by Tami Lund
“To protect you. We thought they would come after me, not you.”
Comprehension dawned. “Jack told you to leave.”
He shook his head, but his cheeks reddened.
“Why are you protecting him? He doesn’t even like you.”
Her father chuckled, and her mother interrupted her snarky comments. “Are you in pain, dear? Push this button right here. It will give you a shot of pain medicine.”
Emily Kate pushed the button her mother indicated. Her body was instantly filled with warmth. Her limbs became impossibly heavy and her eyelids felt too thick to keep open. Her brain didn’t want to function anymore. So she closed her eyes and went back to sleep.
When she next surfaced, the room was bathed in darkness, and all was quiet save for the sounds of the various hospital machines and a gentle, light snoring. Connor sat in what looked like a vinyl chair, sound asleep, with the world’s smallest wool blanket covering his torso. His neck would surely have a crick the next morning. She pushed the button again and drifted back to sleep.
“...healing pretty well. I think we can take her off the morphine drip and put her on oral meds. Oh look, there she is now. Good morning, Miss Emily Kate.”
She blinked groggily at a smiling woman wearing pale green scrubs. She opened her mouth and croaked. The nurse held up a plastic cup with a straw in it.
“Slow and steady now, so you don’t get sick.”
Emily Kate sucked greedily at the straw. “Thanks,” she said on a gasp a few moments later when the nurse tugged the cup away. While the nurse busied herself with removing the morphine drip, Emily Kate studied the group gathered around the table that was supposed to serve as her dining table while she was relegated to the hospital bed.
“What are you doing?” she asked. Her mother, her father, and Connor all looked up.
“Playing euchre, dear,” Mom responded.
“Playing what?”
“Euchre. It’s a card game northerners play. It’s quite fun. Connor says I’m a natural.” Her mother beamed at him.
Dad tossed his cards onto the table. “Not me. I’ll never understand this game,” he said with disgust. He stood and stretched and then walked over to stand over the nurse’s shoulder. “How you feeling, Cornbread?”
It was a ridiculous nickname, of course, which was why it stuck. Emily Kate blinked back tears. “Achy. Thirsty.”
“What about hungry?” her mom asked, her voice filled with worry. “You’re wasting away to nothing.”
Dad rolled his eyes. “She’s only been here two days, Jolynn. And the hospital’s been feeding her through those tubes.”
“That’s not the same as a big ol’ helping of jambalaya,” her mom insisted.
“Where’s Jack?” Emily Kate asked.
“Probably in Cullen’s room, forcing that poor man to work, even though he’s just as beat up as you are.” She shook her head at her son’s perceived folly.
“Something tells me Cullen’s making him do it,” Emily Kate said wryly. “Neither man would let something like a little explosion keep him from the job.” She paused and then asked, “Do they know who did it?” She saw Connor’s guilty look before he turned his head away and stood up.
“I’ll go tell them you’re awake,” he said, and he hurried from the room without looking at her.
***
“What do I need to do?”
Cullen and Jack both glanced up from their computer screens when Connor walked into the hospital room. “Go away,” Jack suggested.
“I’m serious,” Connor insisted as he stepped further into the room. “I want to help. They want me, not Emily Kate. Tell me what to do to keep her safe.”
“Go back to Detroit,” Jack repeated.
“Yeah, because that clearly worked the last time,” he shot back.
Jack started to push from his seat, but Cullen shot out an arm and stopped him. “Jack, I know it pisses you off that he’s sleeping with your sister, but cut the guy a break, okay? It’s pretty damn obvious he’s being eaten away by guilt.”
“As he should be,” Jack retorted.
Cullen rolled his eyes. “Jesus. No wonder Emily Kate ran to Texas at the first available opportunity. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like having you as an older brother.”
Jack shifted his glower to his partner, but Cullen was utterly unfazed.
“I’m sure you’ve figured out that Vik from the casino is likely behind the explosion,” Cullen explained to Connor. “And shut up, Jack,” he added when his partner started to protest.
“Another dead body has turned up, too. Lawrence Gilbert.”
“Who’s Lawrence Gilbert?” Connor asked. Adrenaline surged through his system. Finally, he was getting answers. Of course, this meant he was going to have to come clean, too. He did not look forward to that part of the conversation.
“Worked for Vik. Had some pretty hefty priors that make me think he might have been operating in a henchman type role, although his technical title was casino security,” Cullen explained. “He’s the one we suspect set the bomb in Emily Kate’s car.”
“You think when the bomb didn’t do what it was supposed to do, he paid the ultimate price?” Connor guessed.
“Or Vik knows damn well we’re going to be putting more pressure on him now, and maybe Lawrence Gilbert is the type to roll under too much pressure. This whole investigation has been off since the beginning. I think Vik keeps trying to divert the attention from himself, but his own employees keep pulling it back when they screw up,” Cullen said.
“And then there’s the fact that Vik named you as being involved in this casino scam. Your full name, knew you were from Detroit, that you were a chef, and that you had been staying in the hotel attached to his hotel. In fact, he even invited me to the hotel, took me to your suite, and invited me to search through your stuff. Awful lot of condoms in your shaving kit for a long weekend trip.” Jack glared as he said the last, as if he dared Connor to deny his intentions while he was visiting Louisiana.
“Would you rather I slept with your sister without a condom? You ready to be an uncle?”
Not surprisingly, Jack lunged at him. Connor darted around the bed, using Cullen as a shield. Jack’s partner barked at him. “Calm the fuck down, Jack. Connor, quit baiting him. Jesus, you two are like a couple of dogs, fighting over a bone.” He let the two men glare at each other for a few more moments, and then he continued.
“Is there anything else we need to know, Rikeland? Anything you failed to tell us on Monday?”
This was it. He’d known it was coming, knew he would at some point have to tell them the truth. He sucked in a breath, threw back his shoulders, and forced himself to look Cullen in the eye. Although on the surface, Cullen, with his scruffy beard, shaggy hair, and eyes that seemed to miss nothing at all, appeared to be the scarier of the two FBI agents, Connor knew which one he should fear. It wasn’t Cullen.
“There’s a body.”
His proclamation didn’t quite have the effect he’d expected it to.
“No shit,” Jack said. “We’re up to two at this point.”
“Three.”
“That’s not funny,” Jack said.
“I’m not laughing. There’s a third body. In the casino. In the kitchen, actually. In the walk-in cooler.”
“Fuck,” Cullen said, rubbing his hand over his face.
“And you know this how?” Jack asked.
“I saw it.”
Chapter 15
“Three dead bodies,” Jack repeated. “Son of a bitch.”
“And Vik hasn’t accomplished his main goal yet,” Cullen pointed out.
Connor’s blood ran cold in his veins. “We have to get Emily Kate out of town. Now that they’ve made the connection between me and her, she’s not safe. They’ll come after her again. They’ll—”
“Calm down. As it happens, we agree with you,” Jack said, albeit grudgingly.
“How do you feel about taking a va
cation?” Cullen asked, looking at Connor.
“With Emily Kate?”
“If you choose Vegas, so help me, I’ll—”
“Jesus, Jack, shut the fuck up. If the director heard you right now, he’d pull you from the case,” Cullen barked at his partner.
“Detroit,” Connor said. “My sister’s place. I think it’ll be most comfortable for both of us, Emily Kate especially. My sister would love the company, I’m sure, and her place is plenty big enough for all of us.”
Cullen and Jack exchanged a look and then Cullen shrugged. “Works for us. Now comes the hard part.”
“What’s that?” Connor asked.
“Convincing Emily Kate to leave.”
***
“No.”
“Come on, you can meet my family.”
“I don’t want to meet your family.”
Connor looked injured by that comment, but he pressed nonetheless.
“Emily Kate, it’s for your own protection.”
She folded her arms over her chest and glared at him. “I need to get back to the restaurant. Pedro and Courtney and some of the others have been here, and they tell me it’s fine, but I need to see for myself.”
Connor shifted from cajoling to angry. “There’s no way in hell I’m letting you go back to that restaurant until the guy who’s out to get you is behind bars.”
“Letting me?” she said, her voice positively dripping with ice. “You have absolutely no say in my life.”
They were momentarily alone in the hospital room. She’d finally convinced her parents she was well enough—and well enough protected—that they could retreat to her house to check on the cat, shower, and relax for a short while. They’d even promised to go over to the restaurant to check on things for her, not that she intended to tell Connor as much.
Jack was either next door, meeting with Cullen, or back at his own hotel room, reassuring Kennedy that everything was fine and no one else was going to be hurt before this thing was over. Kennedy wouldn’t believe him, of course. No one did.
Connor let out a gusty sigh. “Emily Kate, knock it off. I didn’t go back to Detroit to stay. I went to Detroit to try to keep this from happening to you.”
He’d already told her as much, but she refused to believe him. She couldn’t believe him. She wanted him; she wanted him to stay. She wanted to be with him forever, and it was impossible. So she needed to believe that he left on purpose, in order to keep herself from hoping.
“Guess your little ploy didn’t work,” she said.
“Actually, it was your brother’s ploy, which I know you already figured out, and you’re right. But the feds have verification that the guy who was chasing us in Detroit is now back in Louisiana. The plan is to put us both on a private jet under fake names. The bad guys won’t even know we’ve left.”
“And you think I’m just going to leave my life, my restaurant, my family and go hang out with your family while my brother hunts down the bad guys?”
“Well...yeah.”
“No.”
“You sure are stubborn,” Connor said crossly.
“She comes by it naturally,” her father commented as he and his wife strolled into the hospital room. “I don’t think I’ve won an argument in forty years.”
“We haven’t been married for forty years,” Mom pointed out.
“We’ve known each other that long, though,” Dad replied.
“She isn’t winning this argument,” Connor said.
“I’m getting real sick of being forced to agree with this guy,” Jack grumbled as he walked into the room behind his parents.
Emily Kate was outnumbered. As soon as the hospital released her, Jack and Connor accompanied her to her house, where Connor ended up packing a bag because she still refused to accept that they were shipping her off to Detroit. Then she was sitting on an airplane, buckled into a seat next to him and still not speaking to him.
“I don’t care, just so long as you’re safe,” Connor declared.
Well she cared. And that was the problem. Damn it.
***
But he did care. He didn’t want her to be miserable. It was bad enough she was still in pain from the explosion and frustrated she couldn’t run her restaurant and be close to her family. He at least wanted her to be marginally comfortable.
Which was why he took her to his sister’s house. If Connor had to stash a beautiful, angry woman somewhere, he felt better doing it in the burbs instead of his studio apartment in the city. Especially one with a full wall of windows.
His sister Marjory lived in Rochester, only a few miles away from where they grew up and graduated from high school. She rented an old brick bungalow dirt cheap from a couple who had been transferred temporarily to Italy for the wife’s job. Marjory was warm and inviting, hugging Emily Kate a bit too tightly. Emily Kate winced.
“Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry. I’ve never hugged someone who was hit by a bomb before,” Marjory exclaimed.
“It’s okay,” Emily Kate said wearily. “I’ve never been hit by a bomb before, either.”
His sister pulled them into the house. “Come on, let me show you what I did,” she said at that point, and she grabbed Emily Kate’s hand and dragged her down a narrow hallway.
What she did was turn one of the small bedrooms into an art studio. An easel perched on a fresh, white drop cloth in the middle of the room. A card table held an array of acrylic paints and paintbrushes. Several blank canvases leaned against one wall. The windows were devoid of all covering, so as to let the maximum amount of sunlight inside.
“Your very own temporary art studio,” Marjory announced with a flourish.
“How did you...” She turned to look at Connor, who had made sure to remain behind the women.
“You did this?” Emily Kate asked quietly. He hesitated and then nodded. She turned back to the roomful of creative supplies, and he held his breath, waiting for something. Her approval would be nice. He just wanted her to be happy. As happy as could be, under the circumstances. If she couldn’t have her restaurant, he had determined, she could at least have her first love: painting.
“Can I…can I have a few minutes alone?” she asked haltingly.
“Come on, Margie.” Connor snagged his sister’s arm and pulled her out of the room. He softly closed the door and then headed down the hall to the kitchen.
“What are you looking for?” Marjory asked a few minutes later when he began opening and closing cabinets.
“Booze. Don’t you have anything?”
She pulled open the door to the freezer and extracted a bottle of vodka. “Vodka tonic?” she suggested, and he gave her a grateful nod.
“So,” Marjory said when they stepped outside onto the deck jutting from the dining room. “You going to tell me the whole story now?”
“I thought I did,” Connor replied as he sipped his drink.
“You didn’t mention you were in love with her.”
He choked on the drink he’d just taken, and his sister pounded on his back until he was able to breathe normally again.
“Oops,” she said with a cheeky grin. “Guess you didn’t realize you were. Explains why you didn’t mention it.”
“I don’t know what I am,” he admitted. He walked over to the wooden railing and leaned against it, looking out over the small, manicured lawn. “Everything’s so screwed up.”
“I heard Oliver’s sales have plummeted since you left.”
“That’s the first good news I’ve had in days, a week even.”
“Jasmine has been begging him to ask you back, but he’s too prideful to do it.”
“Jasmine wants me back?”
“Oh come off it,” Marjory scoffed. “I know you slept with her at some point. Probably in hopes of being promoted, knowing you.”
Connor turned his head to the side and sipped at the vodka and tonic. He did not want to confirm aloud that he had taken some pretty immoral steps in his quest to be executive chef at O
liver’s Restaurant. None of it had worked anyway. Not to mention, he was beginning to wonder if it even mattered. He’d clung to his dream of being executive chef at a high-end restaurant in a cosmopolitan area for so long, maybe it was just habit.
“Have you learned your lesson yet?” Marjory asked softly.
“Which lesson is that?”
“Sometimes, you don’t get what you think you want because it isn’t what you really want in the first place.”
“That is the most convoluted sentence I have ever heard you utter. And you’ve said some pretty damn convoluted shit over the years, Margie.”
She scoffed. “You know I’m right.”
“What I know is that Emily Kate’s life is in danger because of me. What I know is that I could probably talk her into letting me stay on at her restaurant, but it’s in Uncertain, Texas. Not even Dallas or New Orleans. It’s on a freaking bayou in the middle of nowhere. Do you even know what a bayou is?”
He didn’t wait for her answer. “It’s this swampy body of water where trees actually grow in the water and there are alligators and snapping turtles and piranhas, for all I know. It’s not someplace I envisioned myself settling down when I started culinary school.”
“Does anyone really have a clear vision of where they intend to be in life when they are only eighteen years old?”
“Some people do,” Connor retorted. “I did.”
“Then do it. Go talk to Oliver. Pretend to grovel. This time, I think he’ll put you in the executive chef position. While it’s always been about his ego, it’s ultimately about the bottom line, and that’s suffering without you. Your dream is right there, waiting.”
“What about Emily Kate?”
“What about her?” Marjory shot back. “She’s perfectly safe here with me. There’s an undercover policeman hanging out in a car at the curb, apparently until this whole mess it over with. I’m happy to have a roommate. She seems like a nice girl. I bet we’ll get along swimmingly. Go back to Oliver. Go realize your dreams, Connor.”
