“Until we find out the truth, we won’t be able to fight them. We need to find your dad.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying all along,” she said and gave him a smile. “One of these days you just might start listening to me.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.” She pulled his head down to hers, and kissed him. “Starting right now,” she said, and whispered something very naughty in his ear.
Chapter Nine
As Genie lay on the bed waiting for her heartbeat to slow and her body temperature to cool, a sound came from out back. Just a slight crunch of gravel.
“Shit,” she whispered and jumped out of bed. Kyle was right behind her. She ran to the front room where she’d left her clothes and her gun. Stupid. She knew better than to leave herself so exposed and vulnerable. And so did Kyle. She slipped on her panties and grabbed Kyle’s shirt, buttoning it while she headed for the kitchen and the back door. Kyle stepped into his pants and gestured to her as he eased out the front door. He was going to circle around the back of the house.
She was just buttoning the last button on the shirt when the back doorknob turned. With two quick steps forward, she slipped behind the door just as it started opening.
“Hold it right there,” she said, pointing her gun at the back of the man who’d just stepped through the door.
He stopped, and without turning held up his hands. A long stringer of fish dangled from his outstretched fingers. She’d know that frame, those wide, rounding shoulders, and that growing middle anywhere.
“Oh my God, Dad!” Genie launched herself at her dad, plowing into him and almost knocking him over. “Where the heck have you been?”
“Genie! It’s okay. I’m all right.” A huge smile filled his face as one arm—the one not holding the fish—wrapped around her shoulders and patted her back.
After a minute, she stepped away, set down her gun and flipped on the light. Then she looked at him. Really looked at him. At the fishing cap plastering down his wiry grey hair, the two-day-old stubble and the tired lines pulling at his eyes.
“I’ve been so worried.”
“Me, too,” he said. “About you. What’s important is that we’re both okay. I knew you’d find me. Now how about some trout for dinner?”
Before she could answer, Kyle stepped in through the back door. The smile immediately dropped from her father’s face and tension rose through the room like a thick vaporous cloud.
“It’s all right, Dad,” Genie said quickly. “Kyle rescued me from Emerich’s men in the desert. He’s been helping me.”
Her dad’s hard gaze slid down her bare legs beneath Kyle’s shirt then over to Kyle’s bare chest. He grunted then pushed past her toward the sink, turned on the water and dropped the fish into the basin.
“If you don’t mind explaining what’s been going on, sir?” Kyle said, shutting and locking the door behind him. “We’ve had one hell of a day.”
“I don’t have anything to say,” her dad said without turning around or taking his attention off his catch.
“We’re only here to help,” Kyle reiterated. He leaned back against the wall, using the casual stance Genie recognized from when he wanted to make a suspect or informant feel at ease. He needn’t have bothered. Her father wasn’t giving him so much as a glance.
“Cameron send you?” Her dad asked.
“In a manner of speaking. He sent me to collect Genie. Things just sort of escalated from there.”
Stuart snorted as he picked up a fish and sliced open its belly from head to tail then expertly dragged his finger down the fish’s middle and wiped its insides clean. “I can only imagine.”
“So?” Kyle prompted, ignoring the jibe.
“Sorry, son, but like I said, I can’t help you.”
Kyle pushed off the wall, stiffening with frustration.
Genie put a hand on his arm and gave him a look of commiseration, but the truth was, no matter what Kyle said or did, her father wasn’t going to talk to him. Kyle was part of CTA and until her Dad discovered who within the organization was trying to hurt his family, he wouldn’t trust anyone.
“Dad, we have been through a lot today. A little explanation would be nice.”
Her dad turned to her. A half-turn, really, since his hand was still buried in a fish. “I realize that, but someone has been wreaking havoc with my family and, right now, I don’t trust anyone.” He looked at Kyle. “Not anyone.”
“We believe Emerich tried to take Genie today. We were lucky and got there in time.” Kyle’s words hung in the air. “Where were you?”
Her dad ignored Kyle’s repost, turned off the water, and dried his hands on a nearby towel. “How do you suppose that was possible? Emerich would have no way of knowing where Genie was today without inside help.”
“They went after Cat, too,” Genie said.
Her dad’s eyes widened slightly. If she didn’t know him so well, she might not have seen it. “Is she okay? What about the kids?”
“Yes,” Kyle answered. “We got her and her family out just before Emerich’s men arrived.”
“By the skin of our teeth,” Genie muttered.
“They should be in D.C. with Cameron by now.”
Her father looked down at the floor for a long minute, processing, and then looked back up at Kyle. “I hope that will be good enough, but until I discover who Emerich’s bought dog in the CTA is, we really can’t count on anything or anyone.” Again, he looked pointedly at Kyle.
Genie took a fortifying breath. “Dad, we are at a complete loss. We don’t know what Emerich wants from Cat or me. I can only think it’s leverage against you. But then what does he want from you?”
Her dad gave a clueless shrug. “Got me.”
“Whatever he wants, it was clearly not to hurt the girls. He wanted them alive. Any reason you can think of as to why?” Kyle asked, his gaze drilling into her father.
But her father didn’t say a word.
“Until we figure that out, he’ll always be one step ahead of us.” Genie rose, moving to stand in front of him. “We can’t do this without you, Dad. We need to know what’s going on. Please help us.”
Her father’s intelligent gaze perused her face, and then he looked at Kyle. His lips tightened, his face closing. Somehow she’d have to get him to open up. Either that, or get Kyle to leave. She didn’t know which option would be tougher.
She looked at Kyle with his wrinkled air-dried slacks and bare chest. His sharp gaze saw everything. When he looked at her like that, like he was waiting for her to take the lead and make the next move, giving her the space she needed, it was hard not to walk over to him and slip her arms around his waist and rest her cheek against his chest. He just got her. He always had. Always. Why hadn’t she seen that before now? What a fool she’d been. She sighed.
“Dad, I trust him.” She hadn’t planned on saying the words aloud, but as soon as she did, she knew they were true. She did trust him, and she definitely wanted him here to help her with this. With everything, from now on. “He’s a damn good agent. You know that.”
Her father rubbed a hand down his face, hesitated for a moment then dropped into a chair at the table. He looked up at her, eyes tired and shoulders slumped. “I’ve spent a whole lifetime keeping secrets, building a carefully constructed life to protect us, to protect you girls, but it’s all coming down around us.”
It was uncanny. She’d said nearly those exact same words to herself that morning. Her dad wasn’t an empath like his daughters, but he did think a lot like Genie. This morning she’d been desperately worried. Now, with Kyle at her side, she was feeling much more confident.
Could it finally be time to let the past go, and bring all their secrets out into the open? If they did, perhaps then they’d all be able to build futures without fear, and live normal lives.
“For the past few years, while you’ve been building your career at CTA, Becca wasn’t floating around Europe working on her art like she’d
led all of us to believe,” he continued.
Genie slid into the chair across from her father and clutched her hands together beneath the table. Everything always came back to Becca.
“Becca didn’t meet Emerich in some out-of-the-way museum in France, she’s known him for years. They went to boarding school together.”
“So why the subterfuge?” Genie asked. The out-and-out lies? But as annoyance flared within her, she knew. Because with Becca everything always had to have a flare of drama. Emerich couldn’t have just been someone she knew from school, a fellow classmate, a high school crush. He had to be a misunderstood artist, a poet, a freaking bleeding-heart terrorist.
“I don’t know. I found that out last year,” her father said. “Apparently he was a rich brat, an orphan with a trust fund that none of his relatives wanted.”
“And someone Becca could easily relate to.” Genie’s bitter and sarcastic words slipped out without warning, and once they were out in the open in front of them, she couldn’t take them back. But the truth was, she didn’t want to take them back. She wanted her father to know that what he’d done by taking away their family, their security, at such an impressionable age, had not been okay. In many ways, they were still paying for it.
Her father’s eyes narrowed. “I didn’t want to send you girls away. I had no choice. You know that.”
“Do I? Why was there no choice? Were we in danger? Even then, at twelve years old?”
“Your mother had just died. I-I had taken the job in D.C. and I couldn’t look after you properly.”
As she stared at him, she wondered how she’d so easily bought into that tired and weak excuse before? She’d never once questioned it or him. “Ever hear of nannies, Dad? Not to mention the timing doesn’t fit. You took that job after we were separated. Why do that? Why the fanatical secrecy?”
He slapped his palm against the table and leaned toward her. “You know why. I hadn’t accepted the job yet, but I knew I would. You were going to be the daughters of the Director of the National Counter-Terrorism Agency. If someone had gotten hold of you, had taken you— Do I really have to spell out what they could have done to you to get to me? Or vice versa?”
“Was there ever a specific threat?” she pushed.
“Other than your mother’s death?”
“But you said—” She halted, no longer able to speak as something cold and sinuous slid through her. Something that originated from her father. Her mother’s death hadn’t been an accident. Something more nefarious had happened. She met Kyle’s cold, hard eyes. He gave her a slight nod.
Her father glanced away. Evading. “Everyone said it was an accident.”
Everyone.
“But you thought differently?” she pressed. She had to know the truth. No matter how painful. Her dad was transmitting emotions like a beacon. For the first time since childhood, Genie let down her barriers and let his feelings wash over her.
His guilt. His anguish.
His love for her mother.
“I didn’t know what to think,” he said, still not looking at her. “I was overwhelmed. Distraught. Something about it didn’t sit right, but—”
“But there was no proof, nothing you could put your finger on?” It was like pulling teeth, trying to get more from him. What had happened? Fear coiled inside her.
“No,” he said. “There was nothing. Not a single questionable thing. It was an accident, just like everyone said.”
He was lying. She felt it with every fiber of her being. “Then don’t you think making us change our names and move to different parts of the globe was a bit much?”
“I couldn’t take any chances. Not with you girls. I love you all so much. It would have—” He took a deep breath, looking smaller somehow than the formidable man she always thought him to be. Maybe all these years she’d just seen what she wanted to see, and believed what she thought she could accept. She glanced at Kyle who was leaning against the wall again, silent as a glowering statue.
“I’d already lost too much,” her father said softly.
“There’s more you’re not telling me,” she insisted, refusing to fall into the sympathy trap he was laying for her, as she always had before. “You know it, and I know it. Tell me, Dad.” He knew she was able to read him, though she’d always refrained out of respect.
Disbelief flashed across his face as he sensed her now, then he straightened and leaned forward, his lips thinning into a straight line. She knew that look. Knew it meant she wasn’t going to get another word out of him on the subject. It also meant he knew he’d screwed up, but was refusing to own up to it.
Because Stuart Marsters was always the one in charge, but never the one responsible.
“So, Becca…” she said, changing the subject before she lost complete control of the conversation. And to throw him off kilter. “You knew she met Emerich at school?”
He visibly relaxed, leaning back in his chair, resting his hands across his stomach. “When she fell in love with him, I told her what CTA had on him. She insisted we were wrong. She said she’d known him way back from their school days and he couldn’t do those things we suspected him of. That CTA—meaning I—was trying to ruin her life, as usual. She refused to believe any part of it.”
“Could she have been right? Did she have proof, something to refute our evidence against him?”
“She had nothing but anger and accusations.”
“Isn’t all this something you should have told me a long time ago?”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference.”
“Maybe that’s why she wanted to meet with me, because she’d gotten nowhere with you. Had I known what she’d been thinking, what she’d only wanted—”
“It wouldn’t have mattered,” he cut her off. “She didn’t trust CTA, and you were part of it back then.”
“But if I’d known all this, I would have tried harder to reach her, to help her see the truth about that man.” Genie’s voice thinned, becoming shrill. She didn’t like it, but there it was. She was losing more control by the second. Everything about this entire situation was tweaking her buttons. “She’d wanted to talk to me, Dad! She told me to meet her at that warehouse. Obviously it had to do with Emerich, with CTA, with you! And now she’s—” She stopped herself.
“Genie—”
She held up a hand for him to stop. She had to get hold of her emotions. She had to stay focused. If Becca wasn’t dead as Genie’d believed for the last eight months, had she deliberately disappeared out of fear? Or was her sister just playing some freaking demented game only she and Emerich were privy too? And how much of any of this did her father have the answers to? Answers he wasn’t about to give her.
“She couldn’t see the truth, Genie,” he said. “Emerich’d had years to work on her, to corrupt her to his way of thinking. There was no getting through to her. Believe me, I tried.”
She shook her head, trying to wrap her brain around the tangled mess. “But why would Emerich have targeted her way back in boarding school? They were kids. What would he have had to gain?”
Her father looked down again, examining his nails as if they held all the secrets of the world, then he pushed back his chair. “Well, I don’t know about you two, but I hear those trout calling. I’m starving.”
“What about Tom Garrison?” Kyle asked from his spot against the wall. “Who is he?”
Her father stiffened, but didn’t turn. Didn’t acknowledge Kyle in any way.
She’d been surprised by his question, too, but was glad he’d had the presence of mind to ask it.
When her father kept stubbornly silent, frustration pulsed through her.
“Dad, the secrecy has got to stop!”
He pulled a frying pan out of the cupboard next to the stove.
“We found that article in your memento box next to your pictures of Mom. Why was it in there? Who was that man? Did he have something to do with her accident?”
Her father grabbed a knife
from the block and chopped off the head and tail of one fish after another. The pounding thud of the knife hitting the cutting board—chop, chop, chop—grated on Genie’s nerves. She wanted to scream at him to stop. To sit down. To tell her the truth. She pushed back from the table and stood.
“Please Dad, if it’s important, tell me! Because if you had told me the truth about Becca and Emerich, maybe I could have done something to—”
He spun toward her, knife in one hand, fish in the other. “Could have what? Saved Becca? Blaming yourself never does any good for anyone. Haven’t I always taught you that?”
“I’m not blaming myself. Why would I blame myself for Becca’s death when she’s not even dead!”
Her father stared at her with cold fury in his eyes. But not shock. He already knew. The truth had been there, just waiting for her to feel it. And maybe that’s why he had sent her away to be sequestered alone in the desert instead of coming here to live with him.
“For eight months you led me to believe that Becca was dead. Why?”
“Like I said before, Genie. If you want to discuss Becca, if you want to talk about our private family issues, then we will have to be alone.” His cold gaze shifted to Kyle. “There are some things I won’t talk about with outsiders present. Ever.”
Hell, no.
Genie reached for Kyle’s hand and pulled him closer to her. “I want him here,” she said, surprising even herself.
“Anything that’s said will not leave this room,” Kyle assured him, stepping behind her. His hands on her shoulders felt good. He was on her side. She felt it to her bones.
Her father looked at Kyle long and hard, then placed the last cleaned fish on a plate. He pulled down a plastic container of flour from the cupboard along with a bottle of oil that he poured into the pan. He flipped on the fan above the stove. He wasn’t going to budge on this.
Genie turned to Kyle, frustrated to the max. They exchanged a look. “What do we do now?”
He jerked his chin toward the other room, and they walked out of the kitchen toward the bedroom, picking up the clothes they’d strewn along the way. Genie quickly dressed and gave Kyle his shirt. He put it on, buttoning it up.
Deadly Secrets, Loving Lies Page 13
