The Honest Affair (Rose Gold Book 3) Read online

  The Honest Affair

  Book Three of the Rose Gold Series

  Nicole French

  Contents

  Prologue

  Prelude

  I. Primi

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Interlude I

  II. Secondi

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Interlude II

  III. Dolci

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Postlude

  Epilogue

  Also by Nicole French

  The Hate Vow

  Legally Yours

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  September 2018

  Matthew

  A storm was brewing in New York.

  Just four days after Labor Day, the city was drowning in heat. New York was originally built on wetlands, and on days like this, in the last throes of summer, humidity lounged over my shoulders like the sweaty arm of a drunk too far gone, while clouds roiled with anger and dripped with disdain.

  It wasn’t quite five in the morning when I parked my beat-up Accord outside the squat concrete and brick building that housed the eighty-fourth precinct of the NYPD. I’d gotten the call thirty minutes earlier. For anything else, I’d have said “fuck off” and gone back to sleep. But for Derek Kingston, the investigative detective I’d been working with for years? For this specific case?

  Yeah, I jumped right out of bed.

  As I reached the interrogation room, I was pulling my sticky shirt away from my skin, uncomfortable in the air-conditioning of the station.

  “Jesus,” Derek said when I entered the observation side. “What the hell happened to you?”

  Okay, so I wasn’t exactly in my Sunday best. But Derek knew me as a man who generally took pride in my appearance, even at this hour. My colleagues teased me for looking more like Cary Grant than a public servant, thanks to a sister who owned a men’s vintage clothing store. Maybe it was a carry-over from my military days, but I liked the precision of a uniform: a tailored suit, shoes I could see my reflection in, a perfectly knotted half-Windsor, and a fedora for the street.

  Not this morning, though. Right now I looked like any average bum in the t-shirt I’d been sleeping in and the jeans off my bedroom floor.

  “It’s a swamp out there,” I replied. “You said get down here, and I got down here. Has she signed anything yet?”

  Derek shook his head. “She’s been waiting on you.”

  “Not her own lawyer?”

  He shrugged. “She said she doesn’t have representation yet. But she will. You know they always do.”

  “So she’s martyring herself,” I muttered.

  We both turned toward the window to look at the woman whose appearance at the precinct an hour earlier had brought us here.

  Nina Evelyn Astor de Vries Gardner.

  It was a whole lot of names, but then again, she was a whole lot of woman. Even sitting, she was taller than most, with a swan-like neck, ramrod posture, and the kind of cool, competent grace that comes from generations of breeding. Only I really knew how that pristine exterior masked fathomless layers of passion and pride. Nina was like a pool of glassy water dying to be touched. And I knew the exact pattern of her ripples. Hell, even now, I was dying to dive in, despite knowing I’d be burned in a lake of fire.

  According to Derek, Nina was here to confess for abetting the very crimes we had charged her husband with not quite four months earlier: racketeering, bribery, tax fraud, and, most damningly, sex trafficking. We knew all about him and the operation he had worked with. Girls missing from a Brooklyn housing project. Witnesses to several men running people, guns, and drugs out of a safe house in The Hole, one of the worst neighborhoods in the borough. Photographs of Gardner himself outside the house with notorious kingpin John Carson, who had been shot and killed last spring. And lastly, the name of the Delaware shell corporation used to run every dollar in and out of those operations and mask those involved.

  And then, three days ago, Nina had confessed her involvement in all of it. Told me a story about how her husband had forged her signature on a number of legal documents ten years ago. Implicated her in a scheme to sell false papers and smuggle illegal immigrants from Eastern Europe.

  She wasn’t innocent, but at first it seemed clear that she’d been used as a front for the larger operation, a fact which freed her from her husband’s claims of spousal privilege in his trial. I didn’t think she knew anything else beyond what was on the papers. Honestly, it would have been great for the case and my career to have such a coup of a witness.

  It would have been all those things if I hadn’t been in love with her. And if I hadn’t known she was lying.

  Moments after Nina told her story, Derek sent me a giant cache of videos he had received from colleagues in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. It turned out that Gardner’s trafficking ring went well beyond Brooklyn. And in video after video, I watched in horror as a gorgeous blonde whose legs had been wrapped around my waist more than once guided scared young girls in and out of ramshackle houses all over the greater Northeast. I watched her make contact with the other associates we had identified as part of Gardner’s ring. I watched her hand them envelopes and accept their money in return.

  She was the lynchpin. The one who made it all happen.

  And it broke my cold, jaded heart.

  Now Nina sat in the interrogation room, cool as a fuckin’ cucumber and ever the lady, swathed in designer clothes as spotless as snow. A white sundress showed off her pale, sun-kissed shoulders. Slender legs crossed daintily at the ankles. White-tipped fingers folded over the table, the golf ball-sized diamond on her finger glinting under the fluorescent lights while she remained perfectly still.

  Unlike most people, Nina didn’t fidget. Me, I was always grabbing at shit when I was agitated. My tie, my hair, my pockets. Even now, I was pulling the collar of my old Springsteen t-shirt like it was choking me. But despite the fact that she was locked in a room where criminal after criminal was interrogated daily, Nina looked like a queen waiting for her court to arrive. Like I was a jester sent in there to entertain.

  Fuck. That.

  “She’s lucky I was even here,” Derek said. “Most of the guys don’t even know about this case.”

  I nodded. “I know.”

  We had pursued this case secretly for the better part of a year. Given the number of obvious bribes Carson and therefore Gardner had at the FBI, the CIA, and the U.S. attorney’s office, we could never trust anyone else completely to help us with the case. The smaller the circle, the better. Until, of course, I fell for the defendant’s wife.

  “So…you want to talk to her? Or should I?”

  I was about to answer when my phone buzzed loudly in my pocket. I looked at the number and swore.

  “What is it?” Derek asked.

  “Cardozo,” I said. “At five in the morning? I have to take this.”

  I turned my back on Derek and walked out to the hall. The voice of Greg Cardozo, execut
ive assistant district attorney of the Kings County office, chief of the organized crime and racketeering bureau, and my boss, blared through my phone’s tinny speakers.

  “Zola, you want to tell me what you’re doing down at the station? I called the chief last night to let him know you’re off the Gardner investigation, and now he wakes up me, my wife, and my schnauzer to ask if I changed my mind. Because apparently, you’re at the fucking station!”

  I frowned. Apparently the cat was out of the bag. Yeah, okay, only yesterday I’d handed Cardozo my resignation due to my involvement with Nina (who was officially a suspect now). But then he had apparently notified the entire NYPD about everything?

  So much for secrecy. At this point, Gardner was already as slippery as an eel. We were basically giving him a two-day head start with this shit.

  “I—it was late,” I said weakly. “And I’m not technically on leave yet. You said yourself that you had to send the paperwork to HR today, and—”

  “Get the hell out of there!” Cardozo shouted. “Look, Zola, you did the right thing coming to me and submitting your resignation. Don’t make me accept it by sticking your nose back where it doesn’t belong. Leave it to Derek and Cliff and me. Your part is done.”

  “But—”

  “I’m on my way down now to question Mrs. Gardner,” my boss said. “If you’re still there when I arrive, you’re fired, Zola. End of discussion.”

  The line went dead. I walked back into the observation room. On the other side of the mirror, Nina still hadn’t moved.

  “What did he want?” Derek asked.

  I sighed and rubbed the back of my neck. “To remind me that I am off this case and, as soon as HR processes everything, on unpaid administrative leave for the next six months. Minimum.”

  Derek reared. “What? Why? What the fuck did you do?”

  I didn’t need to answer, though. His eyes flew between me and Nina, who was still sitting at the interrogation table, hands folded calmly in front of her like she was waiting for someone to bring her a mimosa, not take her confession.

  “Zola,” he rumbled. “Tell me you didn’t…”

  I shook my head with obvious regret. “I have to go. King, can I have a minute with her first?”

  He frowned, looking a lot like Nonna when I dragged muddy shoes all over the house. “If you’re off, I really shouldn’t…”

  “Just a minute, cameras off? Cardozo said he’s on his way, and if he catches me down here, I’m fired for good. But I need to talk to her. I need to say…fuck, man, I need to say goodbye.”

  Derek looked like he wanted to say no. I understood. I was putting him in a tight spot. But the other side of it was that I was one of his best friends, someone who had pulled all number of strings for him over the years, and he knew it.

  “All right,” he said, resigned as he moved to the cameras and flicked the off switch. “One minute, Zo. That’s it.”

  “That’s all I need.”

  She looked up when I entered, and the expressionless ice was immediately replaced by a flurry of emotions I had come to know so well. Eagerness. Shame. Remorse.

  Lightning-bolt attraction.

  Goddammit. A million questions flew through my mind as those silvery gray eyes lasered through me.

  Why had she lied to me for as long as she did?

  What the hell was she doing here?

  Why did she have to be so crazy beautiful?

  I had told Cardozo that I was off the case because I was in love with Nina de Vries, with the full conviction that the emotion was firmly in the past and had been since the moment I discovered her deception. Who the fuck are you kidding? I thought as I looked at her. You are in love with Nina de Vries. Then. Now. Forever.

  The fact made me that much angrier.

  “Hello, Matthew.” Her voice was low, almost husky, like she hadn’t had enough sleep or had maybe just woken up. It was pretty damn early.

  Her sleek blonde hair was tied back, away from her clean, ice-sculpted face that included those big gray eyes, long nose, and full, pink lips that I knew turned the color of ripe plums when I sucked on them hard. She looked a far cry from the sex-tousled siren I’d left in Boston just a few days prior.

  “Nina,” I said as I let the door close behind me. “What the hell is this? Some plea for attention? Trying to lure me back into your web?”

  Neither of us mentioned the several dozen calls and texts she had sent me since Tuesday. All of them unanswered.

  She refolded her hands. “I thought it was clear. I told Detective Kingston I was here to turn myself in.”

  “For what, exactly?”

  She looked up, and her eyes landed on me with the force of a gavel. “Well, I’m not sure about the correct legalese, but I believe it will be something along the lines of conspiring in sex trafficking, possibly of minors and illegal aliens.”

  I raised a brow. “That wasn’t the story you fed me Tuesday night, doll.”

  “Matthew, as you so judiciously pointed out at Skylar and Brandon’s guesthouse, I am part owner of over fifty houses used to abuse and transport young women across the greater Northeast.”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t know it!” I blurted out without even thinking.

  Something like relief fluttered over her fine features.

  “Didn’t I?” she asked softly. “You seemed to think I did.”

  It wasn’t until that moment I realized that deep down, I wanted to believe her. I’d been so angry about what I’d found. Felt so blindsided by the measures her husband had taken to traffic what had to be hundreds, maybe thousands of girls to other slimeballs, that even the thought of the woman I loved being a knowing accessory to those actions made me feel physically ill.

  But now, a few days after the truth had sunk in, a few days after my skin still yearned for her touch, my heart still hollered for hers, even in my sleep…I didn’t know what to believe. On the bed, when I’d shown her the videos, she had looked horrified. Terrified. And I knew that woman on the screen. I knew her hair, her legs, the shoes she had been wearing the night we met.

  But I still remembered her response: It isn’t me.

  “I—I don’t know,” I said, sinking into the chair across from her.

  Nina unfolded her hands, turning one over so it reached toward me, palm up. I stared at it. I wanted to take it. Just the touch of her, that impossibly smooth skin. But right now, this close, her inimitable scent of roses and light drifting toward me…

  No. I couldn’t. I was confused enough.

  “Do you—do you still have the video on your phone?” she asked. “The one where I…meet…this Ben Vamos?”

  I ground my teeth at the thought of the skeezy bastard whom Derek and I had discovered was a family connection of Gardner’s from back when his name was still its original Hungarian, Károly Kertész. They had been working together for years, with Vamos running the houses through which they had trafficked girls from Eastern Europe into the country. With, apparently, Nina’s help.

  Still, I nodded curtly. The IT guys had deleted all evidence from my hard drive, including my access to the secure file server where we could view digitized evidence. But I’d rebelled and saved one to my own device, if for no other reason than to remind myself of the truth. That Nina was a liar. A traitor.

  Wasn’t she?

  “May I look at it, please?”

  I frowned. What was her game here? But I still pulled my phone from my pocket and flipped to the video in question. Nina showed no surprise I still had access to it. I placed it on the table and tried not to inhale that floral aroma when Nina leaned in with me to watch.

  I’d seen it at least a hundred times. The black Escalade pulling to the curb of a shitty New Jersey townhouse. The back door opens, and out walks Nina in her prim white dress, her sleek blonde hair tousled around her face. I knew exactly how many steps it took for her to walk from the sidewalk, through the gate, and up the porch steps. She knocks on the door, and it’s opened by Vamos, a
thick middle-aged man with gray hair buzzed close, a stained shirt the color of old socks, and a permanent frown etched onto a reddened face.

  They talk, and after a few minutes, she enters the house. Later, she leads a parade of girls from the house to the Escalade that will take them to a private airport, where they would disappear from the investigator’s lens.

  Knowing all of this, I scowled as Nina greeted Vamos like a friend. Kisses to the cheek. Smiles and touches. The whole deal.

  I wanted to punch a hole through the concrete walls surrounding us.

  “Pause it.” Nina’s voice was a soft-spoken command, but a command nonetheless.

  Scowling, I obeyed and stopped the video. “What?”

  “Matthew,” she said, and this time her voice cracked. “How could you not know?”

  I stared at the video, which, for all intents and purposes, still showed a woman that looked exactly like Nina. I honestly didn’t know what she meant.

  “How could I think otherwise?” I answered, feeling like my throat was constricting as I looked back up and felt the hurt and pain in her eyes.

  God, I wanted to believe her. I wanted to believe she had nothing to do with this. That this woman, this beautiful siren who had warmed my cold, callous heart over the last six months wasn’t capable of conspiring to sell women like cattle into sex slavery.

  And yet, there she was, clear as day, wearing those sleek high heels, at least three inches high that tapered into deadly stilettos, smoothed over her feet in waterfall-colored leather. The exact same shoes she had been wearing the night we met. The same shoes she was wearing now.