by Joanne Rock
“One of many joys of a private plane.” He flipped his phone around to let her greet the family runt. Okay, the beast who was bigger than all of them except for Axel.
“Hi, Danny’s brother,” she greeted him, waving at the device. “Nice to meet you.”
Danny gave his brother a second to say hello, then turned the screen around to continue the call.
Kyle pantomimed a silent “wow,” no doubt recognizing Stephanie as the woman Danny had nearly lost his mind over five years ago. At least the rest of the family should have been warned since Danny had given his mother the green light to tell people that he’d be coming home with Stephanie.
“So what’s up? Still practicing this late in the day?” He knew the Phantoms usually did their team skate in the mornings during the preseason, but the guys he glimpsed around Kyle appeared to be in practice uniforms.
“Double practice today since coach says we got all soft over the summer.” Kyle shoved another player who was joking around, pretending to take his phone away. “Ax and I just finished up.”
“Hey, Danny.” Axel Rankin, their Finnish foster brother, stuck his head in front of the camera for a second. Big and dark-haired, he blended right in with the rest of the brothers except for the Nordic blue eyes. “Welcome home, dude.”
“Thanks, man. Good to be here.” In fact, he was looking forward to returning to the family’s home in Chatham, Massachusetts, more than he had in a long time, no doubt because he had Stephanie by his side this time. “Are you guys going to make it home for the party?”
Kyle’s face returned to the screen, his helmet off and his hair sweaty. “Assuming you send the jet to Philadelphia next, definitely. You’re not the only one with a hot chick to introduce to the clan.”
“So I hear. I’m looking forward to meeting Marissa and Jennifer.” Kyle’s live-in girlfriend, Marissa, was a matchmaker and the daughter of former pop diva Brandy Collins. Selfishly, he was hoping to meet the singer sometime, since her music was the real deal—gutsy and personal.
Axel, in the meantime, had started seeing a filmmaker from New York who’d relocated to Philly over the summer to be with him. Jennifer Hunter had made a lot of indie films, but she’d met his brother when she filmed a documentary series on the Phantoms that was a lock for a few awards. Danny had seen the series on TV while he was deployed and had been impressed. Plus, it’d been like hanging out with the hockey team for those few months while they made their run for the Stanley Cup.
“And we can’t wait to meet Stephanie,” Axel said from behind Kyle, giving Danny the thumbs-up sign. “You’ll be happy to know the nose job you gave Kyle five years ago has been redone.” He pointed to Kyle’s schnoz. “That fight he got in on the ice last spring straightened it right out.”
“Uh, yeah.” Danny had no desire to discuss the nose incident in front of Stephanie. Why the hell had they brought that up when she was around? “Looks good.”
Kyle must have felt the same way because he elbowed Axel in the gut hard enough to make the Finn back up a step.
“Not a big deal, either way,” Kyle assured him. “We just wanted to let you know we’ll be there tomorrow, but we might be a little late, okay? Welcome home, my brother.”
The simple words damn near choked him up. Kyle had never said much about the time Danny broke his nose after a fairly innocuous comment about Stephanie, but the fact that he’d left his nose cockeyed for years afterward had made Danny feel like crap. The guy had played professional hockey for years without half the damage his own brother had inflicted. And wasn’t that a testament to how whacked out he’d been after Stephanie was taken?
“Thanks. We’ll be looking for you tomorrow, and make sure Axel knows I’m going to be thinking up embarrassing stories about him to let slip in front of his new woman, okay?”
Kyle grinned and said, “You owe him” at the same time Axel shouted from somewhere behind him, “Hey! What did I do?”
But Kyle disconnected, leaving Danny with a darkened screen and the certainty that Stephanie’s gaze lingered on him.
She cleared her throat while he was thinking about what to say.
“I could pretend I didn’t overhear a thing,” she said finally. “If that makes it easier for you. I don’t have any siblings to tell embarrassing stories about me, so I have kind of an unfair advantage.”
“No kidding,” he shot back drily. “I wish I could say that Axel was the only one of us who is ridiculously blunt and lacking subtlety, but it runs in the family.”
“They seemed glad to have you home.” Her voice took on a wistful note, and he remembered that no matter how many times his brothers threw him under the bus for dumb stuff about his past, he wouldn’t trade them for anything.
“I miss hanging out with them. An-n-n-nd, just to get it out of the way, I broke Kyle’s nose when I threw a punch at him.” He’d regretted it almost instantly, and the remorse had stretched out over the years. “It wasn’t that long after you were released. I came home between training stints, and he helped me pack up my stuff. I was still mad at the world for what happened to you—the news reports were vague and I couldn’t figure out what anyone was doing to go after the people who took you.”
He’d been climbing the walls and being at home didn’t help. At least on duty, he was busy every second of the day.
“The State Department asked me not to give interviews at first. They really wanted to control the flow of information until they investigated some leads.” Taking her seat beside him again, she reached for the bottled water kept in a minirefrigerator beneath the coffee table. “Would you like one?”
Nodding, he accepted a drink now that the turbulence seemed to have passed. They would be starting their descent into a private airfield outside Chatham soon.
“It makes sense, but at the time...” He shook his head. “I was edgy. Tense. Pissed off in general. Anyway, Kyle was on a mission to make me look on the bright side, which was a truly bad plan. At one point when I snapped at him, he said something about me wearing my heart on my sleeve—”
The precise words escaped him now. Basically, he was mad at himself and he took it out on Kyle for pointing out the obvious.
“It sounded to me like he forgave you a long time ago,” Stephanie said between sips. “I mean, the way he talked about it on the phone made it sound like the broken nose was a nonissue for him.”
Danny shrugged. “Maybe. God knows, hockey players break their beaks all the time. But it’s one thing to get blindsided by a puck. Another to field a blow from your own blood.”
If it unsettled her to learn that he’d been a walking time bomb when she’d been abducted, she didn’t show it. Instead, she narrowed her gaze, a wicked gleam in her eyes.
“So what kind of dirt do you have on Axel in exchange?” She smiled and he hoped maybe he was in the clear.
He planned to focus on helping put her past behind her this week, not dredging up his.
“Are you kidding? The Finn is a gold mine for stories. When he was learning English, we taught him all the curse words first. Nearly got him kicked out of school.”
“Hmm. That story might make the rest of you look worse than him.”
“Hey, I wasn’t the one who told the math teacher that his trig lecture was the biggest bullshit ever.” He flipped on one of the TV screens broadcasting the plane’s progress with an updated arrival time and saw they’d be landing in fifteen minutes.
He wasn’t sure if he would be grateful to touch down for the sake of ending an awkward conversation, or very worried that returning home would only initiate a whole bunch of other ones. No doubt his family would all want to know what was up with his renewed relationship with Stephanie.
“Sounds like you’ll have plenty to talk about.” She recapped her water bottle and set it on the table as the plane continued its descent. She hesitated for a moment, then blurted, “And for what it’s worth, I’m sorry that I didn’t make an effort to get in touch with you after I came home. I really regret mi
ssing out on your calls.”
“It’s not like we made plans to see each other again,” he said. He’d been a dumb ass. Why the hell hadn’t he locked down some kind of commitment from her before she left? “I’m sure you were overwhelmed. There were probably a lot of other people who wanted to hear from you besides me.”
She shook her head. “Not really. My mother was so ill, I spent all my time at the hospital.”
That’s right. She’d been with the compulsive mom who’d gotten so involved with the drama of the kidnapping, she’d made herself sick.
“I hate it that you escaped one nightmare and came home to another.” Danny knew he shouldn’t pass judgment on that whole debacle, but damn. Someone should have been comforting Stephanie instead of the other way around.
“Yeah.” Slowly, she nodded. Something about her expression struck him as more serious than he’d ever seen her. “Me, too. But you know what?” She slid her feet back into a pair of blue flip-flops with big yellow plastic flowers on the strap. “I feel better knowing you were mad on my behalf.”
He raised an eyebrow, unsure where she was going with that.
“I mean,” she added quickly, “don’t get me wrong, I’m sorry for your brother that he got hurt. But I had to keep the story quiet for so long that I missed seeing anyone be outraged about what happened to me. My father was scared for my mom. Mom was ill. And when my book came out to finally share what happened, the media focused on such a small facet of the experience that the rest of the ordeal got lost. So, to hear you say that you were upset about what happened to me... In a weird way it makes me feel like I wasn’t alone back then.”
She spoke quickly, as if she was used to not dwelling on that time in her life. Yet maybe shoving the past behind her so fast hadn’t been such a good idea after all. He hadn’t planned to let her see how much her captivity had made him crazy, hoping they’d be able to move forward. But what if her mother’s ordeal when Stephanie came home had robbed her of the chance to come to terms with what had happened to her? Maybe she deserved to know how freaked out he’d been.
Danny took her hand, shifting his focus for these next few weeks together. He was no shrink, but he knew enough about human nature to know that bottling up the dark stuff inside probably wasn’t helpful. Perhaps he wasn’t doing her any favors by trying to move past the event that redirected both their lives so dramatically.
“Outrage only scratches the surface of what I felt.” For the first time he didn’t try to hide the fury that ruled his life that whole year of her abduction. “When I heard you were taken, I was ready to swim the Atlantic with a knife between my teeth to get you back myself. I didn’t sleep for weeks.”
She looked ready to interrupt, to thank him for his concern and be done with it, but he didn’t think about that time too often himself, and this wasn’t a topic he was willing to revisit.
Now or never.
“I was a walking powder keg when I didn’t know what was happening to you,” he continued, remembering vague arguments he got into with everyone around him. “My father and brothers traveled a lot, meeting with powerful people we knew in the Middle East through the resort business to see if a ransom would help you and Christina.”
“She was family,” Stephanie said haltingly. “That only makes sense.”
“For me, it was about you.” Sure, he loved Christina like a sister, but he’d been focused on Stephanie, knowing Christina had the whole rest of his family looking out for her. He’d only suffered through the “diplomatic channels” crap because he thought it might help them. “I was less than diplomatic in those meetings—” Calling a sheikh a lying bastard hadn’t been his wisest move. “I just really needed to find out if you were okay.”
Looking back, he was lucky it hadn’t caused an international incident. The Murphys were damn fortunate to get that meeting in the first place. It had been their last hope for trying to arrange a private negotiation with the insurgents who held Christina and Stephanie.
Now, Stephanie studied Danny as if she’d never seen him before, as if trying to make this glimpse of his dark side fit with her understanding of him.
“My brothers had to take over the negotiations.” Actually, both Ryan and Jack had wrestled him out of there, and even then, they nearly hadn’t been able to hold him back. The fact that Danny hadn’t slept and had hardly eaten for three weeks had ultimately made him easier to subdue despite his fury. He’d been completely depleted and living on adrenaline by then. “At the end of the day, I decided negotiation was a lost cause and that I’d rather fight for you.”
He’d still wanted to put his knife between his teeth and sneak into Baghdad himself. But his brothers had convinced him he might be in the way of well-trained specialists who actually knew what they were doing.
So he’d done the next best thing.
“I flew home and signed a navy contract.” He figured he’d at least be able to support the war effort somewhere. His brother Jack was so concerned for his mental health that he’d joined the service, too.
“My God,” she said softly, breathing the words more than saying them out loud.
His laid-back image was shot. And he’d probably lost whatever chance he had with her now that she understood what a basket case he’d become back then. “Don’t ever think for a second that no one was outraged on your behalf. If I’d had my way, I would have scoured Baghdad until I found you or died trying.”
8
“IF YOU HAVE SECOND thoughts about being here, I understand.” Danny sat next to her in the luxurious BMW sedan that had been waiting for them, his voice sounding stilted. “You’ve been quiet since we landed.”
She hadn’t said much since he’d revealed his real reaction to her kidnapping. She was too busy trying to figure out what it meant that he’d cared about her a great deal more than she’d ever realized. Why hadn’t the PR agency she’d hired to handle her reader letters forwarded the note from Danny? It bothered her to think she’d missed something personal from him.
More than that, it unsettled her to realize how much her kidnapping had affected him. He’d tried to help her behind the scenes and she’d never known it, making her regret all the more that she hadn’t looked him up sooner. It also made the fling she wanted a heck of a lot more complicated since there were deeper feelings at stake.
“I’m right where I want to be.” She couldn’t walk away from Danny now, not when she was on the verge of healing a wound she’d had for years.
Danny’s grip on the steering wheel tightened as he took a hard turn to the right, bringing them closer to Nantucket Sound, according to the signs.
“But you...seem anxious. Worried.”
She peered over at him as he drove, his sculpted muscles a feast for the eyes, his green gaze fixed on the road.
He was so much more intense than she’d realized five years ago. So much...more. She’d been crazy about him back then, enjoying every second of their time together. But the wild, no-strings sex and doing things like licking raspberry dessert sauce off each other’s bodies had only been a playful prelude to the deeper connection brewing between them now.
“Not worried. Just thinking,” she said, trying to keep her voice light. “I realized that it’s sort of unrealistic of me to think we can re-create the kind of affair we had before.”
He was silent for a long minute. She cracked her window to breathe in the scent of the salty air as they neared the water.
“Stephanie, nothing you want is unrealistic.” He took his eyes off the road as they stopped at a street sign. Leveling a look at her across the console, he took her breath away with the heat in his gaze. “If you’re really ready for that kind of no-holds-barred, can’t-get-enough physical encounter, I will put the pedal to the floor right now and have us both naked in a matter of minutes.”
Her heart rate kicked into high gear even if the car didn’t. Heat rushed...everywhere.
“But what about seeing your family?” she finally managed to
ask, the words catching awkwardly in her dry throat.
“They will give us some privacy to get settled today if we don’t head to the main house. We’ll lock the door to the gatehouse and won’t leave until it’s time for the party tomorrow.”
He didn’t move the car, probably because there was no one behind them anyhow. They seemed to have reached a quiet access road with just a few houses up ahead.
And yes, she was probably stalling, taking a sudden interest in the view while the temperature ratcheted up in the vehicle.
“Oh. Really?” She forced herself to turn toward him again, to confront her feelings and figure out what she truly wanted.
Against all better judgment, her eyes zeroed in on his mouth and she thought about the many ways he’d pleasured her the last two days without ever finding completion himself. Maybe he needed this physical release as badly as she did. Why overthink the situation when they were both ready to come out of their skin?
“Really. But don’t think about that. Just tell me what you’d like. Leave. Stay. Lock yourself in a house with me for twenty-four hours. Anything you want—it’s yours.” He didn’t touch her, didn’t sway her with a brush of his fingertips or a graze of his knee.
He just waited. Watched.
If she sat here much longer the windows would start steaming from the heat rolling off her skin.
“I don’t think I need twenty-four whole hours,” she began, her words halting as she tried to force them out. “Maybe just a little time alone to—” she paused meaningfully, unable to put exactly what she wanted in words “—be together. For real. To see this connection through to its natural completion.”
The car was in motion before she finished speaking.
“Then I’m right there with you.” There was a new conviction in his voice, a certainty and a commitment to the plan. “We’ll take as much time as you want. But I’ve got to warn you, I’m wired tight. I don’t know how long I can make this last the first time.”
His frank admission—while they were still in a moving vehicle and hadn’t even started taking off their clothes—told her a lot. This was really happening.
