Shattered. Joan Johnston

readjusted the pillows behind her on the hospital bed, then tugged awkwardly at her cotton hospital gown. She needed time to decide how she was going to answer the angry question posed by her mother-in-law, Texas governor and presidential hopeful Ann Wade Pendleton.

      “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kate said warily.

      “I’m asking who you bedded down with after you married my son. I’m asking who got you pregnant, because it sure as hell wasn’t J.D.”

      “What makes you say such a thing?” Kate replied. “Lucky and Chance—”

      “Are somebody else’s brats. Don’t bother lying. While you were in that coma, Lucky injured himself on a broken window and needed a transfusion. The twins’ blood type proves they aren’t my son’s children.”

      Kate blanched. She’d kept her secret for nine long years. She hadn’t told a single soul that her eightyear-old twin sons, Lucky and Chance, had been conceived with a man who was not her husband.

      “If I’m going to get myself chosen by the party as the next Republican presidential nominee, I need to know what bats might come flying out of the belfry,” Ann Wade said, her voice as sharp and cold as ice. “I can’t afford to have some cretin come forward in the middle of my campaign and name himself as the father of my grandsons.”

      Kate realized that Ann Wade wasn’t upset that she’d cheated on her husband. Wasn’t even upset that her grandsons possessed none of her blood. What had made Ann Wade so furious was the fear that Kate’s misstep might interfere with her political career.

      Kate felt sick to her stomach.

      She’d allied herself with the Pendleton family as a nineteen-year-old, still wincing from the stunning rejection she’d received from the man she really loved, Texas Ranger Jack McKinley. When Jack had married his high school sweetheart, J.D.’s admiration had been a balm for her wounded soul.

      She’d looked at J.D. Pendleton with stars in her eyes. What she’d seen was a University of Texas football hero with wavy blond hair and striking blue eyes.

      She hadn’t known J.D. was a man without honor, a spoiled child of privilege, who would cheat on her within a month of their wedding. Hadn’t known she was marrying a man who would fake his own death, desert his military post and flee to South America after blackmailing his own mother.

      Kate pictured the twins’ biological father in her mind’s eye, a tall, rangy man with silver-streaked black hair and steel-gray eyes. Remembered exactly how and why she’d gone to bed with him.

      She felt her face flush anew with the hurt and humiliation she’d felt on that long-ago night when she’d caught her husband in their hotel room with another woman in flagrante delicto and he’d told her, “Get the fuck out! Can’t you see I’m busy?”

      In a daze, her chest aching, she’d taken the elevator downstairs to the bar at the Austin, Texas, Four Seasons. She’d walked up to a perfect stranger, taken his large hand in hers and said, “Come with me.” She’d led him to the registration desk and said, “We need a room.”

      He’d supplied his black American Express card and took the key card the pretty desk clerk handed him. As they’d walked away he’d asked, “Are you sure you want to do this?”

      “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.”

      He’d been gentle and tender, more so than J.D. ever had. She’d been embittered and impassioned. The sex had been excoriating. She’d cried for half an hour in his arms afterward as he smoothed her long black hair behind her ears and kissed her forehead.

      She’d had to live the past nine years with the consequences of her rash act of defiance. She’d never told her lover that he’d become a father that night. It wasn’t until she’d seen him on Channel 12 News that she’d realized who he was. And the horror that might haunt them all if the truth were ever known.

      Kate felt her insides go cold. What if Ann Wade hired a private detective? The stranger had used a credit card to pay for the hotel room they’d used. Could it still be traced after all these years? The twins’ father might be exposed. The scandal would be enormous and devastating to her children, to her mother-in-law and to Jack McKinley, the man she had never stopped loving.

      Finding the stranger she’d slept with wouldn’t be easy. Predicting his response to the knowledge he had two sons was even more difficult. And terrifying. Kate took the safe course, the only course she knew would keep her sons safe from harm. She looked her mother-in-law right in the eye and lied.

      “I have no idea who the twins’ father is. He was someone I met in a bar. I can’t even remember what he looked like. You’d be wasting your time looking, because I doubt he can be found.”

      Ann Wade arched a perfect brow. “I guess we’ll see about that.”

      1

      “Why are you here?”

      Private Investigator Harry Dickenson felt a shiver roll down his spine at the sound of Wyatt Shaw’s quiet, raspy voice. Shaw stared at him from ruthless gray eyes, his lean, powerful body coiled behind a stone-and-glass desk, like a silent predator stalking unsuspecting prey.

      Harry wondered if the rumors he’d heard were true. Was he alone with a brutal killer? Someone who’d, literally, gotten away with murder?

      Harry’s blood felt like ice in his veins, despite the heat of the April sun streaming through a wall of windows. He was standing on the top floor of the newest, and by far grandest, Shaw Tower, a combination hotel, condominium and office building in downtown Houston, Texas. From his vertigo-inducing perch, Harry could see the far-reaching geographic boundaries of the city, nearly forty miles away.

      It was hard to believe how much of that real estate was controlled by the indecently wealthy man sitting before him. Was it so wrong to want a little piece of that pie for himself? This was Harry’s first venture into extortion, and he was a little nervous. But he was certain Shaw would pay—and pay well—to learn the tantalizing secret he’d come here to sell.

      Harry tried to meet Shaw’s piercing gaze as he made his demand for cash, but he couldn’t quite raise his eyes that last six inches. He focused instead on the crisp collar of Shaw’s white shirt, the smooth knot of his patterned blue silk tie and the lapels of his dark blue blended wool suit, as he said, “I have information of vital interest to you.”

      “I’m listening,” Shaw said.

      Harry saw a flicker of movement over his shoulder and realized they were no longer alone in Shaw’s office on the Tower’s 80th floor. He started as a man two or three inches taller than Wyatt’s reputed 6'4", and maybe fifty pounds heavier, stepped into his line of sight.

      “You wanted me, Boss?” the man said, speaking to Shaw as though Harry wasn’t there.

      Harry wondered how the gargantuan man in a cheap brown suit—who reminded him of the enforcers he’d seen in Mafia movies—had been summoned and realized Shaw must have hit some button on his desk. He thought back to the female secretary in the outer office. The older, benign-looking lady in a skirt that fell two inches below her knees and sensible pumps had made him feel perfectly safe coming into what he could now see was a cage of steel and glass from which there was no escape.

      Harry licked at the sweat above his lip, recognized it for the anxious gesture it was and stiffened his spine. He was the best at what he did precisely because he didn’t allow himself to be intimidated.

      Nevertheless, he felt his bowels shift in an instinctive animal response to mortal danger.

      “I’ll be with you in a minute,” Shaw said to the big man he’d summoned. Then he fixed his steely gaze on Harry. “You were saying?”

      Harry watched as the big man guarding the door, who had an ugly scar on his cheek and a crooked, manytimes-broken nose, took a pose that reminded