Back to Honor: A Reggie Reynolds Romantic Mystery

  BACK TO HONOR

  A

  REGGIE REYNOLDS

  ROMANTIC MYSTERY

  JT WATSON

  c2011

  All rights reserved. Any use of the materials contained in this book without the expressed written consent of the author and/or her affiliates, is strictly prohibited.

  ***

  AUSTIN BROOK PUBLISHING

  America’s stomping ground for romantic ebooks

  ***

  This novel is a work of fiction. All characters are fictitious. Any similarities to anyone living or dead are completely accidental. The specific mention of known places or venues are not meant to be exact replicas of those places, but are purposely embellished or imagined for the story’s sake.

  INTERRACIAL ROMANCE

  FROM BESTSELLING AUTHOR

  MALLORY MONROE:

  THE PRESIDENT’S GIRLFRIEND

  ROMANCING THE MOB BOSS

  ROMANCING HER PROTECTOR

  ROMANCING THE BULLDOG

  IF YOU WANTED THE MOON

  ***

  INTERRACIAL ROMANCE

  FROM BESTSELLING AUTHOR

  KATHERINE CACHITORIE:

  ***

  LOVING THE HEAD MAN

  SOME CAME DESPERATE:

  A LOVE SAGA

  WHEN WE GET MARRIED

  ***

  ALSO

  A SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP

  YVONNE THOMAS

  AFRICAN-AMERICAN ROMANCE

  FROM

  Award-winning author

  TERESA MCCLAIN-WATSON

  ***

  AFTER WHAT YOU DID

  AND

  STAY IN MY CORNER

  ***

  COMING SOON

  INTERRACIAL ROMANCE

  From

  Bestselling author

  MALLORY MONROE

  MOB BOSS 2:

  THE HEART OF THE MATTER

  ***

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  www.austinbrookpublishing.com

  for more information

  on all titles

  ONE

  He sat in her living room, slouched on the sofa, watching her pack up the books and CDs that were strewn across the floor like packaged glimpses of her life. His long legs were crossed, with his expensive wingtip shoes barely an inch from touching her shapely bare legs that draped out from the shorts she wore.

  He stared at those legs and then at her face, at her bright brown eyes that still looked stunned by the remarkable turn of events. He’d been worried sick about her ever since the story broke, but after her father’s suicide, and the recriminations that followed, he knew she would not be able to recover as he had hoped. Something drastic, something dramatic, had to happen first.

  Reggie Reynolds sat Indian-style on the hardwood floor of her small, rented house. She looked at the spine of each book, at the cover of each CD, before tossing them into the box. The idea that Phil Robb was sitting in her living room watching her pack was as surreal to her as the sudden twists and turns her life had taken.

  Just a couple months ago the idea of her packing up to leave her hometown would have been unthinkable. She had loved her town and had loved everything about her life, including her job as reporter for the Honor Sentinel newspaper.

  But then her investigative reporting uncovered widespread corruption within the halls of the criminal justice system, the kind of rancid illegal deal-making and back-slapping that soon stretched from the prosecutor’s office all the way up to her own father, a criminal court judge.

  As soon as the newspaper hit the stands, her world tilted. She was vilified, described as ruthless and cold-hearted by people who barely knew her name. Even her own family turned against her, with her big sister Mavis making clear that their relationship was over. “If mama was still alive,” she had added, “she’d disown you, too.

  “What time do you plan to leave tomorrow?” Robb asked her, his pristine Armani suit giving him an elegant look even as he slouched on her couch.

  “Ten,” she replied. “I told my landlady I’d be out of here by then and I don’t want to get on the road any later than that. At least that’s my plan.”

  He continued to stare intensely at her, as if he was angry about something but was attempting to control it. “When were you going to let me in on this plan of yours?”

  Reggie looked sidelong at him, a puzzled look on her face. She didn’t know how to answer that. Since when did she let him in on anything about her life? “I don’t know what you mean,” she said truthfully.

  Robb became suddenly flustered, as if his control was breaking. He uncrossed his legs, unbuttoned his suit coat, and leaned forward, his big hands clasped. “You’ve decided to all of a sudden leave town,” he said in a tone that seemed to mock the obvious. “You’ve decided to pack up and just take off. But I had to find out about it from some snot-nosed rookie who wouldn’t know where his ass ended and his brains began. That’s how I found out about this monumental decision of yours. From some rookie. But I don’t know why I’m surprised. I’m always the last to know when it concerns you.”

  Reggie looked at the book in her hand, a biography of Edward R. Morrow, and all she could think about was the irony. Everything was wrong with this picture. She and Robb, for one thing, always had had a contentious relationship, not a loving one, where she was a reporter and he was a cop and they were almost always at odds over what he perceived to be her unfair reports, and what she perceived to be his lack of cooperation. When he did grant her interviews, and she was the only reporter in town he ever granted interviews to, they would argue their points to the edge of madness. Sometimes it would get so hostile that he would order her to leave his sight, or she would do what no reporter ever would do and voluntarily depart.

  Although many around town took their combativeness as a shield for their true affection for one another, noting that if Robb really detested Reggie why was he always granting her interviews, the truth, as usual, was far more complicated than that. The truth was, neither one of them understood their relationship and were slowly becoming resigned to never understanding it. They both understood that there was something between them, something that could have even possibly been considered affection, but it was so buried, so deep down, that it just as well not existed at all. That was why the idea that Robb would come bursting into her home for the first time since ever, and demanding to know why she hadn’t notified him of her decision as if they had it going on like that, was as stunning as it was stupefying.

  Another problem with this picture was that Robb was a cop, and not just any cop, but the white chief of the Honor, Alabama police department and the man many in the black community often joked was “no friend of the Negro.” They mainly based it on what happened years ago when Robb wasn’t even in Honor, but was a police captain in New York.

  As the story goes, he hated blacks because his pregnant wife was killed by black drug dealers. He supposedly hunted down the killers and killed them himself. Reggie investigated. Went all the way to New York to get the true facts for her newspaper.

  And the story was true, Robb’s pregnant wife had been gunned down as revenge by black drug dealers, and although Robb didn’t kill them, he did hunt them down and brought them to justice. And they were all black, that was true. But what was also true was that Robb’s now-deceased pregnant wife, was black also.

  But the black community didn’t believe her report and still insisted that Robb was a racist who hated the fact that he was in love with Reggie, a black woman.

  To those people, it would have been an I told you so moment when Robb arrived on Reggie’s doorstep looking uncharacter
istically wounded because she was leaving. They would have missed the irony of it, that the man who literally went to the courthouse and arrested Reggie’s father the day her corruption story broke, was now sitting in her living room. But it was that irony that perplexed Reggie even more.

  Her father’s arrest made every nightly newscast from Honor to Birmingham, as the honorable Judge William Reynolds, the man who once made history as the first African-American judge to ever sit behind a bench in an Honor courtroom, was in handcuffs like some common criminal, perp-walking his way to jail. It was the biggest downfall of such an esteemed citizen in the history of the town. And all Reggie could think to do was to phone Robb in tears, yelling at him and asking why he had to handcuff her father that way. And Robb could find no words to say, none at all, because the answer would have been as preposterous as the question.

  “What rookie?” Reggie finally answered, and for a moment Robb had to remember the words he had just spoken.

  “Some kid,” Robb at first said, and then added: “Walt Matthews. He’s always flirting with you every time you come to the station.”

  That told Reggie little about the rookie, but a lot about Robb. Many of his cops flirted with Reggie, some to the point of annoyance. But the idea that Robb knew about it, since none of his cops dared do it whenever he was around, seemed odd to her.

  “Don’t think I know a Walt Matthews,” she ultimately said.

  “Regina?” Robb said suddenly and Reggie looked at him. “Are you sure you want to do this?” He was still trying to control himself, still trying to display as little of the emotion that Reggie had already seen in his wide blue eyes.

  “I don’t want to do it, no,” Reggie replied, tossing another book into her box. “This is my hometown. I love it here. At least, I used to love it here. The last thing I want to do is pack up and leave. But everything’s changed now, Phil. Everybody’s changed. I can’t stay.”

  “But why do you have to go so far away?” Robb asked, this time with pain in his voice. “Why all the way to Maryland? I know a newspaper publisher over in Mobile. He can get you a reporting job over there.”

  Reggie looked at Robb. Where was all of this emotion coming from? “What difference does it make?” she asked him. “Nobody cares, not even my own family. They probably wish I’d leave the country, let alone the state. Who cares how far away I go?”

  If he would have said, I care, Reggie would have fell over. But of course he didn’t go there. He never did. He simply continued to stare at her as if she had missed the point. “I’m sure your sister cares,” he said. “And your brother Mike. You don’t give them credit.”

  “Mavis told me she never wanted to see me again as long as she lived, and Mike refuses to return my phone calls. Or, if I caught him in an unguarded moment and he did answer his cell phone, once he realizes it’s me, he hangs up. So, yeah, you’re right, I don’t give them credit. They don’t deserve it.”

  The bitterness in Reggie’s voice was new to Robb. She was the most moral human being he’d ever met, a woman who believed in truth for truth sake, regardless of what consequences may come. It seemed almost cruel that she would be the one that everybody would blame.

  “Reggie, it’s not your fault,” he said to her before he realized he was saying it, and he could tell he had touched a nerve.

  She closed her bright brown eyes and opened them back up again. She looked down at the book in her hand, and then back up again. “If he wouldn’t have killed himself,” she said, fighting tears, “I would be able to accept that it’s not my fault. That none of it was my fault. But he killed himself.”

  “Men like your father can’t take the shame, Reggie,” Robb said, his voice almost caressing. “They scratch and claw to make it so high up on that mountain that they can’t imagine what it would be like to fall. When the reality hit, when they realize they’ve actually lost their footing, they have to do something about it. They’re in free fall and they can’t take that.”

  “So he bails himself out,” Reggie said as if she were continuing Robb’s own storyline, “then puts a bullet in his brains. Because he’s ashamed of falling? Or because he’s ashamed of the daughter that caused his fall?”

  Robb stared at her. She was only repeating what every critic this side of Alabama was proclaiming, but that didn’t lessen the pain of it. “You didn’t cause his fall,” he said firmly. “You didn’t cause his suicide, and you certainly didn’t cause him to do what he did.”

  What Reggie’s father did was to work in tandem with the DA’s office and accept bribes for outcomes, especially when outrageous plea deals could be struck. The higher the bribe the defendant could give, the less time he would serve in prison. In many cases, he wouldn’t serve any time at all.

  “Mike thinks it’s because of my ambition,” Reggie said. “He calls it my blind ambition. He actually believe I would have exposed our father just to advance my career.” She said this as if she was still stunned by his allegation.

  “He’s just upset,” Robb said and Reggie looked at him.

  “You’re defending him?” she asked, surprised.

  “I’m not defending anybody. I just think you’re being too hard on Mike. You need to see it from his point of view.”

  “What point of view is that? He thinks I would have destroyed our father to get a little recognition. He thinks I’m capable of something that vile!”

  “Then why did you do it, Reggie?” Robb asked, his anger no longer suppressed. “Why the hell did you put your name on that story? Why didn’t you give it to one of your colleagues to write?”

  He looked at her with a look of bewilderment on his face. It was the question he had wanted to ask her since the story broke. She had to know that she was opening herself up to all kinds of criticisms when the story’s byline had her name on it. The fact that she would put herself through such agony angered him.

  “Oh, I get it now,” she said, nodding her head as if she knew it all along. “What you’re saying is that I should have buried the story, too?”

  “No, I’m not saying that. Of course I’m not saying that. But I see Mike’s point. You could have turned that information over to your editor and let somebody else deal with it. You would have done your job. The story would have come out. Why did you have to put your name on it?”

  Tears appeared in her big, brown eyes and she began to shake her head. “That’s not fair, Phil,” she said, the anguish of the last eight weeks piling back on top of her. Robb immediately hurried to her and fell down on his knees.

  “Oh, Regina,” he said, pulling her into his arms.

  “That was my father and it was my responsibility,” she said, trying to fight his pull. But Robb wouldn’t let up. He made her let him hold her.

  “It’s all right, Regina,” he said.

  “I did what I was supposed to do,” she said as if she was still convincing herself.

  “I know,” Robb said, still holding her, but it wasn’t enough. He sat on the floor and pulled her onto his lap.

  She wiped her tears away as he held her. It felt so strange, that they were this intimate, so much so that she refused to consider it. But the fact of her crazy situation was clear to her now, because everybody were saying the same thing. She didn’t take the coward’s way out, they were saying, and therefore she was a fool. Even Robb was saying it now.

  And all of that confidence she had in her decision, all of that belief that she had done the right thing, was crumbling before her feet as if it were a heap of nothingness to begin with. She looked up into Robb’s deep blue eyes.

  “I was wrong?” she asked him, searching his eyes, seeking reassurance wherever she could find it.

  He was shaking his head before she could finish her question. “No,” he said. “You’re the only one who isn’t wrong.” He placed his hand under her chin. “You did what was the absolute right thing to do. Don’t you ever forget that. It’s the rest of us that fell short.”

  She found it. She foun
d reassurance in his eyes, and it was as comforting as his caress.

  He stared into her smoky brown eyes, those same sincere, innocent eyes that used to intrigue him when he first saw her. He looked down at her mouth, at her full lips that was just a move away from his, and he caved. He could deny his attraction no longer. He kissed her.

  The kiss started out as very controlled, little more than a sweet peck. But the taste of Reggie’s lips against his caused Robb to lose all control. He wrapped her closer to him and kissed her passionately.

  Reggie wasn’t resistant to his peck, but when he kissed her again, and much more passionately, she held back. They were treading into territory she wasn’t sure she wanted to venture. But the way he held her, and kissed her so meaningfully, caused her to venture in anyway.

  That was why she allowed him to lift her, and carry her to her bedroom. She allowed him to undress her, laying her there naked as he undressed himself. It was all so definite, and seemed so fated, that they could hardly contain their emotions. And when Robb laid on top of her, and slowly entered her, she felt a surge of panic mixed with the deepest kind of emotional release she’d ever experienced. Tears entered her eyes as she held onto him, as she allowed him to move into the innermost part of her, caressing her with his finesse as he continued to slide in, doing things to her body she had never allowed any other man to do before. Robb was her first experience.