The Defiant Hero

by Suzanne Brockmann

  Ah, shit.

  Meg’s car was between them and the cop. He would surely look inside as he went past—and see Osman Razeen, handcuffed and tied up in the backseat.

  No, Officer, that’s just my wife’s crazy cousin—went on a bender and beat the crap out of Aunt Doreen. He’s nasty when he gets this way. We had to restrain him so we could take him back to the rehab center in Florida. Although he’ll probably just escape again.

  “Everything okay here?” the cop called out in his Georgia drawl. It was much thicker and gooier than Starrett’s Texas twang.

  “Everything’s fine, Officer.” Nils stood up, and Meg was right beside him.

  But the cop wasn’t talking to them. He’d stopped alongside the car where he’d leaned down to speak to . . .

  Razeen. Who was sitting up in the backseat. Wide awake.

  While Nils and Meg had been arguing, he’d managed to roll down the window. The car was childproof—he couldn’t unlock the backdoor—but the bastard had been about to escape out the window.

  Shit.

  Nils felt Meg touch his arm. “What are we going to do?” she breathed.

  We. Now it was we. Thank God. Nils suddenly loved this cop. He loved his meandering gait, his tough-guy squint, his cheap mirrored sunglasses. This cop had turned them back into a we.

  “Give me the handgun,” he breathed back.

  She shook her head. “No.” She had that look in her eyes again. That on-the-verge look that made him think it wouldn’t take much for her to find the motivation to unload her weapon into Razeen’s head.

  “Meg, stay cool,” Nils said just loudly enough for her to hear.

  But she didn’t move, didn’t blink, didn’t even seem to know he was there anymore. Just like that, we didn’t mean Meg and John. We meant Meg and her little handgun.

  “You all right in there, sir?” the cop asked Razeen.

  Nils felt Meg tense as she reached into her pocket for her weapon.

  Shit. This was going to be really bad.

  “I love you,” he whispered, throwing the last of his cards faceup onto the table. “Meg, please don’t do this.”

  It was only late afternoon, but the neon in the window was bright and beckoning. Sam took Alyssa’s arm and pulled her into the bar.

  “You need a drink,” he told her.

  “A drink is the last thing I need.”

  The fact that she didn’t physically resist, that she didn’t immediately yank her arm free from his grip convinced him that she did need something stiff that would burn all the way down, despite her listless protest.

  It was a working class establishment. Dim with no frills. But it was clean and it had padded stools at the bar.

  Sam pulled one out for her. It wasn’t meant to be chivalrous. He would have done the same for Nils or WildCard if they were walking around like some kind of zombie, exhausted and embarrassed for giving too much away in public.

  But she didn’t know that. He sat before she did, trying to cancel out the implied respect of pulling out the stool.

  “A bottle of my favorite Uncle and couple of shot glasses,” he told the bartender, setting a pile of money on the bar.

  Alyssa sat down. “You don’t fool around, do you?”

  “Hell, no.” Sam poured them both a shot of the Jack Daniel’s. He didn’t wait for her. He just tossed back the shot, letting it roar down his throat.

  Glory be to God.

  Alyssa picked up the glass and sipped it before emptying her glass. She probably got her toes wet before jumping into a lake, too. She didn’t make a face as Jack elbowed his way down her throat and into her stomach. She didn’t flinch, didn’t react, didn’t so much as blink. Which meant that she had a reaction. She was working too hard to hide it.

  “Good, huh?” He refilled their glasses. “I know I feel better already.”

  She didn’t say a word, she just poured back the second shot, drinking right in sync with him.

  He reached for the bottle, but this time she stopped him from refilling her glass.

  “Mind if I get a real glass with ice?” she asked. “I’d like to return to the illusion that I’m civilized.”

  “Bartender, two glasses with ice.”

  “Thanks, Starrett,” she said, as Sam poured them both another drink.

  He glanced at her only briefly, aware that her gratitude had nothing to do with the whiskey he was pouring into her glass. “It’s no big deal.”

  “It’s actually a very big deal,” she told him. “And . . . I owe you an explanation.”

  He pushed her glass toward her, took a sip of his own drink, staring into the amber liquid so that he wouldn’t look at her.

  She had tears in her eyes again. It was hard work—this pretending not to notice.

  “You owe me nothing,” he said.

  “My mother died when I was thirteen,” Alyssa told him, her voice low. “I was the oldest, and I fought hard to keep my sisters and me together. I’d promised my mother I’d take care of them, and I made damn sure that I did.”

  Sisters. Plural. Hell. Sam knew what was coming. He swallowed a shot’s worth of whiskey from his glass and braced himself for it.

  “But . . .”

  Here it came.

  “Two years ago, my littlest sister, Lanora, died while giving birth.”

  Lanora. It all made sense now. God damn it . . .

  “It seems almost absurd, doesn’t it?” she asked in that same low, controlled voice, her face expressionless. “I mean, here it is, the twenty-first century. With all this technology—” She broke off, shaking her head. “There were complications. She had an aneurism during premature labor, and neither she nor the baby survived.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sam said. Crap, it sounded so inadequate.

  But she met his eyes, and whatever she saw there made her nod. “Thanks.” She gave him a smile.

  It was just a little smile, and it faded almost instantly, but oh, sweet Jesus, Alyssa Locke had actually smiled at him.

  “Burying Lanora was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she said even more quietly than before. “I felt as if I buried my heart with her.”

  Sam looked at Alyssa Locke, sitting there, staring down into her glass, and he wanted to cry. For years, he’d thought of her as heartless and cold. He’d had no idea what she’d been living through.

  “My cousin Jerry died of AIDS five years ago. He was my best friend back in grade school,” Sam told her, gazing down at the ice cubes in his own glass. “My sister Elaine and I were the only cousins who went to the funeral. Lainey came to the base and forced me to go back to Texas with her. She wouldn’t let me be a coward and hide from it—from the AIDS and what it meant—like all our other cousins. I’ve always been thankful to her for that. I don’t know what I’d do if she died. I know how I felt when Jerry was gone, and we hadn’t been close for years.” He looked up at her and put it all out on the line. “I can’t even imagine the depth of your loss, Alyssa.”

  She held his gaze a long time before looking away. “I was just starting to come back to life last year, when Tyra got pregnant . . .” Alyssa took a sip of her drink.

  Dear God. “So you’ve been in hell for the past nine months.”

  She met his eyes again and nodded. “Yeah. It’s stupid, I know. All the doctors told me that what happened to Lanora was some kind of freak thing. It wasn’t genetic. Tyra wasn’t in danger. Intellectually, I knew this. Emotionally . . .” She shook her head. “Emotionally, I’ve been a wreck.”

  Her tears back in the hospital had been from relief. After nine months of fear and anxiety, the relief had been too much to handle.

  Sam knew from his own experience that positive emotions were harder to control than the negative ones. Grief, anger, pain, and frustration. You got used to stuffing those feelings back down inside. But relief, when it hit, had a knockout punch. It could smack you flat on your ass, make grown men cry like babies.

  Like Alyssa Locke had cried.

/>   Sam toasted her with his glass. “Tonight, the waiting is over. Tyra is fine. Her baby is perfect, with a perfect name, too, I think. Tonight, s—” He stopped himself from calling her sweet thing, but just barely.

  She looked at him sharply, right in the eye, and he knew that she knew exactly what he’d been about to say. He cleared his throat. “Tonight, Ms. Locke, you can relax.”

  Alyssa Locke laughed. She was looking straight at him, and she actually laughed and then gave him a smile that nearly rivaled the wattage of the smiles he’d seen her shoot her strange little partner.

  “Well, praise the Lord,” she said, lifting her glass in a salute. “It’s a bonafide two-miracle night.”

  * * *

  “Mighty hot today, to be sitting inside a vehicle like that, with the window only half down,” the small-town Georgia policeman said to the dangerous Kazbekistani terrorist tied up in the backseat of Meg’s car.

  “I am used to the heat,” Razeen said in his heavily accented English. He’d gotten awfully lucid awfully fast. He must’ve been playing at being out of it when they’d first gotten out of the car, Meg realized. “Everything is fine. My young friends were having a lover’s quarrel. We all thought it best not to continue it while on the highway. We’ll be back on the road in no time, of this I am sure.”

  Meg looked at John. What the hell was going on? Why didn’t the cop see Razeen’s handcuffs? And why wasn’t Razeen screaming his head off that he was being kidnapped?

  She met John’s eyes. I love you. If he’d been looking for a diversion, that had worked. She’d been ready to pull out her gun, but his words—as untruthful as they were—had made her hesitate just a moment. Just long enough for Razeen to start talking.

  Why wasn’t he giving them up?

  “He figures he’ll have a better chance getting away from us,” John said, low enough so the cop couldn’t overhear him. “If he sounds an alarm, he’ll be taken into custody. And then he’s really screwed.”

  “Where you folks from?” the cop asked Razeen in his thick drawl. “What’s that accent you got there? French?”

  “French, yes. Oui,” Razeen lied. “I am from France. My friends, of course, are American.”

  “Heading down to Florida?” Apparently, to this cop, a foreigner was a foreigner was a foreigner. “This time of year, we get a lot of tourist traffic just passing on through.”

  “Tourists, that is right,” Razeen replied. “My friends are taking me to see your fabulous Disney World. I have heard it is not to be missed.”

  The cop seemed satisfied that they wouldn’t be staying in his jurisdiction for long. “You be sure to enjoy Mickey Mouse, you hear?”

  “I will, of that I am most certain.”

  The cop straightened up and looked at Meg carefully. She knew her eyes were red and her hair looked like hell. He looked from her to John Nilsson and back. He may not have known a Frenchman when he saw one, but he knew the signs of domestic trouble. “Everything all right, ma’am?”

  Heart in her throat, she nodded. “Yes, thank you.”

  He gestured with his head back behind them, toward the fence. “That old factory back there’s private property. You best get going as soon as possible. The owner don’t like folks hanging about out here.”

  “I think we’re ready to hit the road.” John headed around, past the cop, to the driver’s side of the car. “Honey, you got the keys?”

  He knew damn well that she had the keys. As Meg watched, unable to stop him, he climbed in behind the wheel.

  With the cop standing there, there was nothing she could do but get into the car and hand John those keys.

  His eyes were apologetic—no doubt because her own were shooting fire. “I’m going to do whatever I have to, to stick close to you,” he told her quietly. In Welsh.

  I love you. No doubt he’d been doing “what he’d had to” when he’d said that to her. It was no more real than her kissing him to get the car keys had been. She knew that. She’d known it the moment the words had left his lips.

  It was stupid the way her heart had leapt so crazily when he’d said it.

  As Meg clenched her teeth, John started the car. He did a three-point turn under the cop’s watchful eye and headed back toward the interstate.

  I love you.

  Right. She wanted to cry.

  This was just another game they were playing—a life and death game this time. And Meg had just lost this round.

  In every way imaginable.

  Sixteen

  LOCKE WAS WELL on her way to being skunked.

  She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had this much to drink.

  She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a drink, singular.

  She couldn’t remember why she’d ever had such an aversion to Ens. Sam Starrett. Ens. Roger Starrett. That was the man’s real name. Roger not Sam.

  Roger-not-Sam was one unbelievably gorgeous man.

  Provided, of course, that a woman went for tall, big-muscled, macho cowboy rednecks with long legs, perfect, perfect asses, sky blue eyes, and solid senses of humor.

  Funny how she’d never particularly noticed his sense of humor before. Right now, she couldn’t stop laughing at damn near everything he said.

  “Roger.” Locke laughed, and he laughed with her. He was nearly as skunked as she was.

  “You know, it really used to piss me off when you called me that,” he said in his good old boy drawl that used to piss her off, but now flowed past her like warm honey, “but right now I don’t mind it at all. What’dya know?”

  “If your name’s Roger,” she asked, propping her chin up in her hand on the bar, “why does everyone call you Sam? Or sometimes Bob. I’ve heard Stan Wolchonok call you Bob. Sam, Bob, anything but Roger.”

  He laughed, and she made herself frown at him. She was serious. She really wanted to know.

  “Bob is from some book,” he told her. “I don’t remember—you’ll have to ask the senior chief. He’s always reading something or another, and I think there was some book he read with some guy named Bob Starrett.” He poured her another drink. “Sam comes from Houston. You know, Sam Houston, famous Texan? The guys started calling me Houston, and the next thing I knew, I was Sam.”

  Locke tried to get it straight. “They called you Houston because you came from Houston?”

  “No, because my name was Roger, and I was from Texas, and you know, Roger, Houston? You know, like NASA?”

  “Got it.” Roger, Houston was what the astronauts said over the radio when they spoke to the NASA base in Houston from outer space. The fact that his first name was Roger had given him the nickname Houston. And once everyone started calling him Houston, the nickname Sam came out of that.

  It made sense in a too-skunked sort of way.

  Locke sighed and took a sip of her whiskey. It no longer had much of a taste. “Nobody ever gave me a nickname.”

  “Not true.”

  She looked at him, sitting there smiling at her, like some kind of cowgirl’s fantasy. “Sweet thing isn’t a nickname, Rog. It’s an insult. It’s objectifying. You know, all those generic so-called terms of endearment do nothing more than take away a woman’s individuality. You call me sweet thing and I’m one of two thousand nameless, faceless women you’ve encountered in your life. You call me Locke, I know without a doubt that you know who I am.”

  “Fair enough. Although two thousand might be a little high.”

  “What if I called you Cute Ass?” she said. “How would that make you feel?”

  Sam threw his head back and laughed. “Pretty damn good, actually.”

  “No, it would not.”

  “Hell, yes, it would. It would mean that maybe you spent some time checking me out. Because I know for a fact that I do have a particularly cute ass.” He topped off her drink again.

  “Trust me, it might be amusing for a while, but eventually it would make you feel as if you had no real value as a human being, and—” Locke stopped. L
ooked at her full glass. Looked at the bottle of whiskey that was nearly empty. Looked at his glass. Tried to remember when the last time was he’d picked it up and taken a drink. Couldn’t.

  As an experiment, she picked up her glass, took a healthy swallow, and set it back down on the bar.

  “How about if I call you Alyssa and you call me Sam?” he said. “No sweet thing, no cute ass, no Roger. That sound fair?”

  “But your name is Roger.”

  “I could argue that you are one very sweet thing,” Starrett replied. He laughed at the look on her face. “But I wouldn’t dare.”

  He picked up the bottle of whiskey and refilled her glass to the brim, and she remembered why she’d always had such an aversion to him.

  “You are!” she exclaimed. “You’re trying to get me drunk, aren’t you? You son of a—”

  “Whoa.” He put the bottle down. “I am not. I mean, yes, I am helping you forget your troubles, and frankly,” he said with a laugh, “I think I’ve already done a damn fine job of it, but I promise, my motives here are completely pure. No ulterior motives. Really. I’m not doing anything I didn’t do when WildCard had his meltdown a few months ago. I’m just . . . I’m trying to make sure you relax tonight.”

  He was protesting just a little too much. Locke narrowed her eyes at him. “I think you’re trying to get me drunk because you’ve got a meeting planned later with John Nilsson, and you want to make sure I can’t follow you.”

  He snorted. “That’s ridiculous.”

  But that was exactly what he would do and say if she were right and he was trying to throw her off course.

  “No, it’s not. And, guess what? I can still follow you.”

  She stood up, just to prove her point. The world wobbled, but she wouldn’t let herself teeter. She lifted her chin defiantly at Starrett. See?

  He laughed again. “Yeah, right. Siddown, Locke, before you fall on your face.”

  “I can. Go ahead.” She motioned toward the door. “Leave. I’ll follow you.”