by Lori Ryan
“Are his friends usually in on those businesses with him? They seem pretty tight.” Luke eyed the three men and had a feeling he knew why everything about the Brain Trust was leading back to Lyra. His gut clenched when he thought about someday having to reveal to Lyra just what her brother had set her up for. Looking at him, you wouldn’t guess he’d do that to Lyra.
Lyra made a face. “Yeah, on occasion, Damon and Joel will run off and try something new. Joel’s dad has stopped funding everything except the company I work for, since that one typically pays its own bills. Damon is a little more level-headed. After they all graduated from college, Damon went on to study psychiatry. He left that program before getting his degree, but did go and get his LCSW.”
The news of Damon being a licensed clinical social worker raised another flag. Luke could see the fingerprints of someone who understood psychiatry and mental health all over the manipulations taking place in the Brain Trust. Not to mention, Damon didn’t at all seem like he would want to use an LCSW for anything like its intended use.
“He’s a social worker?” He asked, not quite seeing it as he looked at Damon across the room.
“No, he runs a small therapy clinic. Private practice.”
The twins came rushing over with Alyssa talking a mile a minute and Prentiss nodding her agreement next to her. “We did it, Mommy. We got the mouse all the way to the top without any help from Aunt Tracy or Aunt Savvy. Nobody had to help us at all this time.”
“That’s fantastic, girls.” Lyra pulled the girls into her lap and snuggled them. They allowed the move for a split second before they ran away.
“The mouse?” Luke asked as he watched the girls run back to an arcade game.
“You have to use your gun to pump enough air at the right target to get the mouse to go all the way up the clock. Hickory dickory dock?”
“Ah. Got it.” He liked watching Lyra relax. He’d seen her laugh and smile a lot tonight, and it felt good to see.
A couple walked by the table and Luke knew they’d been sitting across the room earlier. Old habits die hard. He’d never stopped monitoring any room he was in, taking in who was where doing what. Who moved around and who stayed put. Who looked right in the space and who looked “off.”
This couple was simply a young couple out for a night together. They’d eaten, and were now walking out.
The woman leaned in to the table. “Your daughters are beautiful.”
Luke felt a kick in his gut at the words, but didn’t have time to identify what he was feeling before the woman continued.
“Where did you get them?”
Luke tried to process the question, wondering if the woman thought maybe Lyra had run on over to a clearance sale at Macy’s to pick up the twins. What on earth kind of a question was that?
Lyra didn’t bat an eye, instead answering with a smile. “Right straight out of my uterus. Well, through the birth canal, so I guess I can’t say straight out, but you get the idea.”
The woman glanced back and forth at Lyra and Luke, then down to where Luke’s hand rested on Lyra’s. He wasn’t sure when that had happened, but he was glad it had. “Oh.” She seemed to struggle for a minute. “I just thought . . . ”
She didn’t finish the thought, but walked away with a puzzled look on her face, as though she were still trying to figure things out.
“Does that happen often?” Luke asked.
Lyra nodded. “All the time. People think they’re adopted. I’ve even had people tell me it’s so wonderful of me to have taken them. Like they don’t bring more joy to my life than I could ever bring to theirs.”
Luke stared at her. People walked up and asked that kind of question all the time? And she didn’t flatten them?
Lyra laughed. “You get used to it and start to have fun with it. Savvy adopted Tessa. If Tessa isn’t within earshot, she says she picked her up at a tag sale—best bargain she’s ever gotten.”
“They ask right in front of Tessa!” It wasn’t a question, but she answered with raised brows and a nod anyway.
Luke felt his blood begin to simmer. “Tell me people don’t ask you that in front of Prentiss and ‘Lyss?” His voice was low.
“They do. I told the girls people are jealous and are hoping they can get a pair of twins of their own. They said maybe not everyone realized how rare and special twins are.”
Luke let out a huff of laughter, but he was still stuck on the fact the girls had heard that.
“Hey,” Lyra leaned into his line of vision and he realized he’d been glaring at some point in the distance. “If I let everything like that get to me, I’d miss the good stuff, like having those girls in my life in the first place. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to lose my husband and not have any piece of him with me. They’re a blessing.”
The air had turned heavy and thick, and Luke realized he was now holding both her hands across the table. They weren’t exactly in the most romantic of places, surrounded by the vinyl booths of the pizza place with the background ambiance of children laughing and video games buzzing.
A smile cut Luke’s face and the tension. “When Naomi was little, she figured out that people sometimes questioned whether I was her dad or not if I was dragging her mid-tantrum out of a mall or a store. We had a few of those episodes in the year after the accident, when she was really struggling. One day, she decided she could use it. She starts screaming that I’m not her dad at the top of her lungs.”
Lyra’s eyes went wide. “She didn’t.”
“Oh, she did. I stopped right then and there, sat my ass down to wait for the cops to arrive.”
“They didn’t.”
“They did. And I didn’t want to be attacked by an angry mob before they got there.”
Lyra now had her hand over her mouth and she seemed to be alternating between gasping in horror and laughing at the image of him sitting and waiting for the cops to arrive. “What happened?”
“Naomi thought it was a good idea for about two seconds, but when people tried to pull her away from me, she thought the better of it. Between that and being grounded for a month, she didn’t try it again.”
CHAPTER TEN
“What the fuck was that?” Billy paced the length of the room moving from the window to the couch and back again as he gripped the phone.
He’d been physically ill the moment he saw the newscast showing two trains barreling toward one another on tracks they weren’t supposed to be on at the same time. He had recognized the scenario with the two trains as soon as he’d seen it. Thank God the person behind the setup had stopped the trains just short of a collision, but still, the passengers on them had to have been scared witless.
One man had suffered a heart attack and it was looking like he might not survive.
Billy’s initial thought had been that one of the people in the Brain Trust had acted on one of the scenarios, but he dismissed that possibility right away. When they set up the Brain Trust, they’d picked their marks carefully. Everyone in the rooms had been chosen for not only their intelligence and naïveté, but also because Damon’s profiling had shown they were highly unlikely to ever act on any of the information shared in the group.
That left one possible culprit behind setting those trains up to collide. And he was talking to him. “Are you fucking crazy?”
“Calm down, Billy.” Damon was using the patronizing tone that always got under Billy’s skin. “It was a necessary demonstration of the product. How can we expect anybody to put money out there without us proving what we have?”
“You could have killed those people. I didn’t sign on for anything like that. We can go to the companies and show them what we have, or a piece of it anyway. They would have paid to see what else we had found, and to find out who gave us the information if they’d just seen a small sample of what we have. Proving it is complete bullshit. You could have killed everyone on those trains.”
Silence on the other end of the line sent a chill throug
h him, but it was the only answer he got.
“What the hell are you doing?” Billy’s question was quiet, too quiet. Mostly because he had a feeling the answer wasn’t something he really wanted to know. He asked the question again, louder, nonetheless. “What the hell are you doing?”
His partner’s answer was frighteningly nonchalant. “I found another way for us to make more money with this. We agreed this was going to be a one-time thing. In light of that, we need to get the most we can out of it.”
“What does that mean?” Every fiber of his being prickled with the uneasy knowledge that his partner’s true nature—a nature he had long suspected but had been studiously ignoring—was behind this move. “What do you mean you found another way for us to make more money?”
The voice on the other end of the phone remained bland. “Early on it made sense for us to go to the relevant companies and extort money from them in exchange for the information that we’ve garnered.” He paused. “There are . . . other parties that will pay more for the information.”
“Anyone who would pay more for this information is going to be dangerous. Very dangerous.” Billy began pacing again, running a hand through his hair, leaving it standing on end.
“That’s of little concern. The bidding will all be done remotely. We won’t have any interaction with them, no engagement at all. Everything will be perfectly safe.”
“That’s not the point!” He’d now raised his voice to almost a yell. A hollow ache began in his stomach, and he was reminded how he’d foolishly once thought he’d been the one in control here. It had become evident long ago that he wasn’t the one in control here anymore. But that didn’t mean he needed to sit by and let this happen. He could stop this. Had to stop this.
He took a slow breath before speaking again. “You know perfectly well that’s not the point. What people would do with this kind of information is the issue. A lot of people will die, or worse. I’m not going to be part of that.”
There was only a slight pause on the other end of the phone, not enough to convince him Damon had given much thought at all to what he had said. “Well, it’s not up to you, is it? If you’re not happy with the situation, you walk away. But remember this, once you’re out, you’re out. No money, nothing to show for over a year and a half of work.”
They’d spent hours every day coddling those idiots in the chat rooms. For people with such high IQs, they could really be incredibly stupid. Not to mention, putting up with the arrogance of the eggheads looking down on anyone who didn’t measure up. And let’s face it, that had been their profiles. The geniuses had often caught on that the fake profiles Billy and Damon were behind in the group weren’t as intelligent as the others. But that arrogance had kept them in the dark about the manipulation going on.
That didn’t matter. Billy would scrap all that before he’d let this information out to the kinds of people who’d pay money for it. He opened his mouth to object, but didn’t have a chance to respond. The line went dead.
He stared at the phone for a minute, not all together believing what had just happened.
Fuck. He needed to find some way to fix this shit. Right now, they both had access to the information. He needed to figure out a way to close that up. To lock down access to the information until he could get this shit show back on the rails.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Luke watched as Lyra set a bowl of pasta and a green salad on the table. The girls chattered in their chairs on either side of him, and he had to admit he found it soothing. He’d been on edge since getting news of the near train wreck. Those trains had come within feet of colliding and one man who suffered a heart attack had died later in the hospital.
Lyra’s invitation to pay him back for lunch by cooking dinner had given him a welcome distraction. They’d taken a few short coffee breaks together during the week, each time sitting on either her couch or his.
There hadn’t been a lot of coffee drinking happening, but something else had happened. His mind raced back to the kiss. He’d honest-to-God not known if he remembered how to kiss or not, but there was no stopping that pull when she’d been laughing and looking so damned beautiful curled up next to him.
When he’d put a hand to the back of her head and tilted it back, bringing her mouth to his, it had been like lighting a fire between them. She’d melted against him, hands coming up to his chest, stoking the flames as he delved into her mouth to taste and tease.
He shook himself out of the memory, well aware that another few seconds would leave him embarrassingly hard at the dinner table. That would go over well.
“And at the end,” Alyssa was saying with an excited giggle, “Batman finally tells the Joker that he hates him.” She dissolved into laughter. “Isn’t it funny? Telling someone you hate them isn’t supposed to make them happy. But that’s what the Joker wanted all along.”
Lyra grinned as she took a seat across from Luke and glanced at him. “And if you planned on seeing that movie, now you know the big ending.”
“You should see it.” Alyssa bounced in her seat. “You should watch it with us. We own the movie.”
“He’s not gonna want to watch a kids’ movie, ’Lyss.” Prentiss spoke with all the authority of a four-year-old going on 30. “Grown-ups don’t want to watch kids’ movies.”
“Hey,” Luke turned a raised brow to Prentiss. “Frozen happens to be my favorite movie.”
This brought a lot of giggles from both girls and Lyra grinned at him across the table, shaking her head.
“I’m not kidding you. I know all the words to every one of the songs. It used to drive Naomi nuts when I wouldn’t stop singing them around the house. And don’t get her started about the carpool lane. If one of them came on while we were sitting in the carpool lane, I’d be singing at the top of my lungs while she sank down into her seat, hoping nobody would see me.”
“You’re fibbing!” Alyssa’s accusation came with a finger point and everything.
Luke proved her wrong by tipping back his head and belting out the chorus to Let It Go.
He’d never been embarrassed to sing in public, but even if he had, the laughter his performance brought from Lyra was worth it. It erased any thoughts of the investigation, the narrowly avoided train wreck, and figuring out who was behind making it look like Lyra was involved.
Prentiss crinkled her brow at Luke thoughtfully. “Everyone knows that one.”
Alyssa nodded in agreement with her sister.
Luke grinned at the girls, offering their mother a wink, before beginning his favorite song, In Summer. The song about a snowman dying to see what summer was like always made him laugh. In fact, he and Naomi both cracked up every time they heard the song or watched that part of the movie. Despite wanting to sink into a hole in the ground whenever he sang the songs publicly, she had still loved watching it and singing along with him whenever they did.
The girls dissolved into giggles, appearing suitably impressed with his depth of knowledge.
Luke finished off the song just as he always did, belting the final notes as loudly as he could. Lyra now had tears streaming down her face as she laughed at him, and he was pretty sure he never felt anything as rewarding as making her laugh like that.
“Mom,” Alyssa said. “Can we watch Frozen after dinner with Luke?” She turned wide eyes to him. “We own that one, too.”
“You do? I knew you ladies were trying to steal my heart.”
Prentiss and Alyssa giggled as Lyra shot him the kind of look that asked if he really wanted to stay and watch the movie with the girls? He nodded at her. As if she could think he was faking his love of all things Frozen. He might be a little offended.
“With popcorn?” Prentiss asked, a slight glance shot toward her sister with the question.
“I suppose.” Lyra’s answer brought cheers from the girls.
“After pasta and salad.” Lyra’s attempt at a stern tone was unnecessary. The girls began piling pasta and salad in their mouths
at a steady pace.
Lyra looked across at Luke. “I guess they know not to question your word from now on.”
He’d forgotten for a minute that all this was fake. That he was getting close to Lyra for the job.
Luke kept the smile on his face but it felt as cold as if Elsa herself had conjured it there, and he was pretty sure you couldn’t chisel it off with a jackhammer. Because one thing was sure, Lyra definitely couldn’t take him at his word.
Lyra forced her mind to focus on getting the girls’ teeth brushed and steering them into bed. It was a little hard since her mind kept going back to the man sitting on her couch. It was also hard to keep her thoughts where they needed to be where he was concerned. She should be thinking that he was too good to be true. That there had to be something wrong with a man who looked like him, had no problem engaging with the mindless chatter of two excited four-year-olds, and seemed to think a night of spaghetti and watching Disney movies was the height of entertainment.
He hadn’t been lying about knowing every word to every song. He and the girls had even gotten Lyra to join in with him on their singing after a few rounds of simply watching and laughing. It was hard not to laugh. There was something about watching a man who looked like he could have starred in Rambo twirl around with her girls as they sang about building a snowman or do the funny reindeer voice for the reindeer are better than people song.
“That was fun tonight, mommy,” Prentiss said, in her quieter manner than Alyssa. Alyssa had been bouncing around during the whole nighttime routine, but she’d fallen asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow. Prentiss and Lyra often had a few minutes to themselves to chat during tucking in. It was one of the parts of the routine Lyra cherished, knowing it would be all too easy for Prentiss to feel overshadowed.
