by Leigh Morgan
A small smile turned into a full grin on Merlin’s impish face. “Golf balls.” He opened his hand exposing a neon yellow golf ball. “It’s all I could find on short notice.”
“You did great, Merlin. You helped her save herself.”
“You know my name.” It wasn’t a question.
Jesse walked to his bike, threw on his jacket, unsnapping the built in holster that held his Sig Sauer in one efficient movement. Reaching into his saddle bag, Jesse grabbed his GPS unit. He flicked it on, started his bike and turned back to Merlin, all prior emotion gone.
Jesse looked at his watch. Precious minutes gone. “Yes, I know your name. I know Taryn’s name, where she works, what she does and everyone she has daily contact with. I need you to trust that I mean neither of you any harm. I’m your only shot right now to get out of here and your best shot at keeping Taryn safe. I need you to trust me now. I’ll explain later.”
Jesse tossed the GPS, pre-programmed for his home, to Merlin who caught it in one hand. “I need you to get Mary Campbell and bring her to the address on the GPS. Taryn’s mother is no longer safe. Do it quietly, and quickly”
Jesse dismissed Merlin and looked at Taryn. “You. On the bike. Now.”
Taryn looked around her frantically measuring the distance between her office and where she stood. Jesse knew that look. He’d seen it plenty of times on plenty of faces since he began working security for his stepfather.
“Don’t even think about it. You won’t make it, and if by some miracle you get past me, you’ll be dead before you can lock the door. Those men won’t be the only team sent for you.” Jesse knew he’d made a tactical mistake the moment the words crossed his lips. She turned from scared rabbit to stubbornly defiant in the blink of an eye. Her gaze now held a shrewdness better suited for an assassin than a cable television archaeologist.
“I’ll take my chances. Leave me alone.”
“Not going to happen.”
He knew the exact second her courage and stupidity overran her fear. Her eyes narrowed and she took off. She was fast. She made it over half the distance before he caught her. Jesse threw her against the brick building separating her from her office, leaning his full weight against her, overpowering her in a primal and necessary way, careful to protect his groin with his knee as his hands manacled her arms.
“We don’t have time for this, Taryn. I don’t know who those men are or why they tried to take you, but I’ve got an idea. If I’m right they won’t stop. I can keep you safe if we leave now. We’ve got seconds, not minutes.” Jesse paused, letting his words sink in. Then his tone shifted to cold determination.
“I will get you on that bike no matter how many obstacles you throw at me. I’d prefer you conscious, but that option is quickly disappearing.” Jesse shook her. “Trust me or take a nap. Your choice.”
Merlin nodded toward Taryn and left on the mission Jesse gave him. Some of the fight went out of Taryn, though her eyes still flashed with defiance.
“Give me one reason to trust you and I’ll go.” Her chin jutted up, certain he couldn’t comply. “Otherwise I’ll fight you every inch of the way.”
“I came to introduce you to your biological mother.” Jesse said, matter of fact, no inflection clouding the simple truth.
Her eyes rounded in surprise. “You obviously know Mary Campbell is my mother.” Her voice caught, causing Jesse to loosen his grip.
“Not your biological one.”
The fight went out of her completely. Her eyes showed only curious wariness now. “How do you know?”
“Your biological mother’s name is Reed Mohr, and I know her very well.
She’s been searching for you for a long time.”
“Why does that matter to you?”
“Because Reed adopted me. She’s my mother too.”
The air whooshed from Taryn’s lungs as her bones seemed to liquefy. The look that flashed across her face made Jesse feel like he’d just thrust a knife into her. It was the same look that young ones in foster care would wear the first time they were hit by someone who was supposed to protect them. It was the same look that haunted his dreams, startling him awake in the middle of the night, cold sweat dampening his sheets. It was a look that woke him with a startle amidst dripping sheets in the night more often than he liked to admit. It was a look he’d hoped never to see again in real time.
Taryn still wore that freshly scared child look as she moved to his bike.
Here was a woman who, with one look, could wipe away seventeen years of security. Jesse got on his bike then helped her settle in behind him. When he woke up this morning he had dreams of grandeur. With one look, Taryn left him feeling the deafening echo of a boy’s nightmares.
Taryn cautiously got on the bike, twisting the knife deeper in his gut.
CHAPTER SIX
Shannon O’Shay, a true Celt at heart, had been dreaming lately. Hot, primal dreams filled with testosterone, need and want better suited to a nineteen-year-old boy than the forty-two-year-old man he was now. He could still feel the soft skin of the instigator of these dreams hours after he woke; he could still smell the heather and moss scent of her hair every time he closed his eyes. Like true Celts everywhere, Shay believed his dreams portended something momentous. The ‘what’ of that portent had him off his game, ready to see evil leprechauns hiding in every nook and cranny.
A rapid-fire back-fist-upper-cut combination, first to his temple then his jaw, jarred Shay out of the mist and back into the reality of sparring with the very red-headed evil leprechaun he ought to be worried about. Reed Mohr, whom he called Red, might be his best friend, but she was mean when it came to spontaneous self-defense practice, even when they were just goofing around.
“Ouch, Red. A little heavy on the contact, don’t cha think?” Shay said, moving out of range. Red didn’t have much reach, but she was fast and fearless and wouldn’t hesitate to hit him again if he dropped his guard.
She must have sensed his head wasn’t in the game because she backed away to retrieve the herbal tea that was never far from her side, downing half of it a series of swallows a professional hotdog eater would envy. She wiped the sweat away from her forehead and the tea away from her mouth before it hit her stained, cutoff SuperTramp t-shirt from their 1983 tour. The image made Shay smile. Reed Mohr was the classiest person he knew even dressed like a sweaty dead-head with her frizzy, red-gold hair standing on end.
“Well, Irish-mon, what’s got you so twisted this morning? You’re dropping your guard like a white-belt and hitting like a girl.”
Shay rubbed a hand over his newly sheared head. It was work to keep up the eighth inch of stubble, but the ladies loved rubbing it, so he gladly wore it that way. Shay’s head rub was a self-deprecating gesture, one he’d honed to perfection. It didn’t fly with Red, it never had, and that was just one of the reasons he loved her and put up with her pain-in-the-ass husband. He respected Jordon Bennett, and even liked him most of the time, but he wouldn’t admit it any more than Jordon would have.
Flashing Red a grin he reserved solely for her, he told her the truth. “I’ve been dreaming lately.” He shrugged when she set her bio-friendly tea container down, her expression turning from curiosity to concern.
“Mari?” she asked, using the name only she and Jesse knew that never failed to sear his heart with a hot poker and salve it with cooling gel at the same time.
Shay nodded, all flirty pretense gone. Red knew and kept his secrets, another reason he loved her and would do almost anything short of outright murder for her and her family. Not that she would ask. Red was used to fighting her own battles.
“Every night for the past week and a half. Some dreams I remember. Sometimes it’s just a feeling and a lingering sense of foreboding.” Shay couldn’t help the slight shiver running up his spine.
“When was the last time you saw her?”
Shay knew Mari was living half the year on Orkney where her main jewelry studio was and half the year j
ust outside Edinburgh, Scotland. Every year he updated his stack of jewelry catalogues with her latest creations. He last saw Mari fourteen months ago when he traveled to Edinburgh to torture himself with her image, afraid to approach her for fear she wouldn’t remember him, or worse yet, would remember and not care.
“A little over a year ago.”
“Has she remarried?”
“No. Not since her first husband died almost twenty years ago.”
Reed put her small hands on what passed for hips and cocked her head at him, sea blue eyes narrowed. “Why don’t you just go to her, tell her you still love her and see what happens? What, exactly, do you have to lose?”
My dignity. My self-respect. My dream-lover and the possibility that she might love me in return.
“It’s been too long now, Red.” Shay looked around the meadow at Potter’s Woods where they were training. It was too early for the residents to be up and about. The sun was still young in the east, filtering through the oaks and maples and willows closer to the pond. Water bugs, dragonflies and butterflies danced along the banks in the mottled light. Shay had a life here. One he loved, among people he loved. He even loved his work, although it forced him to engage with Jordon, Red’s husband, more frequently than he’d like. Could he bring Mari here? Would she come? Could he live anywhere else now that he found a family here?
Red spoke, drawing his attention away from the early summer beauty surrounding him, bringing him back to the reality that sometimes family was a pain in the ass. “That’s a bunch of B.S. and you know it. If you’re dreaming about her there’s a reason. It’s well past time you stopped shagging everything in a skirt and faced the fact that you’re afraid to really love.... and you’re a moron.”
The moron comment stung. It was the supreme insult in Red’s lexicon of insults. That he was afraid was simply true and Shay wasn’t one to engage in self-delusion on a conscious level. Fear was fear and any warrior worth his salt acknowledged it and moved past it.
“You’re not getting any younger and you’ve let the one woman you’ve ever loved go about her life half a world away while you pretend you’re not lonely and you can be happy without her. You should be ashamed of yourself for not trying. If she doesn’t want you, you can stop pining and move on.” She wiped the perspiration from her face with her small towel and then threw it at his head, hitting him squarely in the face.
“It’s well past time to get your chiseled ass in gear and sweep that woman off her feet. Bring her here. We’ll lock her in Finn’s cottage until you can convince her you’re worthy of her love. If she doesn’t get that after about seventy-two hours I’ll knock some sense into her or send her unworthy ass home. Problem solved.” With that, Red walked away.
The image of Mari in Red’s aunt’s cottage made Shay smile with real mirth. Knowing Finn, she’d have Mari stripped to her skivvies and tied down with velvet rope until Mari was well and truly convinced Shay was the love of her life.
Red was wrong about one thing though. He’d loved two women in his lifetime. He was watching one walk away. That one he now called friend and wanted to strangle so badly his palms itched, mostly because she was right. The other one still haunted his dreams. He wanted Mari so badly another part of him itched and no amount of time or distance seemed to assuage his pain.
Shay couldn’t change who or what he was when he left Mari, but he was a different man now, a better one in most ways, more stubborn in others. Life had taught him humility and patience. He was no longer a cock-sure twenty year old with more dick than sense.
The man he’d become now could give Mari the things the boy he’d been could not have. It was well past time he did something about it. Dreams didn’t come indiscriminately or to the unworthy. His unconscious, the gods of his ancestors, or perhaps both, were trying to tell him something.
Unfortunately, before Shannon O’Shay could interpret exactly what the gods were trying to tell him, the very temporal manifestation of foreboding he dreamed about landed on his doorstep.
CHAPTER SEVEN
After his morning dance with Red’s fists, Shay showered and dressed. He was just about to eat something that looked like dense coffee cake with flax seed, carob, and what Finn termed other roughage, when his cell phone rang.
It was Jesse calling from his bike. Shay knew he was traveling well above the speed limit because he could hear the wind in Jesse’s ear-bud, something that that particular high-tech piece of equipment shouldn’t have picked up under sixty-five miles per hour.
Jesse said four words: Firestorm. ETA, nine minutes before he disconnected.
Shay ran from the house he shared with Jesse, abutting Potter’s Woods, to the big house where the rest of the family lived, taking care to arm himself before grabbing his shoes on his way out the door.
“Firestorm, my ass. Shit-storm is more like it.”
…
Why she had gotten on the back of a complete stranger’s bike? For that matter, why had she bothered getting out of bed? It was her birthday. She could have skipped the office, not answered when the delivery man rang and simply rolled over and allowed herself to spend the day wrapped in a dream with her mystery lover. A lover who looked a lot like the man she was now holding onto for dear life.
Never one for recriminations or engaging in self doubt for longer than it took her to blink, Taryn decided to focus on the positive. She had her arms around a strong man, who smelled like wind and rosemary, mint shampoo. An unlikely and wonderful combination. She’d been attracted enough to banter with him instead of calling the campus police, who would have asked him to leave had she insisted. Even a gun to the head hadn’t changed that attraction, and if the rest of the world found something wrong with that, she didn’t much care. Taryn didn’t climb mountains, cave dive underwater, or freefall out of perfectly performing airplanes because the rest of the world thought it was right.
It would have been nice if she’d known his name before deciding to flee with him, but at least that was fixable.
Taryn shivered in the morning sun. He’d wrapped her in his leather jacket, with instructions to shoot anyone who seemed to get too close. The former she was thankful for, the latter made her want to scream. She didn’t shoot people. She shot film, but if anyone ever made her feel that vulnerable again, she’d make an exception. Maybe he could teach her how. It was a skill she was more than happy to learn as of about twenty minutes ago.
The bike pulled into an underground garage at a speed that defined how well the man on it maneuvered. He pulled into a narrow space under a sign that read: Parking Only for the Best Brother Ever. All Imposters Will Be Flayed Alive and Fed to the Fishes. Taryn wasn’t sure whether she wanted him to be fish bait or not, but she wanted to meet his sister. She got the feeling they were going to like one another. The sister, like her, seemed to prefer less subtle means of inflicting bodily damage than shooting, although if Taryn believed the sign, his sister was more prone to utter annihilation than simple body damage.
Taryn got off the bike before he did, which was no small feat, given the size of the bike and the size of the man still straddling it. “What’s your name?”
He lowered the kickstand and slid off with the same liquid grace he’d shown earlier when he flicked his wrists and two men went down. He moved like a dancer closing the distance between them, stopping just short of touching her. Taryn didn’t give up any ground. If he was going to hurt her he would have already, and odds were he wouldn’t have brought her home to do it.
“Jesse Mohr. Do you have a sister?”
“You’ve just been abducted and you want to know about my family? You’re one strange woman, Taryn Campbell.”
“I thought you said it was my family too.”
“Come on.” Jesse said, grabbing her hand, attempting to pull her toward the door.
Taryn yanked her hand away, standing her ground. “I’m not going anywhere until you answer my questions.”
He must have read the determination
on her face or in her voice because he didn’t try to force her to his will again. Something like amusement or maybe astonishment flashed across his face before a mask of cool efficiency took its place.
“It is your family too. Are you going to acknowledge them?” Something in his voice caught. It was a small hitch, probably unnoticeable to the average person, but not to her. She was paying too close attention.
“Are you going to answer my questions?”
“God, you’re stubborn.”
“I can do this all day.” She couldn’t really. She needed to find a bathroom and throw up. Sooner would be better than later, but this was important. She needed to feel in control before she entered his domain and that thin veneer of normalcy was stripped away.
“Yes, I have a sister. Her name’s Daisy.” Reed and Jordon named her after my biological mother.
“Is she a knife throwing, gun toting superhero too? Or is she just a blood-thirsty thug?”
Jesse smiled and his eyes crinkled, lightening the mood and making him so much more appealing. His smile had the added benefit of reducing the wave of nausea that was threatening to make an appearance on his boots.
“To answer your question, no, Daisy doesn’t ‘tote’ a gun.” He laughed, a sound Taryn hadn’t heard from him before, but she recognized the emotion it contained. He loved his sister. The softness of his dark blue eyes said he liked her too.
“You nailed the blood-thirsty thing though.” He shook his head and made a grunting sound deep in his throat. “She’s really going to drive Jordon crazy when she becomes a teenager.”
“She’s twelve?”
Jesse nodded. “Um-hum. She turns thirteen next week. Heaven help us all. You’re going to love Daisy. She’s half Rottweiler, half Golden Retriever disguised as a Papillon and completely fearless.” His face didn’t lose it’s warmth but his expression shifted into something Taryn couldn’t define. “She’s a lot like you.”
