by Regan Black
Trust the man who let her believe he’d died during a failed raid in the Mideast? Who’d obviously lived but never came to find her afterward? Who didn’t know their passion, their uncontrollable lust for each other, had made a baby who was her precious Jake?
“Okaaaaay.” She couldn’t help drawing out her response. Just a little.
“I’ve called because you’ve got new orders, Lopez.”
“Can’t they wait until we’re in? We’re only sixty miles out.” She wanted to be home with her son, in her house. The sooner the better.
“Nope. You’re not stopping in Harrisburg. As a matter of fact, you’re going to pull off in three miles and get a new rental, then head south on I-81. Use your company card and find a hotel when you need to, and hole up. You need to take three days to get back here. You need to practice maximum evasion—not just for his sake but for yours and Justin’s. These are the worst of the worst, Trina. ROC don’t leave anyone alive who’s pegged them.”
“We have to do this all weekend?”
“Yes.”
“Where do we end up, then?” She tried to sound calm, professional.
“Ultimately, you’ll bring Rob Bristol back to his home base.”
The hair on her nape prickled, and she massaged her neck with one hand on the wheel.
“And where is that?”
“Silver Valley.”
“As in where I just bought my new house?” What the hell was Rob Bristol of “TH” doing in Silver Valley?
Corey was quiet for a moment. “Yes. I can’t say anymore on this line. Stop along the way. Stay in more populated areas, at regular hotels. Nothing fancy. You’re just another couple playing tourist. Charge everything to the company.”
Trina groaned. The “company” was of course the US Marshals. This was official business. She blew out a deliberate, angry puff of air. This was not happening to her. Yet inexplicably, it was.
“Roger, boss. Got it.”
“Check in as usual.”
“Will do.”
“And Lopez?”
“Yes, sir?”
“The dog food is on your tab.”
Corey disconnected the call, and Trina would have screamed at the top of her lungs if she were alone.
Alone. Her gaze flew to the mirror and collided with the blue laser that was Rob Bristol’s stare. Justin’s. The glance that had set her on fire at one time, made her wet before he’d stroked between her legs with his fingers. Made her entire body quiver in anticipation.
She gulped. “Your left eye appears to be getting better—the swelling is going down.”
“What did you have on your schedule this weekend?”
Dang it. He’d heard the call. Or her side of it, at least.
“Nothing that can’t be rearranged.” She wished her heart, her soul, felt as calm and easygoing as her reply. Trina had her family and Jake’s friends’ families to rely on. Since they’d moved, though, his friends were forty-five minutes away, north of her office in Harrisburg. They hadn’t set down roots in Silver Valley yet. But he’d be able to stay with her parents, or her brother would stay over at her place with him. She need only make the call.
“There was a time when you would have done anything to spend an overnight with me, Trina.”
CHAPTER 4
Right now she needed to pee, gas up and find a hotel as Corey had told her. A place to hole up. She pulled into a familiar convenience store, her favorite pit stop, and up to a fuel pump. “Do you want something to drink or eat? Can you get out and use the bathroom?”
“I’d rather wait until we hunker down at the hotel. I know a couple of places that no one would think to search for us around here.”
She looked over her sunglasses at him. Emotion sideswiped her, knocking her confidence over as easily as a gull’s feather in the wind. “What’s going on here? You’re not really Rob Bristol.”
His mouth was a grim line, albeit with a swollen lip. It barely moved as he opened it to speak. “Justin died out in the field, Trina. All that’s left is Rob. It’s been my name since I escaped, practically.”
“Escaped?” It felt like it was her ribs that had taken the beating. Her heart had nowhere to escape to, and there wasn’t enough room to fill her lungs. Hell, there wasn’t enough air on earth to keep her blood oxygenated right now.
“Didn’t it ever occur to you I’d been captured by the enemy?” Bitterness laced his tone.
“Every conceivable outcome occurred to me, Justin.”
“Rob. I told you, Justin’s dead.”
“Fine. Rob.” She barely kept herself from shouting at him. “We’ll talk about our history later. I’m going to fill up the tank before we exchange this car for another, use the facilities, and pick up some snacks. Last chance to ask for anything or you’re stuck with what I get you.”
His stare was unholy. As if she were the one who’d done something wrong.
“Water would be nice.”
She slammed her door shut because she could and hooked up the nozzle to the gas tank. As soon as the gas was running she went into the store. Rob was still in the car. He was capable of watching to make sure it all went safely.
With dogged determination to keep her wits about her, she ordered them each two sandwiches and iced lattes from the touch-screen menus. As she walked back to the refrigerator section for water, she called her brother.
“Hey, Nolan, it’s me. I’m involved in something I hadn’t expected. Can you watch Jake this weekend?”
“Of course I can. I saw Mom and Dad at the diner this morning and they were saying how they’d like to take him to the water park at Hershey.”
“Sure they were. That’s way too hot for them.”
Nolan laughed. “Relax. I’ll take him. He and I will have fun. Have you told him yet, that you’ll be away?”
“No. Can you get him from day camp in an hour? I’ll talk to him once he’s at your place. Or you can stay at our place. I have plenty of boxes to still unpack if you’re bored.”
“Sure thing. You be safe out there, Trina.”
“Will do. Thanks.” Her arms full of blissfully cold bottled water, she went to the register and paid her bill. She picked up the bagged food as soon as the server called her number and went outside. As she looked across the lot to the car’s back seat, her strength left her.
It was empty. He was gone. Again.
A cramp the size and pain of ten charley horses stabbed through her middle and she doubled over, dry heaving on the pavement in front of the convenience store. She’d indeed lost her freaking mind.
* * *
Rob made his way out of the men’s room toward where he’d spied Trina ordering food on the fancy terminal. She was gone, and he looked out the store window to see her bent over just outside the doors, plastic bags clutched in the hands that grasped her knees.
Drat.
He walked as fast as his aching, pounding body allowed, out into the afternoon sunlight. He winced as heard her strangled heaves, the blanket of humidity wrapping around him again.
“Trina.”
She was throwing up, the puppy on some kind of makeshift tether she held, but nothing was coming out of her mouth. Dry heaves.
“Trina.” He tried again, placed his hand on her shoulder. “I think you’re dehydrated. You need water.” The puppy jumped and tried to get to their faces, as if this were a game.
“I thought you were gone.” Her tortured whisper reached him, even though she was bent over. Hell. He’d already put her through it once, and she thought he’d done it again after only an hour or two together. Guilt dug its long claws into his conscience, and he had to bite the inside of his mouth to keep from spilling his guts.
“I’m right here, Trina.”
Her body stopped convulsing within seconds of him touching her. S
he slowly straightened, her face as white as the ice freezer behind them. Her eyes blazed with an intensity of emotion he’d thought was reserved for wartime.
“You mother—” To her credit she stopped herself, straightened her spine fully and gulped in large breaths. She reached down for the puppy and hugged him to her chest.
“Just hitting you, huh?” Obviously the trauma of seeing him again had cost her more than she’d let on. He was still trying to process the fact that she’d barely blinked as they outran Vasin. And she had to have recognized him almost immediately. A pain deep in his chest lit a flame of compassion. Now that was an emotion he hadn’t allowed himself to feel in a long time. Trina was shaking with her suffering. And he hated himself, knowing he’d caused it.
“You’ve been here all along. Capable of finding me.” She spat out the last, her anger building from a boil to vaporizing steam. And he knew whom she’d like to zap off the planet. He reached out to her as a large horn blare from an eighteen-wheeler ripped through the sultry air, startling both of them.
Damn it, he’d forgotten that they were both still targets of ROC. He never allowed anything to keep him off his mission. He’d never cared for anyone as he had Trina, either. He’d have to go over it later, mentally. How, no matter how many women he’d casually dated off and on since Trina, he’d never forgotten her. No one compared.
“Get in the car, Rob.” Her demand cut through his pangs of regret, and she stalked off. No offer to help him as he half ran, half limped back to the tiny car. She waited for him next to the open back door. “Hold the dog.” Once inside he held the squirming pup on his lap but otherwise took Trina’s lead. Save for noisily gulping the bottle of water she handed to him, then sharing it with the clumsy puppy, he remained silent.
Within twenty minutes of leaving the filling station, Trina turned into the parking lot of an auto rental place where she exchanged the economy model for a huge, honkin’ SUV.
She spoke not a single word to him, her only acknowledgment of his presence when she held the front passenger door of the SUV open, motioning for him and the dog to get in. It wasn’t fun, climbing into the large bucket seat with his battered bones, but he did it. To show her or himself he could, he wasn’t sure. He found himself more than willing to take out any punishment she’d give him. Which was downright stupid. No amount of abuse from Trina would ever make up for what his presumed death had obviously done to her. The pup curled up on the back seat, as if the emotionally charged day had worn him out, too.
They continued their silent journey on a less-traveled highway that paralleled the main routes. Rob went along with Trina’s zero communications policy until she turned on the radio and played a country station at full blast. The Garth Brooks tune he could deal with, as well as the Miranda Lambert ode to all the bastards she’d ever dated. But when a melancholy, I’ll-never-love-anyone-else ballad began, he pushed the power button and cut the artist off midtwang.
“Just hitting you, Rob?” Her words cut like a bayonet, eliminating any doubt that she’d been as slain by their forced breakup as he had.
“Baby cakes, it hit me the minute I saw you with your new man and baby.” Shoot. Double crap. Holy counterintelligence. He’d just spilled his guts to her. Maybe it was time to get out of covert ops, after all.
“You spied on me?” Her tan hands, naturally olive by birth and deepened by the sun’s kisses, gripped the wheel of the large vehicle, and he was so damned grateful they were busy. Because he had no doubt she’d wrap them around his throat if she could, and he wasn’t sure he’d stop her. Or if he wanted to stop her.
Because he felt lower than dirt. He didn’t deserve her in the desert, and didn’t deserve her when he’d gone to find her the first time.
“It wasn’t spying. I intended to talk to you.”
* * *
Unexpected tears burned like Mace against Trina’s eyeballs, and she damned them to hell. She’d shed more than her share of tears over a man she’d thought dead and buried.
“Wait—I visited your grave at Arlington. Who’s in there?”
He looked straight ahead for once, a relief since he hadn’t stopped staring at her since they’d driven from the rental place. “No one. It was a cover-up.”
“Cover-up for what?”
“I worked for the Agency right after. It was the perfect time to do so.”
“The CIA? But that’s not such a secret that you couldn’t come find me, tell me that you were using a pseudonym.”
“I did find you. You were otherwise involved.”
His explanation was making no sense.
“Where did you find me?”
“Norfolk. You were still living there—on shore duty.”
“That was almost two years after, after…”
“After I was ‘killed’?” He made air quotes around the word, and she almost laughed. Then remembered how pissed she was at him, how ugly this whole situation was. Not including that they were hiding out, on the run from ROC’s top members.
“Go on.”
“I was detained for a while, and then had some physical rehab to contend with.” What he didn’t say, the obvious mental anguish he must have faced, concerned her more. But he wasn’t volunteering, and she wasn’t admitting she cared.
“And?”
“And I was on your street, across from your town house, waiting for you to get home from work. It was a beautiful day, the sun shining, the wind cold as the North Pole. You pulled in your driveway and got out, and lifted your kid out of the back seat.” He shook his head stiffly, and she thought the little gasps he was letting out through his bruised face were laughter. Until she risked a quick sideways glance and saw the single tear, pointed like a knife, sliding down over his enlarged, purpled cheek. This tear wasn’t from tear gas.
“You didn’t like seeing me with a child?” It could have been anyone’s; how did he know it was hers? He clearly didn’t know the real truth of it. That the baby was his. Theirs.
“The kid wasn’t the problem. It was the man you handed it over to.”
“The man I…” She thought about her time assigned to Commander, Naval Surface Forces Atlantic, a staff in Norfolk, Virginia. It had been a horrendous juggling act to deal with her grief while adjusting to life as a new single mom. There had been only two men who’d been close enough to help her at the time. Craig, another naval officer who worked on the same staff, and her brother Nolan, who’d just completed law school and was working as a lawyer in Virginia Beach. Nolan had also been a SEAL, and had gotten out of the Navy two years ahead of Trina. He had been as certain as she that Justin was dead. Killed in a raid some of her brother’s colleagues had participated in and survived.
“Not so smug now, are you?” His sharp words belied the stricken expression stamped on his face.
“There’s nothing to be smug about, you arrogant jerk.” She turned into the parking lot of a suite hotel and drove around to the back, out of sight of any main roads. As soon as she put the gearshift into Park, she faced him.
“I was with one of two men during that time. One was my brother, Nolan.”
She waited for him to turn, not giving a flying fish how much it hurt him. Because she’d hurt for so long, had finally moved on past her loss, and here he was, telling her he’d seen her and their child but had done nothing to broach the divide? Had not wanted to tell her he’d survived? Had picked his adrenaline-seeking career over her and the child he had to have known was his?
He turned, and she saw the glimmer of fear in his eyes. Fear? It couldn’t be.
“The other man—did you marry him?” His voice was a croak.
“He was, and is, one of my dearest, best friends. As a matter of fact, I was at his wedding this past spring. To his husband. He’s gay. I never married, and even if I’d wanted to, that was what, only eighteen, twenty months since you’d died? Scratch that
, I mean went missing, right? Because you were alive all along.” She shook her head, followed by a single harsh laugh. “You know, a big part of me never believed it, that you were dead. As if I could feel you still alive on the planet. But my brother, my family, they all told me I had to move on. To get past what had happened.”
“Did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Move on.”
She didn’t answer him right away. Couldn’t. Because the man next to her, Rob, wasn’t Justin anymore. He was a stranger to her. And she had no idea what a man who hadn’t told her he’d survived would do once he discovered he had a son. “There’s no one in my life right now, if that’s what you’re asking.”
* * *
Trina was single. Available, but not to him. Rob hated the spark of light in his heart when she admitted she was solo at the moment.
He watched Trina as she coordinated their hotel room reservation, checked them in, fed the dog with food from the convenience store and continued to stay in touch with her US Marshals boss the entire time. She was the whirlwind of energy he remembered, and more. And because she was keeping her chain of command informed, he knew that Claudia was receiving the same information. All of the LEA chiefs in an area where a TH op was being conducted were alerted to report anything TH needed to know.
“Have you thought about getting some rest? We don’t know if we’ll have to move again, and it could come with no warning.” Rob stood at the kitchenette counter across from where she was perched on a barstool. The dog was still on his leash but Trina had tied it to her wrist, giving the puppy the security it needed while allowing it to sniff and roll about the strange room. Rob was grateful to be on his feet again. Standing was far less painful than sitting, and to get to and from a seated or reclining position was pure hell. The counter was the right height to lean against for support, too.
Trina didn’t respond right away as her fingers flew over her phone’s touch screen.
