by Becki Willis
“That won’t be necessary. You can borrow the Corvette.”
“I couldn’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“That’s too much,” she protested. “I could never ask that of you.”
“You’re not asking. I’m offering. Actually, I’m insisting. It offers the easiest solution.”
Taryn was silent for a moment, staring down at the half-filled plate she had suddenly lost her appetite for. “Why, Bryce?” she asked softly. “Why are you doing all of this for me?”
His answer was simple. “You hired me.”
“I hired you to find my birth mother. To fill in a few holes in my past. You never agreed to all the rest. The car chases. The danger. The loan of your expensive vehicle. This is far beyond the call of duty.”
“When I commit to a cause, I give it my all,” he told her.
“Is that what I am to you? A cause?” She dropped her eyes to her hands, which had slipped from the table to nestle in her lap. Her voice was small. “Am I really so pathetic?”
A nerve ticked along his clenched jawline. He shoved his own plate forward to settle his elbows upon the table, one fist resting in the palm of his other hand. Taryn couldn’t help but notice the sculpted muscles along his forearms, a natural extension of his bulging biceps. Even in his civilian clothes, he looked every bit the military officer.
“You’re hardly pathetic, Taryn.”
“I just don’t understand why you’re so willing to do all this for me,” she all but whispered. “It goes far beyond the norm.”
His voice gentled somewhat. “You’re not accustomed to people going the extra mile for you, are you?” he guessed.
She stared at a point beyond his shoulder. When she began to speak, her voice was low. “When my mother died, my father couldn’t take me. He had a night job at the time, and there would be no one to watch me, essentially around the clock. His mother was older, and in no physical condition to tend to a rambunctious five-year-old. His brother didn’t step up to offer, even though he was, supposedly, my godfather. None of them wanted me.” Her voice was sad. Small.
“Your mother’s family?”
“The same. Her parents had never approved of her adopting a child. They already had the perfect grandchildren, and they didn’t need any more. Why take in someone else’s unwanted child? My aunt—the sister my mother had never gotten along with since childhood—felt the same way. She had two little angels of her own. Taking on a little she-devil would have disrupted their perfectly ordered world.”
When he would have broken in, she held up a warning hand.
“Her words, not mine. I overhead them talking, debating on what to do with me. They decided it was best—for them, anyway—to let me go back into the system. They claimed it was to give less fortunate souls a chance to have the family they always dreamed of.” Her soft laughter, not really a laugh at all, was bitter. “I was only a child, but even I recognized it for what is was. A lie. A chance to wash their hands of me.”
The words settled between them, heavy and ripe with heartache. Dishes rattled around them. Conversations drifted over from nearby tables. The sound of raucous laughter burst from a group of young men across the aisle. All around them, people enjoyed their meals with family and friends, oblivious to the pain and heartache served at their booth.
“I considered adoption, once.” Bryce’s voice was raw as he released his secret, unspoken until now.
Her eyes flew to his. Skittered away when she saw the pain in their dark depths.
“I was married for three years,” he told her. Even as he said the words, he wondered why they poured from his mouth. He never talked about Maggie. Never.
“We met when I was home on leave. We married, and she came back to Italy with me. It was hard for her, being in a foreign country with no family, and no friends, and with a husband who was always on one mission or another. I tried to make it up to her, by giving her everything she could possibly need.”
The nerve worked in his jaw again. He studied the tines of his idle fork as he spoke. “Turns out, the one thing she wanted was the one thing I couldn’t give her. A child.”
Rather than offer empty platitudes, Taryn offered something better. She offered a receptive ear.
“She wanted a baby more than anything. We went to countless doctors. Fertility specialists. There in Naples, here in the States. I finally suggested adoption. Even when she resisted, I pressed the issue. I looked into it, and found there were hundreds of children, just waiting for the right parents to take them home.”
“What—What happened?” she ventured to ask.
“We weren’t the right parents.” An edge moved into his voice, sharpening the tone, the overall feel of the story. Instinctively, Taryn knew she wouldn’t like the outcome.
“Maggie didn’t pass the background check. It seems there were… things… in her past that she failed to mention when we met. When we were planning our future, and when we were trying to have a child.” His voice tightened, growing sharper still. “Things that a man should know about his wife, and definitely about the mother of his children.”
The noisy group of boys stood from their table and moved along, still laughing and pushing one another in jest, as young men so often did. Bryce watched their retreat before he spoke again.
“Even though the military teaches its men to be officers and gentlemen, they’re still men at their core. And men have a certain way of entertaining themselves, especially on long, lonely nights when they’re stuck on a military base, hundreds of thousands of miles from home. And when those men find a particular type of movie, one that takes away some of that loneliness and reminds them of their sweethearts back home, the movie tends to circulate through base. And when the star of the movie bears a striking resemblance to the wife of one of the officers, word gets around. And when the officer hears such rumors about his wife, he protects her honor. Fights any man who dares to insult her, and him, even if that man is his own superior officer. And when such a fight ensues… well, all hell breaks loose.”
His softly spoken words settled there between them, more heartache heaped onto the invisible platter already overflowing with such burdens.
Taryn’s words came out hesitant, if not a bit squeaky. “I remind you of your wife?”
“Not in the least.” He took a deep breath and slowly pushed it out. “You remind me of those children, waiting for the right parents. I always felt as if I had failed them.”
His admission stunned her. “Whatever for? How could you have failed them?”
“If I had been wiser in choosing a wife, I could have made a difference for some of those children.” The fork clattered to the table as he allowed it to fall. His words fell with it. “I could have been the right father.”
“You don’t have to carry the world on your shoulders, Bryce. You don’t have to save it, all by yourself.”
He pursed his mouth, considering her gentle input, even though his eyes didn’t meet hers as he argued softly, “But I can do my part. It’s what I was trained to do. To serve, honor, and protect.”
He stood abruptly, muttering something about dessert.
Taryn knew he had revealed more about himself than he intended. His hasty departure was a way to save face, and to take the spotlight off him. She allowed him time to reach the dessert line on the right, before she wandered to the one on the left.
Maybe the delicious offerings would lift her spirits.
Blood is red, violets are blue.
Don’t try my patience, I thought you knew.
The text message woke Taryn early the next morning, rattling her phone before the rooster even crowed. The cryptic messages were growing more sinister by the day, each edging toward a definite threat.
With plans to help Bryce today from his office, Taryn dressed in her ‘Englisch’ clothes today, long before Susannah arrived with breakfast. She had asked her aunt to add a bit extra this morning, so she could take the basket with her and
share with Bryce.
She stopped by Kaffi Korner on her way.
“Good morning to you, Caryn,” Helen greeted her with a smile. “You’re becoming quite a regular, now aren’t you?” Her eyes twinkled with mischief, insinuating another reason for Taryn’s presence in town.
“Best coffee in town,” came Taryn’s easy reply.
“And close to Bryce’s house, too. Quite convenient, wouldn’t you say?”
“I imagine for him it is,” she agreed.
“You wouldn’t by chance be buying that second cup for our friend, now would you? It’s his favorite.”
Taryn refused to rise to the bait, even though the older woman all but begged for details into their relationship. “That’s what I like about small shops like this,” Taryn said, glancing around the shop affectionately. “You know your customers well enough to know just what they like. You don’t always get that in bigger coffee shops.” She handed over her credit card with a smile.
“I see how you avoided my question.” Helen chuckled. She frowned when her machine beeped at her. “See now, you’ve gotten me all rattled, Carrie, dodging me that way. Can’t even run a card correctly.” She made a second attempt to slide the card through the reader.
Another beep. Seeing her frown, Taryn frowned. “Is there a problem?”
“I’m sure it’s just this silly machine. Sometimes it runs a little slow.” She tried the card twice more, before admitting defeat. “You don’t by chance have another card on you, do you?”
Feeling uneasy—not to mention embarrassed—Taryn dug into her wallet and pulled out her debit card. She glanced at the expiration date on the declined card. Still good for two more years. Had she somehow missed a payment? She made a mental note to check with her card company.
“Now we’re in business.” The older woman smiled, as the reader happily spat out a receipt.
“Thanks, Helen.”
Taryn collected her two steaming cups of coffee and headed to the door. She thought she was home free, until Helen’s laughing voice called out, “Tell Bryce I said good morning!”
She resisted rolling her eyes, going with an elusive, “I will if I see him.”
Thirty minutes later, Taryn crawled into the front seat of Bryce’s pickup. Her tone was only mildly chastising. “You didn’t tell me we were taking a field trip today.”
“You object?” he asked in surprise.
“No. You just didn’t mention it.”
“Ever been to a racetrack before?”
“Collin used to like stock car racing, but I seldom went along.”
“Collin?”
“The friend I was married to.”
Bryce pulled onto the road and into the traffic flow before responding. “That’s the strangest way I’ve ever heard someone describe her ex-husband.”
“Calling him my ex-husband sounds so negative,” Taryn admitted. “We’re still close friends. Our marriage just didn’t work out.”
Her companion made no comment. Only after two more turns did he offer, “We’re not going to the car races. We’re going to the horse races.”
“Oh.” Obviously surprised, her voice brightened. “Now that I may like.”
“As I said the other day, doing too many web searches could wave a red flag. A sudden increase in internet traffic to dormant sites could alert the wrong people that we’re looking into things. So today, we’ll give it a rest and do our research the old-fashioned way.”
“In person?” she guessed.
“Best kind there is.”
When her phone rang, Taryn looked down in dread. Her expression lightened when she saw the name scrawled across the screen. “Oh. Speaking of Collin… Hey, Collin. What’s up?”
A few minutes into the conversation, a frown replaced her initial smile. By the time she said goodbye, a full-out scowl pulled at her features.
“Troubles?” Bryce asked.
“That was, obviously, Collin. He said he had a strange call a couple of days ago. Someone identified himself as a lawyer and said they wanted to speak to his wife, concerning an inheritance. He thought they were talking about Glynis, until they mentioned my birth date.”
“Did he give them your number?”
“No. After just a few questions, he became suspicious.”
“Isn’t it a bit odd that they called your ex-husband? How long has it been since the two of you were married?”
“Seven years, but not so odd when you factor in the last name. Oddly enough, I married a man with the same last name as mine.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Made it easy on me. Never had to change a single legal document, other than marital status.”
“I suppose Clark is a fairly common name,” he agreed, before turning his attention back to the case. “Did he say anything else?”
“They’ve had several hang-up calls on their home number. No caller ID, no message. And Glynis says one of her credit card accounts was hacked. Which reminds me. My card declined this morning.”
He sent her a sharp look. “Does that happen very often?”
“First time ever.”
“You might want to give them a call.”
“Why the frown? What do you think is happening?”
“It sounds like they’re taking the harassment to the next level. Someone is trying to put the squeeze on you.”
Her phone rang again. “Oh, great. This is my next-door neighbor. Now what?” Even before she said hello, she knew it would be bad news.
Five minutes later, she relayed the conversation to Bryce.
“I think you’re right. This is definitely the next level. That was my neighbor, who shares the other side of my duplex. Yesterday, two boxes were delivered to my doorstep. Josie brought them in for safekeeping, but she says today’s delivery was too much.”
“Dare I ask?”
“Apparently, I’m getting a new kitchen.” Her tight smile was falsely bright. “A delivery van backed up to the driveway and deposited no less than five brand-new appliances, all top brands.”
“That explains the maxed-out credit card,” Bryce murmured.
Taryn dropped her face into her hands. “What am I going to do, Bryce? Now I have to go back to Philly and straighten this whole mess out.”
“You aren’t going anywhere.”
“But I have to! There’s several thousand dollars’ worth of appliances sitting on my lawn!”
“That’s exactly what they want you to do, Taryn. Someone is trying to flush you out, which means our little ploy worked. They believed you left the farm, and they’re trying to draw you back home.”
“It worked so well that now I have to go back and sort this all out.” Her voice sounded defeated. “Turn around, Bryce.”
“You’re not going back. Let me make a couple of calls. In the meantime, contact your credit card company and dispute the charges. If your neighbor didn’t say, ask them where the appliances came from. Report the order as fraud and demand they pick them up. The driver apparently left them without a proper signature, which puts them on the hook.”
He pulled into the parking lot of the racetrack, but neither got out of the truck. They spent the next twenty-five minutes on their phones, making the necessary calls.
“Okay, the store agreed to pick everything back up,” Taryn reported at last. “Stan is sitting outside on the sidewalk, keeping guard. The last thing I need is for someone to come along and steal everything before the van gets back. The card company will look into the dispute and refund my money in seven to ten days.”
“Ouch. Hope that’s not your only credit card.”
“Fortunately, no. But if they hacked one account, I’m sure they can hack another.”
“So maybe you should call the others and put a temporary freeze on your accounts. Same thing with your bank.”
“That’s all fine and good, but what am I supposed to do for the next few days? I have to eat. And I’m guessing the Corvette won’t get nearly as good of fuel
mileage as my car. I’ll have to buy gas at some point.”
“Remember that expense account I told you about? I’ll share.” He flashed a smile her way.
“I’m serious, Bryce. What am I supposed to do for money? I don’t have all that much cash on me.”
“Call your bank and explain the situation. Tell them you’re out of town and will make an ATM withdrawal for X amount. All other transactions need your authorization. Freeze your card accounts with the same instructions. Only authorized transactions are allowed, and you’ll call before each one.”
“I can’t believe this is happening,” Taryn muttered, pulling out her wallet once again.
“Big bites, remember? Be proactive.”
She all but growled at him, but forty minutes later, the deed was done. Bryce stood outside the truck and made a few calls of his own, until finally, they were ready to go inside.
“My legs have gone numb,” she grumbled as he helped her from the truck.
“You’ll be glad you took the time to take care of things. Here, put this on.”
“Is this what you wore?” Her violet eyes danced with humor as she placed the floppy straw hat atop her head.
“Sure did. Would you like my scarf as well?”
She glanced at the atrocious item in question, stuffed there in the seat. If Bryce chose the pattern, he had terrible taste. “No thanks, I think I’ll pass.”
Seeing her curled-up nose, he seemed to read her mind. “In case you’re wondering, a client left that behind. I thought I’d make good use of her carelessness.”
“That was no accident, I can assure you. Your client left that hideous thing out of self-preservation, not out of carelessness.”
He tried fighting the smile that tickled his lips. “Don’t forget your shades.”
As they crossed the parking lot and made their way to the horseshoe-shaped building, Taryn asked what they were looking for.
