by Alice Sharpe
“Not lusting,” Chopra said, close enough now to come to a stop. “Just taking care of business.”
Simon lowered his head and charged Chopra. He hit him in the chest and almost bounced off. The sun glinted off the kukri’s blade as Chopra shifted it into his right hand. Simon stumbled backward, tripping over a boulder, sprawling on the riverbank, faceup. Chopra was there in a flash. The curved blade of the knife started a downward plunge.
Simon took an instinctive breath to prepare himself for the worst. Instead, the knife fell from Chopra’s grip as his hand flew backward. Jack had hit the guy’s palm. Chopra advanced, another shot and his leg crumbled. He stumbled, giving Simon the opportunity to hit him hard and heavy. Wounded, the big man fell to the rocks. Simon scampered to his feet, heart pounding.
Jack showed up. Chopra lay writhing on the ground.
Without waiting to thank Jack, Simon took off toward the waterfall.
CARL WAS AT LEAST twenty-five years younger than her dad and uninjured. It wouldn’t be long before he caught up with him. Ella doubled her efforts, practically flying between leaps. Looking ahead, she saw her father had almost gained the last negotiable rock. She made the first of her last two jumps and looked up in time to see Carl grab her father’s coat by the back of the collar. The waterfall was so close the noise was deafening and river water washed over the rocks, making them slippery. She fell to her knees as she landed.
Carl shouted something, but there was no way to hear what he said. He pointed the gun at Ella, his meaning clear. All they’d accomplished was moving the hostage situation out onto the river.
She turned in time to see Simon upriver, jumping between rocks, and despite the knowledge his appearance out here was likely to get them all killed, felt a surge of love for him. He was such a controlled guy, such a cop, and look at him, behaving like a man willing to die for a woman.
It took her a second to realize there was another man behind him.
She looked back at her father, who had inched closer to the edge of the rock, and she knew, she knew, he was about to make a sacrifice to protect her. If he was gone, she would be safe; only it wouldn’t work that way.
Meanwhile, Carl looked as though he was trying to decide who to shoot first. His arrogance changed her blood into lava. It pulsed through her veins, surged through her heart, burned in her throat. With a guttural scream, she rushed him, shoving him with her shoulder, emulating a linebacker.
Carl’s eyes registered stunned surprise at her audacity. He stumbled backward, seemed to catch himself, then slipped again as his feet came down on a patch of moss. A triumphant smile disappeared as he lost his balance. As he went over the edge into the water, his flailing hand caught hold of her father’s jacket. The older man went down on his belly and slid to the brim. Carl released the gun and grabbed the rock.
Ella immediately clutched her father’s arm. She pounded on Carl’s fingers with her fists. He lost his grip on the rock, but the death grip on the jacket remained.
Her father’s lips moved as he stared into her eyes. She couldn’t hear over the blood rushing in her head and the river and falls—it looked as though he said pocket. She stuck her hand in her pocket and felt the rounded dome of the snow globe. For a second, the river became the ocean; she was dizzy and disorientated.
Her father shook his head furiously. She took a deep breath as his lips moved once again and she finally understood he meant his own pocket. Of course. His jacket had deep pouches on the sides with fold-over flaps. She’d seen him stuff a half-dozen things in those pockets over the course of the past twenty hours. Reaching in, she gouged herself on a fishhook before claiming the prize: his pocketknife.
She flipped the blade from the cover and began sawing on the cloth. Carl had managed to swing his other arm into position and now gripped the coat with both hands. Raging water pummeled his face, blurred his features. He sputtered and gasped. She tried not to look at him.
The cloth was too strong, and wet, maybe even stronger. She made holes and slashes, but it wouldn’t tear. Her father slipped farther forward and she held on to him with one arm.
Then it occurred to her to use the knife to stab Carl’s hands. She raised it and steeled herself, but before she could plunge the knife into his flesh, the material finally started to give way. Her dad managed to twist his body and she saw that he’d somehow undone the buttons while she hacked at the cloth. The jacket slipped off his arms and immediately disappeared into the river. Carl was visible for just a second before the raging water sucked his body under and he was gone.
She and her father got to their feet. He was pale, wet; his arm hung uselessly at his side. His chest heaved with the effort of the past few moments.
She reached for him, half expecting him to dissolve into mist.
He clutched her extended hand.
AFTER WITNESSING THE DRAMA unfold as he jumped between the rocks, Simon landed on the rock a second later. Ella turned to face him, the smile on her face illuminating the air around her. She threw herself into his arms and he caught her. It was over, she was safe. He kissed her face a hundred times. It was a miracle.
He’d cupped her cheeks and was staring into her eyes when something caught her attention. Her eyes grew wide. He glanced over his shoulder and found Jack had arrived and was standing behind him.
Ella’s hands flew to her face; tears sprang to her eyes. She moved away from Simon and toward Jack like a sleepwalker. Simon had witnessed the expression she wore—the unabashed love, the depth of joy in her eyes. It had been directed at him a time or two—
He turned away from their embrace. Taking Starling’s good arm, he helped the older man back across the rocks, vaguely aware that Jack and Ella followed close behind.
By unspoken and mutual consent, they kept going, past Chopra, whom Simon saw had been deftly wrapped in his own duct tape, past the overturned hulk of the bus, all the way to the helicopter and the pilot, whom Simon and Jack laid aside. Simon did everything mechanically. If he’d wondered before about the depth of his love for Ella, he needn’t wonder again.
He loved her. Prickly, sweet, secretive, open, happy, sad…it didn’t matter, he just plain loved her from the tips of her whacked-out brown hair to the depths of her guarded heart. He’d never stopped loving her and damn it, he had a horrible, horrible feeling he never would.
And that was a burden he was going to have to find a way to live with because Jack’s identity was suddenly crystal clear. He had to be Ella’s lover, the real reason she’d been distant before their breakup. Since finding out what had happened the night she was taken from her house, Simon had attributed her behavior to the mess with her ex-husband and her father; he’d not seriously considered the possibility of a wild-card lover.
Until now.
“Can you fly us out of here with a busted arm?” Simon asked Starling. All he wanted to do was get the hell off this riverbank. If Starling couldn’t fly the chopper, then Simon intended on walking back the way they’d come. In fact, now that he thought about it, that was a better plan. He looked around for the backpack.
The old man shook his head. “’Fraid not. But my son can, can’t you, Jack?”
Jack, his arm around Ella’s shoulders, grinned.
“Your son?” Simon said.
“My brother,” Ella added.
Simon looked from one of them to the next as it finally dawned on him she hadn’t reacted to the news Jack was her supposedly dead brother, which meant she’d recognized him out on the rock. “You remember your family?” he said. Happiness for her and the fact that Jack wasn’t her lover left him a little stunned. He abruptly sat down on a rock. “Your memory came back when you saw Jack.”
She shook her head as she dug in her pocket and withdrew the snow globe.
“It started when I saw you racing out to save me—again—and then it just kept building until the moment I thought Carl was going to pull my father into the water. I touched the snow globe in my pocket and the day we bought it—you reme
mber, it was raining that day and cold—came flooding back. Everything else followed. You, me, Jack, my father—everything.”
“And your baby?”
“Our baby,” she said with a dazzling smile.
He ran a hand over his face. “Thank heavens.”
She caught his hand. “Of course it’s your baby. Who else but you?”
“What’s this about a baby?” Jack said.
Ella laughed. “Later, big brother.”
Simon needed to get everything out in the open. He tugged on her hand, ran his fingers across hers, afraid to let go of her. “Can you forgive me?” he asked. Her features blurred and he blinked his eyes.
“Oh, Simon. Forgive you?”
“I’ve misled—”
“Shh,” she said, leaning down to kiss him. “I’ve been running scared and hurt and angry for most of my life, my darling Simon.”
“And that’s my fault,” Tyler Starling said. “I made a deal with a bunch of thieves mostly just to escape a bad marriage. I thought everything would be okay once I was gone. I thought Ella’s mother would take the money I offered her and start over, but she got worse. And I couldn’t come back, I couldn’t help.”
“And I was not only eight years older, I was already in the military,” Jack added. “I was no help.”
Ella shook her head. “It’s too late now to change any of that.” She turned back to Simon, meeting his gaze, lowering her voice. “You’re the one good thing that’s happened to me and I almost destroyed it. What do you want forgiveness for? For reading the clues at my house right? For coming after me even though we’d broken up and I’d been acting like an idiot? For risking your life, for saving mine, for giving up your career—what exactly do you want to be forgiven for? For loving me?”
He pulled her into his lap and buried his face against her sweet neck. He held her so tight she probably couldn’t breathe, but he didn’t care. She was his.
It didn’t even matter that Jack and Starling were standing there, watching. Nothing mattered but Ella.
And the baby that bound them.
Epilogue
Seven months later
Ella’s last memory of a holiday meal consisted of her mother passing out before the turkey was cooked. When she’d woken up and found it burned to a crisp, she’d slapped Ella so hard her cheek stung for hours.
But that memory was fifteen years old and it no longer held the power to hurt. There were two reasons for that, and both of them were within eyesight right that moment.
First and foremost, there was Simon, currently decanting a bottle of wine, tall and strong and so handsome in his red sweater it took her breath away. He was a detective on the police force now; being involved in helping solve multiple murders had actually brought him to the attention of his superiors and he’d been promoted.
Did she wish he wasn’t a cop? Sometimes, but that was the weak her talking and Ella had learned not to kowtow to that weak self, to let her have her moment of gut-wrenching fear and then push on.
The second and no less dear reason lay asleep in her arms. Emily Rose, named after Simon’s mother and grandmother, five weeks and one day old. Simon called her his miracle baby and who could argue that? Emily Rose had lived through more adventures while in utero than most people did in a lifetime.
Oh, there were other reasons, too. Jack alive—talk about a miracle. They’d invited him to join them for the holiday, and he’d said he would but expect a surprise. As everything about her brother was a surprise, she’d just smiled.
As for her father? Well, he sent cryptic postcards on occasion and was trying to convince her and Simon to bring Emily Rose to some undisclosed location to meet him. Maybe. She’d have to think about it.
They hadn’t told anyone the truth about her father. They’d created an alternate story to explain Chopra and Carl. Considering Simon’s bent toward the straight-arrow approach, she thought he’d been extremely generous to agree to let her father continue on his trek. There was no one to return the money to, no one left to prosecute. The only survivor from the old days who knew the truth about what had really happened all those years ago in Chicago was Cal Potter’s widow, and she had no desire to see her husband’s memory besmirched.
In the end, none of the men who murdered Sanjay Chopra’s father and brother got away with it. The big man, along with Carl Baxter’s help, had exacted retribution on every single one of them.
For now, the smell of roasting turkey filled the house, and Simon approached with a glass of wine. Later that night, they planned to put Emily Rose to bed and then retire to the big whirlpool bathtub he’d installed for her birthday, telling her it was only fitting a mermaid have a sanctuary.
They had a private holiday celebration to conduct.
“Trade?” he said.
She lifted the drowsy just-fed baby from her breast, kissed her downy forehead and handed her to her father. Simon passed her the wine goblet as he accepted the baby, and their fingers brushed. The brief contact set her hormones mad, screaming like crazy.
“The baby is sleepy and it’s still a while before my brother and your family are due,” she said softly, loving the way his eyes flooded with desire at the sound of her voice.
“You’re on,” he whispered, and cradling the baby with one arm, reached down to pull her to her feet.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-4843-8
A BABY BETWEEN THEM
Copyright © 2010 by Alice Sharpe
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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