Betrayal of Trust Read Online Free

Dad,” she said when he picked up. “Just letting you know I’m home safely, so you can go to bed now and try to sleep.”
    “Praise the Lord.” She could hear the note of relief in his voice. But there was a weariness that she’d noticed lately that concerned her.
    “Dad, you feeling okay? When was the last time you checked your blood pressure?”
    “I’m just fine, young lady. Don’t start sounding like Ruthie.”
    Raven bristled. The last person she sounded like was Dad’s Southern belle of a fiancée. The mention of the woman’s name conjured the flamboyant red hair piled atop her head like Flo from the eighties sitcom, Alice . The too-cheerful-to-be-real demeanor. The knowledge that Mac could be in love with this type of woman after loving Raven’s mother, a classic beauty with more creativity and style in her little toe than Ruth had in her whole body was just too irritating.
    “Well, I’ll let you go, Dad. Get some rest, okay?”
    “You too, hon.”
    Raven disconnected the call. By the time she’d unloaded her bag, gone inside and showered, dawn was just beginning to glisten over the enormous oak tree in her backyard.
    She sat on her deck, wearing a white terry-cloth robe and sipping a mug of strong, black coffee. By 6:00 a.m., she could restrain herself no longer. She snatched up her phone and dialed Ken, her camera guy and the one person she knew would be straight with her. His grumbled, sleepy “Hello” didn’t faze her. He’d interrupted her sleep plenty of times.
    “Ken, what’s going on with the Matthew Strong story?”
    “Raven?”
    “Who else?” Impatience edged her voice, but after two days of no inside info after finding out about Matt, she’d had all the delays she was going to take. “Matthew Strong?”
    For the next few seconds all she heard was the rustling of sheets and the hiss of a lighter as presumably, the grizzled, old-before-his-time, forty-five-year-old sat up in bed and lit a cigarette.
    “Those things will kill you, Ken. You need to quit smoking.”
    “Mind your own business.”
    “Fine. They’re your lungs.”
    “You got that right.”
    Raven shifted in her seat, stifling a yawn. “Tell me about Matt.”
    “Matt, is it?”
    Despite the fact that Ken couldn’t see her, Raven felta blush creep up to her cheeks. “We had a thing once a long time ago.”
    “What kind of thing?” he asked in his I-smell-a-story tone of voice.
    “The kind that’s none of your business.”
    “Touché, but is it perhaps the kind of ‘thing’ we might be able to use to get access to the almost-senator?”
    An uneasy twist affected Raven’s stomach and suddenly the coffee didn’t sit well. “Just meet me at Corner Coffee, will you? We need to talk and map out a strategy.”
    “All right, girl. But let me tell you, I’m not wasting my time on personal ethics. If you got an inside to this guy, you better use it or I might take the sweet Miss Kellie up on her tempting offer.”
    “You’re old enough to be her dad.”
    “Yeah, well. Ain’t that the kicker? I’m not her dad and she seems to go for my natural maturity. And she likes the way our names go together. Thinks it’s downright cute. Kellie and Ken. It does have a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”
    Raven gave a snort. “Don’t flatter yourself, pops. She wants to break up the wonder twins, and that’s all there is to her sudden attraction.”
    It was common knowledge around the station, and had been for the past several years, that Ken and Raven were an unstoppable team. Thanks to Raven’s instincts for where the great story was, they rarely failed to bring it home, and thanks to Ken’s hot ability with a camera, they ended up with unbelievably good shots of whomever they were after. The dream team.
    Raven’s ire rose at the very thought that Kellie might be making a play for Ken. And even more so that Ken was exploiting it to bait her into using her past with Matt as a means to an end.
    Never mind that