by Cathie Linz
It meant he was an idiot.
Who was he kidding here? He frigging was in love with her. And he was going to kiss her senseless for taking a risk, going rogue this way on her own.
The sound of a gunshot from inside Nolan’s house froze Caine’s heart and instantly threw him into Marine mode. He pulled a knife from its sheath in his boot and headed up the stairs to the front door. It was unlocked.
He heard Faith talking. Thank God. She was alive. For now.
“I don’t like to brag, Fred, but I’m a crack shot, so I wouldn’t recommend pissing me off right now. Do not move!”
“You’re lying. You wouldn’t shoot me.”
“She probably would,” Caine said as he entered the room. “And even if she wouldn’t, I sure as hell would.”
“She and her father were trying to kill me,” Fred Jr. said. “They didn’t want me telling anyone about the money. They wanted it for themselves.”
“That’s a lie,” Faith said.
“Why don’t you give me the gun, Sunshine, and you take my phone to call the police,” Caine said.
Faith readily made the switch. She was afraid she might be tempted to shoot Fred Jr. after what he’d just put her through. Her plan had worked as she’d hoped. Fred Jr. stood at her feet with the gun in one hand, the duct tape in the other. She’d kicked up, landing a direct hit on Fred Jr.’s family jewels with her pointy-toed polka-dot shoes. He’d squeezed off a wild shot that hit the ceiling before dropping the gun and bending over in pain. She’d scrambled to get the weapon before he did. She’d succeeded. Barely.
“Your dad didn’t commit suicide,” Faith told Caine in a rush. “It was his father, Fred Belkin. He killed your father and staged it to look like a suicide. Fred was the one who sold the information to the rival company. He was angry with ARC for giving him a brain tumor.”
Caine was having a hard time processing this news as Faith spoke to the 911 dispatcher while using a Swiss Army knife from her bag to free her dad. But one thing came through loud and clear. His father had been murdered.
Seeing the dangerous look on Caine’s face, Fred Jr. dissolved in hysterical tears. “It wasn’t me! I didn’t kill him. My father did. Don’t shoot me!”
Buddy arrived with the police minutes later. “Picked it up on the scanner,” he told Faith. “Been busy, buttercup?”
Unable to speak, Faith dashed for the bathroom, vowing to never leave her home or office again without first emptying her bladder. A better daughter would have stayed by her father’s side, but the EMTs said he was fine as she raced past them. At this point she was just so relieved that no one had been killed that she could hardly see straight.
An hour later, seated beside her father in the ER, her relief doubled with the news that her father had suffered a mild concussion from being hit on the head with a blunt object but otherwise was okay. Faith had yet to reach the okay level, especially when Caine walked in.
He’d driven her to the hospital in his Mustang, bombarding her with questions she wasn’t always sure how to answer. “Why were you there?”
That one had been easy. “My father texted me to come.”
“Does he usually text you?”
“Not often, no.”
“That should have been your first clue something was wrong,” he’d said. “Next time someone texts you like that, phone them to verify it.”
The last time someone had texted her, it had been Alan, and she could hardly have phoned him to verify that he’d sent the message. Besides, he’d texted her several times after that about his belongings until she’d blocked him.
“What exactly did Fred Jr. tell you?”
She’d repeated the words as she remembered them. “That his father confessed on his deathbed that he’d been the one to give your father an overdose, making it look like a suicide. He wasn’t sure if his father was hallucinating because of the brain tumor, but when he checked out the bank account his father told him about, he found the money. That Fred did all that because he was angry with ARC for giving him a brain tumor. Not wanting to get caught, he used your dad as a cover for his own crime.”
Caine had yet to say anything about his feelings regarding the revelation that his father hadn’t committed suicide after all but had been murdered by Fred Belkin. But then Caine rarely shared his feelings. He buried them. When he put that war face on, there was no telling what his thoughts were.
Caine stood near the entrance to the ER bay where Faith’s dad was situated, as if he’d rather not enter.
“Are you okay?” she asked him.
“Hey, I’m the one with the concussion,” her dad said with a weak smile.
“You’re the one who botched the investigation,” Caine said.
Uh-oh. Faith hoped the two men she loved wouldn’t stage a High Noon showdown here in the middle of the emergency room. Her knees started shaking. Not because she was afraid of a showdown, but because this was the first time she’d really acknowledged that she loved Caine.
She’d heard stories about near-death experiences changing you, making you reassess your life, stripping away your defenses and forcing you to face the truth.
She loved Caine. He hated her father. Not a good mix.
“Guilty as charged. We messed up,” Faith’s father said. “I’m sorry, Caine. You have every right to be angry. I should have verified the investigation myself instead of delegating it to someone else. That was a mistake.”
“One of many.” Caine’s voice was curt.
“So what do you intend to do?”
“I don’t know yet.” Caine turned on his heel and walked out.
A hard rain started to fall as Caine stood above his father’s grave. The flowers he’d brought bowed beneath the force of the sheets of water. Rain ran down his face, soaking his clothes. He didn’t mind the discomfort. He welcomed it.
Pain is just weakness leaving your body.
The Marine Corps had taught him that. Taught him how to deal with death too.
Yet here he was, at a complete loss, not knowing how to express the explosion of feelings ripping him up inside. Still, he felt he needed to say something to his father.
“I don’t know if it’s better that you were murdered and didn’t commit suicide. How sick is that?”
Caine scrubbed his hand across his face. Those weren’t tears, dammit. It was the rain. Just the rain.
“I totally bought the story that you’d taken that overdose. I knew you didn’t do what they accused you of as far as the money and all that shit. But I thought you really had committed suicide, and I felt guilty as hell that I didn’t save you from that. I promised Mom on her deathbed I’d take care of you. Did you know that?” His voice cracked, and his throat clamped shut as he tried to regain control. “I failed you.”
He scrubbed his face again. “I’m sorry, Dad.” Bending his head, he slowly dropped to his knees. Lightning flashed above him, and thunder shook his world.
Caine traced his father’s name carved into the granite headstone. The man responsible for his death was already dead, so Caine could find no revenge there.
Caine had set out to clear his father’s name, never guessing what that mission would entail. Everything had seemed so black and white in the beginning. Faith’s father had driven Caine’s dad to kill himself. No apology could make up for that. No amount of regret.
But now he knew that wasn’t really what happened after all. Yes, Faith’s father still bore some responsibility for botching the investigation. But Faith was the one who’d uncovered the truth. She’d continued asking questions, even when Caine had tried to get rid of her, to scare her away.
Instead, he was the one who’d been scared shitless when he’d heard that gunshot outside Nolan Parker’s house. Gunfire was nothing new to him, although he was more accustomed to the rapid fire of automatic weapons. What was new was his total terror that Faith had been killed.
She hadn’t melted under pressure. No way. She’d stood with that weapon in h
er hand, as mad as hell, an Amazon warrior in polka-dot shoes who’d rushed to the bathroom the instant things were over, muttering something about not wanting to wet her pants.
Faith was such a strange combination of vulnerability and strength, of power and empathy, of primness and passion. And he loved her, God help him.
Caine had spent so much of his life refusing to open himself up to that kind of intense emotion. No soul mate for him.
He slowly moved his hand over the dates on his father’s gravestone. A higher power would decide Fred Belkin Sr.’s final resting place, and the justice system would take care of Fred Jr.
Caine knew one thing for sure regarding his dad. “You’re finally with Mom again.”
Setting the flowers on his father’s grave, he released the pain and the guilt, silently acknowledging how much he loved and missed his dad and finally admitting that the salty wetness on his face wasn’t really caused by the rain after all.
Faith had no idea where Caine was. She’d checked the waiting room, and he wasn’t there. She couldn’t blame him for taking off. He needed some time alone to process the fact that his father had been murdered.
She still didn’t know how Caine knew she was at Nolan’s house. She’d have to ask him next time she saw him. If she saw him again.
The investigation was over. Did that mean that his relationship with her was over? Did he consider it to even be a relationship? They’d never really clarified that issue. She knew she loved him. She didn’t know how he felt about her.
She knew he wanted her. She knew she still pictured him as her Dark Knight. She knew he had the ability to touch her in ways no one else ever had or could. And not just physical ways, although those were awesome. But in other ways—like the way he grinned at her over the top of her Hello Kitty mug. It took a tough man to carry that off.
Her thoughts were interrupted by her mother’s arrival to the ER. She hugged Faith before going to her husband’s bedside. Tears ran down her face as she cupped his face with her hand.
“You heard I’m not having an affair, right?” he said. “As if I’d ever cheat on you.” He shook his head then groaned. “Bad move.”
“I’m sorry,” Faith’s mom said.
“No, I’m sorry for not telling you what I was doing reopening the investigation into Karl Hunter’s case. I screwed up badly,” he said. “The facts, or what we thought were facts, were too neat and tidy. I should have caught that. Faith caught it. She’s good at her job.”
That might be, but Faith was no longer sure that working for West Investigations was the right job for her after all.
She left her parents together and caught a cab home. It had been one hell of a day that got worse when she arrived at her building to find her runaway groom, Alan, standing there waiting for her.
He eyed her new blonde, bad self uncertainly. “Faith, is that you?”
She nodded.
“Good news. I’m baa . . . ack.” As if expecting a hero’s welcome, he opened his arms to her.
Chapter Eighteen
When Faith didn’t run into his tanned arms, Alan appeared taken aback. He stood there, perfectly groomed as always, his light brown hair expertly gelled, his eyes greener as a result of his tinted contact lenses. “What’s happened to you?”
“What happened to me? I got over you, that’s what happened. As well as being held at gunpoint this afternoon, but that’s another story. What are you doing here? If you’ve come to pick up your Wagner opera CD collection, you’re about a month too late.”
“I didn’t come for my CDs, although I can’t believe you got rid of them.” Seeing the dangerous look on her face, he hurriedly said, “Never mind. I copied them onto my iPod, so that’s okay. It’s just that for sentimental reasons I really liked that set . . . Never mind. I can see talking about that upsets you. I came back for you.”
“Then you’ve wasted a trip.”
“Are you still angry about the wedding thing?”
“The wedding thing? You mean dumping me at the altar? Yeah, I’m definitely still pissed about that.”
“Okay, so I may have made a mistake.”
“May have?”
“Definitely did.” He gave her a toothpaste ad smile. “But I’m back now.”
“So what?”
“So we can pick up where we left off.”
“No, Alan, we can’t.”
“Well, not exactly where we left off. Not with that big wedding.”
“Not with any wedding. You said I was boring.”
“Nonsense. I didn’t use those words exactly.” He pulled out his iPhone. “I kept a copy of the text message. Look, here it is.” He turned the phone to show her the screen.
She shoved it back at him. “I don’t need to see that. And I sure as hell don’t need to see you. Go away.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Yes, I do.”
“But we were about to get married,”
“Were being the operative word here. That’s all in the past.”
“How can you throw away the two years we had together?”
“You threw it away. But you know what? You did me a favor, although I would have preferred that you told me you were having doubts instead of taking the coward’s way out.”
“I am not a coward.”
“You wanted excitement and adventure. You didn’t want me, and you didn’t have the nerve to tell me that to my face.”
“I was trying to spare your feelings. Telling you to your face seemed rude.”
She stared at him in disbelief.
“And I was trying to find myself,” he said. “I was confused.”
“I don’t care.”
“Okay, you’re upset with me. I get that now. I’m more self-aware than I was before. I’m a better me.”
“Bully for you.”
“I’m a better me, so I can help you become a better you.”
“You can help me by leaving me alone,” she said.
“You don’t mean that. You don’t want to be alone.”
“She’s not alone.” Caine appeared out of nowhere to stand by her side. “The lady is with me now.”
Alan was not a happy camper. “Who the hell are you?”
“The man who’s going to make your life hell if you don’t beat it right now.”
Alan retreated a few steps and gave Caine a wary look. “I’m her fiancé. I deserve an explanation.”
“You’re her ex-fiancé, and you deserve to have your ass kicked.”
“He’s not worth the trouble.” Faith grabbed hold of Caine’s arm.
“It’s no trouble,” Caine growled. “It would be my pleasure.”
“He’s a former Marine,” Faith told Alan. “I don’t know how much longer I can hold him back, so you’d better get out of here while you can.”
“If I leave now, I’m not coming back,” Alan warned. “This is your last chance.”
“No, it’s your last chance, Alan,” she said. “Leave while you still can.”
He angrily walked away.
Faith turned to Caine. “You came back.”
Caine nodded.
“I wasn’t sure you would.”
Yuri stepped outside to join them. “Is it safe to let Caine in the building now?” he asked.
Faith didn’t know how safe it was, but she was no longer looking for safe. She was looking for love . . . and answers.
So was Caine. At least he was looking for answers. She had yet to discover his thoughts about love.
“Did you know Alan the Asshole was coming to see you?” Caine asked once they were inside her condo.
“No.” She sank onto her couch. “I had no idea. I thought he was still in Bali.”
“Are you still in love with him?”
“Did it look like I was still in love with him?”
He shrugged. “You were pissed, but that doesn’t mean you don’t still love him.”
“Well, I don’t.”
“You’re
sure?”
“I’m positive. Look, can we change the subject, please? I have a question for you. How did you know that I was at Nolan’s house?”
“I put a tracking device in your purse last night.”
“Why?”
“To keep track of you.”
“Because you don’t trust me.”
“It’s not a matter of trust. It’s a matter of security.”
“By the time you got there, I had the situation under control,” she said.
“Yeah, you did.”
“I am glad that you showed up, though,” she admitted. “An extra pair of hands in a case like that is a good thing.” “Sure.”
“You were my backup.”
“Looks like I was.”
“And still are, showing up the way you just did to get rid of Alan. Not that I couldn’t have taken care of him myself.”
“Right.”
“Sometimes it’s nice to have backup.”
“Yes, it is.” He started pacing. “I should have provided backup for my dad. I should have known that I was investigating a murder and not a suicide. But my dad’s last e-mail to me said he was sorry and he couldn’t go on. If that doesn’t sound like a suicide note, I sure as hell don’t know what does.”
“Is that all he wrote?”
Caine nodded. “Two sentences. That’s it.”
“Fred Belkin could have sent that e-mail from your father’s laptop. It didn’t say anything specific.”
“You’re right. My dad would have said something about joining my mom. He loved her so much. Too much.”
“How can you love someone too much?”
“Trust me, it’s possible.”
She wondered if Caine hadn’t inadvertently just given her a key to his inner self. If he thought his father loved his mother too much, it made sense that he wouldn’t want to make the same mistake. And he definitely made it sound like a mistake, like love was something to be avoided.
