Sworn to Secrecy (Special Ops) (5 page)

“I don’t know. I mean I felt guilty.” She finally voiced her thoughts that she still found herself grappling with. “He’s my father. When I was little I practically worshiped him. He could do no wrong. He was the one who always told me you had to work hard and stay honest, and when I found out what he was doing I was angry.”

“So you ratted him out?”

“No. I thought of just not saying anything. You know turning him in is like betraying family, but then I thought about all the people who could get hurt or killed and the fact that he had always raised me to be honest…how could I be honest and do the right thing if I didn’t tell somebody?”

“And so you agreed to snoop?”

“Not exactly. Once somebody finally believed me…well, let’s just say they didn’t give me much of an option. Garrison said I would go down with my father. My dad put up the money for my lingerie company and he bought my house. She said if I didn’t help they would say I was in on it. I knew about the bomb’s location and she was going to use that against me. She told me, she promised me, that I would be safe if I helped.
We’ll protect you
, she had said. So with the threat of being labeled a traitor to my own country—which I love by the way—and knowing that what my dad was mixed up in could hurt a lot of people, I agreed to help.” She wiped away tears from her cheek. “I guess the entire time I was hoping I would find something that would prove me wrong about my father. I hoped I would find out that he didn’t know where the money was going, or what was happening with the companies he own, but then I found his dossier and I learned the truth.” When she found that information her hopes of exonerating her father while bringing down the bad guys went out the window. Her father was one of the bad guys.

“You learned that he was behind the money going into OTG.”

“Yeah, and that he had arranged weapons for them. I documented information on the previous shipments for the feds. They told me something bigger was going down and they needed to know what so they kept me working on it.”

“Did you only make one copy?”

“I’m much smarter than you think I am, Alexander my great rescuer,” she teased him. “I have a copy, but it’s in a safe location. I would have to get to it in order to get it to you.” He had saved her life. He couldn’t be one of the bad guys and that meant he was an ally, a friend who could make sure whatever her father and OTG were up to that they wouldn’t succeed in hurting innocent people. She wanted to survive this, but if she didn’t then she wanted to know that the evil she had stumbled upon wouldn’t stand a chance of winning the end game. Garrison had said they had somebody on the inside, but now she wondered if that were true. Now she wondered if the person they thought they had inside had just gone in to find out how much she knew. He, or she, could have been secretly working for OTG all this time without the Feds knowing and anything that person found out while reporting back to Garrison they could have taken back to OTG. How else would they know where she was? They knew the exact location when the first guys came to kill her and there had to be some reason beyond just following her passport trail.

“Tell me where it is and I’ll have one of the guys go.”

“I can’t.”

“You still don’t trust me?”

“It’s not that. I mean if you were with my father you could have just killed me already…unless you wanted to see how much I knew in which case you would need me alive for a little while.” She looked him over cautiously. She didn’t think that was the case because he seemed genuinely surprised by the attack on them. “I just can’t tell you how to get to it. It’s a special location known only to me, and a good friend. I would have to show you.”

“You can’t go anywhere on that leg. You’re going to need a few days off it to make sure you don’t rip out the stitches I put in.”

“I really can’t tell you. I have to take you there.”

“Okay, we’ll discuss it later. Right now you have to recover.”

“Are we safe here?”

“Yeah,” he brushed his fingers through her hair and it felt good; it felt really good. She always did like it when somebody played in her hair. Something about having somebody else’s touch just felt relaxing and nice, but this time she could add arousing to the mix of emotions. She didn’t even know the man. There was no way she should be aroused by such a simple action as his brushing his fingers through her hair. “We’re safe here.”

“Alexander,” she called to him as he turned to leave the room. “Thank you for rescuing me, and for saving my life.”

He smiled. “I thought you were content to stay in that village for the rest of your days.”

She laughed as much as she could given her current level of pain. “If I had stayed there I probably would have had to marry the chief’s son, walk around topless like all the other women and give him seven sons.”

“Only seven?”

“Seven’s a lot; trust me on that.”

He looked at her and she wondered what he was thinking. She didn’t have to wait long to find out. “Well if you’d like to walk around topless you are more than welcome to do it as much as you want. I won’t mind at all,” he winked at her before leaving the room. She was sure her mouth was probably still hanging open. He was flirting with her—at least she thought he was flirting with her.

She realized after he had left the room that she had forgotten to ask him if he had contacted Garrison yet. She had gotten her into this mess so she should find a way to get her out of it. Well, maybe she couldn’t blame Garrison. Had she not decided to alert somebody to what her father was doing then Carissa wouldn’t be dealing with this right now. Of course she would then be dealing with guilt of astronomical proportions because people would have died and she would have known that she could have done something to stop it. Her father had teased her when she was younger because she was always trying to save things that she didn’t think could save themselves. Birds, rabbits, even the baby wolf cubs whose mother had died just outside their property. She was the one who had begged her father to help her save them. She was sad when the guy from the conservation came and took them away, but at the same time she was happy they were safe. Her father had told her she had too much heart for such a little girl. He had told her she would grow out of it, but she hadn’t. She still wanted to save everything, but she just knew as an adult that she couldn’t.

She donated money to various conservation charities, and to homeless shelters; those was her biggest projects. She had grown up to be the responsible woman her father had said she should be. She had used him as her guide, her model for what she should be like in business, in charitable donations, in life. She trusted him enough to build her business and life motto based on his. She was good in business just like her father. Her designs were taking off substantially and her stores were selling products so well that she was getting ready to open a store in New York and one in Miami…that is she was going to do that before she got mixed up with the feds.

She still had the store openings in progress, but there was no way she could go through with it now. All that hard work on getting permits and paying out fee after fee just to build or refurbish buildings to hold products and she was going to have to walk away because her father was trying to kill her. Not just that, who would want to shop at her store if they found out what her father had done? Whenever she was able to make a call she was going to have to ask her business attorney to pull out on the store openings. She would lose money now, but she would lose a lot more if she opened those stores and then had to shut them down because people wouldn’t come to shop at the store of a domestic terrorist’s daughter.

She closed her eyes. Thinking about the chaos that was going to follow the revealing of the truth had her stomach churning with fear. She had to survive first. Survival wasn’t guaranteed right now. She had been shot twice, and stitched up on the fly by a rescuer, not a doctor, so maybe she shouldn’t be thinking about what was going to come next. For all she knew her dad could know where they were right now and have somebody on their way to kill her.

She didn’t know what was going to happen, but she did know one thing; she now had no trouble testifying against her father. The guilt she felt for betraying him was absolved the minute he ordered a hit on her. She had felt guilty because she loved her dad, but clearly he didn’t love her. If he loved her he wouldn’t have tried to have her killed. He was her only surviving parent and in an instant she had lost him too, not to death, like her mother when she was just six years old, but to his life—to the criminal life he seemed to love more than he would ever love her. She had no place in his heart; well fine, she thought, because he no longer had a place in hers either.

Carissa felt the tears streaming from her eyes. No matter how much she tried to tell herself that it would be easy to stop loving her dad she just couldn’t. But she wasn’t sure she could ever forgive him either.

Chapter Three

A
lex couldn’t say much of anything right now. He didn’t have the best relationship with his family either, but at least none of them had ever put a hit out on him. He could only imagine what pain Carissa had to be feeling now. He knew how it made him feel when his family treated him as if he wasn’t there. Sometimes he would swear his mother and father forgot they had more than one son. They loved Kevin. He was their football hero who had made a name for himself, while Alex was just a military man. He laughed at that thought. He had gone off to war, fought for this country, fought to keep them safe and they acted as if it meant nothing. Sports were everything to them.

He shrugged. Until Kevin inked the contract with the Cowboys, Alex hadn’t been home for a family event in seven months and nobody had missed him. As long as Kevin made it to the party nothing else mattered. Now that Kevin was situated in Dallas his parents expected him to leave Austin and attend every event they decided to throw in Kevin’s honor. He had tried to stay away, and for some of the events he actually had managed to have the good fortune of being too busy to attend. His family wasn’t exactly full of the friendliest people when it came to him and he figured why bother putting himself through hell just to be a good son. It wasn’t as if either of his parents would appreciate his efforts. But avoidance only took him so far. Eventually he had to man-up and show his face at some of their events.

He wasn’t close to his family and probably never would be. But for all the crazy that was his family, never would any of them cross that line—the line that was so final that there was no going back. Never would any of them try to kill each other.

“I thought my family was screwed up,” he mumbled.

“It could be,” he heard her voice from behind him and he turned to find her propped against the wall. “But as long as you don’t try to kill each other I think you’ll live.” She chuckled. “Live…wouldn’t that be nice?”

“You’re going to live too,” he felt angry with her already. “You’re supposed to be in bed. What are you doing up?”

“I had to go potty,” she said so sweetly he was finding it difficult to hold on to his anger. She could injure herself more by trying to move around on her leg.

“Potty?”

“My best friend had a little girl. I helped potty train for a while and now the word is stuck in my head.”

“Had a little girl?”

“She died of cancer two years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too. That was the sweetest, most loving child ever. She was only five. Anyway, Jasmine, my friend, she and her husband sold everything and moved to London. They couldn’t take being in Texas with her gone. I knew they were going to leave the city, but I had no idea they were going to leave the country too.”