For the First Time

by Stephanie Doyle

  She moved past him, but he reached out to grab her arm. “I should go.”

  JoJo knew she was dealing with a highly volatile man right now. She’d seen so many sides to Mark and looking up into his face, she knew this was the scary side. The deadly one. It was a stark reminder that it would always be a part of him, no matter how far away he was from Afghanistan.

  JoJo was on board with this side. Sophie should be protected by all the fierceness that Mark could offer her. Without a specific target there was no place to take his fire. Instead he needed to rein it in by focusing on the tasks ahead.

  “Listen to me,” she said, not trying to pull away from him, but instead moving closer, toward his tight muscles and humming temper. “You’re not thinking clearly. You’re angry, upset. It will be easier for the staff to talk to me.”

  “What I am…is violent.”

  Yes. She felt it in the hand still wrapped around her upper arm. It clenched and unclenched with systematic intent. Not to hurt her or inflict pain, but simply to suggest he was of a mind to hurt someone.

  She rested her hand on his chest and they both looked at it as if neither could explain her instinct to soothe the savage beast. “I know. You have reason.”

  “You’re not afraid.” It wasn’t a question, but a statement.

  He was right. She wasn’t. When she’d confronted her father in his rages she always sensed the harm he’d wanted to inflict. She countered the animal instinct that always told her to flee by standing still instead. Even before he’d started to hit her.

  With Mark she didn’t sense any urgent need for flight. He wasn’t going to hurt her. There was control behind all of his actions. Even his touch. But if she didn’t solve the puzzle of the notes soon, she wasn’t certain how much longer his control would hold.

  “No, not of you.”

  He shook his head. “Maybe you should be. I’ve never felt like this, JoJo. I’ve never felt this kind of…”

  “Fear.”

  His eyes met hers. “Is that what this is?”

  Her lips tweaked at his astonishment. “I think so.”

  “If you knew the things I could do right now to the person who sent this note. Things I’ve done in the past. To men. To women…”

  He was trying to scare her again. Maybe even push her a little, test her strength against the onslaught of his ugly past. She’d seen his ruthlessness by springing Greg on both her and Sophie. Now he was trying to tell her there was an even darker side.

  “Yeah, I know. It’s what made you a badass agent. But it doesn’t scare me.”

  Oddly, it had the opposite effect. She could imagine the lengths he would go to protect Sophie. JoJo could imagine the lengths he would go to protect her, too. Despite her past, despite his past, instead of being frightened she felt safe. She also knew that by accepting Mark as…what, she wasn’t even sure of yet. But she had to accept all the parts of him.

  “It should scare you.”

  “Too late. You’re already the guy who tried to fake cooking a pasta dinner. How much of a threat can you really be?”

  With that she felt some of the tension leaving him. His hand dropped from her arm and she shivered a little as the warmth left her.

  “We don’t tell Sophie about this note. She’s got enough on her plate, we don’t need to add to it. Plus she has it in her head that it might be one of her fellow musicians.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I think she understands that not everyone appreciates her top billing. She doesn’t see the subtle nature of what these notes say…I’m sorry. It’s like he’s already hurt her.”

  “He hasn’t.”

  “Right. Anyway, she doesn’t look good to me and I can’t tell…I can’t tell because I don’t know my daughter well enough…whether it’s because of stress or she’s coming down with a cold. So let’s keep this between us.”

  JoJo nodded. “We’ll need to make another reservation. A different hotel so no one knows where we are.”

  Mark nodded. “We’ll tell her there was a problem with the room and the hotel manager found us accommodations at one of the nearby hotels. We’ll pack while you ask around.”

  “Okay.” JoJo was about to step around him when something he’d said stopped her. Instead she lifted her hand to his cheek. She could feel his five-o’clock shadow and it occurred to her she’d never touched a man this way. With tenderness. Never wanted to.

  “You’re a good father.”

  He sighed, then put his hand on top of hers, as if absorbing her words, her comfort, through his skin. Then he pulled away and let her go.

  His jaw ticked. “Just so we’re clear. I don’t want you to think of me like a father.”

  That made her laugh. “Trust me, the last thing I think of you as is my father.”

  “Excellent. What’s the first?”

  That was a very good question.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “THERE’S DEFINITELY BEEN someone in the house recently.” Mark tightened his grip on the cell phone as he listened to Ben describe what he was seeing.

  JoJo had already returned from her excursion. Interrogating the staff had yielded no information. A manila envelope had been left at the front desk when no one was manning it. A window of time the clerk estimated as no longer than two to three minutes. One of the new clerks had a bathroom emergency.

  When a clerk coming off break returned, he opened the manila envelope, saw a printed note inside that requested hand delivery to Mr. Sharpe. He called a bag boy over to handle it.

  The letter hadn’t been mailed. It had been left. By someone who must have been in the lobby waiting for an opportunity to drop it off. A person who wanted to hurt Sophie. A person who potentially had already hurt JoJo. A person who had followed them to Chicago.

  Someone close.

  Sophie hadn’t questioned why they had to pack up and change hotels. She’d been annoyed more than suspicious. And probably disappointed she wasn’t going to have any chances to run into Bay randomly throughout their stay.

  Luckily, Mark had found another suite a couple of city blocks away—a little nicer and more costly, but it was worth any price. Once they were settled, JoJo and Sophie curled up on the couch to watch a movie on the wide flat-screen TV. He closed the door to his room and called Ben.

  “Any problems getting into the house?”

  “Is that supposed to be a joke?”

  Mark winced. It wasn’t that he’d forgotten who he was dealing with, it was simply that he was more rattled then he had ever been in his life. “What are you seeing?”

  He waited for a response, imagining Ben methodically making his way through the darkened home. With a small pinpoint flashlight, so as not telegraph his home invasion, as his only illumination while making his way from room to room. It was what Mark would have done had he been there.

  “Nothing overt. But there is a table in the foyer covered with picture frames. I can see from the dust that some of them have been shifted. Normal things. High school graduations, a family-reunion-type picture, a kid in a football uniform.”

  “Nothing normal about that family,” Mark reminded him.

  “The dust has been disturbed more under one in particular. It’s him. Anderson, with his daughter sitting on his lap. She’s smiling in the picture but there is a look in her eyes….”

  “How old?”

  “Fourteen maybe. Fifteen.”

  “He’d been molesting her for years at that point. My guess is she was sixteen when she decided to end it. When he started to slowly poison her.”

  “Whoever it was didn’t have a key. The back door lock was jammed open. A crowbar maybe. Nothing subtle. But whoever did it has had access to the house since. None of the electronics have been touched. TV, stereo, computer. Whoever did this had no intention of stealing anything.”

  “Except a car…”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. It’s what I needed. Whoever is sending those notes is connected to the
Anderson case. I just need to find out who and why.”

  “Let me know if there’s anything else you need.”

  “JoJo and I have it covered. You’ve done enough, thanks. Tell Anna I’m sorry for making you leave her in the middle of the night to go spying.”

  “It’s not my first experience with strange late-night calls. She’s pretty cool about that. Now if you want me to apologize to Kelly that’s something else. I didn’t get to read her a bedtime story tonight. No doubt she won’t be speaking to me in the morning.”

  Mark smiled at Ben’s dry humor. “You know she can’t talk, right?”

  “We communicate without words.”

  For a moment, Mark wondered what that was like. To have established that type of connection with Sophie from the beginning, instead of always feeling like she was trying to squirm away from him.

  He thought about the fear that had blazed through him when he realized whoever was threatening them had followed them to Chicago. Fear like he’d never experienced before. Fear that he hadn’t even realized he was capable of feeling.

  Mark had jumped out of helicopters, had been caught in gun battles, had escaped certain death a number of times. He thought he was immune to fear.

  No, he had been immune to it. He just wasn’t anymore.

  “Ben, can I ask you…”

  “Anything.”

  “Kelly. If she was ever in trouble or hurt how do think you would respond?”

  There was a definitive moment of silence.

  “I can’t answer that. I can’t think about her being hurt or in trouble because if I do my mind shuts down. I become an irrational creature and irrational creatures are not thoughtful enough to know how they might respond in such a crisis.”

  Oddly, Ben’s words made him feel better. Under pressure, Ben was the coolest man Mark had ever met. Cooler than him. If Ben would lose it, then Mark didn’t worry he was completely crazy by acting like this. Feeling like this.

  “And if it was Anna…”

  “There’s no difference. Anna and Kelly are mine. With them I function. Without them, I don’t. Not properly. It’s as simple as that. You saw me after she fell into the coma when delivering Kelly. You know.”

  Mark closed his eyes on the memory. Ben covered in blood and broken in ways he’d never seen him. Yes. Now he understood that expression on Ben’s face. Like he’d lose himself if he lost Anna.

  “Can I ask something else? When Anna worked for you—if nothing had happened, if you hadn’t gotten sick and she still worked for you—do you think you ever would have admitted to yourself how you felt about her?”

  “I don’t know. I hope so. Otherwise I would be the dumbest jackass on the planet. Why do I feel like we’re not talking about me and Anna?”

  He shouldn’t have said anything to Ben. He was too damn intuitive. “It’s nothing. I was curious. Forget I said anything.”

  “Mark,” Ben drawled through the phone. “You’re not actually starting to develop feelings for someone, are you? That would be a novelty for the legendary player, Mark Sharpe.”

  “You did it,” Mark grumbled, feeling defensive.

  “I did. When I never believed I could. If that’s where you are, believing you’re not capable of those feelings because you’ve never had them before, I can tell you this—”

  “Yeah?” he asked, impatient for whatever pearl of wisdom Ben was about to bestow.

  “—they suck.”

  Okay, Mark thought. Not exactly the answer he was hoping for.

  “Don’t get me wrong. They’re wonderful, amazing and also life-changing. But having them, acknowledging them and living with the fear that someday something could happen to Anna or Kelly, this…love…that I feel is the hardest thing I’ve ever lived with.”

  “Right.”

  “I also wouldn’t change it for anything.”

  Mark understood what Ben was saying. He just wasn’t sure he was prepared to open himself up like that. He felt like he’d already given everything he could give to Sophie. He’d come home to her, brought her to live with him. Had come to genuinely like her. But somehow he knew there was more. Some deeper connection that they were both holding back from feeling.

  That Sophie would hold back made perfect sense. It was natural she would be wary of him when he’d missed most of her life.

  For him, there was no reason to hold back. Except that he wasn’t sure he knew how to let himself feel so strongly for another person. It was crazy that as he was trying to figure that out with his daughter, a woman had come along who affected him like no other woman ever had.

  Letting JoJo in, letting her get to him on more than a physical level, shouldn’t have made sense to him. Only it did.

  “Thanks, Ben.”

  “Should I post a watch on the house? In case the person returns?”

  “Don’t bother. The person is in Chicago.”

  Mark hung up the phone and joined JoJo and Sophie, who were halfway through the movie. JoJo looked at him, but he shook his head to indicate they would talk about it later. He sat on the couch next to Sophie and dug into a handful of popcorn she’d made from the suite’s stacked kitchenette.

  “This place is the bomb. I’ve never stayed anywhere so swanky. Do you think Hollywood people stay here when they come to Chicago?”

  Mark nodded. “I’m very certain Angelina and Brad were the guests right before us.”

  Sophie rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right. Hey, we need to tell Nancy where we are. I have lessons tomorrow.”

  Mark felt a tightness in his chest. Right now only three people knew where Sophie was. Mark had even checked in under one of his aliases. It was an old habit to keep a set of backup identification and credit cards with him at all times.

  Until she was onstage, it would remain just the three of them. “I’ll call her tomorrow, but any tutoring should be done in her room, okay?”

  “Why? There’s more space here.”

  “I think your dad doesn’t want to show off our nice digs. Makes us look like jerks,” JoJo chimed in. Then she also reached for Sophie’s bag of popcorn. “Can we talk about this later? We’re getting to the good part.”

  Mark inwardly applauded her distraction technique. “What am I watching?”

  “CIA agent turned traitor, turned counterspy, turned rogue killer,” Sophie elaborated.

  “Awesome. I love it when Hollywood gets the CIA right.”

  Mark looked at JoJo, who was staring at him instead of the television screen. There were a hundred questions in her eyes and he wanted nothing more than to answer them. To share with her what he knew. Get her impressions and thoughts. He’d known her for only a few weeks and yet he felt more in tune with her as a partner than anyone who had come before.

  It really was a shame she was going to have to quit after all this was over.

  After an hour of car chases, highly improbable gun standoffs and a thrilling secret revealed, Sophie was ready to call it a night.

  “I need to sleep if I’m going to have enough energy for tomorrow night,” she announced, struggling to get off the couch.

  Mark stood and placed his hand on his daughter’s forehead. “You don’t look good to me. You’re face is all flushed.”

  She looked skeptical. “Do you even know what you’re feeling for?”

  “Excessive heat?”

  “I’m fine. It’s just a cold. I’ll take some medicine and that will knock me out so I can sleep.”

  “Okay.”

  Mark watched her walk to the bedroom and shut the door behind her quietly. He smiled as he thought how nice that it wasn’t slammed. They really were making progress.

  “It could be the schedule that’s wiping her out. It never ends. It’s a lot, you know?”

  Mark turned to JoJo, who was still wearing the same black stretchy pants he’d been so fond of earlier. He hadn’t noticed the loose top that covered her to her hips. Probably because he’d been so enamored with her pants. With her legs curled up
under her and the bag of popcorn now cold, sitting in her lap, she didn’t look much older than Sophie. Yet he trusted her to watch over and protect his daughter without question. A testament to her brains, her strength and her tenacity.

  “I know it’s crazy,” he said. “What I don’t know is how much control I have over that. This is her life and she loves it.”

  “I get that, but at some point she should have a chance to be a kid. Maybe meet a nice boy who isn’t eighteen years old and go out on a… What’s that thing called again?”

  “I believe the word you are looking for is date. And don’t encourage her. I like it this way—I’m starting to become the most important man in her life. You know, after Bay.”

  Mark sat on the couch with a heavy sigh. Their bodies bumped together. This time he kept his hands to himself. He’d made a promise to her that whatever happened next between them would come from her initiative. He would honor the promise. But he couldn’t suppress the thought that he would like nothing better than to put his head in her lap and let her soothe away this new strange emotion in his life known as fear.

  Never in his life had Mark put his head in anyone’s lap. Not even his mother’s.

  Was this what a relationship felt like? As if he could turn over control to someone else and let them carry his burdens for a time? Instinctively, he rejected the notion. He would carry his own burdens. He would solve his own problems. To do anything else would only open him wider to…what? He wasn’t sure, but it couldn’t be good.

  Despite what Ben had said, he didn’t know if he had it in him.

  It was probably the worst trick to play on JoJo. To seduce her. To introduce her to sex and pleasure and intimacy. All the while never once really giving her anything of himself other than his dick. The only thing he’d ever given to anyone.

  “I suck.”

  “At what?”

  “People.”

  JoJo nudged him with her shoulder and settled herself more fully against him. “I don’t know. I used to think I sucked at people, too, but we seem to be doing all right together.”

  “Maybe that’s the magic between us. You’re not willing to take. And I’m not willing to give. We make quite a pair.”