Dez glanced at the bottle of hair dye. Blond. Crap. She saw exactly where Peg was headed. “I dye my hair to the color everyone was used to seeing me with. Call myself Justice.” The name churned her up inside. She couldn’t go back to being that girl.
“People see what they want to see.” Peg leaned her elbows on the table. “Nate’s just about the right age. People will assume…”
Hell. Seems like Peg had neatly circled the conversation back to the one Dez wanted to avoid. They should have packed camping gear and headed for the National Forest. Wouldn’t that be fun this time of year? “You think we should use my past to protect Nate?”
“Forecast is calling for more snow. You can try to make it farther down the road without anyone recognizing you, but if it hits before you get somewhere, you’ll end up putting him at risk. Or, you can dye your hair and we can go out to dinner to celebrate your homecoming.”
Public celebration of family. Dez wanted to throw up, mostly because Peg was right. “Yeah.” Dez knew, but she didn’t have to like it. They had to face the people in town before they got too nosy. “Give me the day to lay the groundwork with Mick and Nate. In the meantime, do you mind giving us a color change? I left town a blond, so they’ll expect my son to be blond as well.”
Peg’s eyes twinkled. “You’re a blank canvas ready to paint.” Peg called in Nate and Mick, and together they ate brunch. Afterward, Peg dyed their hair and gave Dez a haircut. Mick disappeared, as if the ritual of hair and gossip freaked him out. He wasn’t what anyone would call in touch with his feminine side. Most of the time, it didn’t bother Dez. Mick had some demons. Didn’t they all? But today she’d really wanted him around. He made a nice barrier between her and Aunt Peg. Aunt Peg would flirt with a man like Mick, and that would free Dez from the third-degree interrogation that took place while the dye set.
With little choice, Dez filled in Aunt Peg on her life, such as it was, and listened as Peg caught her up on local gossip and Peg’s love life, which was more interesting than anything on television. Peg and her sister Pam—Dez’s mom—had grown up free spirits. Intelligent and inquisitive, Peg was an artist in mind, body, and spirit. She’d been a wild one. Still was, and she was nothing like Dez’s mom. Rather than sow her wild oats, Pam married young. Big mistake. Dez’s father made everyone’s life hell.
Peg had taken a long-distance look at their relationship and decided marriage wasn’t for her. Dez had an up-close look at the marriage and came to the same conclusion. No man would ever control, belittle, and demean her the way her father had.
After washing and rinsing their hair for the final time, Peg sent them upstairs to blow it dry. Dez did Nate’s before tackling hers. Blond hair washed out her skin, made her seem frail and weak. What she’d been thinking at sixteen was beyond her now, but she’d do what she could with what she had. She dried it smooth to her shoulders before unplugging the dryer. Nate sat on the edge of the tub watching.
“What do you think?” she asked, showing off her hair.
He shrugged like he’d learned from the Mick Donovan School of Nonchalance. “Lets get a second opinion.”
Peg smiled at them when they came down. “You’ll make a handsome family tonight at Sneaky Pete’s.”
Nate, who’d sat patiently while Peg worked her magic, raced from the room, screaming as he went. “You’re not my family.”
“Well, crap.” Peg tossed the scissors onto the counter. “Me and my big mouth. I’ll fix it.” She left in a huff, more frazzled then angry. They were out of their element with Nate. He was such a good kid, so quiet and well-mannered it was easy to forget he’d lost his family just the day before. They needed to watch themselves, what they said, so they didn’t make it worse. As soon as this was over, they’d get Nate to people who knew how to handle loss and grief. Dez would gladly call the county victim’s advocate but couldn’t risk anyone discovering his whereabouts. So they’d have to muddle through and hope for the best. Dez cleaned up and was sweeping her hair clippings when Mick walked in.
“You got a haircut,” he said.
“Thanks for noticing, Captain Obvious.” She gave him a sarcastic grin before explaining. “Sully and his men know me as a long-haired brunette. And now my mug shot from the operation last year is plastered all the hell over the place. Sully is pulling some strings, or Stiles really thinks I went off the rails. Anyway, it seemed smart to make the change. I don’t expect Sully to show up here, but I figured it was best to change my looks.”
“You go blond all over?”
Dez turned to catch him raking his eyes up her body.
“You’ve got a dirty mind, Mick.”
“You started it.”
“What are you, an adolescent?”
“Didn’t feel like this when I was a kid.” He came to her, boxed her against the counter, his solid body a wall she couldn’t see around. He smelled like fresh mountain air and warm leather, and he tempted her beyond reason.
Dez stiffened, the memory of last night turning her hot and cold at the same time. Rejection still stung. “Probably not the time.”
“You take pain meds this afternoon?”
“No.” They’d made her too tired.
“Then it’s time.” Mick didn’t wait for a response but leaned in and took what he wanted. His hands were cold against her waist as he pulled her in. Manhandled her, which brought last night’s frenzy to mind. Hiked her pulse even as his lips captured and tortured, drawing her in and releasing on a bite. “We’re not backing away from this. Not by a long shot.”
“But—”
He shut her up with his lips, and then he swept his tongue inside, inciting her response, drawing heat to her chest and her core. Her body turned to goo in his hands, and she melted against him. Just as she relaxed, he released her. She dropped back, rested a hip on the counter. That was a lie. The counter was holding her upright. Mick blew a girl’s mind straight out the top of her head.
“They’re on the way down,” he said as an explanation.
How had he heard them? She’d been deaf, dumb, and blind. She swallowed it back, compartmentalized it in order to deal with the here and now. “Nate went blond, too, touchy subject, so let it go for now.”
“No point in running from it,” Mick said. “Best to pull off the Band-Aid.”
“Men,” Dez muttered. “You send him running back up those stairs and I’ll kick your ass.”
“You getting all maternal, Detective?”
She hated when he called her that, so she flipped him off, but when Nate entered she hid her hand behind her back. Peg wagged a finger at Dez. Obviously she’d seen. Dez busied herself cleaning up the loose clumps of hair from the floor while Mick teased Nate about being blond.
“Go stand next to Dez,” Mick ordered.
Nate did, sliding next to her without touching. God, the poor kid was dying for touch. Dez rested a hand on his shoulder. If she could take his pain, she would. In a heartbeat.
“There’s a resemblance, but no one will believe he’s your son. You’re too young. You’d have to have been, what, sixteen when he was born.”
“That’s right.” Dez straightened, ready to pull the bandage off in one swift swipe. “That’s why it’s perfect. I left here blond, sixteen, and pregnant. They’ll make assumptions, and we’ll let them.”
Mick raised a thick brow. The silence reigned like an indictment, or so it felt.
Nate shrugged off her arm and turned to smack at her. “You said it was a disguise, but that’s not why you changed my hair. You did it so we matched.” His voice raised to a high pitch. “I’m not your son. I’m not anybody’s son. I wasn’t even theirs.”
He raced back up the stairs, but not fast enough to hide the fresh tears.
“Shit.” Dez combed a hand through her hair, came up short where the hair had been chopped off. “I’m gonna have to kick my own ass.”
“I’ll go,” Peg said, turning back toward the stairs.
“No. My screw up. I�
��ll handle it.” Better to deal with Nate than Mick. Would he feel different about her, knowing that piece of her story? It wasn’t even the worst of it. She found Nate face down on the bed with its frilly girl comforter. They should get something better for him. Something boyish at least. And that was avoidance. The boy needed human contact—sympathy, not stuff.
She lifted his kicking body from the bed and settled them both in the window seat. She’d spent months there, staring out the window, imagining herself as a mother. Dez swallowed it back. He pushed against her, strong but not strong enough. Not yet.
“I heard you tell Peg. I was adopted.”
Hell. She had all the nurturing instincts of a viper. First he lost his parents, and then he lost them again with her callous disregard. “Nate.” She held onto him while he struggled. “Nate. Stop. Right now.” She tried for a mom voice, must have come close, because he stopped fighting her. “Listen to me, and listen hard. Kimberly was your mother in every way that mattered. She didn’t give birth to you, but that doesn’t take any skill. Any love.” The words battered her, but she kept going. “She’s the one who watched Doctor Who with you, the one who said your prayers, the one who took care of you when you were sick. She loved you.”
Dez sucked in a shaky breath and heard the panic in her voice. She closed off the pain and faced him like she would any witness. Any victim. This moment wasn’t about her. It was about this hurt little boy. So she told him what she couldn’t tell Mick or Aunt Peg. She told him the truth. “I got pregnant when I was sixteen.” And no, it hadn’t taken any skill. “I wanted to keep the baby at first.” She remembered looking out this very window and making pie in the sky plans of a life for them. A sweet, happy, unrealistic life. She couldn’t even get a job. Didn’t have a car. When she’d realized it, when she’d loved the baby enough, she’d known she had to let him go. “I gave him up for adoption, because he deserved a mom and a dad who could love him. Take care of him the way I couldn’t.”
Tears dripped from his nose. “You loved him?”
The knife stabbed a little deeper, but Nate deserved the truth. “Very much. Selfishly, I wanted to keep him, so he’d make me feel good, but a baby’s job isn’t to make us feel better. It’s our job to love and protect. I know a little about your birth mom.” Maria Calvetti had died in childbirth. “She wanted to send you somewhere safe, with two parents who could love you. It was her last wish.”
“She died, too?”
Gawd. “Yes, but she loved you.” Dez couldn’t know that, but she could guess. The story, as Blake’s girlfriend Vicki told it yesterday, wasn’t pretty. Maria Calvetti—Vicki’s mom—had had two children with a New York mobster before having an affair with another piece of crap. Patrick Sullivan. She’d loved the man, but when it came to it, she didn’t want him near the boy. She’d died making sure Sully wouldn’t know Nate existed.
How much could she tell Nate? Vicki, the daughter of a mob boss and Nate’s half-sister, had risked her life to protect the boy. Make sure he kept his middle-class, safe, protected life, but in the end, Sully had discovered the truth. Found Nate’s family. It was Dez’s turn to step up and protect the innocent. Because this boy with red-rimmed eyes and snot all over his face was the poster child for innocence. “Kimberly loved you. She was your mother. The real kind that puts up with your whining and complaining and when you get sick and when you beg for stuff you don’t need. That’s real mom-love.”
“The kind that loves you so much they turn off the internet.”
Dez laughed, heard the tears in her voice. “Yeah, the turn-off-the-internet mom-love.”
“It’s the best kind.” He sniffed.
Dez put her arm over him and simply held him while he wiped his snotty tears on the hem of his shirt. When they’d both pulled themselves together, Dez sat back and got his attention. She took a deep breath. She couldn’t remember a time when she’d felt so mangled and torn up inside. “Nate, I’m not your mom. Never could be. But I will protect you. On my word. The man looking for you—”
“You said he was my father.”
Sperm donor. Could she use that phrase with a kid? Probably not. “He may be your biological father, but your birth mother died to keep you safe from him. He’s not a good man.” Understatement of the century, but not what Nate needed. “You know, I haven’t told you that I spoke to your mom, before—before I came to get you.” She’d almost blown that one.
“Yeah?” He looked up at her, his blue eyes wide and vulnerable.
“She asked me to protect you. To promise.”
His eyes filled again. “What did you say?”
Dez had choked, but she wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. “I promise you, Nate, I will keep you safe and get you back to your life as quickly and painlessly as possible.”
Stupid, stupid, stupid, to make such a promise. Patrick Sullivan was a cold-blooded killer who would stop at nothing to get Nate, but Dez promised herself that she’d send Sully to hell before he touched Nate. The kid had lost enough.
Chapter Seven
Mick found them, blond heads together, whispering amongst the pillows in the window seat. The sight hit him like a gunshot at close range. Dez was a beautiful woman, but he’d never mistaken her as soft. She was tough as nails. Determined and reckless. She was the perfect woman to help him get revenge on Sully. This softer side changed his perceptions. Now, she was more than a means to the end, and it sent him back a step as he stood outside the door.
The way she looked in the mornings was an invitation that was getting harder to ignore. Yeah, he’d tried. Given himself lectures on keeping his hands to himself. The reasons to stay away were solid.
From the day Tommy had been blown away in the middle of a drug war, Mick had been on a one-way street. Revenge. The day it happened, Blake’s mom Miranda had been babysitting Tommy. Blake’s brother had been a low-level drug dealer, and Sully had taken out a hit on him. The lowlife who took the job wiped out Craig, Miranda, and Tommy. Tommy had been the only one who didn’t deserve it.
Mick had failed his brother that day. Failed his mother. He’d not fail another person again, so he took pleasure where he could, gave it if he had the time, but he never—never—got involved. He was backpedaling, knew the symptoms, and fed the momentum with more reasons to stay away from the woman who mixed him up inside and made him want things he didn’t deserve. She was a cop. That was reason enough. Plus, responsibility was not his thing. Yet here he was, responsible for this woman and this boy who looked so much like Tommy, especially as a blond, that it stabbed a sharp blade into Mick’s back. Like someone kept stabbing away, and he was too stunned to move.
Dez glanced up; saw him there. She didn’t smile. Lines marked her face and bruised skin circled her eyes. The need drawing him to comfort her kept him firmly on the other side of the room.
She waved him in. “Nate and I came to an agreement.”
“Yeah?” He heard the distance in his own voice.
“You’re part of it, so we may as well get it all out.”
He took two steps into the room. That’s all they’d get out of him.
“We act like a family in public, so long as I don’t expect him to call me mom—even when others are around. In return, he doesn’t expect me to say his prayers at night.”
Mick laughed. Couldn’t help himself. Dez saying prayers was like a nun practicing witchcraft. From what Blake had told him, Dez grew up in an ultra-conservative home, and she’d run the other way the first chance she got. “Sounds like the kid made a fair bargain. What’s my part?”
“Parent apparent.”
“You want me to play the daddy?” It was anger now, tied up in his words and his voice.
“We talked about this.” Dez tilted her head like she was trying to figure him out. “This is the plan. Only in public. Obviously.”
He shrugged, the obligation settling hard on his shoulders. He took a breath, but it lodged in his windpipe.
“And,” Nate added
with an over-bright smile, “you can’t turn off the internet.”
Dez laughed, a true full-bodied laugh with her head thrown back as if the kid had caught her off guard, in a good way. The low, throaty sound sent unwelcome need rumbling through Mick’s veins. His mind might want to back off, but his body didn’t get the memo.
Dez drilled a finger into Nate’s belly. “Fair enough, kid, but you owe me a concession to be named later.”
He eyed her warily. “What does that mean?”
Mick stepped up. “Means you added to the deal, so she gets to add something later.”
Nate shrugged. “It’s worth it.”
“You never know.” Dez’s blue eyes lit with teasing laughter. “I might add on something horrible, like cleaning the kitty litter.”
“Aunt Peg doesn’t have a cat.”
“Dang.” Dez snapped her fingers in mock disappointment. “Foiled again, but I’ll think of something.”
Dez stood and glanced at the clock by the bed. “You’ve got forty-five minutes before we’re on. Dinner at Sneaky Pete’s. Food’s not bad if you don’t mind everything fried.”
Nate rubbed his stomach. “Mmm.”
Mick followed Dez back to their bedroom. Shit, he was already thinking of it as theirs. Thinking of her as his. He stepped into the room but leaned back against the wall near the door. “What’s the deal? I thought we were going to lay low?”
“Show and tell. Small-town dynamic. If I stay hidden here, someone will see me. They’ve already seen your truck. It’s isolated in the winter, and people are bored. They’ll come nosing around. Best defense is a good offense. Go to dinner at the local hangout. Make nice with the locals. They’ll assume he’s Micah—that’s what I named—” She shook out her now-blond hair. “We give them two plus two; they’ll do the math without much work. Set up our cover story.”
“The whole family thing isn’t my speed.”
“And you think it’s mine?” Her voice rose to a sharp pitch. “I tried to find an alternative before we hit the highway. You’re the one who decided to pull a switch. One word from you, and we ditched the plan we worked with Blake, because you had a bad feeling. Wanted to get the kid somewhere off the radar.”
Unstoppable (The Untouchable Series) Page 6
