Black Jack

by Lora Leigh

  Travis tilted his head and watched curiously. It had been a while since he’d seen such a blue-blooded tantrum.

  “Perhaps I should remind of you the reason why she was learning how to fight, how to kill, and how to protect herself,” Travis stated calmly when the other man had finished. “Because you and your polite, well-heeled English society, your blue-blooded aristocracy, allowed her to nearly be murdered. You accepted her death, gave her a nice tear-filled burial, and went about your lives without once questioning the results you were given, despite the inconsistencies. Get your head out of your ass, Desmond. She’s a big girl, she’s been a big girl for a long time, and she’s damned sure more woman than your prissy little English boys can handle. You can accept it, and help me protect her, or you can continue to stand in my way and bury her for real next time.” Travis turned on his heel and headed into the living area of the house. “Let me know what you decide. Before it’s too late.”

  He didn’t turn back to the other man as he delivered his parting shot. Nik opened the door that led into the short hallway and then into the house that was as pristine, just as fucking modern and icy cold, as the reception room.

  As cold as Travis’s fucking life had become.

  Lilly parked her cycle at the curved cement and stone steps that led up to the mansion her family had taken for the spring and summer months. She had beat her uncle home. No surprise there.

  The low heels of her boots were silent as she climbed the stairs, and the lack of sound seemed odd. Shoes made noise. Even sneakers made a slight noise when walking. But hers didn’t, and it wasn’t the shoes. It was her.

  It was the way she walked, the way she moved. She could move silently, or if she thought about it, as she made herself do now, she could allow the slight click of the heels.

  Had Travis trained her how to walk with such stealth as well?

  The door opened, and the butler stood aside as Lilly stepped into the warm, golden wood tones of the entryway.

  Shedding her leather jacket, she handed it to the butler, then lifted her head as her mother walked into the foyer. She carried some papers she had been reviewing, probably her latest financial statements. Her mother had come into her first marriage independently wealthy and she was amazingly adroit at managing her own finances.

  Lady Angelica Harrington. She was also a distant cousin as well as a confidante and friend to the Queen. She moved in circles so influential it boggled the mind. Her social life was her career—the parties, teas, luncheons, and charity events.

  Her son, Lilly’s brother, Jared James Harrington, was a solicitor with a law firm that the Queen often relied upon. He had been introduced to his wife by the Queen and had married with her blessing. He had become just as cold and unemotional as her mother sometimes seemed to be.

  “Oh my God! What on earth are you wearing?” Lady Harrington’s tone wasn’t scandalized, it was purely horrified.

  “Leather,” Lilly answered gently, wishing she could find a way to take that fear from her mother’s eyes. “Did you think that because you didn’t inform me about my past, it wouldn’t come back to haunt you? Or me?”

  She pulled her gloves from her hands and slapped them on the shiny, dark cherry bureau that sat in the foyer as she held her mother’s gaze.

  Angelica lifted her hand slowly to her throat, her pale blue gaze flickering with indecision as she watched her daughter now. She wasn’t quite certain how to handle this version of Lilly.

  Her poor mother, Lilly thought. She likely had dreamed of having her daughter back, but Lilly doubted she had imagined the woman who had returned. Even Lilly didn’t know the woman who had returned.

  Lilly pushed her fingers through her hair, feeling the long strands drifting through her fingers and over her shoulders as a familiar wildness rose inside her. She knew this feeling, she had known it for a long time. The same feeling she had fought before her supposed death six years before.

  “Who am I?” She stared back at her mother, suddenly fearful, almost terrified that despite the urge to solve the mystery of those missing years, perhaps she really didn’t want to know.

  “My daughter,” Angelica whispered, her voice filled with sorrow. “The daughter I never want to lose again.”

  Lilly wanted to hit something. With her fist. Her fingers curled with the need to ram it into a wall, a door, a bed, a punching bag . . . A memory flashed in her mind. A sweat-stained punching bag swinging before her, her fists pounding into it, her heart racing, perspiration pouring down her body . . .

  Just as quickly, it was gone. The second before the memory was able to solidify, it was gone.

  “Your daughter changed,” she rasped. “What did she change into?”

  Who was she? Where had she been? Why had she run?

  “Lilly.” Her mother’s hand dropped from her throat as she stepped closer, the silk of her dress floating gently around her knees as the faintest hint of cigarette smoke wafted to Lilly’s senses.

  She blinked. She saw her mother through a sniper’s scope. She was wearing her mink coat. Cigarette smoke drifted in a cold breeze. Lilly blinked again and it was gone.

  “Lilly?” Angelica reached out for her, her cool, graceful fingers touching Lilly’s arm gently as she attempted to draw her closer. “I want you to enjoy being with the family again. Those years you were gone.” Angelica blinked back tears that filled her eyes as Lilly stared down at her. “You were alive, yet you didn’t allow us to know it. You changed your pretty face.” Her mother reached up and touched her face. “Even your eye color is different. You changed everything, as though your family no longer mattered.”

  And those changes had had their consequences. Her brother had walked out of the hospital when he came with her mother and uncle to see the woman the doctors were claiming was Lady Victoria Lillian Harrington. Jared had sworn his sister would never deny her family to such an extent.

  Why had she done it? Changed so much of herself?

  “There are no answers.” Her mother’s voice cracked with emotion. “Desmond and I have tried to find the answers. All we can find is a woman that lived as though she wanted to die. As though she had lost everything precious to her. And yet we were right here.” A tear slipped down Angelica’s cheek then. “Was I so wrong to keep that from you? Was I wrong to hope you never remembered that you were trying to run away from us?”

  “That wasn’t it!” The words, the emotions, flew from her lips before she thought, before she could understand why.

  There was a memory there, for just a second. For just a fragile moment clarity had almost overtaken her, only to disappear once again.

  “Then what was it?” her mother cried out desperately. “Tell me, Lilly, why can’t I call you Victoria as I once did? Why do you wear leather clothes and boots that make you look like the tramp? Why the changes to your appearance and why the changes to yourself if you weren’t trying to deny the very people who loved you?” Her face twisted. “I nearly died when I thought I was burying my only daughter. Instead you were out raising hell and throwing away everything your father and I tried to provide for you. You left your family, Victoria, for a life that bordered on the criminal and a lifestyle that was little better than that of a terrorist.”

  Lilly stood still and silent, watching the emotions that tore through her mother as she felt something shut down inside her. The woman her mother was talking about wasn’t her. Something didn’t sound right, it didn’t feel right. Something was wrong with the scenario her mother was laying out.

  She hadn’t been a terrorist. She hadn’t been a criminal.

  She looked down at the clothes she wore and felt a shudder go through her.

  “I wouldn’t have turned my back on you,” she whispered as a tear slid down her cheek. “Not like that. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know who I am or what I was doing, but I
do know my family was everything to me.”

  Sure, her mother was difficult—to say the least. And yes, Lilly had often wanted to run away from all the expectations and rules piled on top of her, but she had never imagined turning her back on her family, pretending to be dead, going through reconstructive surgery, and taking up a life of crime—or something close to it—just to escape it.

  She had followed in her father’s footsteps as an informant for MI5. She had worked diligently to uncover evidence the agency needed to identify terrorists, terrorist sympathizers, and other criminal elements. And she had done it, ultimately, to protect the ones she loved.

  So what had happened? Why had she turned her back on all of that?

  Just then the door opened, and Lilly swung around to meet the furious expression of her uncle. No, her stepfather. God, why had her mother married Desmond Harrington, her father’s half-brother and business partner? Had she missed her husband so much that she had married his brother to replace him?

  “Victoria.” He stopped as his bodyguard came in behind him and closed the door. “At least you made it home.”

  Anger ripped through her, and she had no idea why. She loved her uncle. He had been an integral part of her life from her birth to her death.

  “Of course I made it home.” She had to fight back the conflicting emotions she didn’t know what to do with. “It seems I’m a rather good rider.”

  He wiped his hand over his face as he shook his head, obviously weary and attempting to hold on to his temper. Desmond Harrington was known for his temper, courtesy of his red hair, but he was also known for his compassion and logic.

  “A rather good rider,” he muttered as he rubbed at his forehead before lifting his head and staring past Lilly to her mother. “It seems, my dear, that this hardheaded child has found a new hobby.”

  He pulled his jacket off, handed it to the bodyguard, Isaac, then strode through the foyer to the living room.

  “It’s obviously not a new hobby,” she stated as she followed him and her mother, only to pause just inside the door and watch as he strode to the bar. “A Crown on ice would be lovely,” she suggested as he lifted a decanter of liquor.

  Desmond paused before pouring the desired drink as well as a snifter of brandy for her mother.

  “Crown and ice.” Her mother sounded furious now. “That is not a proper young lady’s drink, Victoria.”

  “I asked you to call me Lilly, Mother.” Lilly stepped into the room and accepted the drink from Desmond before striding to the sofa and lounging back. She smothered a sigh of exhaustion. Lifting the drink to her lips Lilly sipped the smooth liquor, nearly closing her eyes at the pleasurable burn that hit her stomach.

  She watched as Desmond handed her mother her drink then took his seat beside her on the couch. Strange, she had never seen her mother sit with her father like that, close, intimate. They had rarely sat on a couch, they had each had their own chairs instead. But the distance she had always sensed between her parents was present here as well.

  “We need to discuss tonight,” Desmond told her firmly after taking a long sip of his drink, as though needing fortification.

  “What is there to discuss?” Lilly asked him. “I met a friend for drinks. I’m of age, I have no curfew. What we do need to discuss is what the hell you were doing following me at this hour of the night.”

  “What did you do?” Her mother almost whispered the words, as though terrified of the answer.

  “I found her with Travis Caine,” Desmond informed her. “He has a house here in Hagerstown as well. Your daughter somehow acquired a rather racy motorbike and she broke several speeding laws to meet him at a bar, and then followed him to his house.”

  “Caine?” Wide-eyed, Angelica turned to Desmond. “My God.” She turned back to Lilly. “He’s a suspected terrorist, a man known to associate, if not partner with criminals! Victoria . . .”

  “Lilly.” Determination surged inside her. She hadn’t been Victoria for six years. She was Lilly.

  “Why are you doing this? Do you want to be taken from us again?” Her mother ignored the reminder. “You’ll be arrested for sure!”

  “I rather doubt there’s a warrant out for my or Travis’s arrest,” Lilly objected.

  “There’s a warrant for your arrest in China, should you ever reenter their sovereign borders again, for theft of a government artifact, which they can’t prove to America. There’s a warrant for your and Caine’s arrest in Iran for the suspected death of a militant who was related to the current ruler. There’s also a warrant to bring you in for questioning in Spain for the death of a Spanish militant suspected of being part of a radical extremist group protesting against the government.”

  Had she killed?

  She had. Lilly felt that knowledge bleeding through her, bloodred and stained with guilt.

  Had she killed in cold blood? She couldn’t imagine that. She had a healthy respect for life, more for others’ than for her own. At least, that was the thought that flitted through her head.

  How would she know these things? And why was she suddenly so frightened at the thought of her mother or her uncle knowing the full truth about her?

  “From what I’m hearing, if I did kill, then it was no one that didn’t deserve it,” she informed them both with an air of unconcern.

  She was aware that she would have never made such a statement six years ago.

  “Victoria . . .” Horror rippled through her mother’s voice.

  “Mother.” Lilly shook her head as she leaned forward. “I don’t know what happened to me. I don’t know who I was, or what I did. But I do know I wasn’t a criminal.”

  “I have the report on you, Victoria,” her uncle said. “The governments may not have proof, but I have enough evidence to substantiate, at the very least, a strong suspicion that you did kill.”

  There was something in his gaze then, some thread of compassion, perhaps? Understanding? What was she seeing there, and why did it bother her so much to see it?

  Lilly wanted nothing more than to run now. To escape the judgment and the disapproval she could feel coming from the mother.

  She didn’t know if she could live much longer without somehow figuring out who or what she had been and why she had killed.

  “I want this report you have on me.” She rose to her feet and stared at her mother and uncle. “Then, I want to know how the two of you ended up married, and why the hell my father’s murderer was never found.”

  That was the source of her anger. Her father was dead, murdered, and his killer had never been caught. From what she gathered since she had been back, the search for his killer had been less than enthusiastic.

  With that last warning she strode from the living room, ignoring her mother calling out to her, and her uncle’s almost silent curse.

  She needed answers. She needed to know what had happened and why. And then she needed to figure out just why the hell Travis Caine felt more like a lover than a trainer, more like a friend than an enemy.

  Travis sat in the underground room Wild Card had been assigned as the Harrington’s driver and listened to the confrontation as it played out in the Harrington living room.

  Wild Card, a.k.a. Noah Blake, sat at the small table across from him, earbud attached to his ear, listening as well.

  Travis watched the small, portable monitor as Lilly stalked from the room.

  “Have the file sent up to her.” Lilly’s mother rose jerkily from the couch, her expression and her tone icily furious.

  “Angelica, she doesn’t need the file yet.” Desmond sat forward, his expression concerned now. “She’s barely healed physically. The shock could be detrimental.”

  “And what of the shock to the family?” She turned back, her pale face furious. “She’s determined to bring this family down to the sa
me level she’s existed at for the past six years. Let her see the damage she’s risking by continuing along this path.”

  Travis’s lips thinned at the judgment in Lilly’s mother’s voice.

  Desmond sighed wearily. “She’s been through a lot, Angelica.”

  “And you think I don’t realize this?” Angelica’s voice roughened. “My God, Desmond, the thought of that report destroys my soul. Why? Why did she allow us to believe she was dead? Why live the life she lived rather than returning to us?”

  “That’s a question only Lilly can answer.” Desmond rose to his feet. “And the doctors fear it’s a question she will never be able to answer.”

  He glanced back at Angelica as he made his way back to the bar.

  “She was always so damned stubborn,” Angelica stated, tears filling her eyes. “I tried to tell Harold that if she were not dealt with properly when she was a teenager, then she would only harm herself.”

  Desmond seemed to stiffen before turning back to her.

  “The clinic was not the answer, my dear,” Desmond sighed.

  “You are as ineffectual where she is concerned as Harold was,” she snapped.

  Desmond’s voice hardened. “This is not an argument I will have with you tonight.”

  “You never wish to discuss it,” Angelica said. “It’s as though you want nothing more than to bury your head in the sand and pretend this situation does not exist.”

  Desmond stared back at her coolly. “I can think of nothing better than burying the entire matter for good.”

  With that he tossed back his drink, slapped the glass on a table, and stalked from the room.

  A throttled, furious scream erupted from Lilly’s mother’s throat as she flung her glass at the door and watched it burst into fragments.

  A tear slipped down Angelica’s cheek as Travis turned from the scene and leveled a look at Noah. A soundless whistle pursed his lips as Angelica left the room, slamming the door behind her.

  Travis pulled the earbud from his ear and dropped it to the table as Noah activated the cameras throughout the house, tracking Angelica’s movements.