Then read this. I hate you, she mentally threw back at him, in case he really could. It was possible. He’d read her like a book from the moment he’d forced her to move back into the manor again.
“Ten minutes.” He relented, nodding toward Linda. “Let her in, but watch her closely. Make sure she doesn’t have the chance to make any outside calls while she’s in there.”
Linda nodded. “Yes, sir. I’ll be sure.”
Shannon breathed a small, sad sigh at her miniscule victory. Ten minutes with Jimmy was nothing. It would pass so quickly. The tears came unbidden, drenching her face before she set foot inside Jimmy’s powder blue prison. Goodbye was already in her heart. Ten minutes? That was all?
Her weary mind did the math. Six hundred seconds and not a single more. Linda would make sure of that. How could Shannon see the sunshine of his sweet smile for such a brief moment only to be torn from him again? Yet in she went, her eyes hungry for the sight of his smiling eyes, her fingers and hands greedy for the touch of his petal-soft baby skin.
“Jimmy,” she whispered to her little guy. “Mama’s here.”
He lay asleep on his side, but she eased her fingers beneath him and picked him up from his bassinet. The warmth of his cuddly body filled her heart, instant sunshine to the dismal organ it had become. Jimmy wiggled, sighed, and nuzzled his mother’s neck, as if she’d never left his side.
Ah! She wanted more time to nurse Jimmy again, to feel his lips tugging life from her breast, but it had been so long since she’d been allowed the privilege. She pumped so that witch Linda could hold him while he relished a rubber nipple instead of his loving mother. All the joys that Shannon had lost visited her now. Tears baptized her baby as she held onto this dear, dear life.
She knew it now. All those babies mingled with baby animals in Grandpa Denver’s dream were her purest, unrealized dreams. She was already pregnant then. Those dreams must have been the subconscious quest of her lonely soul for the family she would never had. For love. For Adam.
She shuddered as that truth exploded in the darkness of her despair, bringing the tiniest spark of flickering hope to life. Just as quickly, the memory of his reckless anger when he’d breached the manor sliced at her heart. He’d filled the doorway, his shoulders flexed and squared, his eyes ablaze as he’d searched for her, as if he’d meant to fight all odds to rescue her. The moment tumbled back upon her. The look of pure love in his eyes when she’d run to him. The way he’d caught her up and crushed her in his arms like he’d never let her go. The manly smell of his neck when she’d burrowed into him, needing him so badly that she’d lost her mind for that one hopeful moment. That she’d almost lost Jimmy. That she’d utterly betrayed Adam.
But now…
Linda’s stalwart body blocked the exit like a bouncer, her arms crossed over her squared-off bosom, both sets of jowls locked against her muscular neck in grim determination, and an evil glint of one-upmanship in her eyes. The bitch had won another round, and she knew it.
Shannon turned away, shielding her slumbering babe from the awful truth. Escape was never on her mind. She had accepted her fate because of Jimmy. She flattened her nose against his downy head and closed her eyes, willing them both back to a tropical island where the kindest man on earth sang her child’s first lullaby. Where he’d gently reminded her that, ‘It’s okay to be scared. Us boys are kinda scared, too.’
To Adam.
His name poured into the cracks and crevasses of her broken heart, a cooling balm that couldn’t heal or mend her ever again. Not any more. The damage was done and she was the one who had done it. Where once he’d sheltered her against the hard wall of his body, now his name only brought regret for blessings lost. She cupped Jimmy’s tender head against her lips and cried. She trembled with the coming doom of empty arms. The minutes fled. So few. So fast.
Shannon buried her face in the crook of his neck, absorbing the sweet scent of this tiny man-child, afraid Jimmy might grow up to be a replica of his only role model, his selfish, conniving grandfather. Somehow this child had to know she’d been there; that she’d held him and loved him from the deepest depths of her mother’s soul. That there were better men to follow. Her soul screamed for that someone in her life, someone noble and fierce and—Adam.
“I’ll always love you,” she whispered tearfully to both the loves in her life. “Please know that. No matter what I say, no matter what I have to do for the rest of my life, please know I do love you.”
Jimmy squirmed in drowsy slumber, his tiny lips puckered in an adorable pout. Shannon sang the only song her tender heart could bear, the song that bound her to both the babe in her arms and the gentle warrior she’d betrayed.
“You are my... sunshine...”
Raul Ortega stood in his bathrobe at the door of his condo, a coffee cup in one hand and a totally struck-dumb look of surprise on his olive face.
“May I come in?” Adam finally asked. At seven in the morning, he knew he had a lot of nerve showing up. Just not a lot of time.
“Umm, sure.” Raul backed up a step and nodded Adam inside.
“You do know who I am, don’t you?”
“Sure, you’re that guy who got kicked out of Reagan Manor after you tried to get into see Miss Shannon.”
“Who’s there, honey?” a woman’s voice called from the other room, possibly a bedroom. Adam wasn’t sure. He’d hoped Raul lived alone. He didn’t need another witness.
Raul studied him for a second before he answered. “Go back to sleep. It’s just one of the guys I work with.”
Adam relaxed. Raul was a good man. He could tell.
“Can I get you a cup of coffee?”
“Yes, sir. That would be nice.”
Raul nodded toward the kitchen, and Adam followed. “You take sugar or cream?” he asked as he poured a cup.
“No, sir.” Adam took the hot black drink in his hands, not needing the caffeine as much as the camaraderie of one of Shannon’s trusted friends. He counted on this gentleman to be that guy.
Raul opened the sliding glass patio door off the kitchen. “It’s a nice morning. Let’s talk outside.”
Adam followed him to a pleasant patio lined with redwood planters full of yellow flowers. Raul nudged a small trike out of his path to a picnic table. “Sorry. The grandkids were here. This is about Miss Shannon, isn’t it?”
Adam settled at the other side of the patio table, not sure how much he should divulge. The plan he and Alex had refined under the cover of early morning darkness hinged on too many variables in the light of day. Raul was one of those unknowns. Adam had to proceed with caution. “I saw her on the television last night. She seemed...” The only word that came to his mind was— “lost.”
Raul reached across the table, his hand stretched forward, palm down. It wasn’t exactly a gesture of acceptance, but it helped. “I saw the newsfeed, too. She’s not the happy woman I used to know. She’s not my Shannon.”
“Why not?” Adam asked, his heart bleeding for all he suspected was going on inside Reagan Manor.
Raul shrugged, his eyes on his cup. It seemed he had to be careful, too.
“You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to,” Adam assured him. “I just want to help her if she needs it.”
Raul’s dark brown eyes stabbed him then. “Do you really?”
“Yes,” Adam said, “but I don’t know if she wants me to.”
“She doesn’t know what she wants right now.” Raul took a long, slow drink. “You’re right. She’s lost. She used to tell me everything, but now...” He looked across the shared common area behind his home. A dozen other condos faced Raul’s patio, but no other neighbors were out yet. “Whenever I drive her, she just sits in the back seat and stares out the window. I ask her stupid questions about the weather, but she never answers. It’s like she turned into one of those zombie people in the movies, like she’s dead inside and nobody can reach her. At first, she cried, but now? She barely says good morning
.”
Adam’s gut clenched. Raul had just confirmed his fears.
“Me and Margareta have talked many times. We don’t know how to help Miss Shannon.”
“There is a way,” Adam began, “if you’re willing to help.”
“You have a plan? Will it be dangerous?”
Adam shook his head and pushed a small card across the table. “All you need to do is drive Shannon to this address. There’s no risk to you. None at all.”
“Today?” Raul fingered the card, reading the address.
“Yes,” Adam said softly. “It has to be today. She’s leaving for Texas on flight thirty-three-eleven out of Dulles at one p.m. She’ll be gone for a week.”
“How do you know all that?” Raul asked, but then he waved his hand at Adam. “Never mind. I don’t want to know.”
“All you have to do is come up with a reason to make an unexpected stop on the way to the airport,” Adam whispered. “Can you do this?”
“Oh, yes, señor,” Raul beamed. “I would do anything to make my Miss Shannon smile again.”
Good. So would I.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I hate my son-of-a-bitchin’ life. Every hour of it. Every day. All of it.
Shannon gritted her teeth, angry at what she had devolved into. Some critics and know-it-alls in the literary world decried authors who utilized profanity in their writing. Whether for emphasis or reality, they condemned vulgarity as taking the low road. What was the self-righteous spiel? If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all?
What the hell do they know?
She understood now why people drank and why they did drugs. Why they stepped in front of trains and jumped from bridges. Why they cracked from the stress and pressure of barren, empty lives, their hope and innate goodness suctioned away day after pitiful day. Why they were driven to kill. She’d thought of all the possible remedies for her pain each bleak night she’d lain alone on her bed, her teary eyes fixed to her dark ceiling, and her heart on that sleeping infant down the hall.
There seemed no hope of ever raising her son, not as tightly as Paul Reagan controlled every minute of her daily schedule. Linda would get Jimmy’s first words and his first steps. She’d be the one he ran to when he fell and bumped his head that first time. She’d be the one to hear his first word, the first time he said, “Mommy.”
Shannon balled her hands into fists at the abhorrent thought that Jimmy might actually view Linda as his real mother. That he might love her like a son, while Shannon was consigned to the bleakest shadows, forever skulking at the edge of his life like a distant relative, but never truly part of it.
Ahh! She understood too well the need for opiates and murder, for suicide, because she needed relief from the nightmare she was caught up in, the lies she couldn’t escape.
Her once stellar vocabulary had disintegrated along with her heart. She saved the little that was left of her gentleness for her son and him only. Everyone else could fuck off.
Forcing a deep breath, she lifted her fingernails from the crescent shaped depressions in her palm and uncurled her fingers. The last thing she needed was the piping-hot coffee that nosey Hubbard had left on her dresser, but she wrapped her fingers around it and drank it anyway. Black. Bitter. Scalding. Just like me…
The pain it offered jolted her system with all the push and shove she wanted for the nasty week ahead. She meant the stimulant to mask the misery in her heart, and in a way, it did. Caffeine pumped her up. It turned her into an overly energetic and demanding whirlwind of focused destruction. One day she’d have to ease off the beverage, but today she needed every last ounce of it to rule the world like she was expected to—with blind devotion to her father’s plan, quick obedience to his miserly decrees, and the carrot of a stolen moment with Jimmy for a reward.
She gulped another foul mouthful, wincing as the slow burn trickled past her heart and down into her churning stomach. The acid in her gut ate at her, but who the hell cared? She’d already pumped for Jimmy’s sake. Until she returned from Texas—
Shannon slugged down the last of her bitter dregs. With her mask and ulcers in place, she steeled herself for another day in Dante’s fiery furnace, otherwise known as Reagan Industries.
Her father’s treachery had worked it’s damnedest. From morning to midnight, she ached from the bitter crush of his control. There was no relief. Either she complied or…
She honestly didn’t know how low he would sink to keep her in line, but he’d scared the hell out of her enough that she walked on eggshells most days. Most night, too.
The irony was that some people wanted to be her. They wanted to be rich and famous, have servants at their beck and call, and a limo driver whose only job was to run her bitchy ass back and forth to the office every day. Fools. Every last one of them.
Shannon stuffed the portfolio with the legal action suit against Alex Stewart into the deepest folds of her fine Italian leather briefcase. Even it was stylish, decadently expensive, and an enormous waste of money, just like everything else stamped, etched, or carved with the Reagan name. The briefcase looked good. Others coveted it. But today it held the instrument of a slow, painful death for a man she might have respected in another place and time.
She flicked a stray thread off the sleeve of her over-priced pinstriped suit in disdain. Today she would become Armageddon for the finest covert surveillance company on the East Coast. Like it or not, she would destroy them. She’d read Alex Stewart’s backstory. She knew how The TEAM came to be, how he’d struggled when he’d left the Marine Corps and eventually figured out that he was more than a scout sniper, that he had excellent business sense.
Not many entrepreneurs truly did. Most wanted power or wealth. Alex seemed to want neither, yet he’d achieved both. Established in quaint Alexandria, Virginia, The TEAM thrived under his tough brand of leadership, a difficult thing to manage in these bleak economic times. She knew he’d recently built a modest home near the Shenandoah Valley, and that he employed a helicopter to fly himself and some of his employees to work every day. It seemed he doted on his employees as much as his wife, Kelsey.
He donated millions to various charities, including the one his wife personally oversaw for kids living on the streets of D.C. Raymond’s Kids. What a stupid name. No doubt there was a bleeding-heart story behind that one, too.
Shannon grunted to herself. She already knew what kind of a man Alex Stewart was. She’d shaken his hand and couldn’t help feeling that it was she who’d failed him. If he didn’t believe that now, he surely would by the time she was through with him.
By the week’s end, The TEAM would be burned to the ground, if not literally, then by default of its lost reputation. Honesty had nothing to do with the five days ahead of her. Paul Reagan had set the bar high, but she intended to jump it, maybe fly over it if she had to. He’d better not be lying this time. She needed that one full day with her son when this godawful task was done.
Alex Stewart had to go down, and with him—Adam.
The pieces were falling into place.
Adam marched up the elegantly designed brick walkway to the home of one Terrence Moore. He hit the doorbell, stepped back a respectable distance and waited. The old colonial was well kept, its window trim painted hunter green and the walk swept clean and tidy. A spinning whirligig of a hummingbird floated back and forth in the gentle breeze by the concrete stairs.
Adam found himself wondering how much it would cost to buy a home like this, a place that spoke of nothing but peace on a calm summer morning, a neighborhood where a little boy could grow up safe and sound. Where a man could carry his wife across the threshold and start a new life.
The thought pleased him as much as it worried. Even if today went as planned, would a wealthy woman Like Shannon want to live here in hometown America when she was used to posh and elegant Reagan Manor? Who was he kidding? Shannon had more money in her coffers than any state on the eastern seaboard, maybe all of them.
But there he was, already committed and damned sure going to see where this day ended. If nothing else, he meant to get Shannon and Squeaks out of her father’s clutches.
When no answer came from within, Adam knocked loudly on the matching hunter green door. Ember had been right in calling Alex. An army always made better headway in a battle than a single warrior, not matter how righteous the cause. Raul was every bit the friend he’d expected. One down. One to go.
When no one answered the door, Adam checked his cell phone time, sure he’d heard Ember right. She’d done her homework. Terrence Moore would leave for work in half an hour. It was early enough. He should be home.
Adam peered around the evergreen shrubs surrounding the porch and into the plate-glass window of an old-fashioned living room. It looked like his granddaddy’s place, right down to the doilies pinned to the back of the easy-boy recliner and the copy of Field and Stream on the coffee table. Something was off. The place looked deserted. Only a light in one of the back rooms was turned on.
Time to dig a little deeper. Adam headed around the side of the house. A silver Lincoln parked in the two-car garage, easy enough to see through the paned window of the side door. Again, the backyard was as peaceful as the front, but damn. If the old guy wasn’t home, the battle to save Shannon and Squeaks was lost for the day.
Just as Adam lifted his knuckles to the back door, he froze. Shit! He’d found Terrence Moore, prostrate on his kitchen floor, his face down and his right arm extended. From the four-paned window, Adam could see the blood pooled beneath Moore’s head. He pushed the unlocked rear door open.
“Mr. Moore,” he called gently, on his knees and his fingers to Moore’s neck feeling for a pulse. Once he’d located a steady beat, he dialed for emergency assistance.
Moore groaned, his eyelids fluttering.
“Lie still,” Adam urged. “The paramedics are coming. Can you tell me where you’re hurt?” He scrambled to his feet and doused the towel hanging off the kitchen counter with cold water to make a quick compress.
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