by Joan Swan
“Oh, my God.” The words came out in a whisper as shaky as her breathing. “Oh, my God.”
All awkwardness over his nakedness forgotten, she pushed him back a step and scrutinized the mark. No wonder he felt familiar. No wonder those flames had blown purple and the sparks shot blue. She pressed a hand to her forehead.
“Poolaki. ”
The boy’s sweet voice drew Keira out of her dark fog. She looked up at his perfectly innocent face.
Those bastards. How could they?
“Poolaki,” Mateo said again, his single word thick with a Greek accent. His fingers touched the scar. “Birdie.”
“Birdie?” she repeated. The scar did indeed look like a bird. But not just any bird. “Do you speak English?”
His eyes showed no recognition of her question. He simply gave her one of those half-smiles and repeated, “Birdie.”
“Yes, it’s a birdie.” Disappointment deflated her excitement. She lifted her hand and brushed the soft curls off his forehead. “Who are you? Where did you come from?”
Her own questions echoed Luke’s demands in the chopper and brought reality back into sharp focus.
He was Mateo Esposito. Tony Esposito’s son. And Tony would be coming for him soon. Which brought a whole new complication into her life. How would she tell Tony about what Mateo had been through at that compound? How would she tell him that his son had not been a religious refugee, but a scientific guinea pig for the same government Tony had chosen to spend his life serving as an FBI agent? And how would she do it without exposing herself and her entire team and their abilities?
Keira squeezed her eyes shut and covered her face. “Can this day get any worse?”
FOUR
Why couldn’t he keep his big mouth shut?
Luke stared out the small exam room window, waiting for his X-ray results. Outside, several law enforcement vehicles dotted the parking lot, along with a couple of news vans. He let his gaze blur over the scene, now fading in the early evening light.
Keira kept creeping into his mind. The woman pushed his damned buttons. Always had. After today, it looked like she always would. The hurt in her eyes when he’d accused her of abandoning Kat . . . Pain pulsed deep in his gut, but this discomfort didn’t stem from his injuries. At least not those inflicted by Rostov. These injuries were self-inflicted.
He dug his phone from his jeans and dialed Teague’s number.
“Hello?” Teague’s daughter, Kat, answered, her voice drifting over Luke’s exposed nerves and soothing him. A smile turned his mouth.
“Hey, princess. What are you up to?”
“Playing with my Barbies.”
“Mmm.” Luke rubbed his eyes, wincing at the memory of those tiny high heels spiking into his bare instep in the middle of the night more times than he could count during the years he’d parented Kat while his brother-in-law had been in prison. He’d also done his share of dressing, undressing, bathing, hiding, finding, and role-playing with the figurines.
“You’re color-coordinating their shoes and purses, right?” he asked.
“Yes.” She drew out the word with a dramatic smile in her voice.
“Because we can’t have anyone talking smack about our girls.”
“Oh,” she said. “Alyssa just bought them some new outfits. Cheetah and rhinestones and—you can put them on with me when you come over.”
He half-smiled, half-grimaced. Look what he’d started.
“And they come with matching hair ties, for, you know, me, not the Barbies. Can you put my hair up when you come over? Like in that bun you used to do? And use the ties?”
An image of a long-ago typical morning flashed in his head. Kat sitting cross-legged in front of him on his bed, playing with something in her lap. Him clutching bobby pins between his teeth and mentally swearing as he struggled to wrangle every strand of that dark, thick, curly hair into his palm so he could twist it into a roll, then attack it with pins like a voodoo doll until the bun stayed put on the back of her head.
He’d never been very good at the whole hair thing, but the hours of frustration had been worth it whenever she beamed that little gap-toothed grin back from the mirror and said, “It’s perfect, Uncle Luke.”
“Who’s that, Kat?” Teague, Luke’s boyhood best friend, former fellow firefighter, and prior brother-in-law, called in the background.
“Uncle Luke,” she said. “He’s going to come over and dress my Barbies in their new clothes.”
There was a scraping sound over the line, then Teague’s voice. “I thought you got counseling for that fetish.”
“Old habits die hard.”
“Are you in Nevada?”
“I am.”
“What the fuck?”
Reality pushed back in, smothering all those pleasant memories. “I don’t know yet.” He looked over his shoulder to make sure he was alone. “When’s the last time you saw Keira?”
An extended silence made Luke think he’d lost his connection. Then Teague said, “That’s a strange question. I thought that topic was off limits.”
In an attempt to let go and move on, he’d asked their friends not to discuss Keira in his presence. But after seeing her today, he realized that not talking about her didn’t keep him from remembering or wanting or wishing or regretting.
“It was,” Luke said. “Until she showed up here.”
“What?” Surprise lifted Teague’s voice, then he chuckled. “Her SWAT unit was deployed, wasn’t it?”
“You knew she was on SWAT? Why didn’t you ever mention that?”
“Does ‘subject off limits’ sound familiar?”
“Fuck you.”
“Oh, man, I’d have paid to witness that reunion. Is that how the fire started?”
“Very funny. Where’s that good-for-nothing brother-in-law of yours?”
“Mitch is on his way here. He’s tapping sources at Nevada Bureau of Land Management. Doesn’t know anything yet. Kai has already called. He’s ready to kick asses and take names, as usual. He has Seth on standby and access to his boss’s jet.”
“Jesus.” Luke rubbed his forehead, picturing the two other members of their firefighting hazmat team who’d suffered through the warehouse fire with them. “Those guys are always two steps ahead of me. What about Jessica?”
“Kai said she’s in Italy for some conference. He decided not to leave a message on her phone.”
“Probably a good idea.” He remembered how fragile Jessica, the final member of their team, had been after losing her husband in the fire. How deeply she’d struggled. How far she’d come in the five years since. She’d found her niche, lobbying for firefighters in the political realm. He supposed it was her own personal brand of therapy for dealing with Quaid’s tragic death.
And man, loss seemed to be a common thread for all of them, didn’t it? Though Luke hadn’t suffered through Keira’s death in that fire, he’d lost her just the same.
“When can you get here?” Teague asked.
Luke’s brain was starting to numb around the edges. “Uh . . . Not sure.”
“Are you bringing Keira with you, or are you two going to have to take separate vehicles so you both make it alive?”
Luke scrubbed a hand through his hair. That was something he hadn’t contemplated—spending time with Keira. The thought brought mixed emotions—most of them painful. “I’ll call you later.”
He hung up before Teague could twist the screws any tighter. Keira was doing a fine job of that on her own.
“Agent?”
The male voice drew Luke around to the doorway. The doctor who’d examined him approached and snapped an X-ray film to the light box attached to one wall.
Luke shoved the phone into the front pocket of the fresh jeans he’d put on and squinted at the film. “Ribs and shoulders. That’s about all I can make out.”
“You’ve got three breaks, in three different ribs. All beneath the bullet’s impact.” The older man pointed toward gray line
s on the film, but his suspicious hazel eyes stayed on Luke. “Unusual bruising pattern on your chest, though. Never seen that in my thirty years of medicine.”
Luke didn’t want to get into that conversation. “It was an unusual situation.”
The doctor nodded. “You’re going to be sore for a while, but there’s nothing we can do for broken ribs. Just get lots of rest. Considering what could have happened, and the condition of the others who came in here tonight, I’d say this is inconsequential.”
Yeah, he could be lying on a refrigerated metal slab in the morgue. He trailed his fingers over the bruises on his chest, now black and purple and throbbing like a sonofabitch. “That’s very true.”
Simply by being present, Keira had amped his physical strengths and saved his life. And all he’d done was harass her. Accuse her. Bitch at her. He was such a piece of shit.
“How are they?” he asked. “The kids.”
“Lucky.” The doctor’s brows lifted. “None suffered fatal injuries. Even the girl who was badly burned has stabilized. I guess this is a day for miracles, Agent Ransom. I’d like to think you’ll use the opportunity to its fullest. Second chances don’t happen as often as people think.” The man offered a thoughtful smile, as if a little in awe of the opportunity himself. “I’ll get you some pain medication. The nurse will bring your discharge papers.”
Luke thanked the doctor and turned toward the window again. He’d had broken ribs before, so he knew they’d just hurt until they healed. And he doubted there would be any rest for him—physical or mental—for a long time.
“Lucas.” Keira’s voice washed over him from behind. Warm. Familiar. Sweet. It wrapped around him and held tight.
“You know,” he said, his tone melancholy from the doctor’s talk of miracles and second chances, “you and my mother were the only two people who ever called me Lucas.”
“No,” she said softly, “I didn’t know that.”
She couldn’t know, because he’d never told her. Along with so many other things he’d kept to himself during their relationship. Including the fact that he’d needed her more than he’d needed his next breath when she’d walked away.
“I needed you, too,” she said. “But that didn’t keep you from giving me an impossible ultimatum.”
He huffed a dry laugh and dropped his head. “Maybe if you’d been able to read minds a few years ago, we’d still be together.”
“I shouldn’t have had to read your mind to know what you needed or wanted. You should have been able to tell me, like I tried telling you. Besides”—she sighed—“we both needed very different things.”
Regret was an ugly, relentless emotion, and it ate away at his gut as he turned to face her. He looked right past the boy she was holding to the cuts on her face covered in Steri-strips and her red, puffy eyes. She’d been crying. Hard. A protective instinct twisted inside him. Maybe she wasn’t the warrior princess he’d thought.
Those bright blue eyes traveled over his bare chest with a level of heat he hadn’t expected. He could have convinced himself the attraction was his imagination, except for the flare of jet-black pupils against her light irises. That was a signal he would never forget, a signal his body would always respond to, like it was responding now, with heat sparking in his groin.
Her eyes skimmed down and away before focusing on the light board with the X-ray still illuminated. “What did the doctor say?”
“Few broken ribs.” His voice came out rough. He cleared his throat and grabbed a clean shirt from his bag. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cared what he looked like, but with Keira standing feet away scouring him like a contestant from the Bachelorette show, he wished he’d had a recent haircut, a clean shave, fifteen more minutes added to his daily workout.
He tugged the shirt over his head. When he looked in her direction again, she was gone. Luke swiveled and found her studying the X-ray images up close. Her face was illuminated in the diffused light, outlining her furrowed brow and down-turned lips.
“What?” he asked.
She didn’t answer, but she was thinking. He could practically see the wheels turning in her brain.
She stepped toward him, grabbed the hem of his T-shirt, and pulled it up.
Excitement spiked his heart rate. Shock started his mouth. “Hey, hey—” He tried to push her arm down, but she didn’t budge. “If you want a better view, we can work something—”
“Shut up,” she muttered. “If that shit works on other women, you need to raise your minimum expectations.”
She dropped his shirt, turned on her heel, and scanned the room.
“Keira, what—”
Still holding Mateo in one arm, she grabbed his body armor in the other and flipped it over where it lay on the gurney.
Luke clenched his teeth against an overwhelming desire to yank the vest from her view, which was completely illogical. He wasn’t hiding anything. What she thought shouldn’t matter. Yet when she sucked in a breath and ran her fingers over the exposed, flattened bullet on the inside of the canvas where the metal had hit Luke’s skin, he tensed.
Would she insist on taking credit for saving his life? Would she use this as an example of how wrong Luke had been to push her away? Laugh at him for being such a fool?
Her breath leaked from her lips in a slow stream. She folded the front of the vest again and ran the flat of her hand down the tattered front where sections had been ripped and melted. Her touch was reverent, almost loving, as her palm paused over the hole, beneath which Luke’s heart would have lain.
“Have you . . . maintained . . . that ability since I’ve been gone?”
“No,” he said cautiously, unsure of her mood.
She nodded.
“How’d you know?” he asked.
“Rostov hit you with a powerful rifle at close range. You should have more breaks than that. And the bruise on your chest, it’s”—she shrugged—“strange. An intense, perfect circle in the center, surrounded by stippling in a complete, unbroken radius. It looks the way an actual bullet wound would if the metal had pierced your skin.”
That was a sickening thought.
Keira turned to face him, but he couldn’t read her eyes. “No more taunting me about new abilities. Deal?”
He nodded agreement.
She wandered to the gurney, where she gently laid the sleeping boy, and Luke experienced an ease in the atmosphere. And an unmistakable and powerful connection. They each knew and accepted that they affected the other—mind, body, and spirit. Like it or not. Accept it or not. Deal with it or not. The facts didn’t change.
Luke finally focused on the kid. He was dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, his brown hair a mass of damp, dark curls. “They found him some clothes, huh?”
“Yeah, but he doesn’t like wearing them.” A smile softened the edges of her pretty mouth, making Luke want to do things that shouldn’t even enter his mind. “Absolutely wouldn’t put on shoes.”
“Sounds familiar.” Luke chuckled, his heart warming over the parenting experience he and Keira had shared while raising Kat for that year before Keira left for the academy. These were the moments that made him long for a wife and children of his own. Only, the more time that passed, the further away that dream slipped.
Keira rested one slim hip against the gurney and crossed her arms over her chest. “How is Kat?”
She wasn’t combative. Just sad. Which intensified his lingering guilt. “She’s great. Has everything she always wanted—her dad, great new mom, baby brother—”
“On the way,” Keira finished. “I know.”
Luke bit the inside of his bottom lip to keep from asking about her visits to the area or nagging her about never looking him up when she came. Not even tossing him one damn phone call.
“You had a phone, too,” she said. “My cell number hasn’t changed.”
“I thought we talked about this mind-reading thing.”
“We did. It sounded something like projecting. Re
member?”
“I remember how exasperating you are.”
“Ditto.”
He scrubbed a hand through his hair. “Just talked to Teague.”
“Yeah?” She straightened, her eyes sparking. “What did he say?”
“Doesn’t have any info on this yet. Mitch is on his way to Truckee. I guess I’ll head home, too, once this quiets down.” He hesitated. “He asked if you would be coming. . .” with me.
He cut off the last two words, but he guessed she’d probably heard them anyway.
“I don’t know.” She shifted her feet and dragged the corner of her lower lip between her teeth as she looked at the sleeping boy. “My team may be here until it’s over.”
Luke met her at the gurney, absorbing the sight of her now in civilian clothes. Dark blue jeans hung low at the curve of her hips. A plain white short-sleeved T-shirt clung to breasts that looked fuller than he remembered in comparison to the narrowness of her waist peeking from beneath a trim-fitting lightweight jean jacket. She’d always been healthy and fit. Perfect, in his opinion. But this little body was a compact machine of muscle.
The metal badge hooked at her waist created pressure beneath his sore ribs, a mixture of pride and regret.
Second chances don’t happen as often as people think.
He skimmed the fall of her shiny hair, nearly black. The way her eyes glimmered a brighter blue in contrast. That creamy, smooth skin. And the crème de la crème, her freckles. The caramel-colored dots across the bridge of her little nose, fading as they arced out over her cheekbones. Eighty-three of them. He’d counted every one. Kissed every one.
Was this a day for miracles? Had they been brought together again for that rare second chance?
Keira’s brows pulled together. Those silky lips parted, and Luke’s chest tightened in anticipation of a yes coming out of her mouth.
“Luke, we really need to talk about Mat—”
“Keira?” A male voice called from somewhere down the hall. “Keira? Where are you?”
