Her skin crawled. “What pictures?” she asked. Maybe if she played dumb they’d think they had the wrong girl. How could he even know? Toby always blurred her face out, promised her no one would ever know it was her. Their little secret.
But she couldn’t trust Toby to keep his dick in his pants. Why should she trust him not to out her online?
The man brushed off her question, his hand trailing down her throat like a snake, coming to rest on the pendant that hung just below the hollow of her throat.
“You have a treasure,” he said, closing his fingers around the small silver charm. It was a stylized V, with three tiny diamonds, one at each end, one at the point. Laurie Friedland’s mother had given the charms to Kara and Laurie two years ago at homecoming.
Right after they’d established the V-Club on FacePlace.
Where Kara often posted pictures of herself along with her almost daily messages.
He hadn’t seen the other pictures. A faint flutter of relief started to unwind her nerves.
But her relief was short-lived as his fingers tightened on the pendant. She shrank from his reptilian gaze as it raked her up and down, lingering on her breasts and between her legs.
“This treasure you value so very much,” the man said. “Let’s hope your father values it as well.”
D
READ BUILT SLOWLY and steadily as Ethan drove to his father’s house. He wasn’t looking forward to hearing all about whatever crazy lead Dad was chasing this time. Tension and fatigue joined forces and started a dull throbbing at the base of his skull.
By the time he got to his father’s house fifteen minutes later, the tension had erupted into a full-blown headache, pounding in his temples with the rhythm of his heartbeat. His father still lived in the house Ethan had grown up in, a sprawling ranch-style home that sat on a full acre of land in the middle of wealthy Atherton.
But unlike the showpieces that lined the oak-studded street, the Taggart house showed its age. The paint on the trim was starting to chip, and as he walked up the driveway to the front door, Ethan noticed that the asphalt had buckled and cracked in several places. When Ethan was growing up, even one of these small defects would have driven his father insane. Though he’d given up his military career to pursue one in finance, Joe Taggart had still expected everything in his life to be spit-polished to a high shine. The lawn was always neatly mowed, the hedges precisely trimmed. The house got a new coat of paint every five years without fail, and he would never have allowed the oak tree roots to spread under the driveway until it became a cracked mess.
But that was before Joe’s wife had disappeared without a trace, and the father Ethan had always regarded with equal measures of love and awe had disappeared along with her.
Ethan had memories from when he was a little kid, before they moved to California. Memories of his parents laughing, his mother jumping into his father’s arms and kissing him passionately the moment Joe Taggart walked in the door. Then his father had retired from the army, which was supposed to mean more money, more stability, since they wouldn’t have to move every few years. Instead, Joe’s success in the investment banking world meant long hours in the office, weekends spent at work, and vacations canceled so deals could be closed.
Ethan didn’t know when his mom had checked out. He didn’t remember the first few years being so bad. His dad wasn’t around much, but he didn’t remember his mom hassling Joe about his long hours and frequent trips out of town.
But when his mother’s face swam into his memory, Ethan didn’t see a happy woman. Without her husband around to shower her with affection, she’d wilted like a flower in the desert, and even her three growing boys weren’t enough to make up for a husband who was never around.
If Joe noticed his wife’s increasing dissatisfaction with their marriage, he didn’t show it. He sure as shit didn’t do anything to fix it, still working just as hard if not harder. In the end, Anne Taggart had descended into a depression-induced fog of booze, pills, and who knew what else. She’d disappeared emotionally long before she’d disappeared physically.
Joe hadn’t meant to ignore her, Ethan knew. He’d been focused on his career, convinced he was doing the best for his family by making as much money as he could, as quickly as possible. He’d ignored her complaints, convinced she would thank him later for every day that she sat in her multimillion-dollar home, dressed in designer clothes from the most expensive boutiques. Unfortunately, Joe hadn’t recognized the depth of her unhappiness until it was too late. Anne had already left, without a backward look, leaving no clue as to where she’d gone.
Now, though Joe still did financial consulting on the side, his top priority was finding his wife. He’d spent the past eighteen years chasing every lead, no matter how far-fetched, no matter how unreliable the source. If he’d spent only one-tenth of the time with his wife when she was around as he did searching for her now, Ethan knew she never would have left. The irony wasn’t lost on Ethan. Only after she disappeared did Anne truly become the center of Joe’s life.
Ethan let himself in the front door, trying to stave off the wave of sorrow he felt every time he saw the house he grew up in. The inside wasn’t in any better shape than the outside. While it was kept clean by the housekeeper’s twice-weekly visits, the hardwood floor was scuffed and the upholstery on the furniture was worn. His father always kept the heavy drapes closed, giving the house a dark, suffocating feel even on a bright summer day like today. Upstairs, the bedrooms were the same as they’d been since Danny, Ethan, and Derek had left home. Danny had gone to West Point, followed two years later by Derek, while Ethan had opted for Annapolis and navy flight school.
And though he never went in there anymore, he knew his father kept the master bedroom exactly the same as it had been on the day their mother had disappeared. None of her clothing had been removed, none of the personal items she’d left behind in her hurry to disappear had been put away. As though any day now she was going to walk through the front door and start life right back where she’d left it.
On the front table was a pile of mail that no one had bothered to go through in what looked like weeks. Catalogs and bills were piled haphazardly, threatening to spill onto the floor. Ethan reached out to straighten it, freezing when he saw his mother’s name on the address label on a catalog.
He snatched it up and crumpled the thick paper in his fist, slamming it into a wastebasket as he stalked down the hall. He found his father and his older-by-six-minutes twin brother Derek in the dining room, looking at a map spread over the scratched surface of the cherrywood table.
“A woman matching her description was at the Champlung Hotel in Ubud,” Joe said, indicating the city in Central Bali with his forefinger.
Ethan and Derek exchanged a speaking look over their father’s head.
Can you believe he’s doing this again?
Derek’s look said. A
nother lead. Another dead end. Another chunk of change out of Dad’s bank account.
Ethan didn’t have to utter a word to make himself understood.
Though they weren’t identical, they’d always had that weird twin bond. If anyone ever asked either of them about it point-blank they would have denied it, neither of them being big believers in any kind of sixth-sense, touchy-feely crap. Nevertheless, when Ethan’s plane had gone down over Afghanistan four years ago, Derek had contacted Ethan’s commanding officer to find out his brother’s status before the crash had even been reported.
But it didn’t take special twin juju to know what Derek was thinking as he listened to Joe.
“She was in Ubud last week, but she’s heading south to Sanur,” Joe said, as though her presence in Bali were a given.
Derek’s shoulders were slumped, his jaw pulled into grim lines. His light brown, close-cropped hair was sticking up on top where he’d run frustrated fingers through it.
Ethan was sure he looked the same, but he did his best to hide his exasperation. He’d learned a long time ago that it did no good to try to dissuade his father when he’d caught the scent, however elusive, of their missing mother. It did no good to tell him it was a waste of time, that someone was yet again scamming him for the reward money he put up. “So you really think she’s in Indonesia, Dad?” Ethan asked, not bothering to point out that the woman he remembered had had a deathly fear of bugs and had hated the humidity because of what it did to her hair. Unless she’d changed dramatically, Southeast Asia wouldn’t exactly be Anne Taggart’s scene.
Joe pulled a small notepad out of his breast pocket and squinted over the rims of his reading glasses. “Yes. My source said he saw a woman fitting her description just five days ago. So you can see why I have to move fast.”
“Dad, the picture you have is almost twenty years old,” Ethan said, struggling to keep the impatience from his tone.
In Joe’s head she was still a thirty-eight-year-old California blond, whose age and years of increasingly harder drinking had just begun to catch up with her.
Who knew if she looked remotely the same, or if she was even alive?
Didn’t matter to their father, though. Send him a blurry picture of an attractive blond over forty and he was off and running. Ethan had long ago stopped trying to talk him out if it.
Their older brother, Danny, had no such qualms about poking holes in their dad’s cockeyed theory. “This is fucking bullshit, Dad,” he said, slamming an empty pot into the sink and filling it with water. “Like every other bullshit lead you’ve followed for the past eighteen fucking years. She left us. She’s not coming back. She never wanted to be found. Move on.”
Joe Taggart went very still, his finger frozen to a point on the map. Very slowly he straightened up and pinned his eldest son with a steely glare. For a moment, Ethan caught a glimpse of the man his father had once been. A man who commanded the room with his very presence, a man whose word was law. A man who brooked no disrespect from anyone, especially not his own sons. “Do I have to remind you that we’re talking about your mother and my wife? If I have to spend the rest of my life and every last penny of my fortune to find her—dead or alive—you bet your goddamn ass I will.”
Joe folded up the map and strode from the room, shoulders straight like the soldier he once was. Danny swore under his breath and turned back to the pot of sauce he was stirring for the spaghetti. Christ, Ethan thought, wondering how he’d ended up here. He should be out on a date, not having a spaghetti dinner with a heaping side of family drama.
But when he thought about having dinner with a beautiful woman, the only face that came to mind had catlike hazel eyes, heavy-framed glasses, and full red lips pursed as she focused on the screen of her computer monitor. Not his usual evening companion by a long shot.
“Why do you two humor him?” Danny said from the kitchen. “We should declare her dead and put Dad out of his fuckin’ misery already.” A spoon clattered into the stainless steel sink as Danny hurled it down. His big muscle-bound body looked out of place in the kitchen, but Ethan knew from experience that Danny’s hard-bitten exterior hid a master chef in the making. He cooked the way he did everything—aggressively, no holds barred, throwing every bit of his considerable passion into the process.
It didn’t make for a particularly neat process, and anger didn’t help, Ethan reflected as he watched Danny pick up a spice jar and wrench the top off with unnecessary force. He poured some of the contents into the palm of his hand, then flung it in the direction of the pan. Most of it went in. “I’m so fucking sick of these lowlifes taking his money, and watching him waste his life chasing after a woman who didn’t give a shit about us.”
“What else are we supposed to do? It’s not like we can change his mind,” Ethan said. As usual, Derek remained silent, letting Ethan and Danny battle it out. “Besides, if he’d just let her get a divorce like she wanted, she wouldn’t have had to leave.” It sounded lame even as the words left his mouth, but it’s what he’d been telling himself for the past eighteen years. That his father had forced his mother’s hand. If Joe hadn’t ignored their marriage for so long, she wouldn’t have become so depressed. And if he’d let her out when she’d wanted, she wouldn’t have felt so trapped.
Danny threw down the wooden spoon, sending a spray of sauce arcing like blood across the backsplash. He threw his hands up. “Oh, here we go again, defending poor Mom, whose life was so fucking hard she had to run away from it.”
Ethan didn’t say anything. Rationally, he knew Danny was right. Their mother—a woman who had abandoned her husband and children without a single look back—didn’t deserve his defense. But inside of him still lurked that little boy who had spent years doing everything he could to put a smile on her face. Who thought that if he had tried hard enough, the happy, fun-loving woman he remembered would reappear.
He didn’t dare admit any of this to his brothers. Danny, in particular, would bitch-slap him into next week and tell him to stop being a whiny mama’s boy.
Even so, Ethan never accepted Danny’s black-and-white version of how things went down—that their mother was weak and shallow and couldn’t handle real life, so she’d cut her losses and found herself a new life.
“None of this helps the situation we’re dealing with right now,” Derek said, always the voice of calm rationality. “Who’s going with Dad to Indonesia?”
“I don’t see why we have to hold his hand,” Danny said, stirring spaghetti into the pot with such vigor that boiling water splashed across his wrist. “Fuck,” he roared and thrust his hand under cold water. Clenching his teeth against the pain he said, “He wants to go on another wild goose chase, let him go on his own.”
Derek and Ethan exchanged a look.
It’s all bluster.
They all knew none of them, including Danny, would send their father alone into a situation like this. It wasn’t that their father was particularly stupid or naïve, just that he had a huge blind spot when it came to tracking down a lead on his wife. It had led him to deal with shady, unscrupulous characters from every dark corner of the globe. Men who would rob him blind and cut his throat if someone wasn’t there to watch his back.
“Not me,” Ethan said, not bothering to hide his relief. “I’m on duty till we find out where Kara Kramer has gotten herself.”
Derek shook his head. “I have three consultations this week, plus a seminar on corporate espionage. Danny, since you just wrapped up that corporate job in South City, I’m afraid it’s got to be you.”
“Son of a bitch! I need another trip to Southeast Asia like I need a hole in my fuckin’ head,” Danny said. “Ethan, why don’t you let me take over the Kramer case,” he said, his tone suddenly wheedling. “You speak better Bahasa than I do, anyway, and since you and Dad actually get along—”
“No way in hell,” Ethan held up his hands. He wouldn’t be charmed or bullied into covering for his brother. “I’m the one who had to go to Russia with him, last year, remember?” The memory was enough to make Ethan shudder. And not just from the remembered cold, though it had been a bone-chilling twenty below in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk. No, it was the memory of how his father had nearly gotten a bullet in his head when his search for a woman matching Anne’s description landed him face-to-face with a couple of Mafiya thugs in the middle of an arms deal. Fortunately, Ethan had been a lot more sober and a lot faster with his fists than the thugs and had been able to get them both out of there.