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
