Still The One (Family Stone #4 Jack) (Family Stone Romantic Suspense)

by Lisa Hughey

Jack felt the uncontrollable urge to shake her up. To rattle that calm facade and see what came tumbling out. To see if that blast of panic was real. “I was ready seven hours ago. I’m just waiting on the expert, Ms. Lee.”

  Larsen aimed a fierce look at Jack. “Put aside your issues and work together. This is an important witness.”

  Jack bristled. “Believe me I have a vested interest in this guy. He pissed in my backyard.” Besides the fact that he had a favor to repay to Judge Adams, the opportunity to give Ava peace of mind burned like a fire in his gut.

  “Excellent.” Jillian sauntered to the door of her office and glanced back one more time. “This situation needs to have a happy conclusion.”

  She closed the door with a muffled thump. And Jack and Bliss were alone for the first time in thirteen years.

  Three

  Suddenly the silence was laden with tension. Jack needed to hold onto his anger. But it was hard to stay angry in the face of her obvious changes when what he really wanted to do was ask her what had happened to her. But that was far too personal a topic for the strangers they were now.

  Anger. Anger. Anger. He tried to channel the anger so he could stay immune to the underlying sorrow that he sensed in her. “So Fernandez knows she’s escaped. Do you think he has any idea that Adams-Larsen was involved in relocating her?”

  “Most people are unaware that we do anything but PR and image consulting.” Bliss ran one long elegant finger over a line of type in the report. “We’ve maintained a ninety-nine percent success rate with our clients by being overly cautious.”

  Jack had been briefed by Judge Adams, Marsh Adams’s father, about the other more secretive services that the company offered. But it had been a very short and succinct recitation. They relocated witnesses and people in mortal danger and gave them new lives where they could be safe. “So I’m a special case.”

  She jerked involuntarily before she could control the movement. “Yes. That information is usually very high clearance and individual case basis. And normally you wouldn’t need to know.” Bliss kept her attention on the reports. “But Fernandez has resources in high places, and if he is aware of our…other business, then anything we put online or over the airwaves could be tracked.”

  Jack agreed.

  “I think we should go completely radio silent on this.” Bliss finally held his gaze for one long fraught moment.

  She wanted him to cut contact with his office. His first instinct was to argue, but then he thought about the fact that Ava had slim ties to the missing woman Maria Torres. And the fact that he had Connor looking into Fernandez’s background. Maybe Bliss had a point.

  “I have my brother digging for any information he can uncover on Fernandez.” Jack figured they needed to share information and now was the wrong time to hold back. “What if he needs to contact me with information?”

  “Phones off.” She crossed her arms over her chest, the move plumped her breasts slightly, the hint of cleavage only a shadow in the V of her button up shirt. “No compromise. Maria’s life is at stake. You’re talking about a guy who had no qualms about leaving her trapped in a basement for eight years.”

  Jack swallowed. “So….” If they had no contact with anyone else, it meant the two of them would be working extremely closely together.

  “It’s just you and me,” she said grimly.

  Him and Bliss. A hitch of some emotion he refused to name constricted his chest.

  He needed to remind himself that there was no him and Bliss for the long term. Just in the context of this case for a very short period of time they would have to work together. Distance. Perspective. Focus on her new life. That didn’t include you, you dumbass.

  She’d clearly done just fine. Without him.

  Jack’s blood pressure rose. Stress and worry pushed at his skull from the inside. Fuck. He did not need to pursue that line of thinking. Business. Keep his focus on business.

  “Is Maria your typical client?”

  “I can safely say that I’ve never had to relocate someone who has been basically held hostage for eight years in a basement, who never saw the light of day, or anyone besides her captors.”

  Jack bent forward in the fancy brocade chair, the more delicate frame groaned as he shifted his two hundred and fifty pound bulk. He bunched his fists and scowled. “That bastard.”

  “Yes. Which is why we need to find Maria before he does,” Bliss returned solemnly.

  Jack was in complete agreement. “Where do you think she went?” He leaned closer to her and her jasmine perfume teased his senses.

  Bliss subtly leaned back in her chair, increasing the distance between them. “That’s it. I don’t have a clue.” Jack could see that she was beating herself up over the fact that she couldn’t intuit what Maria had been thinking. “I should have had some idea that she didn’t trust us. I should have realized that she was going to bolt.”

  For a few seconds she clearly forgot he was in the office with her, her honey-colored gaze far off and unfocused. “Dammit. I should have known.”

  “But you don’t have any personal experience with a total relocation,” Jack argued. He couldn’t stand to see that anguished look in her eyes. “You shouldn’t beat yourself up.”

  Bliss’s expression froze for a fraction of second. Her eyes widened, and then she blinked until the fan of her lashes hid her from his suddenly far more interested gaze. And then she curved back into the wings of the chair as if very subtly hiding.

  Everything in Jack tightened, sharpened, narrowed in on Bliss and her reactions. He saw beneath her outward show of frustration before she relaxed carefully. Denial. She did have experience with relocation.

  His Bliss had had another identity. If he’d read her body language correctly, she’d had the kind of identity and relocation that meant she’d been witness to or had direct experience with a violent situation that she needed to be protected from. And she’d never mentioned it the entire time they’d been together.

  Jack’s brain kept circling around to one thought. She had experience with relocation. Questions bombarded his brain at Mach speed. When? Why? How? Where?

  But Jack wasn’t an idiot. If he asked her outright, she’d deny and shut him down. But what if her experience could help them figure out what Maria was doing, where she was going? Shit.

  He had to shove that revelation to the back of his mind. Take it out and examine the ramifications later. Right now his focus needed to be on finding Maria. “Did you take her to Iowa personally?”

  Bliss seemed to relax when she thought her reaction had dodged his notice. Far from the case, but Jack had to time his questions and come at her with them when her guard was down and she wasn’t expecting them in order to get an honest answer out of her.

  “Yes,” Bliss admitted.

  “And how was she?”

  “Terrified of the sun.”

  “Terrified?” Jack asked skeptically.

  “Honestly, she hadn’t been outside in eight years.” Bliss said angrily, “Eight years. She was afraid of everything. She’d been completely isolated, no interactions with anyone.”

  “What about her captors?”

  “They shoved food at her through a cat door installed in the ceiling.”

  “Medical?”

  “If she got sick they bought her over the counter medicine.” Bliss rubbed her palms over her biceps. “Fortunately she seems to be extremely healthy.”

  “Exercise?”

  “They gave her an exercise bike, a television, and a small refrigerator, and a single burner.”

  “Jesus.” Jack rubbed his severed brow with his index finger and contemplated that information. “So where the hell would she go?”

  “I don’t know.” Bliss tapped the gnawed end of her pen on the manila folder with all the details of Maria’s case. “That’s why I didn’t think we’d have to worry about her taking off.”

  Jack stared at a pair of etchings of colonial era buildings stacked on the wall. “A
re we sure she didn’t just barricade herself in the basement?”

  “There’s a basement and a storm cellar. We inspected them thoroughly once we realized she was gone.”

  “How long did it take before she bolted?”

  “Only a few hours.” Bliss grimaced, her brows crimped in concern. “Her large cash withdrawal at the ATM triggered an alarm in our system. I called her right away but she didn’t answer. And the guard we’d placed in town was at the ATM within ten minutes.”

  Jack raised his eyebrows. “You provided the cell?”

  Bliss said, “Yes. But her cell phone hasn’t moved. She left it at the safe house.”

  “Who would she call?” Jack tried to approach the problem analytically. But he kept getting caught up on one fact. If he was in trouble he could call any one of his siblings and they’d drop everything to help him out. And he’d do the same for them. But Maria Torres had been alone, abandoned, for what probably felt like forever. “She didn’t need the phone. She’s been alone for eight years. It wouldn’t occur to her that she had anyone on the other end who gave a shit.”

  Bliss’s mouth curved downward as Jack’s words hit home. “I gave a shit,” she replied softly.

  “I get that.” Jack resisted the urge to take her in his arms and comfort her. “But she probably didn’t believe you.”

  Bliss’s eyes were glassy as she blinked rapidly.

  Jack desperately tried to distract her before she started crying. “If she’s been underground and isolated for the last eight years, how did she know what to do?”

  “She was addicted to crime shows.” Bliss’s lips quirked. “CSI was her favorite.”

  Jack leaned forward, elbows on his knees, fingers clasped together and hung low between his spread legs as he reasoned out Maria’s plans. “She couldn’t possibly have figured out how to escape and evade someone like Fernandez.”

  “She’s smart, Jack,” Bliss countered. “She basically watched television and she learned.”

  “But this guy has been fooling the public and his staunch supporters for eight years without even a whiff of corruption or criminal activity.” Jack stood and stretched his legs. He needed to be doing rather than sitting. “This situation is going to send serious shock waves through the community. Especially the Hispanic community. The guy is practically a saint in my town.”

  Bliss snorted. As if she couldn’t restrain her curiosity any longer, she asked, “What are you doing in Monterey?”

  Jack raised a brow. “I live there.”

  Clearly she hadn’t been following up on him. Apparently not like he’d been keeping track of her.

  “In Monterey?”

  “Yeah.” He rubbed his palm over the back of his neck trying to ease the tension that had gripped him since this morning when he’d discovered that not only was he going to have to see Bliss again but he’d have to work closely with her.

  And now it appeared that while he had kept tabs on her, where she was and what she was doing, even when she’d been married, dammit, she had not given him another thought once she kicked him out of her life.

  If that didn’t deflate his ego faster than an inflatable pierced by a machine gun round, he didn’t know what would. “I started my own company about a year ago.”

  “That’s…great.” But her face had slipped back into that mask, as if she’d shut down the monitor and turned off the lights.

  “Yeah.” Jack was proud of what he and his family had accomplished in one short year. “Global Humanitarian Relief has managed to do a lot of good in a very short amount of time.”

  “So what does this situation have to do with a humanitarian relief company?”

  “I’m paying back a favor,” Jack replied shortly. He wasn’t about to admit any more than that. And they were wasting time. As much as he hated to take second chair, his job was muscle and resources. So he figuratively bit his tongue and deferred to Bliss. “So what’s the plan?”

  She raised a single brow in question.

  “You’re lead.” Jack shrugged. “I’ll follow, and offer my opinion, if requested.”

  “We need to figure out where she was headed.” Bliss rubbed her fingers over her mouth, worry etched in every line of her face. But Jack’s attention was riveted on her lips, on the sweet bow of her mouth. “Which could freaking be anywhere in the U.S.”

  “No passport?”

  “No. We didn’t give her a passport card. Thank goodness. Otherwise we’d have to expand our search to Canada and Mexico.”

  Jack was pretty impressed. The girl had cojones. He’d give her that. “Wouldn’t she know that the safest thing she could do would be to stay put and wait until we could expose Fernandez?”

  “She probably felt like she’d exchanged one prison for another.” Bliss’s shoulders slumped.

  God, he couldn’t stand to see her obvious discouragement. Without thinking, he reached over and curled his fingers around hers. The spark was instant and electric. A current shot from his fingers to his groin and his heart began to beat in triple time as if he’d been shocked by a defibrillator.

  At the surprising arousal, he tightened his fingers over hers. Unwilling to let the contact slip away, he tugged her to her feet and curled his other arm around her shoulders. Bliss stiffened. But Jack was lost in the feel of her in his arms. She fit as if she’d never left. As if she’d been made just for him. Her head tucked perfectly beneath his six foot five frame and into the curve of his neck.

  Jack closed his eyes, shut out the fancy office, and reveled in how she felt in his arms. Familiar, and yet different. He remembered the days when she belonged there. Why the hell had he ever let her go?

  Except the truth was, he hadn’t let her go. She’d kicked him out and never looked back. She’d gotten married. He’d celebrated the day with a highball glass and a bottle of scotch. And when she’d gotten divorced he’d spent that day the same way.

  And damned himself for still caring.

  Yet, all that was forgotten the moment she nestled in his arms like she’d been made just for him. She relaxed into the curve of his embrace for a precious second as if she were happy to be there. Just as happy as he was to have her there. But that quickly ended.

  “What are you doing?” She shoved out of his embrace, avoiding his gaze. But her indifferent mask had slipped revealing a pain she’d hidden expertly. Her anguish nearly brought him to his knees with its depth and intensity. But then he realized she’d been hiding things for years.

  He thought about her hesitation when he’d said she wouldn’t have any personal knowledge of relocation and witness protection. Her reaction meant she’d been keeping secrets for far longer than he could even imagine. That was irrelevant right now.

  But in the back of his mind, where all this new information about Bliss took up residence and simmered, he wondered…What else had she hidden from him?

  “You need to stop beating yourself up over this.”

  “Really?” Bliss’s bland mask disappeared in a puff of anger. Her honey eyes sparkled and her face heated. The indifference was gone.

  Jack could feel himself getting sucked back in to the vortex that was Bliss Lee. He couldn’t afford to let her get to him. He’d been lost the last time she’d tossed him out. While he liked to think he was older, wiser, and his heart protected by a cynical barrier that not much penetrated anymore, he wasn’t about to chance it and end up devastated and alone in the same position thirteen years later. The thought that she could suck him in and he would end up back in the same place raised his ire.

  “Fine. Let’s just focus on what to do next.” Anger was a much easier emotion to express than regret and sorrow, so Jack embraced the geyser of hurt and rage that shot up from the pit of his stomach and jabbed at her with a small dig. “What would you have done?”

  Bliss jerked as if he’d punched her, but she didn’t acknowledge that he’d scored a direct hit. She shut her eyes and contemplated what her response would have been to a threat. What
action would her instinct prod her to take?

  “The first primal instinct is to get as far away from…Fernandez as possible.” Bliss rubbed her palms against her biceps, the gesture caused the button up shirt to gap. Jack tried to keep his gaze from drifting to the tantalizing glimpse of skin. “That was part of the reason I put her in Iowa, besides the smells and sounds.”

  “What?”

  “It’s smack in the middle between California and DC.” Bliss lamented, “I wanted her to feel safe.”

  Bliss paced around the office until she stood behind the wing chair. The furniture was like a shield that protected her body from his penetrating stare. Her fingers traced the graceful arch of the back as she processed her thoughts.

  “What’s the second?” Because if Maria was as smart as Bliss thought, then she wouldn’t go with instinct number one.

  “Go back,” Bliss whispered.

  “What?”

  Bliss tilted her head, her burnished copper hair fell over one shoulder. “Where’s the last place he would look for her?”

  Jack shook his head. “She wouldn’t.”

  “It’s what I would do.” Bliss argued as the idea took root. And she knew with the instincts that had protected her for the last eighteen years, that she was right. “She’s got guts. She’d go back to the absolute last place Fernandez would look for her.”

  Jack was speechless.

  “We’ve got to go. Now.”

  “Where are we going?” Jack asked.

  “California,” Bliss said grimly. “After a quick stop in Iowa.”

  Four

  Shane had filed their flight plan and was doing the preflight check on the Bombardier while Jack got Bliss settled. Once Bliss was ensconced in a butter soft, cream leather seat in the passenger cabin of the Stone family jet, Jack went to the cockpit and sat with Shane, serving as the co-pilot for takeoff.

  It had been a long fucking day.

  But Jack bet the day had been even longer for Maria Torres. Wherever she was.

  He was torn between wanting to spend more time with Bliss and wanting to stay as far away from her as possible. But he had a duty to Maria, a responsibility to the people, to find her and make sure that José Fernandez paid for his actions eight years ago.