“Dani,” she said automatically, although she had no way of knowing if her housemate would be home. Dani kept her own schedule, and Erin hadn’t told her when she was coming back. Had it really been just a few days ago that she’d left Boston in the first place? It seemed like a million years had passed. “She should be home, anyway. If not, I have a key, of course.”
Zander nodded. “Dani, then,” he said. “Good. Meanwhile, I suspect I’ll be visiting with a friend of my father’s for a few hours, then I’ll go home, too.”
Erin nodded, biting her lip. The she lifted her chin again. She had to ask. Once again, even if he laughed in her face, she had to ask. “And us?”
Zander paused a long moment, and as she watched, his face shifted a little, going carefully blank. As if he were a doctor about to give bad news. Or an employer about to talk layoffs.
Or a guy she’d lost her heart to one too many times, who was on the verge of telling her good-bye.
“Well, ‘us’ is still an open question, I guess,” he said at last, shaking his head. “And we should maybe think some more about what we want the answer to be.”
“You don’t know?” Erin’s voice sounded odd in her own ears, distant and cold. As if she already knew Zander’s ultimate answer—and maybe she did. Certainly the way his sharp eyes regarded her didn’t bode well. And neither did his hard, cutting tone, when he did finally answer her question.
“I thought I did, yeah.” He shrugged. “Now I don’t know anything anymore.”
Chapter 28
Zander could have kicked something, but he was too goddamned tired to even kick his own ass. The thought of landing and dealing with Mr. Jackson, his family, the empty hole that was his father’s place in his life…and now his screwed-up reactions to Erin. It was all just coming at him too fast. Erin had shut down, predictably, her waterworks apparently a onetime event in her life, never to be repeated. They’d no sooner landed then the pilot was all over the intercom, explaining to them who they’d be meeting at the private air terminal at Boston Logan, and where, and when, and how.
He’d been right, too. Erin had a car waiting for her. There was no reason for either of them to say anything else, so, of course, they hadn’t. And now she was driving away, and he was still standing there like an idiot, just as a second car drove up. The pilot poked his head out of the doorway at the top of the stairs and surveyed it, then called down to Zander.
“That’s your ride, Staff Sergeant!” he said, giving Zander a wave. “Now go and get a good meal and some sleep, my man. You look like shit!”
Zander laughed, shaking his head. When the limo pulled up, he practically fell inside.
“Well,” Mr. Jackson said, seated across from him. “You’ve been busy.”
“Sir, I owe you a debt of thanks I don’t think I can ever adequately repay,” Zander said, cutting right to the chase. “I don’t know how you knew where I was, or what I’d been doing, but your generosity in sending a plane to Laredo and getting us out of there in such speed and comfort…” He found himself staring down at his hands, and forced himself to look up again. “Much appreciated, sir.”
Mr. Jackson smiled. “Your debt, as you choose to call it, is to tell me the whole story. I only got a very abbreviated version, and I told you, I keep an eye on my people. You should know I’m also a close personal friend of your CO.” He paused. “I’m not convinced that your activities on either side of the border are exactly what he had in mind for somebody on a leave of absence to return home for a family funeral.”
Zander went still. Was this the price of Erin’s safety, then? Would he be reported? He had fired a gun, even though it was in self-defense. “Sir, I assure you, my concern was only for the well-being of my friend.”
“Your friend, yes. Erin Connelly. The young woman who so effectively derailed your West Point plans all those years ago, now back in your life and coming all too close to derailing your military aspirations as well.”
Now it was Zander’s turn to sit back. “Sir?”
“There’s something you need to be aware of, son. Something you should have been aware of a long time since, if your father, God rest his stubborn soul, had not been such an ass.”
Zander stiffened, but Jackson waved him off. “No, he was. He was also my dearest friend, so I can say this with the proper amount of force. Your dad was a man of secrets, some that he kept from the ones who would most have benefited from them. One of those secrets has been kept too long.” He leaned forward, rummaging through a leather case at his feet. “He knew, Zander. He knew about your hell-raising, knew about the races. Knew enough to debate long and hard about warning the police in advance, asking for leniency should there ever come a time that you got yourself in trouble. He was a good man, with good sons, including yourself. He was proud of all of you.”
Zander snorted, but didn’t speak as Jackson continued. “And that night, the police officer who arrested you told him who had placed the 911 call. Not the name of the woman, he didn’t know that. But that she was young, unquestionably a teenager, and that she was scared. It didn’t take a rocket scientist for him to figure out who it was.”
Zander stared. “He never told me that.”
“Yes, well, he didn’t tell you a lot of things. But that didn’t mean he didn’t pay attention. In the end, he was proud that you owned up to your mistake. He hated it, absolutely hated it that you didn’t go to school first, but he was proud of you for enlisting.”
“I wasn’t an officer.”
“You weren’t an officer, no. But you were all these things.” Jackson pulled out a long, slender ledger book, completely unadorned. “He kept this in his office at the war college, where he kept a number of important papers, later entrusted to me, and all of which I’ve returned to your mother. Except this. He’d not thank me for giving it to you, but as I said, he was a stubborn son of a bitch. And my very good friend.” He handed the book to Zander. “Open it.”
Zander frowned, opening the book to see his name written on the inside cover in his father’s jerky scrawl. Not just once, but a half dozen times. He’d written PFC Zander James first, then it was crossed out. Directly underneath, he’d written Zander’s name again, with Specialist before it. And then Corporal and on up. There were two ranks that received special notice. Zander’s last promotion, to staff sergeant, and his designation as Ranger. Both of these were circled three times.
Opposite the front cover was the notice his mother had put in the paper about Zander’s enlistment, complete with his first official army photograph. The page had been taped into the book, and there were several pages behind it, all of them thick with additional taped-in articles, pictures and documents. Zander glanced up to Jackson. “This is a scrapbook,” he said flatly. “My father didn’t keep scrapbooks.”
“Your father was a complicated man. The product of his father, and of the path his father chose,” Jackson said. “The product of the path he chose as well. But he wasn’t a stupid man, Zander. He didn’t get as far as he did in life by not noticing the details.” He gestured to the scrapbook. “I just wanted you to know that he did notice. He noticed, and he was proud of you, even though he chose never to share that with you.”
Zander closed the book resolutely and squared it on his knees. He would deal with it later. He suspected that Mr. Jackson hadn’t gone to all of this trouble just to give him a memento of his father, and sooner or later there would be an accounting to be made for everything he had done over the last few days. Hell, the cost of flying that bird all the way to Texas and back could not have been insubstantial. He looked up to see Jackson still studying him, an inscrutable expression on his face.
“So what’s next, sir?” he asked.
“Next is we take you to my company’s physician and make sure you’re not injured.” He waved off Zander’s protest. “Your mother has enough on her mind without worrying about you. Do you have any known injuries?”
Zander scowled. “No, sir.”
“Well, we’ll check anyway. Then you’re going home, son. Your mother has bought my little story that you’ve been with my men on a training expedition. The message she left my admin was polite and only mildly curious, wondering when you might be returning. It seems she wants to throw you a party tomorrow night with your favorite foods, and she needed to prepare for that.”
At Zander’s mystified look, Jackson chuckled. “Don’t worry, my admin has received enough of those kind of calls that she knows to ask for details. Apparently your favorite foods are picnic food—fried chicken, corn, tomatoes, potato salad. Your mom is going to add to that beer, wine, and some sort of high-sugar lemonade that has been your favorite since you were a little boy. Sounds like a really good party.” He shot Zander a long look. “In fact, it sounds like the kind of party a mother probably wanted to throw for her son right before he went off to college, only instead he decided to head off to basic training, without telling anyone where he was going until he was already on his way.”
But Zander was looking out the window now, watching the suburbs roll by. “Sir,” was all he said.
—
Erin clutched her two backpacks in her lap as the limo pulled onto her street, startled at how different the brownstones of her neighbors looked to her eyes, when she’d only been gone a few days. “It’s right here,” she said, and the driver dutifully pulled to a stop, double-parking in front of her home. “You don’t have to—oh.” She held backpacks up against her chest with one arm as the young man walked around the car, opening her door and holding out a hand for her. She took it and stepped out into the soft Boston evening, thanking the man for the seventeenth time.
He nodded to the house. “Friend of yours?”
Dani had opened the front door and was leaning against the doorframe, her face coolly curious as she watched them both. Erin smiled. “Definitely,” she said, and turned up the walkway as the man returned to the driver’s side. She’d barely made it to the front door when she smelled something positively mouthwatering. “Pizza?” she asked hopefully, and Dani grinned.
“Nothing but the best.”
Her housemate led her back to the kitchen, and Erin dropped her stuff on the side bureau, marveling at how strange the hallway seemed, too. Maybe she was going through some latent kind of shock? Some sort of mild posttraumatic stress? She supposed it was possible. At this point, she was willing to expect anything.
What she didn’t expect was the sight that greeted her when she rounded the entryway into Gran Ginny’s kitchen.
“That’s not my stove,” she said abruptly. “And everything’s, um…clean.”
“Yeah, well.” Dani snorted. “You beat the shit out of your stove a few days ago, in case you didn’t notice. I had no intention of cleaning that sucker. And it stunk. All of it stunk.” Dani went to the cupboard and pulled out plates and glasses to go with the box of pizza and bottle of wine on the kitchen table. Erin flipped open the cover of the box, then sank down in a kitchen chair, too tired to even process how Dani had found and gotten a gleaming stainless-steel oven installed in the past two days. It was Boston, so anything was possible, but still. That sort of thing usually took time. And money.
Dani sat down opposite her, pulling out a piece of pizza for herself and then gazing at Erin, her eyes raking her face. “So, for real. You guys broke up.”
“What?” Erin drew back as if she had been slapped. “How in the…we were never dating. That’s not what was going on here.”
“Nooo,” Dani agreed, shaking her head. She slung herself back in her chair, sticking her legs out. “What was going on was you getting a frantic voice mail, what, about a week ago now? Maybe two? Which you left on your phone. The phone you left here, coincidentally. The most responsible woman in the world disappears for two days without so much as a warning, and she leaves her cell phone behind, as well as an Internet trail of long and busy activity at her bank and mortgage holder. As well as a concerned financial institution who called said left-behind phone and texted said left-behind phone a string of messages asking for transaction confirmation.”
Erin stared at her. “You got into my phone?”
“Please. I figured out your passwords the first week I was here. Not to take anything,” Dani assured her, waving around the place. “You don’t have anything I need, ’Rin. We established that pretty early on.” She shrugged. “But after you left this week, I thought I might as well confirm everything that you were doing was something you actually wanted to do, since you’d clearly set that ball in motion. Without telling me any of the details, I might add.”
Erin sighed, slumping back again. “It wasn’t supposed to be any big deal.”
“Right,” Dani said dryly. “Which is why you took your badass boyfriend with you. I got a visit from his overseers as well.”
That pulled Erin up short. “The army? They came here?”
“Not exactly.” Dani grinned, the expression transforming her face from its usual narrow-eyed skepticism into a flash of sharp beauty. “Security firm of some sort, from what I gathered. Something a little bit above and beyond rent-a-cops. They showed up yesterday morning, wanting the world. Your computers, phone records, the whole nine yards.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Not even a little bit. I told them to go fuck themselves, of course, and we had a nice little chat. They insisted that they were in this to help your boy Zander out with backup, just in case it was necessary. Once they told me what you were actually doing on your little sojourn in Mexico, I decided that sounded reasonable. Plus they gave me a ride back to HQ so I could meet the big boss. Very swank digs they have there. And lots of toys.”
“You went with a group of strange guys into a fortified security firm,” Erin said, not believing her ears.
“Oh, honey. I’ve done far worse than that. And I was bored. So, you know. Win-win.” Dani fished a card out of her denim shorts and tossed it on the table. “I looked the main guy up. This Jackson character. He served with Zander’s father, so I figured he was as much on the up-and-up as I was going to get, and I did like the idea of backup for you both, if things went south.” Dani waggled her brows. “I take it you were successful, though? Right up until the breakup part?”
Erin sighed. “We were successful. It was my mom.”
Dani let the front legs of her chair crash back to the kitchen floor. “Your mom. I thought your mom was dead.”
“Yeah, well.” Erin shook her head. She’d actually forgotten she’d told Dani that particular version of the story. There had been so many versions over the years. She wondered if this last one would hold—the tearful reunion, the promises of reconciliation, of tentative, hopeful outreach. She wasn’t holding her breath; she suspected she wouldn’t see her mother again anytime soon. But at least she was safe. At least she was—for now, anyway—safe. “She has a habit of not staying dead.”
“Hear, hear,” Dani said dryly. She picked up her glass and held it high until Erin joined her in a toast. “The past has a way of doing that.” She watched Erin down another sip of wine before she went on. “So the security dudes pretty much thought you’d been tagged by a ransom demand—they didn’t know for whom, though. Looks like your mom was the target?” Pause for Erin’s nod. “And you tagged Zander because you’re not an idiot, and he went because…why? He’s been carrying a torch all these years? He was bored? He has a hero complex?”
Erin shrugged. “I told him I’d pay him?”
Dani flashed another smile. “Yeah, right. Not even you can believe that. Well, I know it worked. I ended up with one of the guy’s numbers, and he clued me in that the op was successful. Of course, now I’m roped into dinner with said guy. I’ll deal with that later. But either way, Zander agreed, you split, you got your mom out, Joe Security sends a plane to whisk you to safety, and—then what happened? Why do you look like your grandma just tossed your favorite stuffed animal into the washing machine?”
“Because he still hates me.” Irr
itation flashed through Erin as Dani snorted a laugh.
“Um, no,” Dani said. “News flash. If a guy hates you, he doesn’t agree to help you save your mom from Mexican drug lords. There are way easier ways for him to show his disdain.”
Erin shook her head. “You don’t know Zander,” she said.
“Yeah, but—” An unfamiliar chirp interrupted their conversation, and Dani stood, striding over to the kitchen counter to where her phone rested. She peered down at it, hitting a few buttons. Then she turned and settled against the countertop, waving the phone at Erin. “I win.”
Erin blinked, suddenly recognizing the device. “Hey, that’s my phone,” she said, getting up from the table. “But that sound—”
“Dude. I was not going to listen to Beethoven’s Fifth every time you got a text. I would have broken up with you myself.” She held the phone high as Erin reached for it, well out of her grasp. “But tell me you’re sorry. Tell me that I know everything.”
“I learned how to kill someone with two fingers yesterday, Dani,” Erin growled. “Give me the damn phone.”
Dani laughed and dropped the phone into Erin’s waiting hands. She scrolled to the text, and the message made her heart almost stop beating. It was from Zander.
That didn’t end right. Come to the house tomorrow night at 6? Mom throwing party. And I need your help.
She stared from the phone to Dani. “My help?” she asked.
“An Army Ranger needs your help?”
“Not as far as I could see.” Erin frowned, reading the text over again. That didn’t end right. “I wonder what he means, about the way it ended. I don’t know that I could handle ending things in some new and special way, you know?”
“How do you know he’s going to end things at all?” Dani asked reasonably, but Erin shook her head. She thought of the look on Zander’s face when she’d admitted her weakness. Admitted her reasoning. The scorn in his eyes as she’d tried to explain. The way he’d stared at her when she’d finally gotten up the nerve to ask about their future.
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