It was quiet—too much so—and tension bowed the air as she walked toward the main information desk. It was usually bustling, no one staying in place for very long, but they’d stopped taking patients and now all she saw were people’s backs as their faces remained glued to the television mounted on the wall above the station.
She saw the front of the hospital and pictures of the Wallaces flashed on the screen. Next was the picture from her ID badge, looking humorless and sallow. She grimaced a little, but if that was her worst problem …
It wasn’t.
Her face was still on the TV screen, but now it was a younger version—that file photo of her at fourteen that the press had used over and over again when the school shooting first happened.
She knew the one they would show next—the one of her wearing a bloodied shirt, being escorted out of the school … and then her kneeling on the pavement.
There had been a recent school shooting. Whenever that happened, it was inevitable that Jeffrey’s name would come up—as sure as it was that they’d mention Columbine. This time there was even more interest because of Jeffrey’s transfer to the mental health section of the prison. They claimed it was just as secure as the main prison itself, but she’d worked with her share of psych patients and, in her opinion, they could be far more devious than regular criminals, without being obvious about it. Often underestimated, they would appear catatonic and still steal your keys to the ward.
It’s prison, it’s different, she repeated to herself.
Her brother and what he’d done had been her secret since before she’d moved here to this large New York hospital. She was twenty-six and she still looked slightly haunted, some might say, and anonymity was something she craved, something she needed as much as air.
Even though she used her stepfather’s last name, it would be easy enough to tie her to the horrible tragedy that had occurred. It was so far in the past for most people that she’d thought that by now it was safe. But she of all people should have known better. She would never be safe from any of it.
Still, the news report signaled the first time anyone had found her since she’d gone off to college. She’d kept her identity hidden, cut her hair short and dyed it darker, wore glasses even though she didn’t need them and made up a fictional background that basically left her an orphan.
Now she wore her hair long and back to its natural blond. She had also ditched the glasses because she was old enough not to be recognized as the girl she’d once been. But as of today, her security was gone.
The entire staff was glued to the television—one by one, they’d turn surreptitiously to look at her, to try to see the resemblance between her and that young girl in shock. She could see the questions in their eyes, and she understood.
Everyone wanted to know what it was like to live with evil. She would do anything in her power if she could only forget.
Carole Ann snuck her out of the hospital, but a few members of the press followed her home.
“Paige, do you have any comment about your brother’s transfer?”
“Paige, are you going to allow yourself to be interviewed for the new book on your brother’s crimes?”
“Paige, after all these years, are you ready to talk about what happened?”
She shut the front door without a word to them and locked herself in her apartment. The press continued to knock on the door, until her landlady threatened to call the police on them.
Paige didn’t bother to open her door to thank her, didn’t want to face Mrs. Morris’s questioning eyes. No doubt she already knew.
Exhaustion covered her in a sudden, debilitating wave. She felt as if she’d been on the move since the murders.
In the beginning, before Jeffrey went on trial, it had taken exactly fifteen minutes before the first news crews camped out and seven days before the first hate mail showed up. There were news articles and magazine covers and books, which all tried to make sense of what had happened—all asking, How could the parents not have known?
Anonymous death threats and accusations followed, resulting in six moves in that first year, until the trial was over and many people felt as though justice was served. Then some of the parents of the murdered teens had wanted to bring Paige’s parents up on criminal charges, but that hadn’t happened. Still, there were civil suits, and even though there was never a judgement found against her family, the trials had still drained them physically, emotionally and bled them financially.
The saddest part of the entire ordeal was that neither Paige nor her parents blamed any of the victims’ families for anything they did. Their own guilt was too deeply imbedded in them to do so.
Now that guilt became so all-pervasive that she didn’t leave her apartment—she wrapped herself in her quilt and stayed in bed. But nearly forty-eight hours after she’d left the ER, once the press had finally left her alone, she got a phone call from a man whose name she recognized from the recent newspaper articles.
“I’m writing a book about your brother and I’d love to interview you,” he said, after introducing himself as Arthur Somberg and her skin began to crawl.
“Don’t you ever contact me again,” she whispered, her voice raw, as if she’d been screaming for days. But really that had only been inside of her head.
“Don’t you want your side of the story told?” he asked. “I’m interviewing the victims’ families and friends and I think your point of view would be invaluable.”
She hung up on him and unplugged the landline. Mind made up, she packed as much as she could into two suitcases and figured the rest she could call a wash. She’d miss the landlady, a widow who often gave her homemade cake and cookies, especially around the holidays.
Yesterday had been Thanksgiving—she had the half-eaten pumpkin pie and a plate of ham and mashed potatoes to prove it. Mrs. Morris had been kind enough to simply knock and leave them outside her door, as if she knew Paige still couldn’t face her.
She’d lived there two years, a tidy, furnished, one-bedroom apartment in the borough of Queens, close enough to Manhattan to get back and forth to work easily, without the ridiculous rent. In all that time, she’d bought herself only a new mattress, a small TV stand and some kitchen utensils, preferring takeout to cooking and extra shifts at the hospital to spending time at home.
The most valuable things—the photo albums and Gray’s medals and letters—those she packed up and dragged down to the car with her, but not without checking first to make sure that no one was hanging around. It was dark and she appeared to be alone in the small driveway.
She hoped her old car could make this trip to the Catskills. Sometimes it barely made it cross-town.
She wore the thickest sweater she owned and still wasn’t warm enough. She suspected she never would be, jacked the heat up as high as the small car would allow and ignored her racing pulse and the butterflies in her stomach. Two hours of highway driving left her on the two-laned road that would lead her to the small town named after a cow, and she realized that her head felt clearer up here.
Or maybe she was just light-headed from the change in altitude.
Fingers tapped the wheel as the truck in front of her car lumbered slowly along. She peered at the sky and then turned off the radio, tired of hearing how the early-for-the-season snowstorm would be the worst of the century.
She hadn’t called ahead—Mace, Gray’s best friend, wouldn’t know she was coming. Better that way. She’d always believed that the element of surprise was most effective—based on her own experience and hatred of surprises, she could say that with firsthand certainty.
But if she ever wanted to find out what happened to her stepbrother, she’d have to speak to his teammate.
The Army wouldn’t tell her anything. She’d waited for his friends to show up at the memorial service, but none of them had. It would be up to her to find them, and this seemed the perfect time.
Everything happens for a reason, her mother used to say, and Paige wonde
red what this reasoning was, why Gray had been taken from her … why her face was plastered on the news again.
Gray had always told her to go to Mace if anything ever happened and he wasn’t around. Mace will take care of you.
She’d met Mace once, when she lived in Chicago. Gray and Mace had stayed at her apartment overnight—they’d been on leave and traveling to California for vacation. Could still hear Gray introducing him.
Hey, Sis, this is Mace. He’s motorpool, like me.
Translation—he’s Delta.
She’d been on her way out to work the night shift, but Mace’s eyes had haunted her the entire time. He was broad and handsome and seemed to take up the entire apartment.
She’d hated him on sight. Maybe because he was so good-looking. Cocky. An asshole. And she’d labeled him all of that before he’d even opened his mouth.
When he had spoken to her, it was all one-word answers.
She’d been grateful that spending time with him hadn’t been an option. But the next morning the men were there later than she’d realized. She’d come in from work after having breakfast out with some of the other nurses on the night shift and dropped her stuff by the door. A pocketknife sat on the table next to the keys and jackets and she picked it up, assuming it was Gray’s.
It hadn’t been. The images of fear came spiraling through the metal before she could stop them. She’d wanted to throw the knife down, but couldn’t. She saw a young boy. Saw fear and pain—and the word trust and then escape, over and over again.
The man this knife belonged to had been through hell as a child. But even though she understood tough childhoods, she didn’t need to take on any more than what she had.
But that wasn’t the end of their encounter.
She’d walked in on Mace sleeping naked in her bedroom—in her bed. She had given him and Gray her room, despite their protests that they’d be fine on the couch and the floor.
Gray had been in the shower.
She’d wanted to tear her gaze away from Mace, but hadn’t been able to for a good long while. Although she was used to seeing the human body on a regular basis, she remembered thinking she’d never seen anything so exquisitely male.
In the four years since she’d seen him, she’d been with a handful of men, none of whom really mattered. No, she’d never been able to shake the vision of Mace from her mind and, to be fair, she hadn’t really tried.
CHAPTER
2
Men had acted stupid over women since the beginning of time and tonight proved no exception. It wasn’t even midnight and Mace Stevens had already broken up three near misses and one full-blown fight. Caleb had nearly been the recipient of a chair to the head while trying to tend bar on one of the busiest nights of the year, the Friday after Thanksgiving.
His grandfather used to say, When the weather gets bad around here, there isn’t much else to do but drink and make babies. Mace hoped the baby-making portion of the evening was going to start soon, didn’t care if it started happening right on top of the bar, because at least everyone would be too distracted to throw down.
“Lighten up, man.” Caleb shoved a beer at him. “It’s almost over.”
“No it’s not. Not by a long shot.” He shook his head and then took a long pull from the bottle.
“Cut the gloom-and-doom shit, all right? Go get laid or something.”
In Caleb’s mind these days, getting laid was never a bad thing—and once upon a time it hadn’t been for Mace either. Sex used to be a distraction. But that was before they’d been captured and tortured, before they’d come home on extended leave from the Army.
Before Gray was killed.
Tonight, like all the others since then, there were no distractions to be had. The storm bearing down on this region had even the most weather-resistant people resigned to waiting this one out.
Plows would run as they could, but since the next day was the Saturday of a holiday weekend, no one cared much about the possibility of being snowed in. Now that the auto plant two towns over had closed, most of the locals were struggling. Friday night in the bar was a time for them to forget their troubles.
But Mace’s were just beginning. He’d had the feeling in his gut all day, couldn’t shake it, had snapped at Caleb for no reason and now Keagen, the other bartender, was also giving him a wide berth.
Cael, not so much. He was used to Mace’s moods—even with Caleb’s memory loss, he seemed to understand instinctively that his friend was, and always had been, a moody bastard.
And then the door opened and his world tilted a one-eighty for the second time in three months.
The woman framed there looked like an angel. Light from the parking lot shone in from behind her, illuminating her like some kind of protective aura and he most definitely wasn’t the only man who noticed her.
But he was the only one who knew exactly who she was.
Paige Grayson. The woman he’d promised Gray he’d take care of if she ever needed anything.
My little sister, Gray would call her when they first became friends, but even from the pictures Mace had seen before he’d met her, Paige hadn’t looked like a little sister. She was gorgeous, the stuff of fantasies.
Seeing her in person that first time four years ago had only made him realize that the recent pictures Gray had taken of her hadn’t done her justice at all.
He didn’t have to wonder what she’d thought of him the one and only time they’d met in person. Most people thought he was a suspicious asshole, and they were right. Paige had picked up on it immediately—and he’d had such a strong attraction to her that he’d hidden behind the great wall of defenses he had built so well.
The morning he’d left, he’d known she’d walked into the bedroom where he’d been sleeping naked, had closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep, only because nothing was going to happen with Gray in close proximity. He’d waited patiently while she watched him, her gaze like hot fire on his bare skin. He’d already been hard just thinking about her, being in her apartment, smelling her on the sheets and towels, but the appraising look he could see through his lashes had made it worse.
When she’d left, he’d jerked off, imagining what it would be like to do that with her next to him, what it would be like to have her hand replace his. And then he’d remembered she was Gray’s sister—off-limits—and he’d left her apartment that same morning with a simple Thank you.
And now she was standing in his bar.
There was an energy around her—it almost made her glow. Her eyes, big and brown, her blond hair pulled back. She looked young, younger than he knew she was. And way too freaking innocent to be hanging around here. Except that Mace knew she was tough as nails, at least from what Gray had told him. She’d worked inner-city ERs for years.
Jesus, she did it for him in every single way. He couldn’t help but stare at the way the soft, old denim hugged her curves in all the right places. Her sweater was thin—definitely not warm enough—and she held the fabric of the sleeves fisted in her palms.
He’d noted that the sleeves were worn and stretched, as though holding the sweater like that was a common occurrence. Gray had told him about Paige’s psychometry—magic hands, Gray used to call them.
She could read people’s thoughts if she touched them, although that last part was a secret she didn’t like anyone knowing.
Mace hated knowing everyone’s secrets as well. “Not the type of woman you could ever hold anything back from,” he’d noted at the time.
Gray had shot him a look. “She’s not the type of woman you’d want to. Not that you should get any ideas about my sister, brother.”
Mace had ideas—both then and now—definite, inappropriate ideas. Hundreds of miles, sometimes continents, had separated them then. Now, maybe twenty feet and counting.
“Who are you … ah.” Caleb had come up behind him. “Pretty. Not from around here.”
Yeah, Caleb had a one-track mind when it came to women these days. He
also had traumatic amnesia that wiped out much of his memory, one he was currently trying to rebuild.
“Wait, that’s Gray’s stepsister.” Caleb often studied his past as one might a history textbook with the same fierce determination that brought him up the ranks and commanded Delta Force’s attention. “Something must be wrong.”
He moved to go to her, but Mace put a hand out. “Let me—she’ll have questions.”
Caleb glanced at him, and Mace saw the nerves take over the big man. He held it together well most days, but any mention of Gray—or their capture and Gray’s subsequent death—was enough to throw him off his game. “She’ll want to know what happened that night. I’m sure the Army’s not telling her shit.”
Mace nodded in agreement. “We’re not telling her anything.”
“But for Gray …”
“For Gray, we’ll make sure she’s all right. And then we’ll send her back home,” Mace said, and Cael pushed past him to get behind the bar.
The crowd was gearing up. Midnight. Witching hour coincided with Paige’s arrival.
There was no way that was simply a coincidence.
It only took a few steps before Paige found herself the object of unwanted attention, in the form of a tall man with a long beard and a big belly. He grabbed her around the waist, pulling her close while managing to pinch her ass at the same time.
The recent attack she’d endured in the ER was too fresh in her mind—she was still reeling from it the way the bruising was still fresh on her skin, and so she jabbed her elbow back into his ribs while simultaneously jamming her heel into his foot.
He howled and let go, but she didn’t, brought him down hard by flexing his own hand inward toward his wrist. He was on his knees in front of her; and she kicked him in the balls for good measure.
In the Air Tonight Page 2
