SEAN: A Mafia Romance (The Callahans Book 3) (80 page)

              Concerned, he asked, “How do you know this?”

              Rose pressed her mouth into a hard line, praying that the argument she was about to make wouldn’t be easily dismissed.

              “One World has been tracking them. Over the past five years we’ve tested the soil and drinking water in towns where they’ve laid pipes for similar projects. Taylor, in some of these areas, the wildlife lays dead near ponds, frogs are floating belly up. We’re still gathering data and working on a class-action lawsuit, but it’s been really difficult proving it’s from their materials.”

              “Then maybe it isn’t from their materials,” he suggested, though his tone sounded worried.

              “The correlation is too exact to be mere coincidence,” she went on. “These have been healthy areas. Then, within one year of those materials going into the ground, people started getting sick, cancer has been on the rise, and animals are dropping dead. What else could it be?”

              He considered her point. “What if we engaged a different company?”

              “And reduce the hazard to leakage and spills?” she countered. “The people of Bellevue don’t want that pipeline running through their homes.”

              “The era of trucking natural gas is over, Rose.”

              “We can still reach a compromise.”

              “Not yet,” he said, silencing her. “I’m going to have to look into this.”

              She gaped at him. “Look into what? Government reports? They’re all clean. You aren’t going to find anything.”

              “I can’t uproot a pipeline project that costs billions of dollars just because you feel strongly it’s bad for the environment. I need proof.”

              Sighing in exasperation, she leaned back in her chair, shaking her head and gazing out at the view of Seattle, the bay, and Bellevue in the distance.

              “I thought you said we’d settle this matter here and now,” she said, disgruntled.

              “I wish we could. I need to look into this.”

              Meeting his gaze, she asked, “Will you promise to keep the pipeline on hold while you do?”

              Taylor clenched his jaw as though he were torn. “I’m not sure I can afford to.”

              “Which means you aren’t really listening, and you don’t really believe me. You’re just placating me, and I don’t appreciate it.” After a long moment, she added, “If you go back to work, then so do I.”

              “I could have you arrested.”

              “You could,” she said, getting to her feet, “but you won’t. I need to get back to One World.”

              Staring up at her, his jaw dropped. “I was looking forward to spending the day.”

              “You don’t have time,” she said. “You’re going to be looking into things. And so am I.”

              Taylor didn’t want to let her go as he walked her across the red carpet outside the Escala and helped her into the limo, but it would be selfish to try to convince her to stay, and quite frankly, he was disturbed by all that she had brought to his attention. As someone who used to save lives on the operating table, the possibility that his pipeline could be detrimental to the health of an entire community was jarring.

              He closed the limousine door, pained to see Rose disappear behind tinted glass, and then watched as the limo rolled off down the street.

              It was a long ride up to the fiftieth floor, and when he reached his suite, Taylor heard giggling through the door.

              Entering, he found his father, Porter Montgomery, fixing himself a drink at the bar in the far corner of the room, while two women who looked like models passed a cigarette between them from where they sat on the leather couch.

              “What are you doing here?”

              Porter straightened his back then turned, facing him. His white hair was combed so slick to his scalp that Taylor could see the teeth marks from across the room. As always, his father was dressed in a sharp, Armani suit. He angled his dark eyes on Taylor and a sly grin formed at the corners of his mouth.

              “Don’t be rude, Taylor,” he said. “You’re acquainted with Jasmine and Cassandra. Say hello.”

              Taylor offered the call girls a curt nod, but wouldn’t hold their flirtatious gazes. The mere reminder of them turned his stomach. Months ago, in an effort to keep Taylor relaxed and help his head stay in the game, Porter had hired the women to pay him a visit. It had been an impulsive and admittedly fun night, but had left Taylor feeling empty and unsatisfied the next day. It hadn’t been the first time his father had made that kind of arrangement for him, and wouldn’t be the last, evidently. But now that he’d met Rose, the thought of indulging in the company of two women who cared about nothing more than the cash they’d collect unnerved him.

              “I think you know why I’m here,” said Porter, motioning for the escorts to excuse them.

              “We’ll be in the bedroom, Taylor,” said Jasmine, whose long black hair cascaded over her shoulders and down her tight, red dress.

              “How about the terrace,” he countered, but it only made Jasmine laugh.

              Following Jasmine, Cassandra shut the bedroom door, affording father and son a bit of privacy.

              “Who told you?” asked Taylor, who was furious that any of his subordinates would have told his father about the activist explosion after he’d specifically instructed them not to.

              “It doesn’t matter,” said Porter. “It’s my right to be informed.”

              “You handed me this project,” he said impatiently. “If you didn’t think I could handle it, if you assume you need to watch every move I make, then what was the point of putting me in charge?”

              “Taylor, if you’re going to be snappish, I’m going to have to insist we resume this conversation after Jasmine and Cassandra have worked their magic on you.”

              “You shouldn’t have brought them here. You’re only wasting their time,” he said.

              Porter lifted his brows, as he stalked over to the couch and sat.

              “What's the damage on the pipes?” he asked after drinking his whiskey.

              Porter’s capacity to knock back hard liquor at any hour, no matter how early, never ceased to amaze Taylor.

              “It was only one stack of pipes,” he began. “It would’ve made up five hundred yards.”

              “I don’t need the details,” Porter interjected. “I need the amount, so I can revise the budget.”             

              “I’ll revise the budget,” he countered, but the look on his father’s face told him he had better be forthright with an answer. “Twenty thousand.”

              “One stick of dynamite and you lost twenty thousand.”

              “Apparently.”

              “And those rebels are locked up? You’re pressing charges?”

              “I’m handling it,” he said through his teeth.

              “You have to press charges and file copies of the police report with our attorney so we can sue One World for damages.”

              Arguing with his father would be a futile effort, so he neither agreed nor refused, but lowered into the adjacent lounge chair.

              “What do you know about the construction company we’re using?” he asked.

              “Construction company?” he said as though it was a foreign term. “What do you want to know about them?”

              “It’s been brought to my attention that their materials could be hazardous to the environment.”

              Porter steadied his gaze on Taylor and his eyes grew dark, narrowing as if to caution his son. Drawing in a deep breath, he then lightened his mood and had another sip of his drink.              

              “Everything we do is by the book and legal,” he stated. “You know that.”

              “But what if the materials are harming the environment and it’s going undocumented?”

              “What if, what if,” he mused. “If such a thing were occurring, and it were brought to my attention, why I’d rectify it immediately. But it isn’t. We’ve been using Davey Construction for decades, not to mention we own them.”

              “We own them?”

              “We bought them out six years ago.”

              Taylor tried to wrap his head around the legal ramifications of owning a construction company that was in the habit of using hazardous materials. Starlight wouldn’t be able to argue they had no idea, should Rose’s class-action lawsuit ever see the light of day. If Starlight owned Davey, then they were ultimately responsible for everything Davey did, which meant that Taylor would have to make it his business to find out what precisely was going on over at the site.

              “Taylor?” his father asked when Taylor had drifted into thought, staring out the window at the view of Seattle. “You can’t put this project on hold. Now, what do you need in order to get underway?”

              He glanced at his father, whose mouth was lifting into a strange smile. Seeing Porter smug made him want to roll his eyes and snort, but he held his expression steady.

              “I’m not interested in those women,” he said in an even tone.

              “Oh, come now. Every man is interested in beautiful women.”

              Taylor was tempted to throw it in his father’s face that he’d found a beautiful woman he was quite happy with.

              “Are you pouting because you prefer when I send them over to you in a crowded bar or restaurant? I know bringing them here and having them wait in your bedroom doesn’t exactly afford you the same thrill, but it’s the best I could do. Taylor, you need to indulge in a few vices, clear your head, and then get back on this project.”

              He agreed, but the only person he wanted to clear his head with was Rose, and the reality of getting back on the pipeline project might not turn out entirely how his father was envisioning it.

              “Well, I’ll leave you with the girls,” he said, rising from the couch.

              “No, take them with you,” said Taylor. “I need to be alone. I need to think.”

              Porter frowned, but didn’t fight him. Once he’d collected Jasmine and Cassandra from the bedroom, he crossed to the door and gave Taylor one last look.

              “I’m not leaving town until the project is underway,” he said, the words coming across as a warning.

              Taylor shot his father a glaring look then returned his gaze to the window, listening to the door click shut.

              Why was this the position he had to be in? Why did Rose have to be on the opposite side of the divide and working against him? And why did he feel intuitively that she was onto something huge, not to mention downright detrimental to the life he’d chosen? Natural gas pipelines were flowing all over this country. It was a way of life, something that couldn’t be changed. Starlight might not be innocent, but they weren’t the only guilty company. But since when was that acceptable logic? Taylor prided himself on being conscientious, and the thought of putting anyone at risk was unacceptable. Was he slowly turning into his father? Was his sense of ethics and morals gradually eroding as badly as the pipelines running through this country?

              There had to be a way to build a pipeline safely. And the first step in that effort would be to carefully examine the protocol and materials that were in place.

              If only time weren’t running out.

              “Where have you been?”

              Carter filled the doorway of her motel room, his dark eyes probing her for an explanation.

              She had barely scurried from the limo to her room, breathless with anxiety as she made sure her entrance went unnoticed, and had changed into her jeans and a tee shirt before Carter had knocked and opened the door.

              “I had a meeting with the CEO of Starlight,” she said, feeling decent to be telling the truth. Her thoughts skirted over Taylor—his lips, the firm wall of his chest that she’d caressed, the way he felt inside her, the wild impulse they’d both succumbed to in the back of the limousine. “I got him to pause the project for the rest of the day.”

              “Meaning?”

              “Meaning, he’s going to review the possible hazards of the materials and reconsider.”

              Carter snorted a skeptical laugh. “Possible hazards? It’s common knowledge Davey uses toxic materials.”

              “To us it’s common knowledge. You know we’ve been fighting an uphill battle to prove as much. This is a good sign, Carter. Taylor Montgomery is open minded, but he won’t act based on my word. He needs to look into things.”

              “And you trust him?”

              “I don’t know.” Rose thought about it a long moment. She really wasn’t sure if she trusted him when it came to the pipeline, and yet she felt deeply conflicted, because in a strange way she completely trusted him as a man. But blind faith, joys of the flesh, wouldn’t be enough to cause her to give him the benefit of the doubt. She wrestled her sneakers on, explaining, “If the site’s vacant, there’s no better time for us to get some hard evidence that those materials are detrimental to the environment.”

              “You can’t go alone,” said Carter, which gave her pause before she could reach the door.

              “You think I need your help?” she challenged.

              “And Layla’s. We’ll take the Jeep.”

              “After the stunt you pulled this morning, there’s no way I’ll let you come along.”

              “Oh, come off it, Rose.”

              “Come off it?” she gaped.

              “That’s right. I made a rash decision, but the fact of the matter is that it panned out. It bought us time.”

              “Taylor bought us time,” she countered, putting her hands on her hips. “And you have Taylor to thank for the fact that you aren’t sitting in a jail cell right now.”

              Carter cocked his head, narrowing his big brown eyes on her with a hint of suspicion.

              “Just how exactly did you convince him to postpone?”

              “I have my ways,” she asserted, keeping her response vague. “I’m the president of One World for a reason.”

              “You started the company. That’s the reason.”

              She glared at him.

              “Layla and I mapped out where their materials are located along the twelve-mile trench.”

              “I’ll take the map,” she said, pulling her purse over her shoulder now that she’d transferred her belongings from the designer clutch that Taylor had given her.

              “You’ll take us, as well,” said Carter, whose gaze touched the sparkling clutch. “Just where, precisely, did you have this meeting?”

              Ignoring the question, she barreled past him, saying, “If you’re coming, let’s go.”

              Carter’s Jeep was parked just outside Layla’s room, and while Rose hopped in the passenger’s seat, Carter knocked on his girlfriend’s door, urging her to come quickly.

              Rose eyed Layla as the woman wrapped her thick, dark hair into a ponytail, walking quickly to the vehicle then jumping in the back seat, while Carter climbed in behind the wheel and turned the engine.

              “I think our best bet,” Layla began as they drove off into the hot afternoon, wind whipping through the vehicle, “is to park at our former site and walk due north by five hundred yards where I noticed seven unmarked barrels.”

              “What do you think is in the barrels?” Carter asked, yelling over his shoulder so he’d be heard over the wind.

              “Between their hazmat gear and track record, I’d say the same chemical cocktail that leached into the soil around the Davey-constructed pipeline in Arizona, namely benzene, toluene, and ethylbenzene. But we won’t know for sure until we get a sample to the lab.”

              “This is huge,” Carter said, directing his comment to Rose as if she didn’t already think so. “We’ve never intervened a build so early in the process as to catch a company with those kinds of toxins.”

              “So let’s catch them,” she said, meeting his gaze. “No heroics, guys. No going against the plan.”

              Layla snorted a laugh from the back seat. “Girl, you think we’re going to blow up a barrel of benzene? We’re not on a suicide mission.”

              Rose didn’t appreciate her sarcasm, but Layla had a point. The toxic chemicals Davey was in the practice of using could easily blow up if it came into contact with an explosive.

              “Just so long as we’re all on the same page,” she said, gazing through the windshield as they flew through an intersection and began heading into the rural and winding roads of Bellevue.

              Layla leaned forward, draping her arms around the driver’s and passenger’s seat, as she spoke up over the wind. “That was one hell of a dress you were wearing.”

              Alarmed, Rose glanced at her, but holding Layla’s gaze was too rattling.

              “Dress?” asked Carter.

              “Yeah,” she went on. “I stepped out of the shower and peaked out the window, and who do I see climbing out of the back of a limousine but our very own Rose Cole dressed to the nines and hustling to get into her motel room. What was that all about?”

              When Rose didn’t respond, Carter reiterated the question.

              “It was nothing,” she said firmly and a little annoyed that they were prying. “Let’s focus on what we need to do.”

              “Sure,” said Layla, shifting back in her seat and scanning the trench that stretched out parallel to the dusty road they were traversing. “It’s up there on the right.”

              “Okay,” said Carter. “We’ll overshoot it then double back on foot.”

              As they flew past the barrels, Rose eyed them carefully, counting seven and noting the skull and crossbones insignia on each one.

              “This is a hell of a world we live in,” she said to herself, though Carter caught the sentiment, pressing his mouth into a determined line in response.

              “They won’t get away with it, Rose,” he said. “No matter how long it takes, no matter how many of us are arrested in the process, we’re working towards making the world a safe place.”

              She glanced at him and smirked in agreement. As much as she’d butted heads with Carter over the years, he truly was her biggest ally, and having him by her side meant the world to her.

              Carter angled the Jeep off road then pulled to a stop along a dusty patch of terrain where the One World campsite had once been. When he killed the engine, Layla hopped out of the back and began sorting through their gear in the trunk, while Rose scanned the vacant Starlight trench through her binoculars.

              “It certainly is vacant,” she said, thinking to herself that Taylor had kept his word. In so many ways, she wished she hadn’t been compelled to run off from the Escala earlier. Part of her would’ve loved to have stayed, forgotten her worries for an afternoon, gotten lost in the spell of his body, the intoxication of his effect on her, but saving Bellevue from certain death was far more important. What was this war brewing inside her, hating and also loving Taylor, if love was even a remote possibility?

              “Let’s go,” said Layla, who had gathered a pack of plastic containers to put the samples in, as well as gloves and gas masks so none of them would have to breathe the toxins once they got the barrels open.

              For eight minutes they walked in silence along the trench, Rose taking in the beautiful landscape and trying not to be riveted by the damage that would surely become of it should Starlight resume construction.

              When they came upon the barrels, Layla passed Carter and Rose the gas masks and gloves, which they all put on as a precaution. Carter used a crowbar to pry the lid off of one of the barrels.

              As soon as he set it on the ground, Rose peered into the barrel and saw that it was filled to the brim with a green liquid substance that she couldn’t identify.

              Quickly, she took a plastic container from Layla and scooped the green liquid into it then secured the cap on tight, while Carter investigated a stack of pipes and scraped the metal cylinder with a knife, collecting the shavings into another container.

              “Should we open another barrel?” asked Layla. “In case there are other chemicals.”

              “Couldn’t hurt,” said Carter, who immediately began prying the lid off a second barrel.

              When they all glanced down, it appeared to be the same green liquid, so Carter opened a few more barrels to discover the same chemical. Determined to be thorough, Layla collected more samples before the three of them fastened the lids back on, tucked their samples into Layla’s backpack, and started off down the trench.

              “How long will the lab take?” Carter asked as they made their way to the Jeep.

              “Five days or so,” said Layla.

              “Unless we put a rush on it,” Rose added. “I have a contact in Seattle who can do it overnight, but it’ll cost us.”

              “Can we afford it?” said Carter, but it wasn’t a question. Aside from Rose, he was the only member of One World who had a handle on their waning finances.

              Taylor came to mind. The fact of the matter was that One World had depleted their funds and exhausted their lines of credit, but Rose had no reason to believe Taylor would do anything to assist her in shutting down his own pipeline.

              “I’ll figure it out,” she said. “We won’t get billed until the lab is complete, so I say we get it over to Madison Alder and deal with payment later.”

              “Hey!”

              Rose glanced over her shoulder to see the man who’d yelled at them and found a construction worker jogging after them.

              “Hey, stop!” he called out. “I saw what you did! You have no business here!”

              Carter jumped behind the wheel and turned the key, as Rose and Layla hurried into the Jeep. Peeling out, the tires kicked up dust in the man’s face, but they made it, the Jeep bouncing over the rough terrain before the construction worker could stop them.