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  Scarlet Harlot Publishing™

  Erotic Romance

  Copyright © 2013 by Amarinda Jones

  Editor: Vivian Vincent

  First E-book Publication: April 2013

  Cover design by Amarinda Jones

  All cover art and logo copyright © 2013 by Amarinda Jones ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

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  www.amarindajones.com

  Deadly Suspicious

  The Outcasts Series

  ©Amarinda Jones

  Chapter One

  February 2012

  “I agree. Women must be jailed for abortion.” Sirius Tate’s voice was strong and full of determination. The dark gray suited men of the Jacobson Committee nodded and murmured their approval. “Women cannot dictate to men whether they will or won’t have a child, nor can they abort a fetus because it doesn’t suit them to have a baby. A man has rights.”

  “Well said.”

  “That must be put into the ruling draft.”

  “Agreed. For a woman to have a baby is as important as it is for her to marry.”

  They all nodded. “That is a woman’s job after all.”

  Sirius looked around the boardroom table at the bland faces. They all appeared identical to him.

  Pale, thin lipped and with a fanatical gleam in their eyes. That they disliked women was a given.

  That’s what made them good, servile lackeys of the Committee. Knowing he was one of them sometimes surprised him. He only disliked one woman. Intensely. She was the reason behind the amendment to the draft he’d proposed. “No woman should ever take away a man’s right to his child.”

  The Jacobson Committee, which had its origins in Australia, but soon became a global entity, was in the middle of drafting a law designed to change the world. They had started off as a small group of men who expounded their theories on old fashioned values and a woman’s place being in the home. To get their message out to the masses, they schmoozed with pop stars and politicians and lobbied anyone in power to listen to them. Rock concerts, film productions, sporting events and men’s health programs were funded to win the hearts and minds of the people. The best looking members of the Committee spoke to women’s homemaker groups, making the women feel special, letting them know the homemaker projects they were doing were important to the happiness of the family home. They wined and dined female politicians, having sex with them when necessary, adoring them and making them feel what it was like to be looked after by a man and why it was a feeling every woman should have instead of worrying about things that were a man’s job. They were smooth, charming and influential. One of their biggest coups was to pay the big breasted, no brained Miller sisters, Milly, Molly, Mandy and their mother Mattie, to influence women to be like them and follow not only their diets, fashion lines and hair styles but also their beliefs that anything the Jacobson Committee wanted was good.

  What the committee wanted was so alien to the world, it took the pop stars, divas and the politicians who could be bought off with sex, drugs and fame, to promote it. The war on women started because the vain and the vacuous had the following of the uneducated, the needy and the gullible. When pronouncements like ‘ all women past the age of twenty-one must be married to a male or in a monogamous, sexual relationship with another female constituting a partnership that has been sanctioned by the Jacobson Committee’ were made, Milly Miller and her sisters jumped on the bandwagon with their vacuous thoughts on what else was a woman for but to be adored by a man and ‘think of the power, ladies, in having a man who adores only you.’

  Senator Jane Roenfeld was completely on board with the committee’s beliefs that all women must have at least one child unless they could prove they were medically unfit to conceive. She was quoted as saying, “It seems reasonable to me and not too much to ask.” But then her campaign for re-election was being topped up by the shadowy committee and she would say whatever they wanted. “If a woman is found to be pregnant and single and refusing to marry?” the senator preached on the campaign trail. “Well that’s unfair of her to make a man suffer. Exposing her to jail time and having the child taken from her is reasonable also. Why penalize the man?” Women’s groups were outraged. The committee slammed them down by having superstar, sex symbol Jed Jedson, whose drug habit they were funding, announce that he only found ‘married women sexy.’

  Those women hungry for a man and romance fell on board with this idea. When he told the adoring masses that the women’s groups who opposed the benefits of the new plan were militant, khaki wearing, lesbian throwbacks from the 1970s, many agreed with him.

  The war against women was fought and won using celebrities to woo adoring fans into believing the committee only wanted the best for women. What woman wouldn’t want romance, love, kids, and a stable home with a loving husband?

  * * * * *

  Sirius Tate wasn’t surprised the men of the committee instantly agreed with him. They hated woman. They wanted them subdued and under control. At that moment, Sirius knew only one thing. He was still angry. Very, very angry. It was a cancer that had begun to eat away at him three months ago when Penny, his lover of the time, announced she had aborted their child ‘because I’m not in the right place in my life to have a baby.’ Sirius had been horrified. He didn’t have a clue she was pregnant and that she had so coldly announced it was done and a baby didn’t suit her? It had made him want to throttle her. The fact she hadn’t considered his rights as a father, nor had she even considered he needed to be brought into the discussion, made him mad. Real mad. So mad that he joined the then new men’s group, the Jacobson Committee, to try and change the laws about abortion and the rights of fathers. What the other men’s personal agendas were didn’t concern him.

  He knew what he was fighting for.

  However, once a part of the Committee, they urged Sirius on to feel anger towards all women.

  The Committee wanted that to happen. Angry men were strong men and useful to their cause.

  Added to that, at thirty-five, Sirius Tate was a poster boy for their cause. He was handsome, commanding, dark haired, tall and well-built. They recognized he had an authority that made other men l
isten and women want to do whatever he told them. The Committee needed men like Tate. He became a rising star and even the founder of the Jacobson Committee, who few had seen and many speculated on, was impressed with Tate.

  “Keep him angry.”

  “That won’t be hard, we know which buttons to push.”

  “Good. That’s why I pay you.”

  “Sir, I hear your daughter is in town.”

  “You hear correct.”

  “Can we do anything to assist?”

  “Keep an eye on her. Denby had this foolish notion she wants to change the world by militant over reaction.”

  “Hasn’t she learned the world has changed?”

  “Her mother was a bitch. She had strange ideas too. Australian women are like that. Too independent for their own good.”

  “Those females are going to be the hardest to crush.”

  “Yes, but we will. Watch Denby. I don’t want her getting any more crazy ideas about equality and the rights of women.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “Introduce her to Tate. Let’s see if he can dazzle her, but make sure he doesn’t let her know he’s part of the committee. She also doesn’t know my part in it. There’s no need for her to.

  “Yes, sir. When are you coming back to your home in Brisbane?”

  “When it suits me.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  Chapter Two

  February 2015 present day

  Denby Dumaresq strode through the Queen Street Mall, in the heart of Brisbane city, like she was daring someone to question her. She was twenty-five years of age, unmarried and dressed in camouflage combat pants and a bright red t-shirt with the iconic female symbol emblazoned on the front. Her Blundstone steel capped boots made a clumping sound as she moved down the street. She was deliberately conspicuous and couldn’t care less. She wasn’t the sort to spend her life hiding out to fit the rules of the time. Many people stopped to look at the woman with the long, flame red hair, defying all convention by being herself. Denby didn’t care. She knew she was going to turn heads but she didn’t want to live in a world where she was supposed to be a housewife clone, dressed like everyone else and too scared to say anything for fear of what someone thought.

  Denby had come back to Brisbane after being away a couple of years on a search to find answers. Because I sure as hell didn’t find them overseas. When she had first departed Australia, it had been to look for reasons about why her mother had left her as a child. The only lead she had was that Shanelle Dumaresq had gone to London, like so many other Australians, to work and travel. That had been twenty years ago when Denby was only five. No one explained why she had gone and no attempt was made by her mother to contact her nor had her father tried to find his wife.

  Hearing him say her mother ‘had made her choice’ didn’t sit well with Denby. What choice? Why?

  Who leaves a child behind without an explanation or reason? Her father was no help. He was bitter, arrogant and not interested in the whereabouts of her mother.

  “Forget her.”

  “No.”

  “If she loved you she would’ve stayed.”

  “But—”

  “Denby, you’re under my control now and you’ll obey me. If I say forget her, you will.”

  This conversation resembled many they’d had. She was to do as she was told and not bother him with disobedience. Denby, of course, had gone out of her way to be exactly that by swearing, smoking and drinking. The first she enjoyed. The second two made her as sick as a dog. She paid dearly for all her actions when, at fifteen, her father shoved her into an archaic all-girl boarding school that followed eighteenth century beliefs about the education and rearing of girls. They had to act a certain way, dress in a certain manner and her hair? Good grief. It’s a preposterous color! No normal person has red hair. When she told them to ‘get stuffed’ and she ‘didn’t want to be normal’

  she had been whipped hard with a leather strap on her naked back and legs. Denby refused to cry when the pain cut into her. She also refused to behave. Each time she had run away from the school, she had been dragged back, whipped and locked in her room and ordered to conform.

  When she turned seventeen, Denby had left the school unannounced. She’d endured enough. No one knew where she was and she doubted they would’ve cared less. Her father certainly wouldn’t have. He’d sentenced her to that school and never once visited so it wasn’t like he would miss seeing her. She travelled around fruit picking, waitressing and trying to learn what she could about life from everyday people who understood pain, heartache, happiness and independence. It wasn’t an easy life but at least it was real. She ignored her father and, for three years, Denby did as she pleased. That was until the Jacobson mess started and she was thrown in jail for being ‘recalcitrant.’

  It was the standard charge given to any woman who had no fixed abode and no gainful employment. It would be another year before the ruling that any woman over twenty-one and not married would be jailed. Denby was only inside the small prison for two days before suddenly being released. The deference she received as she was let out of the cell was bordering on creepy and obsequious.

  When they ordered her out of the small, cramped cell in the basement of the police station, Denby was suspicious. Up until that point they had ignored her. She had heard such treatment of women was becoming more frequent but it never occurred to her she would be subjected to it.

  When she had demanded legal counsel and they had just laughed and walked away. But now they were freeing her. Why? “What’s going on?”

  “We weren’t aware who you father is.”

  She looked the pot-bellied, uniformed officer up and down. “He’s no one special. Just your basic, anal lawyer with a God complex.” And the last man on the planet Denby wanted to see.

  The other officer looked at her in disgust. “You have no idea what a great man your father is and how lucky we are to have him.”

  “Whatever,” she muttered, all the time thinking if they believed her father, Joseph Armstrong, was important, then that was weird but of no concern to her.

  As Denby left the jail, a large, black, expensive looking car pulled up to the stairs. It had the now familiar symbol of black dragon crushing a white bird crest on the hood. It was said to represent strength over weakness. All the Jacobson committee cars had the same crest. Once it had been easy to spot a government car by the license plate. Now the black dragon was becoming more familiar and ominous.

  She saw the door open but ignored it. Denby wasn’t in the mood to be preached to about feminine morality by some guy in a suit. She walked on, thinking about whether to hitchhike or to jump on a train. “But to where?” she murmured to herself.

  “Denby.”

  She stiffened slightly but didn’t look behind her. That the person in the Committee car knew her name didn’t bode well and she wasn’t about to see what they wanted. She wasn’t scared. I just know I’ll get into a fight with one of those anal pricks.

  “Turn around, Denby.”

  “No thanks.” She kept walking. “I’m not interested in whatever erosion to female rights you’re trying to sell to the ‘recalcitrant’.”

  “Get in the car.”

  “Piss off.”

  “Denby, do as you’re told.”

  She almost turned then. If she did, a fight would have ensued. That these men felt they had the right to hound women made Denby clench her fists to try and refrain from retaliating. “I’m not about to start now, face-ache.” She heard the car door slam. Good. They had given up.

  But they hadn’t. Instead the car sped up and drove in front of her, blocking her path. The door opened once more. “Get in the car or else.”

  Denby squinted inside the dark interior. “Says who?” Who am I about to get in a fight with?

  “Says your father.”

  “What the fuck!” She was shocked. He was the last person she expected to see and why now? It wasn’t like she was about
to suddenly become the dutiful daughter, nor he the doting Dad.

  “Watch your mouth, young lady.”

  Yeah. That sounded like her father. She was no more interested in him or his opinion as he was of hers. She wasn’t a powerless teenager any more. “I do what I like and I’m not about to get in a car with you, old man.” Denby wanted nothing to do with Jacobson and wondered what her father’s connection was.

  “You’ve clearly learned nothing.” He got out of the car and came to stand before her.

  He was older, taller, harder and scarier looking than she remembered. His face was lined with a harsh cragginess that bespoke a bitter man. That didn’t surprise her. As a child, he had looked terrifying to her. Denby had thought aging would have changed the harshness of his features, making him more mellow. Clearly not. “What do you want?” His black eyes bored into her.

  Denby’s were the same color. She wasn’t about to be intimated by the disgust she saw in them.

  “You.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re my daughter,” he bit out impatiently.

  “So? Why would you suddenly care about me now?” To Denby, he was looking at her like she was the scum of the earth. Why the need to find her if she was an inconvenience? She looked from him to the car. “And what’s the deal with the creepy Jacobson people car?”

  He scowled at her. “You think you know everything, don’t you?”

  She shrugged, deciding to play this casually and not show the surging apprehension building inside her. “Yeah, pretty much.” The jailer’s words ‘we weren’t aware who your father was’ came back to her. Who is my father? She looked him up and down, unimpressed at the man she saw.

  Blood may be thicker than water but they were no more than strangers.

  “Get in the car.”

  The way he said it was like she was some feral animal he was trying to deal with. He commanded. He didn’t ask. He glared at her. There was no fatherly interest in his eyes. She had the feeling she was just a thing he had to deal with.