The Unsung Hero

by Suzanne Brockmann

  “These are really great,” David said, spreading them out on the table.

  He leaned forward to point to the angry woman, and his shoulder brushed Mallory’s.

  She didn’t move back. In fact, she moved closer. Their heads were almost touching, too, as they looked at the photo, and David’s mind went completely blank.

  Two seconds ago, he’d intended to tell her something about this picture, but right now, all he could think about was the fact that her shoulder was warm and solid against his.

  From the corner of his eye, he saw her turn to look at him.

  She smelled like the gum she chewed by the pack as a substitute for her cigarettes, sharp and spicy. Cinnamon today.

  He turned toward her, too, his mouth suddenly dry, his palms suddenly sweaty, feeling completely uncertain and scared to death. He wanted to kiss her. Every instinct he had was screaming that she wanted him to kiss her, too. But if he was wrong, he could lose her as a friend.

  And he couldn’t bear that.

  “Brandon’s late,” he said through the parched desert that had once been his mouth.

  Mallory sat back. “Do you want me to get changed? Do I have to get changed? Since it’s just a kiss, can we do it dressed—without the oil and bathing suit?”

  “Oh,” David said. “Yeah, well, I was going to take more than just a close-up. I mean, I was going to take close-ups, too, but I also wanted some full-length shots. Bodies and legs. And hands. Hands are so hard to get right. I wanted to see where they fall—naturally, you know? Do you mind?” he added. “I know the baby oil’s really gross.”

  She’d already crossed to his costume box and was searching for the bathing suit she’d worn the last time. “The baby oil’s not half as gross as the thought of kissing that asshole again.”

  “You don’t have to do this,” he told her. “I really don’t want you to if—”

  “Chill.” She found the suit and turned to face him. “It’s acting. It doesn’t mean anything if you’re acting, right? But if he tries to cop a feel again . . . well, we’ll just have to take a little break while he recovers. If you know what I mean.”

  Mallory went into the bathroom and closed the door. But she opened it right away. “I’m going to need help with the baby oil,” she said. “Can you do me a favor and help me put it on? I mean, instead of letting Bran put his hands all over me again?”

  “Yeah,” David said. “Of course. My pleasure.” He realized a fraction of a second too late just what he’d said, and how completely inappropriate—although baldly true—it was.

  He opened his mouth to stammer some kind of apology, but Mallory was smiling at him. “Mine, too,” she said, and shut the bathroom door.

  As David stood there, he felt the pupils of his eyes dilate, felt his body go into a mild state of shock.

  That had not been his imagination. Not that time.

  “Joe, can you do me a favor?” Tom said. “I’ve got to get to the train station in fifteen minutes.”

  Kelly knew when he realized she was sitting out on the deck with Joe and Charles, watching the sunset turn the ocean colors and the sky shades of red-orange. It was right when he’d said the words train station. Something changed, very slightly, very subtly in his voice.

  She shook the ice around in her glass of lemonade before she glanced up at him.

  He was looking at Joe, tension visible in his shoulders, in the muscles working along the sides of his jaw. He’d changed into jeans and a T-shirt. Sneakers on his feet. Baseball cap.

  “I need to rent a cargo van with tinted windows—Jazz is going to rig it with surveillance gear,” he explained. “I finally found what I’m looking for in Swampscott, but it’s a first come, first served kind of place, and they’re open only till twenty hundred hours. Next train’s in twenty-two minutes.”

  “Are you sure you should be driving?” Kelly asked. “All the way back from Swampscott by yourself?”

  He looked at her, his eyes taking in her sundress—the same one she’d had on earlier that afternoon, clearly noting the fact that she’d let her hair down. Or rather he had. In the closet. She’d combed it since then. Put on sandals. And underwear. Reapplied the makeup that had run when she’d cried.

  She wondered if he even knew he’d made her cry by leaving the way he had. So coldly. So abruptly. As if . . . She cleared her throat. “What if you get dizzy?” she asked.

  “I won’t,” he said.

  Joe had been about to stand, but now he was giving it a second thought, too. “You sure you’re feeling up to this?”

  Tom was exasperated. “I feel fine. I’ve got a headache, but I’ve just spent three hours on the phone trying to find this particular make of van. If I didn’t have a headache after that, it would be some kind of miracle. And if I don’t catch this train . . .”

  “Why don’t I just drive you into Swampscott,” Kelly said, her mouth dry—afraid he would turn her down, just as afraid he’d accept. What would she say to him during the forty-minute drive? “You can skip the train, Tom. I’ll take you right to the rental place.”

  But he was already shaking his head. “Thanks, but no. I’m not going to ask you to drive me to Swampscott.”

  “You didn’t ask,” Kelly countered. “I volunteered.”

  Joe and Charles were looking from her to Tom somewhat warily, obviously aware of the undercurrents of tension, but—hopefully—having no clue as to their origin.

  “Thanks, but no,” he said again.

  “I want to.” Her voice wasn’t shaking. Yet. “I haven’t had a chance to apologize to you and—”

  “You did,” he said. “Before. I accepted your apology.” He turned away, a trace of desperation in his voice. “Joe, can you please drive me to the train?”

  Kelly stood up, nearly knocking her chair over. “God damn it. When I said what I said last night, I didn’t mean that we should never talk to each other again. I don’t want us not to be friends, Tom!”

  Tom didn’t move, didn’t react, didn’t blink. He just looked at her.

  Kelly couldn’t stand it. She didn’t care that her father and Joe were watching. She marched up to Tom and kissed him, long and hard on the mouth.

  “My doors will be open tonight.” Her voice shook with emotion. “But if you come in, you better be ready to talk.”

  She swept into the house.

  Charles went along, riding in the backseat as Joe drove Tom to the train station.

  Since it took only three minutes to get to the train, they’d stopped at the Honey Farms on the way. Tom had wanted a bottle of Pepsi, no doubt to try to control his headache, which surely had to be a damn sight worse after that show Kelly had put on out on the deck.

  Kelly, whose doors—presumably the French ones on her balcony—would be open to Tom tonight.

  Charles tried to reassure himself that he was okay with that. It was, after all, the start of the twenty-first century. If his thirty-two-year-old grown-up daughter wanted to have a relationship with a man who wasn’t her lawfully wedded husband, well, that was her business, not his. He should have done the same with his second wife—saved himself one hell of a lot of grief. Not to mention money.

  Tom got back into Joe’s car, Pepsi in hand, and Joe put the car into reverse.

  “Wait,” Charles ordered. He tapped Tom on the shoulder. “Have you got everything you need? Because if you don’t, you might want to go back in there and buy it. Them. A box. Ah, Christ. You know what I mean.”

  Joe and Tom both turned to look back at him.

  Where had Jenny’s father been with that kind of advice the night Charles had taken her to the Lennox Ballroom in Boston, and driven home via back roads? Very dark, very deserted back roads. Dark enough to take a blanket out into the crisp autumn night, spread it out in the middle of a deserted field so they could share a bottle of wine and gaze up at the stars . . .

  Well, maybe Jenny had done some stargazing, but Charles sure hadn’t.

  “Condoms,” he
said now, crossly. “Do you need me to spell it for you, too? Do you have some, son?”

  Tom gazed at him, completely surprised. Charles could read this Paoletti nearly as well as he could read the senior one. It was obvious that Tom wasn’t afraid of Charles, but he was taken aback by his frankness, unsure how to respond to the father of the woman he was probably intending to . . . intending to . . .

  Yes, this was awkward.

  “Just nod your head,” Charles demanded. “Yes or no? If it’s yes, we go, if it’s no, you trot back into the store and—”

  Tom nodded. Yes. But then he shook his head no. “Sir, I’m not—”

  “Not going to talk about this anymore,” Charles loudly cut him off. “You told me what I wanted to know. Just promise if the opportunity arises, you’ll actually use the damn things.”

  Tom nodded again. Yes.

  And then—smart young man that he was—he turned back around and sat facing the front. Probably praying hard that Joe got him to the train before Charles started questioning him about his favorite sexual positions.

  Joe drove down North Street, making sure Charles saw him rolling his eyes balefully at him in the rearview mirror.

  Just what Charles needed after they dropped Tom off at the train. A lecture from the High Priest of Polite on the propriety of talking about condoms with the man his only daughter had just publicly invited into her bedroom tonight.

  Joe would probably have preferred that Charles urge caution to the point of not needing condoms. He didn’t want either of their children—grown-up children, but still their children—to get hurt.

  And Charles and Joe both knew a thing or two about how easy it was to hurt the people you care about the most.

  As Joe pulled into the commuter rail station, Charles couldn’t help but remember another trip he took with Joe to the train, this one back in France. Cybele had been with them, along with Henri and Luc Un, the poor bastard. They’d received a coded message from a BBC French Special Broadcast, requesting aid in stopping German troop movement. The fighting in the French countryside was fierce, and anything they could do to keep the Germans from sending reinforcements and supplies by train would help the Allies.

  Joe had asked Charles to go with them. They were shorthanded that night. Luc Deux, Marie, and Dominique were nowhere to be found, and Joe and Cybele needed his help.

  Charles’s leg had healed enough that he could move without his cane. Ironically, that had been the very night Joe had planned to begin the dangerous journey taking Charles to the Allied side of the line. But with the BBC broadcast, all bets were off.

  Things were still tense in the house—it had been only a few days since he and Cybele had fought in the kitchen, since Joe had realized Cybele had gone to his bed only because she couldn’t have Charles. The entire dynamics of the household had been turned sideways. No wonder Luc Deux, Marie, and Dominique had taken a powder.

  At first, Charles had refused to help. What could he do? He knew nothing about explosives or blowing up train tracks. Besides, he’d told them, he’d quit the hero business. He’d filled his lifetime quota of heroic acts already, thanks.

  But by nightfall, when the time came, Charles found himself dressed and ready to go, unable to let them leave without him.

  Cybele had matter-of-factly handed him an extra gun as if she’d been expecting him all along, securing her own Walther PPK just inside the waist of her trousers. She was dressed like a man, complete with smudges of coal on her face, and she quickly helped him blacken his own face, too.

  Moving through the streets was terrifying. They had to hide several times from patrolling Germans, hardly daring to breathe, knowing that the slightest wrong move, the slightest misstep, would mean discovery and certain death. It was nerve-racking and exhausting. And Joe and Cybele had been doing it nearly every night for years.

  Moving through the woods outside town was only slightly better. They traveled quickly south, still on foot, to a nearby village that sat on the train line. The entire track was being guarded—the Germans were expecting saboteurs.

  But Cybele had proposed they plant their explosives along a section of track uncomfortably near the German barracks, near the station, right on the outskirts of town. And sure enough, although it was tricky to get to, once they were there, the area was completely unguarded.

  Henri planted the explosives along a key length of track, while Luc Un set his bomb beneath a railroad car sitting dark and silent nearby. It was open and empty, but it was there. And if they blew it up, the Germans couldn’t use it to carry food and water to their soldiers on the front lines.

  As the two men worked, Joe, Cybele, and Charles kept watch.

  Charles had been terrified. Not for himself. For Cybele. He didn’t want to care. He didn’t want to love her.

  All he’d ever wanted was to be back home. . . .

  He gazed out the window as Joe pulled the car up alongside the Baldwin’s Bridge station house and braked to a stop.

  “Thanks for the ride,” Tom said.

  Joe nodded.

  Tom opened the door and climbed out of the car.

  Charles put down his window. “By the way. Something I forgot to mention earlier. If you hurt Kelly, I’ll kill you. Slowly and painfully.”

  It was true that Kelly had told him she didn’t want to marry Tom, but for all Charles knew, that was simply a case of protesting too much. He himself flipped back and forth between wanting them to try to have a life together and wanting them to stay far away from each other.

  Tom had the good grace not to laugh in his face. “Mr. Ashton, I can assure you, it’s not my intention to—”

  “I don’t care about your intentions. I know you don’t intend to hurt her. I’m just telling you don’t.” Charles pushed the button and the window slid back up.

  For a minute, Charles thought the young man was going to knock on the window and demand to continue this conversation. But the train came into the station, and Tom dashed for the platform.

  Joe sat for a moment, watching him. “He’s a good man,” Joe said. “And he loves her. I’m certain of that. I don’t know what that was about tonight on the deck, but I’m pretty sure she loves him, too—although I don’t think we could get either of ’em to admit it.”

  For Charles, that wasn’t good news. For Charles, love was no kind of answer.

  “Great,” he grumbled. “That means Tom’s got the power to really hurt her.”

  Who were those stupid musicians who’d written that song a few years back? The song with the refrain that went “All you need is love”?

  Bah. What did they know about love, anyway? Love was certainly not all he’d needed, back when he’d finally found it. It was a curse, a cause of pain for everyone it touched.

  What he’d really needed was to avoid love, to put up that newspaper barrier between him and his little blue-eyed daughter, because opening his heart to her would have meant just that—opening his heart. And God knows what might have happened had everything he’d locked inside escaped.

  Maybe Kelly and Tom would be lucky, and they’d keep their relationship casual. Casual lovers having casual sex. No love.

  No complications.

  No heartache.

  No endless lifetime of what-ifs and might-have-beens.

  Mallory closed her eyes as David’s hands slid across her bare shoulders and down her back.

  He was silent. The room was silent. She could hear the sound of his quiet breathing in the stillness as he put more oil on his hands and gently, almost reverently applied it to her lower back.

  And then he was done. He stepped back, away from her.

  Damn.

  “Thanks,” she said, turning to take the bottle from him.

  For a half second, the look in his eyes was pure male. It gave his face an edge that was both frightening and exciting. David wasn’t just skinny, goofy David. David was a man.

  But then he looked embarrassed and apologetic, as if he was afraid tha
t what she’d seen in his eyes might have offended her. And she wasn’t at all afraid anymore. Because this man was David. Kind, sweet, wonderful David.

  The phone rang. He crossed the room, grabbing a paper towel to wipe his hands before he picked it up. “Hello?” It came out raspy, and he cleared his throat. “Yeah, where are you?”

  It had to be Brandon.

  David glanced at her. “But Mal’s already transformed into Nightshade and—”

  As she watched, he laughed. It was not a gee-that’s-a-funny-joke laugh. It was a boy-you’re-an-asshole laugh. “Yeah, great. You get what you pay for. I know. Look, Bran, next time you cancel, don’t do it thirty-five minutes after you were supposed to be here. When it’s just you and me, I don’t mind. But Mallory’s here. If you’d let me know earlier, I could have called her and rescheduled. Instead she came all the way over and—”

  He met her gaze, shaking his head slightly, an apology in his eyes. Bran wasn’t coming.

  David hung up the phone. “God damn it, I really wanted to get these photos taken.” He ran his hands through his hair. “Shit. Shit. Mallory, I’m really sorry. I’m—”

  “It’s no big deal,” she reassured him. “I would have come over anyway to see the pictures and to, you know, hang out. I mean, if you didn’t mind.”

  He laughed as he turned away, as if he didn’t want to look directly at her. “Mind. Yeah, right. Look, why don’t you take a quick shower and we can go get something to eat. I’m really sorry we didn’t wait until we heard from Bran before you got oiled up.”

  “You know what I think?” Mallory asked. God, she’d just had a flash of brilliance. David was so painfully polite, if she waited for him, they were both going to be a hundred years old before he even held her hand. What better way to do this? She took a deep breath. “I think you should use a remote and stand in for Brandon.”

  David laughed again. “Oh, I’m real photogenic.”

  “But you are.”