Authors: Stephanie Tyler
“There is no baby.”
“—has nothing to do with the case.”
“You tell me you’re psychic and then you tell me I’m pregnant. If you know that, then you know why I was put into witness protection, right? And you know exactly what happened with Mike. You’d know so much. So why don’t you tell me what else you know.”
“I know you’re pregnant, but that’s all. I can’t see inside to your deepest, darkest secrets. I just know that you have them.”
“Get out of my house.”
“Not until you promise to take a pregnancy test and start taking care of yourself.”
“I take care of myself just fine. You don’t get to walk back into my life and tell me what to do.”
“This isn’t just about you anymore.”
“I’m investigating you. What aren’t you getting about this, Chris? I’m trying to find out the truth.”
“And you know, deep down in your heart—the one you’re trying to pretend is cold as ice—that I’m innocent. One hundred percent.”
“I don’t know anything but the fact that you shouldn’t be here.”
“Take the test, Jamie. Take the damned test.”
It took all he had not to slam the door after him on the way out.
Awareness pervaded her body—that sharp jolt of feeling from belly to groin that reminded her she was a woman with needs, ones Chris had fulfilled well.
She headed to the bathroom to get a look in the full-length mirror. She pulled her shirt up to just below her breasts and held it there while she turned sideways and ran her hand over her exposed belly and abdomen.
This was impossible.
She’d actually lost weight over the past couple months. She’d been tired and she’d felt sick some days, but she’d attributed it to stress. To missing Sophie. To missing Chr—
She dropped her shirt and slammed the lights off on the way out of the bathroom, away from the mirror.
Chris was levelheaded. Calm taken to the extreme when he worked. He’d been to hell and back on many missions when his team had been threatened.
He’d bared his soul to her about what happened during that mission and she’d taken the information, twisted it and thrown it back in his face.
It wasn’t that she couldn’t believe he had some level of psychic awareness. In fact, the FBI utilized psychics with varying degrees of success. But she’d always stayed away from those people just in case they could actually sense something about her past. Mike had always believed, though. Had used a psychic’s tip to hunt down Gary Handler, the man who’d ended up killing him.
What Chris had admitted to her tonight gave him motive. In the heat of the moment, he could’ve killed Josiah if the agent had gotten in Chris’s way.
In the heat of the moment, if someone had gotten in your way of finding Sophie in Africa, what would you have done?
It was a question she couldn’t answer. At least not out loud. Because the answer,
Anything
, might be exactly what Chris had done.
He grabbed the first thing he could—some military manual—and flung it hard against the wall. It left a satisfying hole, and he didn’t have to finish the thought that had been running over and over in his mind.
And then he went out the door to the back deck, into the cold air, stripped down and headed across the beach toward the water.
But he was silent now.
She should’ve expected the tackle, but bracing for it would’ve made it harder on her body. As it was, he knocked the wind out of her as he laid her flat on the hard-packed sand.
If she’d wanted, she could’ve fought him off—she’d had plenty of training, and even though he had more than a hundred pounds on her, she’d learned how to fight dirty thanks to the CIA, and even dirtier thanks to her recent stint in Africa.
She no longer had any job now—she was an outcast, swimming by herself. And so she lay there, under this man, unafraid.
He was hurting more than she was, and anyone hurting that much couldn’t be all bad.
“You shouldn’t go sneaking up on people, little girl.”
“Were you trying to kill yourself?” she asked calmly, her breath coming in short gasps. He was big. Handsome, from what she could make out of his face in the dark.
He rolled off her suddenly, lay on his back in the sand and stared up at the sky. “I was just going for a swim. Why don’t you fuck off?”
That did it. In a flash, she was on him, straddling his prone body, knife blade at his throat.
“I wouldn’t flash anything you’re not planning on using,” he told her, his drawl deeper than it had been just a minute earlier.
“Who said I’m not planning on using it?” she asked, the anger reaching a near boil far too quickly. Shit. She thought she left this back in the DRC. And in that brief second of hesitation, the man easily took control, the knife flying out of her hand.
He towered over her while she lay on her back in the sand. “Look, honey, I’ve had a really bad week. I don’t know what your game is, but if you’re looking to rob me, you picked the wrong guy.” He pointed to his body—he wore only a pair of black boxer briefs that clung to him.
When he spoke again, his voice was quieter, like his mind was far away. “If you need some money for a place to stay tonight, I’ll see what I can do.”
“I don’t need money.”
“All right, then.” He turned to walk away. When her eyes followed him, she saw a house about thirty feet up from the beach, lights on, sliding doors open. His house.
“I’m sorry about the knife,” she said. “I really thought, when I came up on you …”
“Who are you?”
Who was she? Jamie still wanted her to be Sophie, but she was far more comfortable these days as PJ. Although that wasn’t saying much—most of the time, she felt ready to jump out of her skin.
“Is that a hard question?” he asked.
“I’m PJ. I’m not from here. I was supposed to be staying with my sister, but that didn’t work out.”
“You’re military?”
“I was, a long time ago.” A whole lifetime ago. “Are you sure you weren’t trying to kill yourself?”
“No, ma’am. I’m Navy. We enjoy cold water.”
“SEAL?” All the ones she’d known had always hated being cold and wet, but she didn’t call him on that, even when he didn’t answer her question but rather asked one of his own. “What happened with your sister? Did you pull a knife on her too?”
In a way, she had—if he asked Jamie, she’d claim there was one buried in her back. “She’s angry.” She looked around. “Maybe I’ll hang out here for a while, if you don’t mind.”
“Too cold.”
“Says the man who just came from a swim in the ocean.”
He stood. “Come on inside.”
“And what, you’ll be the perfect gentleman?”
“Not likely.”
“I’ll take my chances with the elements. I don’t even know your name.”
He rubbed his palms together, looked up at the sky. “It’s Saint. And my best friend was killed five days ago. Normally, I wouldn’t take no for an answer, but I’m damned tired. Do whatever the hell you want.” He gave a single, definitive good-bye nod in her direction before he walked slowly up to the house.
She turned back toward the ocean and wondered if she’d ever feel right again.
“I told you he’d know,” Nick said without moving his lips.
“I wasn’t the one who told her to get out of here,” Jake answered him in the same fashion.
“I can hear everything the two of you are saying.” Chris sank into the leather chair in the den and rubbed his head, which still ached like a mother. “Where is she?”
“At the Hilton. Penthouse suite. We told Jules to take herself and the reporters who are bound to follow her the hell out of here,” Jake said.
“Only we said it nicer than that,” Nick added.
“Not much,” Jake muttered, and Chris sighed.
“What does she want?”
“You,” Jake deadpanned.
“Ah, fuck.”
“Yeah, that too.”
Chris went to throw something at his brother, then decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. Because yeah, if he and Jules weren’t fighting, they were fucking, and that wasn’t the kind of relationship he wanted.
He also didn’t throw anything because Jake was hurting. Nick too, but Jake had known Mark the longest. Mark had been the one to help his brother through BUD/S when Jake was only fifteen and still having nightmares about his stepfather.
Neither brother asked where he’d been, why he’d come home so late, why he was on his own. Instead, Nick made him the coffee he liked and Jake had already filled the prescriptions he needed and he wondered if they’d continue to hover over him like two mother hens for much longer.
He just wanted back to normal. Craved it. And yet, that wasn’t going to happen for a long time. “Saint said Mark’s memorial is planned for next week.”
Jake nodded. “No body.”
“No body. Saint said he’s going back—leaving in the morning,” Chris told them.
Nick leaned against the back of Jake’s chair. “He can’t go back there on his own.”
“You try telling him that.” Chris rubbed a hand over his side—it had started to ache on the ride to Jamie’s. On the way home, it had turned into full-blown pain.
He popped, dry, two of the pills Jake handed him. “I told Saint to stay there—he insisted on escorting me home. If it’s too late to find Mark now …”
He trailed off.
“I’ll go with him.” Jake stared past Chris, toward the sliding glass doors behind him. Those doors led to the deck, and with the curtains open, dawn was starting to peek through.
Wordlessly, the three men headed outside. Barefoot, they stood on the deck waiting for the sun to rise. Watching it come up over the horizon, peeking through the woods behind the house.
It was a tradition that Jake had started himself when he was a young boy—now, seeing the dawn held significance for all three of them. It was something they rarely missed, whether or not they were together.
A reminder that they were alive, no matter where the hell in the world they were. Survivors.
This morning, with Mark’s death hanging over them, the silence stretched out long after the sun had risen.
“He saved my life on our first mission,” Chris said finally, and Nick nodded, because he’d been there too. They all knew the story, but somehow telling it now seemed important.
It was a night Chris had a permanent reminder of. The bite that ran along the right side of his chest and back was due, in part, to an impromptu water escape in the shark-infested waters off the Ivory Coast.
The shark had grabbed him, but its grip on Chris had been thankfully awkward. Chris had slammed the thing hard on the nose with the O
2
tank, and by the fucking grace of God, he’d been dropped, and then dragged by Mark to the safety of the waiting boat.
Today, the set of scars from the tiger shark’s teeth looked like tiny white pearls that ran along his right side, both chest and back. The story had become something of a folklore among the new recruits, with the shark getting bigger and Chris getting stronger with each telling.
He didn’t have the heart to explain that it was luck, pure and fucking simple. That, at the time, he’d been pretty sure Mark had saved his ass from the rebel soldiers so he could die in the warm waters in Africa.
“When I was going through BUD/S, Mark found me outside—I’d catch my rack time on the beach instead of in the bunk with everyone else so if I woke up with a nightmare, no one would hear me,” Jake recalled. “He could’ve ridden me so hard for that. I know the master chief would’ve too, if he’d known. But Mark never said anything about it, to me or to the master chief. Didn’t ask me why until Hell Week was over.”
“He was good like that,” Nick said.
“He was,” Chris agreed. Nick and Mark were probably the most similar, background-wise, both from wealthy, fucked-up families. Chris wasn’t sure if the two men ever talked about their pasts, but they were probably as close as Saint and Mark were.
“Is Jamie Michaels really investigating you?” Nick asked finally. He leaned against the deck’s railing, his broad back turned away from the sun.
Chris nodded. He’d been attempting to be angry with her—and not succeeding, because he kept picturing his hand on her belly.
“I went to see her,” Chris told them, heard the defensiveness in his own voice. “Tonight—that’s where I was.”
“Great idea to hang out with the woman who’s trying to hang you,” Jake pointed out.
Nick, who’d been in Africa with him and Jamie, didn’t say anything for a long second, and then, “You fucked up, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.”
Jake immediately leaned forward to take his brother’s hand. “We’ll fix it. Whatever you did—”
“I told her. About the thing … the psychic Cajun bullshit.”
“Okay, so she thinks you’re nuts. But she probably thought that before,” Nick reasoned.
“She’s pregnant.” Jesus, that was the second time he’d blurted out that information.
“She told you that?” Jake asked.
“I told her.”
Nick and Jake shot each other looks. When Jake spoke again, his voice was low and soothing. “Come on, you’ve been to hell and back. Let’s get you settled in so you can sleep some of this off.”
Chris shook his head. He wanted nothing more than to settle in and relax, but the thought of being on the fourth floor all by himself wasn’t something he could handle. “It’s already morning.”
But Nick motioned to him and he followed Nick into his own bedroom, which was on the first floor. He didn’t argue, crawled under the covers even as Jake plopped down next to him and Nick took a chair by the side of the bed.
“We’re here,” Jake told him. “Sleep now.”
“I haven’t spoken with Dad,” he mumbled when his head hit the pillow. His brothers knew that, didn’t say anything, didn’t tell him what he had to do. They never really did.
Right now, he appreciated that more than anything.