The Secret Son

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  Erica, seeing the story’s end, swallowed back tears.

  “One of the kids grabbed her, held her in front of him while he made his way out of the school. They were holed up in his van for more than three hours before gunshots were heard again. When the authorities got inside the van, Melissa and Courtney had been killed by a single shot. I was working here in New York and they couldn’t reach me.”

  “What happened to the kid?” It didn’t matter. Erica didn’t give a damn about the kid. She just had to get her mind off that young woman and her baby.

  Jack’s baby.

  “He was dead, too.”

  Jack’s eyes were bleak. Vacant. And completely dry.

  Erica had to fight not to cry for him.

  “Jack,” she said, attempting to bring him back to her if she could. “I’m sorry. So incredibly sorry.”

  As he refocused on her, Erica could see the raging emotions he was struggling to control. “I know,” he said.

  There was nothing she could do for him, nothing she could say that was going to make any difference at all to the despair he was fighting. She could only sit there. Give him her love. And hope that there really was some healing power in a human heart.

  “She was only two months old. Not even rolling over yet.” His voice was low. “That’s when I joined the Crisis Negotiation team.”

  Erica ached to hold him in her arms.

  She ached for a lot of things she couldn’t have.

  CHAPTER TWO

  HOURS PASSED. Erica drank four more glasses of wine, well past her limit. But without the numbness it brought, she’d never be able to walk away from Jack and go home to the man she’d married.

  Maggie’s was closing within the hour. There were only a few late-night stragglers left.

  “I’m glad Jefferson is good to you.”

  “I don’t deserve his goodness,” Erica said. She’d always felt that way, but never more so than she did at this moment, sitting here with Jack, clutching his hand, afraid that she’d fallen in love with him.

  “How can you say that?” Jack argued. “You spend your life presenting him in the best possible light, giving everything you have to the building of his reputation.”

  “He’s in love with me.”

  “I sure as hell hope so.” The words were sharp.

  “I love him, too, but I’m not in love with him.”

  “You said he knew that going in.”

  She nodded. “I’d been working in his office for several years, and I’d recently received the promotion to communications director.” Erica, remembering back three years before, could hardly make sense of decisions that had seemed so logical and clear-cut. “The Republican senatorial race in Massachusetts was going to be brutal that year. While Jefferson’s reputation was good, so was the reputation of the state prosecutor hoping to win his seat. No matter how much we pumped the issues, the campaign was going to come down to the fact that the prosecutor had a beautiful wife and three honor-student kids, and Jefferson was childless and had been divorced for several years.”

  She didn’t want to waste precious time talking about this. And yet, it was important to know he understood.

  She stared at their hands. His tanned skin was in stark contrast to her paleness. She loved the back of his hand, covered with a sprinkling of the same sandy hair that fell across his forehead.

  His touch was bittersweet, promising things she’d stopped believing in.

  “One night, late, after consuming almost an entire bottle of wine to unwind from a particularly grueling week, Jefferson confessed that he’d been in love with me for years.”

  It was well past midnight now. Their hours had turned into minutes.

  Jack’s eyes narrowed. “He just blurted it out?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “That’s not Jefferson’s style. He was arguing with me, actually, disputing a statement I’d just made about the nonexistence of love. I told him the emotion was a fantasy. That its power was ephemeral. That the happiness I thought I’d found with Shane didn’t really exist.”

  It had been one of her many misconceptions, though she hadn’t discovered that until this past week.

  “We debated through another glass of wine, and then I finally just told him that if love did exist, it wasn’t anything I was going to allow in my life again. I refused to be that vulnerable. Wasn’t going to give someone else the power to hurt me that much.”

  “A wise decision.”

  Erica wasn’t surprised he agreed. After sharing a sardonic grin with him, she continued. “At that point, with the conversation at a standstill and the bottle of wine gone, Jefferson’s confession lay between us like…like some shocking indiscretion.”

  The bartender came over and handed Jack their final tab. Without letting go of her hand, he fumbled with his wallet, threw his credit card on the table. He caressed her palm with his fingers—and the rest of her with his eyes.

  Time was almost up.

  She needed more to drink. She wasn’t numb enough yet.

  “What happened next?” he asked, as though their world wasn’t coming to an end.

  “We talked awkwardly about the campaign for a few minutes, trying to get back on familiar ground. The talk came around to Jefferson’s single status, and the solution seemed obvious. We should get married. He must’ve asked me fifteen times if I was sure I didn’t harbor some secret dream about a knight in shining armor.

  “I pointed out that I hadn’t had a date since my divorce and that I didn’t want one.

  “He said he hated the thought of me living my whole life alone. I told him I wasn’t thrilled with the idea myself, but that it was far better than the alternative.

  “He asked me to marry him and eventually I accepted.”

  The bartender came back with the receipt for Jack to sign. Resentment shot through Erica. Couldn’t the man have given them a few more minutes?

  “Two months later we were married, and four months after that, he won.” She continued telling her story as though they hadn’t been interrupted, as though they weren’t supposed to be standing up, heading toward the door, leaving the pub.

  And each other.

  “I had a lot of reservations because I knew he was in love with me and I couldn’t return those feelings. But in the end, he somehow convinced me that being allowed to share my life would make him happy. I let him convince me it would be enough.”

  The biggest mistake of all.

  Jack was frowning.

  “You have to understand,” Erica said quickly. “It wasn’t that I didn’t love him. I did—I do. It’s just not a stars-in-your-eyes, heartjumping kind of love. He’d been a colleague of my father’s, a friend of the family for years. I’d actually had a crush on him for a short time while I was in high school.”

  “Just how old is he?” Jack asked, pulling her up to stand with him, still not relinquishing his hold on her hand.

  She didn’t want to tell him. Jefferson looked younger than he was, and Jack had told her he wasn’t really up on Washington politicians, anyway. She was pretty sure he’d missed the publicity about her marriage to Jefferson three years before.

  “Fifty-nine,” she said with obvious reluctance.

  He stopped. Stared at her. “Twenty-seven years older than you?”

  He was good with the math.

  Erica nodded.

  “And here I’ve been picturing you with some hotshot young stud tearing up Capitol Hill. This kind of reminds me of that song by the Eagles. ‘Lyin’ Eyes.”’

  Hand in hand, they walked to the door.

  “Except that I’ve never visited the cheatin’ side of town.”

  The New York air was crisp. Cool. Forty-seventh Street was almost deserted. With the minutes closing in on her, Erica felt caged, claustrophobic.

  “Let me walk you to your hotel?”

  “Of course.”

  But there was no “of course” about it. Always before, he’d hailed her a cab on Fifth Aven
ue and wished her good-night.

  A twenty-minute walk to her hotel—if they took things slowly—and then her soul mate was going to walk out of her life forever. How could she possibly make it through a lifetime of never feeling this way again? Of never feeling the intensity, the rightness, she felt when she was with Jack?

  This wasn’t the youthful passionate love she’d felt for Shane. It went deeper than that. Deeper than what she’d known as love.

  Jack made her feel complete.

  THEY WERE NEARING her hotel. Jack spent the last couple of blocks wondering whether he dared to kiss her good-night.

  He was going to have to leave her without doing what he needed most—take her to bed. He didn’t even question that.

  Jack didn’t sleep with married women.

  And she wasn’t the type to cheat.

  Jefferson Cooley might not have passionate love from her, but he had her loyalty. And of the two, loyalty won out.

  As he believed it should.

  “See that guy over there?” Erica said, gesturing as they approached her hotel.

  A man, dressed casually in a pair of well-fitting jeans and a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, leaned against the corner of the building.

  “Yeah.”

  “My first night here, he tried to get me to go with him, supposedly to pick out some earrings for his mother. I had to tell him no three times before he finally gave up,” she said, her voice not quite steady, though from wine, their imminent goodbye or something else he couldn’t be sure. “He’s been hanging around the hotel all week.”

  She slowed her steps until they were barely moving forward at all. “For a while I thought he was out here smoking, but I’ve never seen him light up. A couple of times since that first night, I’ve caught him watching me. And then last evening, I’m almost certain he followed me into the hotel. He came in right after I did. I slipped into an elevator just as the door was closing and lost him.”

  Once a cop, always a cop. Jack checked the man out. Erica was right. He was watching them. Or rather, her. The guy hadn’t been hanging around his place all week.

  “I’m walking you inside,” Jack said brusquely, putting an arm around Erica to lead her through the front door of the hotel.

  He glared at the guy as they passed, warning him off in no uncertain terms. The other man shrugged and looked away.

  The man might be perfectly harmless. Just a hotel guest appreciating a beautiful fellow guest.

  But Jack had learned the hard way that you could never be sure.

  Glancing back as they entered the hotel, Jack wasn’t pleased to see the man still leaning there, still watching them.

  It was odd, the way he’d been leaning against that wall all week. Was he a threat to Erica? And if so, why?

  “I’d feel a whole lot better if you’d just let me see you safely up to your room.”

  Erica looked at him uncertainly, lightly chewing her lower lip, and he knew it wasn’t just the man loitering outside that was troubling her. With every moment they prolonged this goodbye, they were giving temptation the edge, challenging a strength that might not be able to sustain them.

  She nodded, silently leading the way.

  Not another word was said as they rode the deserted elevator up to the twelfth floor. She paused outside a double door about halfway down the hall.

  A suite. At least Jefferson Cooley kept her in style.

  She slid her electronic entry card into the slot above the door handle. “I can’t do this,” she said suddenly, resting her head against the door.

  Jack reached for the card with shaking fingers. “Here, let me.”

  But the green light was already on. She’d unlocked the door.

  Erica turned, her eyes bright with unshed tears as she looked up at him. “I can’t just go in there and leave you when I still have another six hours before I have to be at the airport….”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I just wish we could go somewhere and talk.”

  He had to work tomorrow. Lives were at stake. He had to be sharp, decisive, alert to every nuance.

  But he’d have a long plane ride to recover from a sleepless night….

  “It does seem criminal to waste six perfectly good hours,” he said.

  “We could go to that place we passed a few blocks back, the one with the yellow and green lights,” she said.

  Jack thought of the man hanging around outside. “I’d rather you didn’t leave the hotel again, not while that guy’s still down there. He’s probably harmless, but just in case…”

  Erica frowned, her dark-brown eyes filled with so many conflicting emotions he couldn’t decipher. “Nothing in the hotel will be open this late.”

  Temptation battled resolve with no clear victor.

  Jack took a steadying breath. At the agency, they called him a man of steel. They joked that his middle name was self-control. And it was true. A hostage negotiator had to be cool under pressure.

  He reached around her to open the door of her suite. “I’ll bet you have a fully stocked bar in here,” he guessed, “and a perfectly good table and chairs we can use.”

  He glanced around the corner of the entryway. He’d been right. The bar was along the far wall. The table was glass, with four chairs around it and a big bowl of fresh fruit in the center.

  “We’ll pretend we’re in the bar down the street, the one with the yellow and green lights, but I’ll know you’re safe.”

  She looked as though she was going to refuse. As though she had to refuse. And then she smiled at him.

  “Okay,” she said, hesitation in every line of her body. She stood there, tall, model-slim, arms tight against her sides. And he realized that if this was a risk for him, it was a greater one for her. “We’re in a bar. And we have the whole night ahead of us….”

  Jack wasn’t sure how many shots of whiskey he consumed over the next couple of hours. He only knew that he was ahead of her and her glasses of wine probably two to one. And that it still wasn’t enough.

  On his last trip back from the bathroom, he couldn’t make himself return to that hard wicker chair, squeezing his long legs under the ridiculous glass table. He’d been afraid something was going to break every time he set his drink down.

  He wasn’t sure why he’d thought staying in her suite had been such a good idea, either.

  He’d miscalculated the danger. It wasn’t the man outside she had to worry about but the one sitting here in her room.

  She’d gone to the second bathroom in the suite, and while she was gone, Jack poured fresh drinks for both of them and took his over to the long beige sectional in the living area. The square coffee table in front of the couch was glass, too.

  Jack set his glass down, anyway.

  And thought of Erica.

  Every time she laughed, every time she moved, every time she spoke, every time those dark-brown eyes met his, every time he remembered that he was going to tell her goodbye and never see her again, Jack felt as if he’d been punched. He’d never wanted a woman as badly as he wanted Erica Cooley.

  And yet, when he considered chucking it all, giving up the crusade to save others where he hadn’t been able to save his own, he knew he couldn’t do it. When he thought about changing his life, his goals, his mind filled with visions of that tiny body, that small casket and he realized he couldn’t turn his back on all the lives he could save.

  He couldn’t risk committing himself that completely again, either.

  He laid his head back, eyes closed, waiting for her. Trying to predict whether she’d join him on the couch. Or make the smart choice and stay over at the table.

  He tried to figure out what he hoped she’d do.

  She joined him on the couch—a full cushion away. He still hadn’t decided if he wanted her there, or across the room where he wouldn’t have to be so strong.

  He’d had a lot to drink.

  Jack leaned forward, grabbed his glass from the table
and took a full sip. He didn’t look at her.

  “What are you thinking about?” The soft words touched him, seemed so intimate.

  “When Melissa and Courtney were killed, something inside me changed. Shut down.”

  It still felt odd, talking about that part of his life. He never had before tonight. And yet, strangely, it felt right. The environment was safe, somehow.

  He wanted Erica to know.

  His arm lay along the back of the couch and she reached out with her hand, laying it on his.

  “How could it not?” she asked gently. “They were a big part of you.”

  “Far more than I’d realized,” he admitted. “If I’d allowed myself to acknowledge how important they were to me, I’d never have been able to do the job I’d chosen, risking my life every day.”

  “You didn’t work in an FBI office?”

  He shook his head, remembering some of the more dangerous situations he’d somehow managed to get through unscathed. “I was a field agent. Drug trafficking.” He’d slammed into more than one hovel filled with greasy, violent, conscienceless men, who’d pull their guns without the least provocation.

  “I didn’t train for the crisis team until after Melissa’s death.”

  Her fingers trailed lightly over the back of his hand. “Whenever you’ve talked about the past few years, you’ve mentioned your work, things you do in your spare time, skiing, books you’ve read, movies, trips to Vegas. What about your personal life?”

  “That is my personal life. Work and what I do in my spare time. I’m out of town a lot, but I have an apartment here in New York.”

  Erica looked down shyly, which was not like her. “I mean your really personal life,” she said. “You haven’t said so, but there must be a woman in the city someplace who’s missed having your company this week. Someone who would’ve had it if I, if we—”

  “There’s no one.” He wasn’t sure how smart it was to tell her that. But he wasn’t sure about a lot of things at the moment.

  Except that he hadn’t had enough whiskey to dull his senses. He took another sip.