The newest addition to my latest romantic suspense series is here! You can pick up THE SECRET HUSBAND (The O'Connells, Book 3) at all eRetailers starting today. Plus get your final peek at Karen's story below!
Small-town lawyer Karen O’Connell believes that all of her clients who have found themselves recklessly embroiled in scandal and trouble have done so foolishly because of love. She has heard far too many times that the heart wants what it wants.
But one night, Karen receives a call from Jack Curtis, her vengeful ex-husband, whom she’s never told anyone in her family about. He’s found himself in a world of trouble, arrested and in jail, charged with murder.
He says he’s innocent, and he needs her help.
Her first response is to say no, but Karen knows Jack isn’t the kind of guy to ask for help from anyone, especially not from the ex-wife he openly despises and hasn’t seen in years. She knows there must be more to the story—but what she doesn’t know is that the mysterious circumstances surrounding the murder could be the reason their hasty marriage ended so badly.
THE SECRET HUSBAND (The O'Connells, Book 3) is now available for at:
Did you miss your sneak peek of Chapter 2? If so, click here.
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Chapter 3
Owen wasn’t waiting outside the police station. In fact, he was in the glassed-in waiting area at the front of the cop shop, and his eyes connected with hers as soon as she stepped out from the back.
Her heels clicked on the floor, and she said nothing as she walked straight for the doors without stopping, pushing them open. She couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Very aware that her brother was right behind her, she strode down the concrete steps to the sidewalk, and she barely made it off the last step before she ran as fast as she could in her heels to the bush. Her stomach pitched, and from out of nowhere, she vomited.
“Oh, man…” Owen said from behind her, his hand on her back as she spit and rested her hands on her knees, again pulling in a breath, shaky, trembling. When she stood up and pressed the back of her hand to her mouth, she couldn’t avoid looking her brother’s way.
“Come on,” was all he said, and he somehow ushered her to his van, which was parked two stalls over.
She didn’t allow her gaze to connect with a passing couple, who she knew had seen everything. Owen pulled open the door, and she climbed in the passenger seat of the older-model van. He stood there a second, taking her in, and she didn’t know if the shock on his face meant he was going to lecture her or start in with all the questions he’d never asked.
Instead, he said, “You okay?”
She pulled her hand down over her mouth again, feeling the ache in her stomach and wanting water to rinse her mouth and maybe settle the queasiness, which she knew was just nerves. “I’m fine.”
He swore under his breath and then closed her door and walked around. She reached for the seatbelt and fastened it, glad now that her brother had insisted on driving. He was right: She wasn’t in any condition to drive.
He took his time putting his seatbelt on, putting the key in the ignition, and then starting it. “So I’ve been sitting out here, trying to wrap my head around the fact that you’re married…”
“Was married, past tense.” She wouldn’t let him finish. “If you can call it that. Not sure it even counts, considering a job interview lasts longer.” She didn’t look his way, but she didn’t need to. She could feel him watching her. Thankfully, he put the van in gear and backed up.
“Wow, seriously? Whether you were or still are married is just semantics, Karen. That’s not the kind of thing you keep secret, and that’s him in jail, the guy you were married to…” Owen’s voice dripped with sarcasm as he pressed the gas.
Karen gripped the strap of the seatbelt over her shoulder. “Jack is his name. Yes, the very same. He’s in jail and wants me to help him after everything.” She knew it wasn’t laughter, the rude sound her brother made. At the same time, she was still reeling over what she’d agreed to do. “I don’t know if I can do this, Owen.” She turned her head, pressing her cheek into the seatback.
Her brother was on edge, of course, but he had nothing on her.
“Please don’t tell anyone in the family,” she said. “Not Mom, Ryan, Marcus, Suzanne, Luke…I don’t want anyone to know. I’m not exactly proud of what happened, and then there was how I reacted.”
“I think maybe you need to start at the beginning and tell me what the fuck you did. When, where, how…? I just don’t get it. Like, what the hell? I don’t understand, Karen, but I’m thinking some pretty bad things. Who is this guy?”
She shut her eyes for another second, hoping it would steady her, but it didn’t. “It was one of those things, you know. I don’t even know how it started, but it just did. It was during law school, at the beginning, and there he was. He was so big. He knew what he wanted. He was smart, brilliant. He had passed the bar and been offered a position at the DA’s office. I don’t know. We spent every minute together. It started as hot courtroom sex. He was on the other side, and I was interning under the public defender. The first time, it was, like, a closet at the courthouse, his car in the parking lot, a…”
“Whoa, stop, for Christ’s sake! I don’t want to hear about your sex life. No details,” Owen said, cutting her off.
It was too late, though. Every one of those memories flooded her, the memories she hadn’t allowed herself to think of in so long. As she relived those moments, the passion and the way he had touched her, kissed her, fucked her, it both saddened and angered her. It had been hot and dangerous, and he’d been like a drug to her. She had craved him, dreamed of him, loved him. How she hated him now.
“I never thought it was possible to love someone so much that I obsessed over him. You know, I can say it now. It’s taken me how long…?” She took in the darkened highway, glad that she could sit and consider without the light of day making everything about what had happened that much worse.
“I don’t know how long, Karen, because you didn’t tell us—didn’t tell me. Why not? Seriously.”
She turned her head to her brother again, hearing how pissed he was and how personally he was taking this. “Because it was over as quick as it started. One minute we hadn’t even dated. It was just sex, great sex. Then we were on a road trip in Georgia, a backroad place, and he suggested getting married. Next thing, we were standing in front of a justice of the peace, and he was slipping this ring on my finger, you know the fake metal and glass kind? He picked one up at the corner store.
“Then two days later, he was walking out of his apartment with a suitcase and telling me to fuck off. What the hell was I to think? I thought he was crazy, messing with me. But it was the way he looked at me, with such hate. I mean, I loved him.” She pressed her hand to her chest.
Owen rested his left arm on the door and rubbed his hand over his face, his other on the wheel.
“He got a restraining order against me, considering I didn’t handle it too well,” she continued.
Owen darted his gaze to her, shocked and speechless. “What the fuck? Oh my God, you’re serious,” he said. He was shaking his head.
All Karen could do was sit there, trying to explain something she couldn’t, because no part of the situation would make sense to her. “He told me it was over, but I just wouldn’t let it go. I called him over and over, filled his voicemail to the point his mailbox was full, over and over and over again. I didn’t stop. I kept phoning, feeling absolutely gutted. I mean, who does that, marries you and then walks out on you and refuses to talk to you? Well, you know me. I wasn’t taking that. I don’t even remember the content of my messages, but next thing, I was served a restraining order, because I apparently threatened him in one or more of the hundreds of voicemail messages. Worst of all was that it was Sheriff Bert who paid me a visit and gave me a sit-down, a dose of reality. He said Jack didn’t want to be contacted, that I’d made my point, and that I’d gone too far. It was humiliating.”
“And Marcus doesn’t know?”
She breathed in past the ache, feeling that moment from so long ago, sitting there in a chair with Bert giving her a look that let her know she’d really fucked up. She wished she could go back and undo what had happened. “He had just started, you know. He was still a green deputy. Bert promised he wouldn’t say anything. At the same time, he made me promise to stop calling Jack, or I could find myself behind bars, and the law degree I’d given everything for would be gone. Jack had changed his number, so it was an easy promise to make. I couldn’t call him anymore, because I didn’t know where he was or how to get a hold of him. So I swallowed it, and…”
Her brother was pulling his hand over his face again, shaking his head. Yeah, evidently, he was having some trouble getting his head around this. “So Marcus has been with the sheriff’s office going on eight years.”
“Just over.”
Her brother nodded. “You were just a kid then. You’re saying it was that long ago?”
She shrugged, because the problem was that although it was so long ago, it still felt as if it were yesterday.
“Wow, that sounds totally fucked up, Karen.”
Yes, and her brother had no idea how much. “I know,” she said, “especially considering I have to go back and see him.”
Her brother slammed on the brakes and swerved to the side of the highway, and she jerked forward, grateful that it was dark in the cab between them. “You just finished telling me that this guy fucked you over big time and has a restraining order on you, and you’re going back to—”
“Just one time, Owen, just to get him out if I can, and that’s it. I told Jack that’s all I was willing to do. Then he has to find himself another lawyer.”
Owen put the van back in gear and pulled back on the highway, shaking his head again. “You know, Karen, sometimes you can be your own worst enemy.”
She turned her head, looking out into the darkness, feeling the sting of his words. She felt a tear slip out and then roughly wiped it away. “You think I don’t know that? But what kind of lawyer would I be if I couldn’t put personal feelings aside?”
“Well, you just keep telling yourself that, Karen. I guess I just don’t understand why you married him, why he walked out, why you have a restraining order against you. He didn’t want to see or talk to you, yet here he is, calling you, and you go running. The whole thing sounds so totally fucked up.”
Of course it did. She just settled into the seat. “How am I supposed to explain something I can’t even understand myself? God dammit, now I sound like one of my clients.”
She realized in that second that if she’d heard the same story from another woman, she’d have told her to get her head right—but how could she? She didn’t even understand what she’d done to make him basically cut her off and out of his life. Her rational mind jumped in and told her that reasonable people stayed and talked.
“You get anything to eat tonight?” Owen said. So he was done talking about it.
“You’re doing it again, Owen, trying to father me—but I’m a big girl, and…”
“And you just had the rug yanked from under you. You were puking your guts out over a guy who, by the sounds of it, has totally and completely fucked you around. I don’t understand any of it. You should eat, and you need to tell everyone. No more secrets, Karen. I mean, do you know the details of what he did? Maybe he’s guilty and you shouldn’t be helping him. Talk to Marcus, get him to look into it, and stop going through all this alone.”
She just took in the brother who had been there for all of them. At the same time, it seemed no one ever thought to check in on him and see how he was.
“Not yet,” she replied. She knew she was being stubborn. “And how about we stop talking about me and talk about you? Before Jack called, you showed up at my office, and I can’t help wondering if there’s something going on with you. You sound off, or you did.”
He made another rude sound and shook his head, but he didn’t pull his gaze from the road as he drove. “We’re talking about you, Karen, your problem. Don’t start spinning this and shining anything my way, because we aren’t done by a longshot. You’re in over your head. I don’t know this guy, none of us do, but either you tell Marcus or I will.”
There it was, the tough love. Owen had stepped in too many times after their dad had left, after her world had fallen apart. But now, there was just something about having her back to the wall that didn’t sit right with Karen.
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