Page 6 of Release

Chapter Two

Then

I wasn’t a nun before I became romantically involved with Declan.

Pun intended, as you’ll soon see why.

In my experience, it seems to me that a lot of priests, the non-pedophiles, fit one of two types—gay men straightjacketed into the lie of chastity, when they’re actually sleeping with other men, or straight men bound into a similar lie where they have secret wives or girlfriends.

Benjamin Orotello fell into the second category. I knew this with all certainty, because once a week we met at a different hotel, usually in Murfreesboro, to fuck each other’s brains out.

Among other deliciously dirty, sinful activities.

The man was damned gorgeous, let me tell you what. Ten years older than me, but he kept himself in shape. Hung like a goddamned horse, too, and with oral talents that could literally have me speaking in tongues and calling upon any deity he wished me to worship. Definitely a man wasted in the service of the Catholic church. I told him he should switch teams and join the Episcopalians, so he wouldn’t have to hide being in a relationship. But he wasn’t quite ready to give up on the church yet, unless I was ready to give up my insistence on never getting married. And, to him, he carried the double “shame” of also being a submissive masochist.

Except for the marriage issue, I was more than happy to help him out in every way he needed. I knew he wouldn’t talk, and he knew I wouldn’t talk.

Because I wasn’t merely his secret fuck-buddy—I was also his attorney of record. Which, yes, that was a conflict of interest for me, but one I knew he’d protect. He needed me as his confessor and relief valve more than I was worried about anyone giving me any shit over sleeping with a priest. We had the perfect double excuse—attorney-client privilege, and piercing the veil of the confessional.

Hey, at least I was an adult, consenting woman, and not a kid.

I enjoyed talking to him after we exhausted each other in bed nearly as much as I enjoyed the act of exhausting each other in bed. Brilliant man, funny, sweet, and a great conversationalist.

Also fantastic at picking up little tidbits and pointing me toward people who needed help. The kind of help I could provide.

Which is how I learned about Lorena Smith six weeks before my path first crossed with Declan’s.

She was eighteen years old and recently orphaned. Her mother was a housekeeper at a hotel in Nashville, and Lorena never knew her birth father. She suspected that her mother had lied on her birth certificate, because her father was listed as one John Smith.

Three weeks ago, however, her mother had said she was going to approach Lorena’s birth father and ask for money for her for college, now that Lorena was about to graduate from high school. She didn’t, however, tell Lorena her birth father’s real name.

Just that he was into raising cattle.

Her mother was dead less than a week later. Murdered. The only thing Lorena had to go on was that she found on her mother’s Kindle Fire tablet a search for the address for Terrance Ronald’s home address two days before she was killed.

Senior, not Junior.

Now, Lorena was worried her mother had been deliberately targeted by someone, and that she might be next. The cops were useless, because they’d already ruled that it was a “crime of passion,” and had arrested a homeless man for the murder.

A man who’d killed himself his first night in custody after he confessed to killing her.

Case closed.

Lorena, however, wasn’t convinced, and had talked to her priest about it—Benjamin.

Benjamin had talked to a friend of his, a fellow priest who he knew was a spiritual counselor to the Ronald family, and asked if he’d heard anything. He hadn’t, but said he’d keep Benjamin posted.

Benjamin knew that man wouldn’t rat him out, because Benjamin had covered for the guy plenty of times so he could conduct his ongoing affair with another man in Nashville.

I agreed to talk to Lorena and quietly look into the situation. That’s when I discovered a pattern that was clearly visible, if you knew what you were looking for. Several people who’d died or were killed under unusual circumstances, all with some sort of tie to the Ronald family.

I knew for a fact the Ronald family was trying to win a lawsuit that would boost their already stratospheric net worth, and that Senior was dying.

During my investigation, tapping into sources I knew would keep my queries quiet, I learned Senior likely had dozens of illegitimate bastard children all over Tennessee and Kentucky. He’d preferred affairs with Hispanic women of shaky citizenship status so he could leverage that against them to ensure their silence. Frequently hotel housekeepers, because he traveled a lot and they fit his type perfectly.

He’d pay for all the hospital bills, and usually provide a small payout that would seem like a windfall to the baby mommas, as long as they signed an affidavit stating he wasn’t the father and they didn’t put his name on the birth certificate. He would frequently visit while the baby was young, but once they were a toddler, he disappeared, never to return to their life.

He also preferred not to pay for abortions. In fact, Benjamin put me in contact with one woman who said Senior had become enraged when she said she was going to get an abortion. He demanded she have the baby, even though he wasn’t going to have anything to do with it past infancy.