When Love Intrudes (When the Mission Ends) (7 page)

There was an unmistakable wobble in her speech that wasn’t normally there, and everything about her body language said ‘back off’ right now. But she was here and safe for the moment so he could be a patient man. He knew enough about Toni to know she would be better capable to handle it after she had time to recover from whatever rattled her. Those two weeks when she’d taken care of him had taught him that. She needed time to process things before reacting.

They both set their bags on the kitchen counter and Brian dug through the contents while surreptitiously watching her. “So, what did you get us to eat tonight?”

She didn’t hear him as she continued to pull things out and set them onto the counter as if by rote. He gently touched her shoulder. She jumped, swung around and dropped the jar of pickles she held. It shattered.

“Oh my God.” Her voice was high-pitched and panicked sounding. “I’m so sorry. Don’t move while I clean up the glass.”

He grabbed her to hold her steady and was surprised to find her shoulders shaking. She tried to pull away, but he held her firm. “Hey, what happened to you at the grocery store?” Putting a finger under her chin, he lifted it so she had to look him in the eye. “Toni, talk to me.”

Her eyes filled with tears and she opened her mouth, but then Nathan and Sam came barreling into the kitchen. Toni dashed at the tears in her eyes before Nathan spotted them.

“Nathan, grab Sam,” he instructed. “There’s broken glass on the floor and neither one of you need to come in here and get hurt.”

“What happened?” Nathan narrowed his eyes as he glanced between the two of them, taking in the tenseness of the scene.

She gave a slight brittle chuckle. “My bad. I wasn’t paying attention and dropped it. Give us a moment and we’ll have it cleaned up. Then we’ll cook some burgers out on the grill. Sound good?” At Nathan’s nod, she instructed, “Take Sam outside while we get this cleaned up. We’ll be right there.”

She waited for the door to snap closed as Nathan and Sam left the house before turning back to Brian. “I don’t want him to know anything about this. Can we talk about it after he’s gone to bed?”

She still didn’t want to look him in the eye and that gave him a really bad feeling. “If you tell me one thing—are you really okay?”

She nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

She was shaking, so he pulled her into his arms. He shouldn’t enjoy holding her like this when she was upset, but she felt so right here. Closing his eyes, he inhaled her distinct cinnamon scent, enjoying the press of her breasts against his chest. He didn’t know what had happened, but it had definitely rattled her. Feeling powerless to help, he just held her. She began to pull away, so he brushed a slight kiss across the top of her head, trying to ignore how much he really didn’t want to let her go.

She shoved a package of meat into his hands. “Go outside and start the cooking. I’ll clean up this mess in here.”

* * *

A half an hour later, the three of them sat circled around the built-in campfire pit in the yard, chowing down on burgers. Well, Nathan and he were chowing down, while Toni picked at hers. The food sat like a rock in the pit of Brian’s stomach though as he watched her. She stared out over the massive yard. He hated how quiet she’d become and it worried him about what happened, but she obviously didn’t want Nathan to know anything about it.

“How long have you lived here?” she asked him.

“Seven years.”

She waved a hand over the heavily landscaped yard. “Did you do all this?”

“Yeah, the entire thing’s been a work in progress, inside and out. When I bought it, the house had been abandoned for a while, so I started work on the inside first. It was definitely a fixer-upper.”

He looked back at the house, remembering. He’d bought it as a surprise for his longtime girlfriend, Anna, right after he made detective and right before he asked her to marry him. The house was a mess, but they spent many hours lovingly working on it in those early days. It had sat empty for years and had been home to many woodland furry creatures and a few homeless two-legged creatures who hadn’t thought twice about building fires in the middle of the rooms on the gorgeous original wood flooring.

They worked hours and hours, bringing all those floors back to beautiful. He hadn’t realized at the time, though, that the only thing keeping him and Anna together was their common work on the house. After the first floor was complete, they had decided to take a break on the house and he began to fill those hours with work. He’d been so busy that when she left him, it was three days before he even realized she was gone and then it was only because he noticed the dog was missing. It had been an awful lesson in self-discovery to find that he could be that oblivious. That wasn’t right. She deserved better, and he couldn’t begrudge her leaving.

There was a very good reason he was single. He did relationships with inanimate objects much better than real people. This house just proved that.

“I spent the first few years working on the inside, then the last couple of years, I’ve gotten the yard where I want it. I have an album somewhere with all the before pictures. Remind me and I’ll find it so you can see. It truly was a mess.”

“Well, it’s beautiful now,” she murmured, as she snuggled back into the pillow cushions on the stone bench and watched the fire.

“So you have this huge house and piece of property,” Nathan mused, “but you don’t have a family, right? You’ve never been married?”

Brian silently nodded.

“This isn’t exactly a typical bachelor pad. Why’d you buy it?”

Brian looked back over the property. “I had just become a detective when I bought the house. It was my little celebration…” he paused, “…and my way of proposing to the girl I was dating at the time.”

Toni’s shocked eyes flew to his face and her mouth dropped open. He wasn’t sure whether to be offended by that or not. Was it so hard to believe that he could have been that serious about someone once upon a time?

“For the first couple of years, she lived here with me although we never got around to the wedding part. In the end, she got tired of placing second against my job, so she took the dog and left.”

“She took your dog when she broke up with you?” Nathan asked.

Brian nodded.

“Man, that’s harsh.”

Brian gave a dry laugh. “It is what it is. I’m just glad she was smart enough to realize we wouldn’t make it before we got married. I didn’t see it like she did at the time.” No, at the time he’d thought he was heartbroken.

It took him another seven years before he found out what heartbroken really was. And then it was because of a girl who he’d never even been romantically involved with. But she managed to break his heart anyway. In fact, he was pretty sure neither one of them came out of that unusual relationship with their hearts unscathed.

He looked over at Toni who watched him with compassion filling her eyes. And that right there hurt. She was such a wonderful, giving person. She gave a bit of her soft heart to every person she came in contact with, while he had no heart to give. He couldn’t be her latest stray. Never again. Been there, done that. Not doing it again. He wouldn’t be with her just because she felt sorry for him.

The night darkness started to settle around them, so he stood to collect their plates. Toni stood to help, but he waved her back down. “Stay here and enjoy the fire. Nathan and I can take care of this. We’ll be back out in a moment.”

When the two men reached the kitchen, Nathan grabbed Brian’s arm. “What happened? Something’s wrong with Toni. She’s tense.” Nathan narrowed his eyes at Brian. “Did you do something to her?”

Brian shook his head and tried to shake off the immediate exasperation at Nathan’s assumption. “No, I think something happened at the grocery store to upset her, but I don’t know what it is yet. She didn’t want to talk about it earlier, but I plan to ask her again in a few minutes.”

Nathan watched him for a moment, passing judgment, but he must have seen what he wanted from Brian’s demeanor because he gave a sharp nod. “Okay, I’ll leave it alone for tonight. She made it obvious earlier that she doesn’t want me to know what’s going on, but I want to help if I can. I owe her.”

“Noted, but I don’t think it’s anything for you to worry about, Nathan.” At least that’s what Brian hoped. They deserved some calm for a bit here.

The two of them made quick work of throwing away the scraps and loading the dishwasher. Then Nathan headed down the hall toward his bedroom. “I’m out for the night. I have an online meeting with a customer.” He turned around, walking backward and he cocked an eyebrow at Brian. “Now, don’t go wild out there with our girl. Just because it’s dark, doesn’t mean you can get frisky.”

And just like that, erotic thoughts of Toni underneath him flooded Brian’s mind. Immediately, his erection flared to life. Standing in front of a seventeen year old with a half-hard cock was wrong on so many levels. He scowled at the smart-ass, but Nathan wasn’t too intimidated as he tilted his head at Brian with a wide smirk.

“Detective, I do believe you’re blushing.”

“I do not blush,” he growled.

“Sure you don’t.” The kid drawled those three little words out to show his total disbelief. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell. Enjoy your evening,” he sing-songed as he closed the door to his bedroom.

Brian took a moment to compose himself. All it took was the thought of Toni, of how rattled she was when she got home, and he was back under control. He just hoped she was ready to talk now because he was tired of waiting.

Heading out the door, he sidetracked to the living room to snag the throw quilt off the back of the couch. The autumnal evenings were getting cold, and even with the fire, it was liable to get nippy before they finished their discussion.

As he came off the porch steps, he stopped for a moment just to watch her. She stared into the fire, her expression reflected in the soft firelight. She appeared so serious that it actually hurt him. Toni was a person who always had a smile lighting up her face. This pensive expression wasn’t right.  Resolute to fix whatever troubled her, he strode over and draped the quilt across her shoulders.

She gave him a soft smile. “Thanks. It was beginning to get a little chilly and I think you’re going to have to work on the fire. I don’t have any better skill with it than I do with cooking.” She looked morosely at the dwindling fire.

“No problem. I’ll get it going again.”

While he worked on stoking the fire, she glanced toward the house. “Where’s Nathan?”

“He said he was done for the night. He has some work to catch up with online. So it’s just you and me.” He set down the poker and dusted his hands against his jeans to clean them off, before joining her on the bench. “Want to tell me exactly what happened earlier when you went to the grocery store?”

Despite the blanket pulled around her and the fire casting heat, she shivered as she looked up to him.

He clenched his jaw to fight back the need to hold and comfort her, but didn’t think she would welcome that at this point in time. She squared her shoulders, steeling herself. Against what, he wasn’t sure. He just hoped to hell it wasn’t against him.

“Can you answer me a question first?” She glanced inquisitively toward him.

He nodded hesitantly. “I will if I can.”

“Do you think Mark Hunter committed suicide?”

He didn’t know what he expected from this conversation, but that wasn’t it. Slowly, he answered, “At this point, that’s what it looks like…”

She shook her head impatiently at him. “No, I didn’t ask you what it looks like. I want to know what your gut tells you. Do
you
think he killed himself?”

“Toni, I don’t understand where this is coming from.”

She threw her arms up in exasperation and stood up to pace. “Yes or no? It’s not that difficult. Do you think he killed himself?”

A ball settled into the pit of his stomach. What the hell happened while she was out? “No, my gut tells me he was murdered.”

She blew out a gusty sigh and sank back into her seat. “That’s what I was afraid of.” She said it so quietly that he could barely hear her.

“You’re scaring me, Toni. What’s going on?”

Her eyes filled with tears. “I don’t know what to do. I’m not supposed to tell you anything. They said they’d kill you or Nathan, but if I don’t tell you then it’s probably going to happen anyway and other people could get hurt, too. I trust you to keep us safe. God, we have to keep everyone safe.”

He couldn’t resist anymore. She was too vulnerable, too alone, too scared, and so goddamned determined to keep everyone besides herself safe.  He needed to comfort her. Besides if this conversation was going where it felt like it was going, he needed to feel the comfort of her safe
and secure in his arms as much as she needed it, too. He slid over beside her on the stone bench and pulled her into his lap, where she belonged.

“Relax, honey. It’s okay. Just calm down before you hyperventilate. I promise you, I will do everything in my power to keep you and Nathan safe, but I can’t do that if I don’t know what I’m keeping you safe from.” He ran his hand up and down her back to soothe her. She continued to tremble, but her breathing settled a bit as he ran over what she’d been saying.