They were dismissed from the hotel suite and sent on their way, just as they had been the last time. Roland was still playing dictator.
Brennan waited until they were well clear of Roland’s hotel and in his car, on their way back to his hotel before he asked, “What are you up to?”
“I already told you. Getting my sister back.”
Janie wasn’t as tough as she was, Tiana told herself. But she could survive this ordeal, not let it define her—or at least she fervently hoped that was the case. But she also knew that it was just a matter of time before her sister broke down. She had to get her out before then. At the very least, she had to let her sister know she was working on her rescue.
“You know what I’m talking about,” Brennan told her. “What was with that ‘oops, I’m falling’ act back in the suite?”
She turned toward him, the face of innocence. “What, don’t people trip in your world? Or are they all surefooted goats?”
“You didn’t look like you tripped,” he told her. “You looked like you pitched forward.”
“The difference being?” she asked innocently, leaving the end of her sentence up in the air.
“The difference being that one happens naturally and the other is staged.”
She laughed at his assessment. He’d caught on, but then, the man had struck her as being brighter than the average person right from the beginning. “Well, hopefully, Roland isn’t as astute as you are.”
Brennan laughed shortly, dismissing the compliment. After getting to know him a little, he thought of Roland as being only slightly smarter than a single-cell amoeba. “From where I was standing, Roland looked happy just to have an excuse to grab you. Frankly, he seemed to be hoping your clothes were going to fall off next.”
“Yeah, well, he can hope all he wants to. It’s not going to happen,” Tiana said firmly, adding, “Not for any reason.”
They’d arrived at the hotel and he got out, allowing the valet to take his car and park it for him. “Tripping is a diversion,” he said, looking at her and waiting for an explanation.
“It can be,” she agreed, walking ahead of him into the hotel.
Once inside, she kept walking. He had to speed up his pace in order to catch up.
Since she wasn’t elaborating any further on her own, he asked, “Exactly what were you diverting his attention from?”
“You skip the class on English grammar?” she asked, amused. “That is one awful sentence.”
He enjoyed wordplay as much as the next person, but he’d been patient long enough. “Stop stalling and answer the question.”
She inclined her head, lowering her voice at the same time so that only he could hear what she was saying. “You said yourself that we can’t move in until we know who’s calling the shots, right?”
His eyes never left her face. “Right.”
“Well, since we made our selections, and Roland apparently doesn’t do anything more independent than get dressed by himself, he’s going to have to call whoever is heading this operation to ask for the go-ahead to bring us to where the girls are being kept.”
“With you so far,” Brennan said, doing his best to remain patient. He could see that she was enjoying herself, drawing this out. Considering what she’d been through already, he let her have her moment—but he was determined that it would only be the one.
“If we record Roland’s conversation when he calls his boss, didn’t you mention that there was an IT wizard back at your CSI lab who could track down the IP connection and get a name?”
“Yes.” Brennan drew out the single word, still waiting.
“What would you say if I told you that I planted a minitransmitter on Roland’s person that can pick up every conversation he has, whether in person or over the phone?”
He stared at her. “I’d say how the hell did you manage to do that?”
“I slipped it under his collar when I made a grab for him to supposedly keep from doing a face-plant on the floor in his hotel suite. As far as he was concerned, he was getting his jollies holding me against him. He had no idea what I was doing.”
To say he was surprised would have been understating the matter. “But I saw you. You hardly touched him.”
She merely grinned with satisfaction. “Doesn’t take long if you know what you’re doing and how to do it.”
“And you know how to do it.” It wasn’t a question so much as it was a statement underscored with admiration.
Again she inclined her head, this time as if she was humbly taking a bow. “I do.”
He was impressed. “Where did you pick up that little trick?”
“That’s exactly what it is, a trick. A magic trick,” she specified. “When I was growing up, my dad had a friend on the force, Ray Holland. Ray’s hobby was doing magic tricks. Janie and I were his very attentive audience. He was kind of a lonely man, didn’t have much luck with women,” she recalled. “We were always happy to see him when he came by to dinner and he showed his gratitude by teaching us a few basic tricks,” she told him. “Janie and I practiced on each other,” she recalled with a fond smile.
Brennan could only laugh as he shook his head. “You know, the longer I know you, the more interesting you become.”
Having ridden up an empty elevator, they got off on their floor. “Is that a compliment?” she asked him.
“That is an observation,” he replied honestly. “But you can take it as a compliment if you want. Just where did you get this microdigital camera?”
“I like keeping up on technology in my line of work,” she told him casually.
Sliding his card through the door slot, he unlocked the hotel room, then let her walk in first.
At first glance, everything appeared just as they had left it. “Okay, so he had this transmitter attached to his person. What’s next?”
“We take my monitoring equipment, go back to the vicinity of his hotel and park somewhere across the street—and hope we pick up some kind of pertinent information from him soon.”
Taking her suitcase from under the bed where she had slid it earlier, she placed it on top and flipped open the locks. The monitor she was referring to was barely the size of a cell phone and looked very much like one, as well. After slipping it into her pocket, she dropped the glib act and looked at him, the smile gone from her eyes, replaced by concern and a sense of urgency.
“That monster’s got Janie. I’ve got to get her out of there. I have this really bad feeling that if we don’t—” She couldn’t get herself to say it, to give voice to the dark thoughts that were ricocheting through her brain, all centering on the possibility that something awful was about to happen.
Tears shimmered in her eyes, tears that instantly hit him where he lived. Tears that made him want to do anything to wipe away their existence.
“But we will,” he assured her. “We’ll get to your sister and all the other girls in time. I promise.”
As much as she wanted to believe him, she shook her head. “It’s not in your power to promise something like that.”
Placing his hand beneath her chin, he raised her head so that her eyes met his. With the edge of his thumb, he wiped away some of her tears. At the same time, he looked into her eyes and repeated, “I promise,” with quiet feeling and conviction.
And just like that, she found herself loving Brennan for that. For lying to her because she needed so badly to believe that everything was going to work out.
Chapter 13
Loving Brennan.
The thought, the singular word, telegraphing itself through her head out of the blue like that, rendered her utterly speechless for a moment.
Loving?
Really? What was going on with her?
She and the word love weren’t even on a fleeting, nodding ac
quaintance level. Aside from Janie, she had never said or even felt that she loved anyone. Oh, she’d felt a filial type loyalty to her parents, even after they continued to disappoint her time and again. But whenever she looked back on her life with any measure of honesty, Tiana couldn’t really say that she recalled loving either her mother or her father. They were family and she would have done things for them if the occasion or the necessity arouse, but that was out of a sense of obligation and duty, not because she loved either one of them. They weren’t lovable.
They had, each in their own way, conducted a scorched-earth policy on her ability to love them—or, eventually, to be able to love anyone but Janie.
And yet there was definitely an effusion of emotion racing through her, overwhelming her right now. A lovely nervousness, for lack of a better word, that had seized her. Filling her with vague, delicious anticipation that remained formless, but there nonetheless.
Maybe it was just gratitude taken to the nth degree, Tiana thought. She really couldn’t say for sure. All she knew was that she hadn’t really felt whatever she was feeling at the moment ever before.
Because it made her nervous, Tiana tried to reason herself out of what she was thinking and feeling. Maybe she was just overwrought and emotionally exhausted. This certainly wasn’t a state she was accustomed to or even vaguely familiar with.
Neither was this desire to be held, to be comforted, to gain some sort of emotional support. But there was no denying that she was very, very weary of constantly being strong, of only having herself to lean on, which was, at times, pretty much an emotionally exhausting endeavor.
She slanted a glance toward Brennan.
The way he was looking at her made her feel that he knew what she was thinking, what she was feeling and the remote possibility that he actually might know embarrassed her almost to pieces.
This flustered, fluttery person wasn’t who she felt she was, or at least, it wasn’t the face she wanted to present to the world. Weak people were looked down on, trampled on without so much as a backward glance or an afterthought. She couldn’t allow herself to be that person no matter how weary she felt at times. If anything, she’d wind up hating herself, hating her spineless behavior.
“You know,” Brennan was saying in the same quiet, understanding voice, “you don’t have to shoulder all this all alone.”
He had guessed what she was thinking, she thought, surprised. Not only that, but for a second she was so tempted to take him up on what he was hinting at—to share some of her burden with him.
Tiana did her best to shake off her desire to let him help. If nothing else, it just wasn’t right to have him shoulder this with her. She hardly knew him.
And when this was over, he’d disappear out of her life—which would make everything that much worse. She couldn’t let herself rely on him, or need him in any fashion. That was not something she could allow herself to get used to.
“Why, are you offering to adopt me?” Tiana quipped.
“And you don’t have to joke in order to keep me at arm’s length,” he told her. “There’s no shame in letting your guard down once in a while, no shame in needing help.”
She squared her shoulders, refusing to give in, to admit he’d seen her for what she really was. “I don’t need—”
She didn’t get a chance to finish. Because he was attempting to get through to her via another route, to make her see that there was nothing wrong with being a little vulnerable and admitting it, because it made her human—and approachable.
“That’s what teamwork is all about. Having each other’s backs. Helping each other,” Brennan deliberately emphasized.
She looked at him for a long moment. “You want to help me?” she finally asked.
There was no fanfare, no bravado in his answer. “Yes.”
She pressed her lips together, then finally said, “Then stop being so nice to me.”
Brennan laughed softly at her earnestly worded request, shaking his head. “You’re complicated, I’ll give you that.”
She released the breath she was holding and crossed over to the hotel door ahead of Brennan. “Now that that’s settled, let’s go. We’ve got a lowlife to trap,” she said gamely.
* * *
Twenty-four hours later, they were no further along than they had been when they set out. They had been in Brennan’s car, parked a block away from the hotel’s entrance, watching and listening to what amounted to utter nonsense, occasional strings of foul, bordering-on-obscene language and long stretches of silence intermittently sprinkled with sights and sounds of absolutely no consequence or interest.
It was like being tuned in to the world’s most boring reality program, Tiana thought. She’d been so very on edge, waiting for something to break, that she was bordering on utter exhaustion.
What was glaringly missing was mention of anything even remotely related to the girls who were being held captive.
Roland, who slept late, drank and ate to excess, seemed content to just wait things out. His demeanor was such that she was fairly convinced he was into some sort of drug abuse off camera.
Either that or he was waiting them out.
“Think he’s onto us?” she asked Brennan out of the blue.
She didn’t know if she could take another five minutes of watching the monitor mounted inside Brennan’s car. The one she’d handily hooked up in his vehicle once she’d planted it. And she needed to get out quick.
“No, despite what he might think of himself, he definitely isn’t clever enough to plan something so subtle,” he told her, looking away from the monitor that, because of where she had planted one of the transmitters, allowed for two alternating views of the main room. “I think he’s just waiting it out because that was what he was told to do.”
She found herself agreeing with Brennan’s assessment. “Okay, then I have another question for you.”
He glanced in her direction again—she was a lot easier on the eyes than the man on the screen they were supposed to be watching. “Go ahead.”
“How do you keep parts of your body from going numb?” When Brennan gave her a grin that went a long way in making her stomach do some very strange things, Tiana immediately became more specific. “I mean like your legs and your butt.”
“Oh, those parts.” The wattage from his grin decreased a little. “Mind over matter,” he told her. “Also getting out of the car and stretching a bit helps. You can take the next food run,” he told her. “That coffee shop on the next corner,” he pointed out, “also has a bathroom in the back should you find yourself needing one. And before you say you don’t,” he warned, way ahead of her, “even camels go once in a while.”
She shrugged, dismissing his suggestion as unnecessary. “Not if they don’t drink anything.”
“That creates a whole host of other problems.” He looked at her for a long moment, as if weighing the pros and cons of the situation. “I think we should take a break for a while.”
She glared at him, appalled at the idea. What was he suggesting? This wasn’t some game they could pause and return to later. “We can’t pack it in now. We walk away, that’ll be just when he places his call.”
“I didn’t say anything about packing it in,” Brennan pointed out.
Her brow furrowed as she looked at him. Okay, he hadn’t used those exact words, but that was the intent—wasn’t it? “But you just said—”
There was no point in her finishing her sentence. “We’re going to be spelled for a while,” he said, cutting in.
As far as she knew, they were the only two working the case on this end. And she was here because she’d horned her way in. So what was he talking about? “Spelled by whom?”
The words were no sooner out of her mouth than Brennan nodded toward someone standing on her side of the vehicle. “By him,” he
prompted, indicating the person directly behind her.
The next moment, as she turned to look, the person Brennan was referring to crouched down to her level and look into the car. She quickly rolled down her window.
“My brother’s not much on introductions,” the casually dressed man with the infectious grin told her. “Hi, I’m Duncan and I’m here so that the two of you can get some shut-eye.”
She glanced back at Brennan. “You called your brother?” she questioned.
“I called one of them,” Brennan corrected. “Duncan was free and as it so happens, he owes me a favor.” He offered her a bit more information. “Duncan’s just transferred to the APD, same as me. And in case you’re wondering, this has all been sanctioned by the chief of Ds,” he assured her.
“When?” Tiana asked. Not that she didn’t believe him, but as far as she knew, he hadn’t had time to make any calls. They’d been together for the whole time. “We’ve been out on stakeout since yesterday.”
“The chief knows how to read texts—and how to send them, as well,” he told her. “Don’t worry, nobody wants to do anything to jeopardize this assignment.”
“Look, why don’t you go?” she suggested to Brennan. He obviously wanted to get some sleep, and she didn’t blame him in the slightest. But for him, this was just a case he was assigned to—for her, it was extremely personal. She needed to stay. “I’m fine.”
“Is that so?” he asked skeptically. “Is that why you fell asleep twice in the last hour right in the middle of talking?”
“I did not,” she cried indignantly. Then, because she wasn’t nearly as sure as she was trying to pretend, she looked at him and asked, “Did I?”
“I wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true,” he pointed out simply. “Where’s your car, Duncan?” he asked, looking over Tiana’s shoulder at his brother.
“Parked half a block behind you. Oh, and Valri’s coming, too.” he said as an afterthought.
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