was now gray, with huge beads of sweat on the forehead. Bracing herself, she irrigated the wound again, locking her jaw against the scream that tickled her throat.

Again and again she filled the bag until the liquid from the wound ran pale pink in the sink instead of bright red.

The pain was blinding. Her hands and knees were shaking by the time she’d finished. Though she could barely stand up, there was more still to do.

Opening the packet of antibiotic powder for dogs, she sprinkled it liberally over the wound, hoping against hope that her physiology was close enough to that of a dog to kill the bacteria. By the time she’d finished putting packing on the wound and taping it, she was trembling so hard she could barely stand up.

There was still one thing left to do—clean up the bloody mess she’d made. Using the towels to wipe off the blood would have been stupid. Instead she used up an entire roll of toilet paper, flushing it all down the toilet.

It was possible that if some crime-scene analyst were to examine the bathroom, he’d find plenty of DNA, but Charlotte was certain that unless she did something to call attention to herself, it would be all right. Tomorrow the cleaning crew would come in with bleach and eliminate all traces.

By the time she was finished, Charlotte was exhausted and sweaty and whiter. . .