Troubleshooters 02 The Defiant Hero

by Suzanne Brockmann

  That hadn’t gone quite as well as he’d hoped, but about as well as he’d expected.

  Considering he was a fucking idiot and she hated his guts.

  Impending death was a freeing thing.

  Meg lay naked in John’s arms, gazing up at the ceiling as he ran his fingers from her shoulder down to the curve of her hip and back. It was soothing and hypnotic.

  It would have been easy to fall asleep. He was probably hoping she’d do just that. But her life had come down to hours, and sleep seemed a waste of precious time.

  “Do you trust me?” she asked John.

  His hand stilled for a moment before continuing its endless journey up and down her back. “Yes, but I know you don’t think I do.”

  Navy SEALs were known for their high levels of intelligence. There were no stupid men in the teams. John had to know what was coming next.

  Meg wanted to know who he really was, where he really came from—she’d made that clear to him before.

  And now they were almost out of time. If he didn’t tell her now . . .

  “How bad was it really?” she asked, surprising herself a little by her ability to be so direct. But that was one of the pluses of impending death. It was now or never, so damn it, she had to ask—now.

  He pretended not to know what she was talking about. “How bad was what?”

  “Okay,” Meg said. “I’ll tell you, and you can just kind of nod if I get it right, okay?”

  He laughed. “Meg—”

  “Your father drank and when he drank he beat the crap out of you—”

  “No,” John said. “Not true. My father wasn’t that kind of drunk, not like—” He shut his mouth fast, as if he realized he’d just given too much away.

  “Not like your uncle?” she finished for him. She lifted her head to look at him, her heart in her throat. “Oh, John.” She hadn’t really believed it. She hadn’t actually thought . . .

  “Shit.” He closed his eyes.

  He had a beautiful face, all clean lines and strong jaw. A perfect nose, and eyes that would have made him a fortune had he gone to Hollywood instead of Coronado.

  She waited for him to open those eyes and look at her, but he didn’t. He tipped his head back and looked up at the ceiling. “Shit,” he said again, this time on a sigh of air.

  And he still wasn’t going to tell her. Meg fought the urge to cry. “I’ve trusted you as much as any human being can trust another,” she told him, her voice sounding very, very small to her own ears. “I’ve put Amy’s life into your hands. And we just made love. That implies a certain amount of trust, too. Can’t you trust me enough in return to let me inside of you? Just this little bit?”

  He was silent, and her heart broke for him. How badly had he been hurt, how bad had it been that he’d had to create an entirely different version of his life?

  “I’ve already guessed a lot of it,” she told him. “I figured you grew up poor. Not just middle class, but hand-to-mouth poor. Food stamps. Evictions?”

  He nodded, still not looking at her.

  “You’re really from Amagansett,” she continued. If you’re going to lie, he’d told her once, use as much of the real truth as possible. “Just not the wealthy part of town.”

  Another nod.

  “You said your father was in the food industry.” That had to be another part of the truth. “Where did he work—in a restaurant?”

  John nodded again and finally spoke. “He was a short-order cook for a while. Before that, before he went to ’Nam, he and my uncle Al owned a fishing boat.” He cleared his throat. “I’m not sure if he drank because he couldn’t keep up the payments on the boat, or if he lost the boat because he drank. All I know is that he loved that boat, loved that life, and he lost it. He lost everything—our house, everything. You name it, it was gone.”

  He looked at her as if he were angry she was making him talk about this, as if he didn’t want to remember. As if by not talking about it all these years, it had somehow disappeared or ceased to be. As if her need to know was resurrecting his pain.

  “We moved into a shitty apartment with my uncle and his wife, my aunt Debbie. She drank too much, too. It was pretty much up to me to take care of them. I was seven the first time a neighbor called to say that my father had passed out in the parking lot. It was oh-two-thirty, and I had to go out there and find him and bring him inside.”

  Meg could imagine him at seven years of age far too easily. Too serious for his years, with sad brown eyes, still raw from missing his mother. “Oh, God.”

  “Are you sure you really want to know this? Because it’s pretty ugly—not just the stuff I had to live with, but the things I did. You know, there were times I got so hungry, I stole food. I got good at shoplifting, so I used it to get other stuff, too. I was a thief, Meg. My father would have died of shame if he knew. He was the most honest man I’ve ever known.”

  “Except he didn’t manage to take care of you,” Meg pointed out. “If you were the one taking care of him when you were seven—if he was unable to keep you from going hungry—how does that make him honest?”

  John shook his head. “Why do you want to know all this?”

  She touched his face. “Because I want to know you.”

  He kissed her. “Meg, you know me better than anyone in the world. What does it matter where I came from? It sucked, all right? And it got worse before it got better.” He shook his head. “It didn’t get better until I joined the Navy. And by then I’d gone to both Milfield and Yale, and everyone who met me after that thought I’d been raised at the yacht club alongside Ashley and Chip Moneybags.”

  What does it matter? he’d asked. “It doesn’t matter to me at all,” Meg told him. “Why does it matter so much to you?”

  “Because I don’t have any room for pity. Poor Johnny Nilsson,” he said mockingly. “His mother died, and his father’s too much of a drunk to notice that his bastard of a stepbrother kicks the shit out of his kid every chance he gets. And believe me,” he added hotly, “the son of a bitch didn’t get a lot of chances. I learned to be fast on my feet. I learned to move around the house without making any noise. I learned a lot of valuable skills that I should probably thank him for now.”

  She couldn’t keep her disagreement in—it escaped in a soft sound of protest.

  He looked her in the eye again. He forced himself to. She could tell this wasn’t easy for him. “See why I like the story I made up better?” he asked. “Can you understand why I didn’t want to be this John Nilsson? I didn’t tell you about any of this because, you’re right, I didn’t really trust you. I was afraid you wouldn’t like me if you knew. I’m still afraid that some of the things I could tell would be too hard for you to hear.”

  “How could you think that?” she asked.

  “How could you be so certain we’re going to die?” He looked at her intently. “How could you be so willing to die?”

  Meg sat up. “See, this is what you always do. The conversation gets too personal or intense, so you turn it around, throwing it back on me. Well, right now I don’t want to talk about me! I want—”

  “I don’t want to talk about me, either,” he cut her off. “If you want to hear all my bullshit, all my pathetic poor-me stories about stupid things I’ve done that I regret, you’re just going to have to live through the next few days, Meg. Because I’m not going to talk about it anymore. Not now. Not until we get Amy back. Then you can have at me. You can rip open all my emotional baggage with a crowbar if you want. But you can’t do it until this is over.”

  He was serious.

  “So,” he said. “The way I see it, we could either make love again, or talk about something else.”

  She couldn’t believe it. “This could be our last chance to—”

  John shook his head. “No,” he said. “It’s not our last anything. It’s our first. It’s the start—of something that’s going to last a very long time. What do you think of Edward?”

  She blink
ed at him. He was gazing at her with that intensity that could practically knock her over. And he smiled—a hot, quick smile that warmed his eyes—at her confusion.

  “Or maybe Julie, if it’s a girl?” he continued. His smile softened, and the warmth in his eyes turned to something else, something tender, something a little uncertain. He reached for her, covering her stomach with his hand. “That’s what I want to talk about. Names for our baby.” He kissed her, sweet and lingeringly, on her mouth. “Unless you want to double our chances at procreation and make love to me again?”

  Meg couldn’t breathe. “You think . . . ? You want . . . what?” His hands were exploring her body, making it even more impossible to make any sense of his words. Baby.

  “One thing we’ve got to discuss,” he told her between long, slow kisses, “is the best way to tell Amy. I mean, it’s gonna be a shock for her. She gets kidnapped, and when she comes home, her mom’s going to get married and—”

  Meg pulled away from him, out of his arms and off the bed. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t! I don’t want to do this anymore! I don’t want to play your stupid pretend game! It’s not funny anymore! I’m not going to marry you, we’re not going to have a baby! So just stop.”

  He followed her over to the sink that was outside the bathroom door, catching her arm and pulling her back to him. “Pretend? You think this is pretend? We didn’t use protection, Meg. That means it’s not pretend.”

  “Yes, it is!” She couldn’t help it, she started to cry. “I have no future! Oh, God, he told me . . . He said . . .” She couldn’t get the words out. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to.

  John pulled her to him and wrapped her tightly in his arms. “Jesus, Meg. What haven’t you told me yet?”

  She shook her head. If he knew . . .

  “He,” he repeated, trying to tip up her chin so that she’d have to meet his gaze. “As in the Extremist who first approached you in the parking garage. What’d he tell you, Meg?”

  She tried to pull away, but he wouldn’t let her go.

  “How am I going to know what we’re up against if you don’t tell me everything?” he asked. “How the hell can I figure out how to beat this if you don’t come clean with it all? And I mean all.”

  “Promise me you won’t stop me from going to wherever it is they have Amy!”

  She could see from his eyes that he didn’t want to do that. Still, he was reading her pretty damn accurately, too, and he knew she wasn’t going to move on this. “I promise. Fuck. What did he tell you?”

  “That they’re going to kill me.” She managed somehow to get the words out. “That even if I bring them Razeen, that part of my payment to get Amy back is my death. That even if I killed Razeen myself, that they would come after me and kill me, too. That one of us is already dead—it’s either going to be me or Amy. And I’m not going to let Amy die.”

  “The son of a bitch,” John said. He laughed, but there wasn’t much humor in it. “Meg, he was lying.”

  “No, he wasn’t.” She knew liars, and this man had been telling her the gospel truth.

  But John held her chin and looked into her eyes. “Yes. He was. He was pushing your buttons—playing mind games with you, Meg. If you killed Razeen the way they wanted you to, what possible reason would they have to come after you? Why would they take that risk? Think about it. It doesn’t make sense.”

  God, she wanted to believe him. But, “Does any of this make sense?”

  “Yes. They want Razeen and—” John cut himself off. “Look, Meg, whether this guy is telling the truth or lying doesn’t matter. If he’s telling the truth, we’re going to prove him a liar anyway, do you understand? If for some reason their intention really is to target you for death, we can take measures to protect you. And we will protect you.”

  “Even after it’s over?” Meg asked.

  “Yes,” he told her.

  “How?” she asked.

  “However we need to,” he said absolutely. “Whatever it takes.”

  She wanted to believe him. Hope flickered. God, she wanted so much to have hope again. She’d gone far too many days without any hope at all.

  Meg looked into John’s eyes. He stood there, looking back at her, meeting her gaze steadily, clearly trying to infuse her with his hope and his strength and his . . . love.

  He’d said he loved her. He’d said it often over the past few hours—maybe too often.

  She’d assumed it meant nothing, assumed it was simply something he said to help convince her to trust him.

  But now he was talking about . . .

  Naming their baby.

  Meg had to sit down. She’d made love to him just a short time ago. She hadn’t given a damn about protection—at the time it seemed ridiculous and useless—because she knew she was going to die. She’d told him she wanted his baby, but when she’d said that, she’d thought it was so far out of the realm of possibility. But John . . .

  For John, it hadn’t been impossible. When John had made love to her, he hadn’t believed she was going to die. He’d thought there was a very definite chance that he could get her pregnant—and he’d made love to her anyway.

  He wanted her to have his baby.

  He wanted a lifetime—he’d used that very word, and he’d actually meant it.

  He loved her.

  “Is that finally everything?” he asked her now. “No more secrets?”

  She didn’t get a chance to answer him.

  Because the phone rang.

  Meg leapt for it as John scrambled for his clothes.

  “Hello?” Her heart was pounding so hard, it almost drowned out her own voice.

  “Sorry to bother you,” a very American-sounding man said, “but this is the front desk?”

  The disappointment that hit Meg was nearly physical. She had to sit down on the bed.

  It wasn’t the Extremists who had Amy. It was the insect-man from the motel.

  “My wife just came back in,” he told her. “Apparently there’s been a package here, waiting for you. I’m sorry—it was under some newspapers and I didn’t see it when you checked in.”

  A package. For Joan Smith. The hope was back with a surge of power through her veins.

  “Can you send it up to this room?” Meg asked. “Immediately?”

  “I’m on my way,” insect-man said.

  The Bear was arguing with the woman with the dead soul.

  Eve put her arm around Amy, who nestled more closely at the sound of the raised voices.

  This didn’t sound good.

  The Bear gestured to the windows, gestured to the watch he wore on his left wrist.

  “Not tonight,” Amy whispered. “That’s what he’s telling her. Not tonight.”

  Eve looked at the little girl in astonishment. “You understand them?”

  “Just a little.” Amy’s brown eyes were so like her mother’s. A grandmother wasn’t supposed to have favorites, but she and Meg had always had a special bond. “She’s upset. Something about a phone call. Someone’s supposed to call, but they haven’t so she’s mad. Something about being ready to leave quickly. Something about a boat to . . . somewhere. Cuba, I think. Something about you and me. Bear keeps telling her yes. Yes, but not tonight.” She frowned, worried. “I can’t understand a lot of it. It’s been a long time since I lived in Kazbekistan.”

  Not tonight was all Eve had to hear. Yes, but not tonight meant yes, in the morning.

  When the sun came up, the Bear was going to take them into the swamp and shoot them.

  He followed the woman out of the room, still arguing, and Eve heard the woman stomp up the stairs, clearly angry at not having gotten her way.

  The Bear stomped back into the room, scowling.

  Eve gave him time to sit down, time to cool off. He was mad at the woman, mad at them, too. Mad at the world.

  She knew what that felt like.

  She waited nearly forty minutes, forty endless minutes, before she spoke.

  “
I wonder, young man, if you could arrange for Amy and me to have some soap and a towel so that we might wash?”

  He scowled at her, but she didn’t let her gaze waver. She just kept on looking him straight in the eye.

  “Allow us at least the dignity of clean hair,” she said quietly.

  He didn’t speak, didn’t move—aside from the muscle jumping in his jaw. He just gazed back at her for what seemed like another forty minutes.

  Finally he stood up and left the room.

  She heard the TV go on in the kitchen, blaringly loud. Was it possible the Bear had turned it on that loudly? He was always shouting at the others to turn it down. And what did that mean? For him to walk away, leaving them unguarded while he watched Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?