by Julie Miller
“You were a child.”
Cal didn’t say anything for a long minute. “When I asked you to hide in the closet, I was doing the same thing that Chase had done for me. Protecting. For good reason, perhaps. But it was the wrong thing to do.”
“I’m not angry,” she said.
“I was. After Brick told me, I couldn’t keep my head on straight. The underlying message was clear. You can’t protect yourself so I’ll do it for you. No matter what the cost to me.” How the hell was something like that supposed to make a guy feel?
Emasculated. Impotent. “What did you say to Chase?”
“Nothing. I couldn’t. As fast as I could, I enlisted in the navy and left home. Chase was shocked, to say the least. I’d just graduated with a mechanical engineering degree. I’d never talked about enlisting. And suddenly, I was in and on my way to basic training.”
“Why did you do it?”
“I had to. I had something to prove. That I didn’t need anybody fighting my battles. I was determined to be the best, the toughest. Nobody would ever have to take care of me again. When an opportunity came up to become a SEAL, I didn’t hesitate.”
She sat quietly, processing everything that he’d said. “And you and Chase have never talked about this.”
“Nope. I sort of stopped talking to him at all. Look, I’m not proud of that but I was twenty-two and very angry with him. Yet, I loved him and knew that I owed him a great deal. With those conflicting emotions, I felt it was better to just be away. Chase and I have communicated over the years but we’ve never really talked. That’s why I was coming home this Thanksgiving. It’s time. Past time.”
She understood much better that myriad of emotions she heard in his voice whenever he talked about his brother. “I’m betting that’s going to be a really good conversation,” she said. “You’ll handle it beautifully.”
He shrugged. “We’ll see. He needs to understand that I’m not angry any longer. I get why he did what he did.” He looked her in the eye. “And I will try very hard to never ask you to hide in another closet.”
“Thank you,” she said softly. “And thank you for telling me about Brick and about Chase. You know, you’ve got your head on pretty straight.”
He shrugged. “I thought you should know, especially since we...”
“We did it,” she teased, wanting desperately to lighten the mood.
“Yeah. Since we did it.” He stood up and stretched, yawning widely. “I’m still real happy about that, you know.”
She felt warm. “I’m probably going to turn in shortly,” she said. “I’m hoping that you’re not planning on sleeping downstairs.” She wanted him in her bed. She wanted his heat, his strength, his incredible maleness to surround her. To insulate her from the rest of the world.
She wanted him inside her again.
She held out her hand. “Come with me.”
* * *
WHEN SHE WOKE UP the next morning, Cal was already awake. He was watching her. “Hi,” she said, a little self-conscious. “What are you looking at?”
He smiled. “Dessert.”
She raised an eyebrow. “As I recall, you had a couple helpings last night.”
“There are certain times when it’s just damn foolish to count calories.”
She’d been counting orgasms. Four.
“Remember anything else while you were sleeping?” he asked, his tone gentle.
She shook her head. “Today will be the day. I just know it.”
“I know you have your hopes pinned on what we might get from Pietro but I don’t want you to be disappointed.”
She sat up in bed. When the sheet dropped to her waist, she pulled it up fast but not before Cal gave her a look of pure male appreciation. “Of course I’ll be disappointed. But not devastated. There’s a difference.” She smoothed down the sheet, running the palm of her hand over it several times. “It’s Friday. I think I’m running out of time.”
He nodded. “So we should get up and get going.”
She would much rather stay in bed and play. “Yes,” she said, already swinging her legs over the side.
They ate a quick breakfast of cereal and toast. When they walked outside, she could tell the weather had warmed up considerably, probably to the midforties. That, combined with the sunny day, was making the remaining snow and ice melt quickly.
When they passed Fitzler’s, she didn’t tease him any more about buying the property. But she saw him take a long look, as if he might be sizing the place up.
When they got to the spot where Cal had found her, there were spots in the vast expanse of land where the ground, an ugly green-brown, showed through. It looked so different than it had just forty-eight hours before.
But then again, she was very different, too.
A woman couldn’t leave Cal Hollister’s bed unchanged.
Cal had touched her heart, too. Of course she was different. When he’d listened and really heard her request to not be shuffled to the back of the closet, she’d known that something powerful had happened. It had been a connection that she still wasn’t sure she understood but it had told her everything she needed to know about Cal Hollister and the kind of man he was.
They pulled into the diner parking lot and went through the same routine as before. She got out of sight, Cal checked the parking lot, then entered the diner alone. At three minutes, she followed.
Unfortunately, Lena wasn’t working. It was a younger waitress who was hurrying back and forth with coffee and heaping plates of food.
She slid into the booth, anxious to see if there was any sign of recognition. It was impossible to know how many people G had shown her picture to. “Coffee?” the waitress asked, barely giving them a glance. Her name tag said Laura.
They both nodded and Laura hurried away, presumably to get them cups. Cal got up from the booth and snagged a newspaper off the stack that was haphazardly lying at the end of the counter. He sat back down and started quickly scanning the contents, flipping through the pages.
“Looking for something in particular?” she asked.
“Nope. Just looking,” he said.
She didn’t believe that. Cal probably never did anything without intention.
He pushed the newspaper in her direction. “Why don’t you take a look?”
She shrugged. “Can’t hurt,” she said. The front page was primarily devoted to national news and then it turned more local on the inside pages. She scanned the obituaries and passed up the food ads. The second section of the paper was Sports.
And the hair on the back of her neck stood up. Her hand hovered over the page, anxious to flip, not able to complete the action.
“What?” Cal asked immediately.
Laura chose that moment to return to the table, two coffee cups in one hand, setting them down with a thud.
She watched as Laura took a pen out of her pocket. At least somebody was acting in a normal, expected manner. Not like her, who practically had a panic attack over a newspaper. What the hell was wrong with her?
“What can I get you this morning?” Laura asked.
Instead of ordering, Cal looked toward the kitchen. “We were hoping to catch up with Pietro while we were here,” he said.
“Good luck,” Laura said. “He didn’t show this morning.”
Her hand started to shake. She put down her coffee cup before the liquid sloshed over the rim. “Is he sick?”
Laura shrugged and looked toward the door as a table of four came in. “Not sure. But he hasn’t called in and the owner is really pissed. He’s acting like Pietro does this all the time. I’ve worked here for over a year and have never seen it before. The guy is a jerk.”
“Pietro?” Cal attempted to clarify.
“No. The owner.” She tapped her p
en on the order pad. “What would you like?”
Cal pushed the menus to the edge of the table. “We’ll take four of your cinnamon rolls to go and if you could put these coffees in some paper cups, that would be great.” He pulled a twenty out of his shirt pocket. “You can keep the change.”
Laura scooped up the money and their coffee cups. “I’ll be right back.”
“What do you think?” she asked once the woman was out of hearing range.
“It’s odd,” Cal admitted. “And when odd things happen, we should pay attention. But first, tell me about the newspaper.”
“There’s something here,” she said, her voice soft. “I can feel it.”
“Which article?”
She looked at the Sports section again. There was a big article about the St. Louis Blues hockey team, a smaller article about coaching changes in the National Baseball League and several blurbs about local sporting events coming up on the weekend.
“None of them,” she admitted. “It’s just an overall sense of unease.”
“You have a lot of sports knowledge,” he said. “For a girl,” he added, his tone teasing.
As always, Cal had the most amazing way of adding just a little humor right when it was desperately needed. “We need to find Pietro.”
“Agreed. That’s why we’re taking our stuff to go.”
In less than three minutes, they were in the car. Once they got out of the parking lot and back onto the highway, Cal drove with one hand and held a cinnamon roll in the other. She felt too nervous to eat but she sipped her coffee.
“How do we play this?” she asked as they got closer.
“I’ve been thinking about that.” He took a big drink of coffee. “I think we need to be prepared for the possibility that something happened to him. After all, to unexpectedly not show for work and not call...”
Her coffee started to roll in her stomach. “You think something happened to him because he talked to me?”
“I don’t know. But it does seem odd that your conversation was yesterday and today, this.”
“I’m like the damn plague,” she said, so irritated with the whole situation that she could barely stand it. She wanted to thump her head against the window, to shake loose the memories that refused to come back.
“You might be the catalyst but you’re not the person responsible for anything that’s happening,” he said. “And I could be way off. I said we simply needed to be prepared.”
He wasn’t wrong. Something had happened to Pietro and it likely had something to do with her and the Mercedes Men.
When they got close to Pietro’s house, Cal did a pass-by, the same as the day before. Nothing appeared different. The snow had melted enough that the car tracks from the day before were no longer visible. Now there were simply patches of snow, split by long strips of gravel.
She expected Cal to stop like before, so that he could get out and she could drive. Instead, he did a U-turn and headed back toward Pietro’s. “We’re going in together?” she said.
“Yeah. I would prefer to leave you alongside the road while I go check but I figured you wouldn’t be too happy about that.”
He had remembered that she’d asked him not to leave her out, to include her in her own defense.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Don’t thank me yet,” he said, his tone disgusted. “This could be the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. We need to be prepared for the possibility that the Mercedes Men found out about your visit and that they are betting that you’ll come back. They may be waiting for us.”
“Then we deal with them,” she said. “We need to stop this before more people get involved.”
He didn’t respond. When he made the turn into Pietro’s driveway, he glanced at her. “Be ready,” he said.
“I am.” She sincerely hoped that they did not find Pietro dead in his house. She wasn’t sure how she felt about a potential confrontation with the Mercedes Men. She’d been truthful when she’d said she wanted this over with. But she certainly didn’t want to put Cal in danger.
“I go first,” he said. “Stay behind me.”
“Okay. What if he’s inside, on the couch, with the flu? What are we going to tell him?”
“We’ll have to think of something.”
Nobody shot at them as they walked from the SUV to the front door. Cal knocked sharply. She listened carefully for any telltale noise from inside and knew Cal was doing the same.
But they heard nothing.
Cal tried the door. It was locked.
He hesitated for just seconds before removing the tool from his pocket and picking the lock. Then he wrapped his hand in his shirttail before turning the knob.
The interior was dark. Quiet. They went into the kitchen, which looked out into the backyard, similar to the Hollister house. But the similarities ended there. While the Hollister appliances were thirty years old, these were brand-new stainless steel. There was a six-burner stove with double ovens. Big pans with copper bottoms hung from hooks in the ceiling.
All of that was interesting but not as interesting as the plate on the counter. It was a sandwich, with four or five bites out of it. There was a half a slice of fresh pineapple.
It appeared that Pietro’s lunch had been interrupted.
“I’m going to look in the bedrooms,” Cal whispered.
She nodded. The kitchen smelled like...cinnamon. Yes, that was it. She opened the oven. Inside was the remains of some kind of crumble. It looked half-baked.
Pietro had had the presence of mind to shut off his oven but he hadn’t wanted to waste any time waiting for the dessert to finish cooking.
Cal came back into the kitchen. “The house is empty. No signs of struggle. I’m going to check the garage.”
His car wasn’t going to be there. She was confident of that. When Cal came back in just a minute, he shook his head. “He’s gone,” he said.
“He was in a hurry.”
“Looks like it,” Cal agreed. “There’s no way of knowing what he took for clothes or where he might be headed. Let’s get out of here.”
“Wait,” she said. She walked over to the desk in the corner of the kitchen. She used a pen to pick through the mail, flipping envelopes over.
“What are you looking for?” he asked.
“Two things. His last name. There’s an electric bill here for Pietro Moroque. And—” she stopped and smiled at him “—this.” She pointed to a bright orange envelope. Like Cal had with the door, she used her shirttail to pull out the card from inside. It was a Halloween card. A child had scribbled his name inside. It was hard to read but she thought it said Jacob. She didn’t care about that. She looked at the envelope. The return address in the corner was a preprinted address sticker. Tika Moroque. 519 Feather Ave., Kansas City, MO 64110.
“This has got to be his wife and child,” she said. “If he’s running, will he go there first to say goodbye?”
“Or to make sure they’re safe?” Cal said.
With her shirt, she carefully wiped off the pen that she’d touched. She tossed it back onto the desk. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It took a couple hours to reach Kansas City but they had no trouble finding Tika Moroque’s house. Their GPS led them right to it. It was a modest ranch on a quiet street. There was a swing set in the backyard with a big slide.
They made a pass-by in both directions before parking on the street, across from the house. They got out, crossed the street, walked up the short sidewalk and rang the bell.
It was almost noon on a Friday and there was no reason to believe that anyone would be home. Still, they waited. And rang the doorbell a second time.
Just as they were about to return to the car, the front door swung open. A woman, dar
k short hair, maybe midthirties, wearing a gray business suit, answered the door.
Before Cal or she could speak, the woman held up her index finger and pointed at them. “You need to get the hell away from my house.”
“We just want a minute of your time, ma’am,” Cal said.
“No, you don’t,” she said. “You want to screw up my life. And the life I’ve built for my son. But I’m not going to let you. Get off my porch.” She tried to close the door but Cal was faster.
He stuck his foot in the door and pushed forward. In just seconds, they were inside the small house.
The woman had her back against the wall with her hand up to her mouth. She looked scared to death.
Now it was Cal’s turn to hold up a finger. “We are not going to hurt you. Or your son. Let me be clear about that. But I didn’t want to have this conversation on the street.”
“I have nothing to say to you,” she said.
“Well, we have something to tell you.” Cal motioned to the small living room at his right. “Perhaps we could sit?”
Tika finally nodded. She took small sideways steps, never taking her eyes off them. When they sat on the couch, she lowered herself into the chair opposite of them.
“My name is Cal Hollister. This is Stormy. I call her Stormy because I found her three days ago, injured and alone, in the middle of a snowstorm.”
They had the woman’s attention. Her eyes were big.
“Unfortunately,” Cal continued, “Stormy doesn’t remember her real name or how she ended up in the snowstorm. She had a head injury.”
Tika didn’t say anything but her face looked less frightened.
“We went to see your ex-husband yesterday. We had reason to believe that he might be able to help us. But he wasn’t helpful. And today, when we tried to talk to him again, he’s suddenly gone from his house and missing from work.”
Tika showed no reaction to the news. They weren’t surprising her.
“We need your help. That’s all we want.” Cal sat back on the couch.
She felt like squirming under Tika’s stare. But she sat still, with her hands calmly folded in her lap.
