Or maybe that was just what she hoped he’d do.
Giving herself some space to think without his overwhelming physical presence to distract her was her only hope.
“I have to go,” she said, striding toward the bedroom door. “If I drive fast, I can still catch Ly Vo at the office. He always works late.”
“Shouldn’t I—”
“No,” she cut him off firmly, knowing what he was going to offer. “I’ll go right to Mayhew, I’ll call when I get there, and then I’ll come back here. I promise. No unnecessary risks. They have really good security, and I’m sure the FBI or the NSA or whatever is still watching the place even though the Iranians have been arrested.”
“You can have the bed,” Neil said. “I’ll sleep on the couch.”
She grabbed the bag that held her keys and both her phone and Frank’s, then literally ran out of the room.
She’d clean up and put her bra on in the downstairs bathroom. Another second in Neil’s company and she’d lose her resolve.
She’d be the one sleeping on the couch, she told herself as she hurriedly washed off the residues of sex. The bedroom was already stocked with delicious memories and tempting smells she needed, God help her, to avoid. Even if she had to stay at Neil’s for her safety and his peace of mind.
Chapter Twenty
Suzanne dodged traffic on the back streets until she reached Route 95. Traffic was still heavy this close to the city but it gave her something to think about. In a Prius, she couldn’t be a lane-changing, speeding fool, and she thought painfully of the Mustang. Wouldn’t have been safe to take it for a spin, she knew. It was too distinctive a car, unlike the anonymous little blue Prius. But it would have been cathartic to open the Mustang up, take it on some side roads somewhere.
She laughed at her own thought. A decade and a half with Frank had just about broken her of that urge. Cars were so much Frank’s thing that they couldn’t be hers anymore, even though the car collection had been part of her initial fascination with the man. A few days hanging out with Neil and she was back to admitting she was a car buff and just a little bit of a speed demon. Not that she’d tell Neil the speed-demon part, seeing that he was a cop.
Not that she knew what she’d be telling him from now on. Neil was very much alive and Frank was gone, but that didn’t matter in some aspect. Not when Frank was haunting her the way he was now.
How could she move on—with Neil Callahan or without him—when she didn’t even know who Frank really was and how he’d felt about her? How she felt about him, for that matter?
She felt her mind split as she drove. Part of it focused on the road and the cars around her, focused on driving a little fast, but safely. The rest lost itself in thought and memory. Memories of Frank when they first met, when she was charmed by him and everything was good. He’d always had a cool edge to him, and at first that was part of the attraction. It reminded her of a Dom during a scene, that way of being a little distant while still being focused on her in the bedroom. Even though he’d turned out to be utterly vanilla, the attitude had been enough to make her hot. Looking back, she thought she could pinpoint when he must have started working on the top-secret projects. That was when the pose of distance started to become real.
Not like Neil. She couldn’t imagine him ever being distant except for kinky effect, and then she could tell he was playing a role. Normally, she imagined, he’d be direct, maybe a little too blunt. Not a bad thing, though.
She shook herself. She’d gotten so lost in thought she’d almost missed her exit.
Mayhew was in one of the towns bordering on Bellwood, but not directly on the highway. She wove her way down a state highway and from there onto the side road that would take her to her destination. It was suburbia, sure, but pretty suburbia, and driving along the tree-lined street pulled her back from her memories and into the now.
And in the now, she realized she’d been unfair to Neil tonight, but worse, she’d been unfair to herself, slamming herself when she’d done nothing wrong. Even if she didn’t know exactly what was going on in her own head and heart, or how things really stood at the end of her marriage, she knew she’d come to care about Neil. She could mourn Frank and what they’d lost in all his necessary secrecy while exploring what Neil had to teach her. She could work through the aftermath of Frank’s life and death while still getting on with her own life. Even if Frank had been ready to get the divorce in part to protect her, the fact remained he’d been ready to leave—not arm her with the truth and a plan of action, not pretend to split up to confound enemies, not find some other way, with that clever mind of his, to stay together and work together to stay safe. Time and complacency as well as secrecy had taken their toll, sapped their desire, made it impossible for them to communicate even in the areas where Frank didn’t need to guard Defense Department secrets.
Inertia was a habit that died hard. Love, on the other hand, died more easily. Frank had cared enough he wanted her to be safe, and she’d cared enough to be hurt by his silence and enraged by his seeming infidelity—but neither of them had cared enough to break through those challenges and get back to what had brought them together in the first place.
Hadn’t cared enough.
Damn, she was turning into a leaky faucet these days. The road was blurring through a haze of tears, and while willpower could keep the tears from turning to Niagara Falls, it couldn’t keep them from welling up, interfering with her vision.
Luckily, she was almost at Mayhew. She made it into the parking lot, checked that her doors were locked, and called Neil. “I’m sorry,” she said into the impersonality of his voicemail. “I think that was what you call a bad drop but my head’s clearer now. I’ve reached Mayhew and I’ll call you after the meeting’s done. It should be quick. Call me.” She might have rambled on to fill the silence, but she wanted to get in at about the time Ly Vo had tried to set up the original appointment. She’d see Ly Vo, make it short and sweet, then go home.
Home. When had that two-family house in Dorchester become home? She smiled at the thought. For whatever reason, it felt more like home than her own house had the past few years.
A big green SUV had pulled in while she was calling. No big deal. The driver and a passenger were just stepping out. Both white guys, one very blond and fairly young, the other older with angular features, graying dark hair, both dressed in the engineer version of business casual. She froze for a second, considered staying locked in the car until they went inside or otherwise proved they were harmless.
No one had been right behind her on the road; she’d have noticed on the narrow, windy road through the industrial park. And if they’d been following her and she’d somehow not seen them, they’d have pulled in right when she did, right? People must come and go here all the time. It was a business, and there was a second shift for the production team, with a few engineers and designers no doubt working late or on flexible hours. No reason to lurk in the car like a big old coward.
She took a deep breath, opened the door.
The two men converged on her, moving fast and with practiced intent. The one who reached her first grabbed her arm.
She did three things at once: she threw her coffee at his face, screamed bloody murder, and fumbled in her pocket, trying to hit redial on her phone.
The young man—he looked old enough to buy cigarettes but maybe not beer, and his hair was so blond it was almost white—cursed in a language she didn’t understand, but only gripped her arm tighter. The screaming was equally ineffective. No one was around.
When the older man—he was hard-looking with a craggy face that looked like it was awkwardly carved from New Hampshire granite—pressed something hard and cold against her back and muttered, “Come along quietly,” she could only hope she’d redialed successfully and Neil would get a phone message full of screaming—and get it soon.
Because otherwise sh
e was fucked.
Chapter Twenty-One
Neil figured they weren’t having a real fight. Stress and sub-drop had conspired to make Suzanne’s brain explode and, well, maybe stress and top-drop had made his not work as well as it should have, either. Janice would smack him for trying new games with a justifiably stressed-out sub, even games he thought of as pretty mild, games she’d suggested herself on a less totally fucking weird occasion.
Still, he needed to distract himself from worry about her off on her own, even if, as she’d pointed out, Mayhew Technologies was probably the safest place in the greater Boston area at the moment. It didn’t help that he suspected he’d been an idiot, hadn’t taken care of Suzanne in the right way. For that matter, maybe part of the issue was that, much as she was enjoying the kinky sex, she wasn’t feeling the same level of connection to him that he did to her. He truly didn’t want to think about that too much.
Doing something useful would help. He grabbed a set of keys, jingled them in his hand. The weight and familiar noise soothed his nerves as he ran down the stairs and headed outside. There wasn’t a door connecting the two halves of the house, so he knocked on his father’s back door. “Want to take a look at the Mustang?” he asked without preliminaries when his father answered.
“Hell yeah.”
Of course, in order to look at it, they had to take it for a drive first, though they didn’t make it a very long one.
And it was a good thing they did because on that ride, his dad caught a slight rattle in the passenger doorframe. Neil should have heard it before, but every other time he’d been in the car, he’d been distracted by Suzanne.
A pretty damn good reason for missing that tiniest of off sounds, even his father agreed.
“Let’s check it out,” Joe insisted. “Any other car, I’d say it was nothing. But this Mustang was her husband’s baby. It’s as shiny and perfect as the day someone drove it out of the dealer’s lot.”
“Yeah…so why didn’t he do something about that noise unless he wanted someone to hear it?” Neil was already turning the Mustang around as he asked the question.
They made it back to the house in record time.
* * * * *
Neil was good with cars, but this one was special in many ways. The property of a woman he was just a little crazy about. A heirloom from a dead husband who might have been a rat bastard but was also a genius and, if not a hero, someone who helped heroes do their jobs. Potential evidence in an investigation that involved murder, espionage and God only knew what else. And leaving all that aside, one of the sweetest cars he’d ever seen. Neil was confident, most of the time, but Neil was nervous about touching the car.
Luckily, his father had no such compunctions.
Probably because while he respected the car and the whole spies-and-killers-and-treason situation, his dad wasn’t madly in lust with the car’s rightful owner.
In lust and maybe a little in love. Which was definitely not going to come up in conversation because Neil was having a hard time admitting it to himself, let alone to his dad or God forbid, the woman herself.
His dad could be calm about investigating that rattle, and that meant Neil could too.
They had to take the interior door panel off, but when they looked, they could see where it had been done before. Certain screws appeared to be replacements, not matching the ones on the other side. There was a tiny scratch near one of the replacement screws, in a place where you’d never see it unless you were looking to take the door apart—but given how pristine everything else was, it stood out.
Once they got the door apart, they discovered a small box from a jewelry store in the doorframe. “The man went to a lot of trouble to hide Christmas gifts,” Joe grumbled.
“You’ve talked to Suzanne. She’s sharp. You’d need to go to this much trouble.” Neil smiled as he said it, but he felt anything but jovial. He was excited in the same way he sometimes was when he found some seemingly insignificant clue that, to a trained eye, promised to be a key to a case, but anxious at the same time. Whatever was in this box had gotten a man killed, might have gotten Suzanne killed too if he hadn’t stopped to check out the Mustang and its beautiful owner.
He and his father both reached for the box, then stopped and said, in chorus, “Gloves!” Evidence found when “fixing a friend’s car” would still be admissible—you didn’t need a warrant to do a favor for a friend. If anyone asked, they’d say they hadn’t necessarily been looking for anything other than the source of the rattle, but once they saw the unlikely box…well, they were trained officers and they knew about Frank Mayhew’s missing documents.
Neil grabbed gloves from inside before he lifted the box out of its hiding place. He set the box down on the red leather passenger seat.
The phone rang, but he ignored it at first. It wouldn’t hurt to let her stew a little bit and besides, if he waited a few minutes and called her back, he’d have real news for her. Not all the answers, but possibly the source for the answers that everyone needed.
Right. Time to get those answers. He opened the box with exaggerated care.
It was full of foam padding, and nestled inside was a flash drive.
He held it up, let his father see it. His dad nodded, asked, “Gonna look at it?”
“No way in hell. Guy was an übergeek and this is national-security type stuff. I’m leaving it for people who know what they’re doing.”
“Point. It’s probably encrypted to self-destruct or something.”
When Neil heard “Mustang Sally” blaring from his phone for the second time in less than five minutes, he grabbed it. “Suzanne?” he said quickly, maybe too quickly.
He was answered with what sounded like screaming and the sound of struggle.
He took a deep breath, hung up the phone, and met his father’s eyes, now a stormy blue gray. Shit, before he’d said anything, the old man had sensed trouble. “They’ve grabbed Suzanne,” Neil said simply. “I’m going after her.” He wasn’t sure where he was going, exactly, other than toward Mayhew Tech’s headquarters. But he sure as hell wasn’t sitting still. With any luck she’d be able to hang on to her phone long enough for the tracking software to do some good.
“Shit.” His father nodded tightly. “I’ll grab my gun.”
Neil called the police immediately, trying to sound like a professional dealing with a situation, not a scared-shitless boyfriend. But he was a scared-shitless boyfriend. He understood fear did strange things to a person’s brain, but as it turned out, knowing that didn’t necessarily prevent the way terror made you babble. At least he had some idea of what they’d need to know on the other end of the phone. Knowing that calmed him enough to think through what to do next.
He ran inside to grab his own gun, rummaged through the papers on which he’d made notes until he found the name and number of the FBI agent Suzanne had spoken to. Thank goodness Suzanne had taken notes. He had the DoD contact’s number too, but that would be a later call. Ms. Chang would have contacts and probably intel the local guys would need, but Delvecchio was law enforcement; he and Neil would speak the same language.
Not to mention, they had something the FBI needed, so maybe the FBI would play nice.
Neil hadn’t actually intended to bring his father with him, just let him know what was going on. But why had he imagined for a second his father wouldn’t assume he was coming along?
When Joe strode out the door, his gun holstered at his hip, barely concealed by a light jacket, he looked better than he had in several years. More focused. More determined. A cop on the case, or maybe something more dramatic, like an older but very competent action hero, Liam Neeson maybe.
Well, cop or action hero, only an idiot went up against an unknown number of mysterious enemies alone. Even though Joe Callahan was Dad to him, the depressed, retired widowed dad he normally had to fuss over and motivate, Joe
Callahan was first and foremost a decorated Boston police officer who’d been a cop longer than Neil had been alive. And right now he looked plenty motivated. “So what are we waiting for?” his father asked, heading toward the garage. “We taking the Charger?”
Neil tossed the keys to his dad. “You get us up out to Walton—it’s the next town over from Bellwood. I have calls to make. I’ll take over once we get there.” At least he knew where he needed to go for now. Suzanne’s call had definitely come from Mayhew, or near it. Thank goodness he’d insisted on that software, although right now he wasn’t getting a clear reading from it. He’d so hoped she would be right, that he was worrying too much. Unfortunately for them, his instincts had been good.
His father still drove like he had a siren on top of the car. What the hell? Luckily, Neil had his police ID on him and they were both licensed to carry concealed.
While his father drove, Neil called Bellwood and filled them in—they’d be sending an officer too—and then his own department. Not that there was a hell of a lot they could do yet; it wasn’t Boston’s jurisdiction. But he wanted them to know something was going on that might involve terrorists.
The sergeant on duty listened to him, asked the right questions, then paused before she said, “I know you, Callahan. I know your dad. I’m not even going to ask where you’re going or what you’re planning to do, because if I know, I’d have to try to stop you and I doubt I could without actual shooting.” Neil could picture her shaking her head. “Just do me a favor and don’t do anything too stupid. And keep an eye on Joe.”
Despite the tension—no, because of the tension—he laughed. “Right. You know how well that works. I’m his son. He’ll listen to me even less than he did to you and the lieutenants.”
Joe took one hand off the wheel long enough to smack him.
Neil was glad for that blessed bit of normality in a mad world, because the next call he had to make was to the FBI.
Drive: Cougars, Cars and Kink, Book 1 Page 17
