DEFENDING TIERNY (Gray Wolf Security, Texas Book 1)

by Glenna Sinclair

  Whatever happened to her…it’s funny how it feels to realize that you’re not the only person in the world who has a warped sense of trust and commitment.

  “Were you military, too?”

  “Briefly. I was recruited into the CIA almost as soon as I finished boot camp at Fort Pendleton.”

  “Really? That must have been exciting work.”

  “Exciting, yes. Complicated and frustrating, too.” She dragged her fingers through her hair. “Do you remember hearing about that rogue agent who was arrested in California some months ago?”

  I nodded. “They accused him of treason, saying he ran a terrorist cell out of France under the name of the CIA.”

  “Yeah, well, a lot of people got caught up in that mess before anyone even knew there was a mess. I was one of them.”

  “What happened?”

  She shrugged. “I was accused of giving information to one of the agents involved in the cover up. I thought I was just making a report to a superior officer, not aware that he was doing things he wasn’t supposed to. When it was all said and done, my superiors suggested I find a new career path.”

  “That’s wrongful firing.”

  “I wasn’t fired,” she said, smiling at me. “I was given a suggestion that I chose to follow. And, to be honest, I kind of prefer this work, anyway. More freedom to do what needs to be done.”

  That sounded a little dangerous, but I supposed that in a job like this, it was good to have someone on your side who was willing to break the rules.

  We sat there in silence for a few more minutes. I sipped the coffee, feeling a nice, warm buzz come over me. I put it down to the booze when I thought I saw Alexander walking toward us. But then he came into the warm light shining from the fixture just outside the back door.

  I set down my mug and went to him, pressing my body hard against his.

  “I’ll give you guys some space,” Knox said, but I don’t think we were really listening to her.

  “I didn’t think I’d see you again tonight.”

  He brushed a piece of hair away from my face. “Did you really think I’d walk away without talking to you first?”

  “Your boss was pretty mad.”

  “It’s fine, Tierney. It’s just a job.”

  He lifted my chin and kissed me. I moved into him, loving the feel of him against me. And this…he was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. That felt more natural to me, like he was finally who he’d always been. I slipped my hand into his and led the way into the house, not sure where Knox was and not really caring. I pulled him after me as I stepped into the master bedroom, too tired and too stressed to care about jobs and protocol and safety tonight. I just wanted to lie in his arms for a while.

  He let go of my hand, leaning back against the door to close it, his fingers flipping the flimsy lock on the knob. I turned to look at him, wondering why he wasn’t following me. But then his eyes moved slowly over the length of me, and I got an idea what he wanted.

  “There are bruises,” I said.

  “I don’t care.”

  I lifted my shirt over my head and—contrary to what he’d said—he flinched when he saw the bruises beginning to show up along my rib cage. He came to me and dropped to his knees, peppering the bruises with kisses.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I should have been here.”

  “It might have happened anyway.”

  He ran his hand slowly over the marks, tracing them like I often did with the tattoos on his chest. There was pain in his eyes. I touched his face and ran my fingers along his jaw.

  “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  He shook his head. “You don’t want to know.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  He wrapped his arms around my waist and pulled me closer to him. He pressed his face to my belly, his hot breath waking things inside of me that should have been as exhausted as the rest of me. I brushed my fingers through his hair, watching his silky hair fall to the side as my fingers passed through it.

  “I wasn’t there for her,” he said. “I had a job offer; I could have gone to school with her and worked in the evenings; I could have been here for her. But I had always wanted to go into the military. It was a stupid dream, but one I thought would make things so much better for us. And she encouraged me to go…but she was a child and I was the adult.”

  “Vanessa…”

  He looked up at me. “I never should have left. And when she told me she was dating that boy, I should have told her to end it. I should have been there for her.”

  “You were there for her. You are there.”

  He shook his head. “I promised I would always protect her. But that…that thing hurt her so badly—and he left her there to die. If those joggers hadn’t come along, she would be dead.”

  “You don’t know that it wouldn’t have happened even if you were there. She was twenty years old, Alexander. She was a grown woman who had the right to make choices of her own.”

  “But if I’d met him, I would have known there was something wrong with him.”

  “Do you really think she would have listened to you? She thought she was in love with him.” I lifted his face so that he was looking up at me. “She would have hated you for trying to keep her from the man she loved.”

  There was pain in his eyes, real pain that I couldn’t touch. I wanted to make it go away, but I knew nothing I could say would help. But that didn’t stop me from trying to help.

  “You’ve been there for her every moment since. You’ve done more than anyone else would have done.”

  “But I keep screwing up. I wasn’t here for you, either.”

  At that…my heart shattered to hear those words coming from his mouth, knowing that I added to the burden he carried on his shoulders already.

  I caressed his face and head, running my fingers through his hair again.

  “This was my fault, Alexander.” He opened his mouth to object, but I pressed my index finger against his lips. “You have to allow me to take responsibility for my own actions.”

  He shook his head even as he pressed his forehead against my belly again. I dropped to my knees so that we were face to face, my hands moving over his face again even as he ran his hands along my bare back.

  “I won’t let you take all the responsibility for this. You already carry too much around on your shoulders that you don’t deserve. Your father leaving had nothing to do with you. Your mother’s illness was not your fault. And your sister…she was a victim of a horrible crime. You didn’t put her in that position. You didn’t leave her without the skills necessary to protect herself. You can’t take all that on your shoulders.”

  “How can you say that?” he asked softly. “Can’t you see who I am? Everyone I’ve ever loved has been hurt in some way. Everyone who ever depended on me suffered from my failures. How could you—?”

  “Stop!” Tears were beginning to roll down my cheeks. “You haven’t failed anyone. Those people, they failed you, Alexander! Can’t you see it? Your father made the choice to leave. Your mother made the choice to harm herself. That wasn’t on you.”

  “But Vanessa—?”

  “Only one person is responsible for that—and he’s hiding like a fucking coward in Nepal!”

  Alexander’s eyes came up to mine, surprise clear in them.

  “What? I’m not allowed to cuss?”

  He laughed, the tension suddenly fleeing his shoulders, his body.

  “You’re crazy, you know that?”

  “Thank you,” I said, pressing my palm to the side of his face. “A little crazy is a good thing.”

  He groaned, as he slowly extracted himself from me and stood, scooping me into his arms. He laid me in the center of the bed, stripping out of his clothes before coming to join me. I bounced around on the mattress a little, eager to rid myself of my own clothing. And then we were tangled in each other, our hands exploring places that should have been very familiar by now, but weren’t somehow. When he came
inside of me, it took my breath away. I wrapped myself around him, pulling him as close as I could possibly get him.

  He was broken. I’d been aware of it almost since our first meeting, but I hadn’t understood the cause of it until now. And now I knew that it was possible to fix him. It was possible to make him whole again, to make us whole together. Because we were both broken, just different degrees of broken.

  ***

  Alexander was gone when I woke the next morning. Knox kindly informed me that he’d been assigned a new case and would likely not be able to stop by again for a few days. The boredom settled on me almost immediately.

  It wasn’t until the next afternoon that I finally found something I could do. The prosecutor sent me an email that contained pages and pages of scanned police reports regarding the break in Brendan Harmon was accused of committing. It took me half the afternoon just to sift through them and another few hours to make notes on the pertinent points. And then I went through it all a third time, trying to figure out what it was about them that bothered me.

  There was something. Something that just seemed…off somehow.

  I logged into the network at the office over the internet, searching through notes I’d made when I first took the case. I always took a copious amount of notes because I never knew what might prove to be important later on. Sometimes I used the bulk of them, sometimes I didn’t. This time…I don’t know what it was that bothered me so much.

  When Brendan and his parents first came to me, he’d just been arrested for the breaking-and-entering charge. His mother was a wreck, clearly frustrated with her son’s continuing trouble with the law. His father was calmer, angry but clear in what it was he wanted done. And Brendan. We were meeting at the county lockup so that he could be part of the meeting. He seemed disinterested. Disconnected. But that wasn’t unusual. I saw that a lot in cases involving young people. Sometimes I think they simply couldn’t wrap their minds around the thought that they actually got caught, that they weren’t as invincible as they thought they were.

  Brendan said that he and a couple of people he knew from rehab had gone out to attend a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. He said they checked into the meeting a little before nine and stayed for coffee afterward. He said he was home by midnight and his father backed him up, saying he’d heard him come in. Brendan swore that he went straight to bed and didn’t go out again that night. However, when the police searched his bedroom three days later, they found items from the Smith home. Brendan claimed he had no memory of those items.

  The Smiths were friends of the Harmon family. Brendan grew up attending barbecues in their home, so it wasn’t strange that his fingerprints were found in their home, nor was it that far removed that he would have items from their home in his bedroom. What bothered me about Brendan’s original story was that he claimed to be home by midnight, but the police had a witness in the neighborhood who saw him walking in front of his parents’ home at one thirty.

  The witness could be wrong. That wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was the fact that this particular witness happened to be a municipal court judge. Not the kind of witness who’d be likely to misread a clock.

  And then there was the missing Peterman kid.

  Alicia Peterman was taken from her bed at midnight on the same night Brendan Harmon supposedly broke into the Smith home, three hours later. Brendan was seen outside the Peterman home that night, just like he’d been seen outside his family home. The witness in the Peterman case wasn’t as reliable as a municipal court judge was. He was an eighty-year-old man who was out walking his dog. He wore glasses and his eyesight was questionable, so he could have seen someone else. But the timeline seemed to line up perfectly.

  The cops claimed that Brendan broke into the Smith home at three in the morning. If he was at the Peterman home at midnight, then in front of his parents’ home at one thirty, that would have given him enough time to grab the girl and stow her somewhere before returning home. Then he would have had more than an hour to wait for his father to go to sleep and then sneak out of the house and burglarize the Smith home. Why he would do that, I was still unclear on. One of the cops—and the prosecutor—had suggested that he did it to take some electronic equipment that he planned to use to make movies of the little girl. That he’d taken her with the sole purpose of videotaping his assaults on her so that he could sell them to black market buyers in order to bankroll his growing drug business.

  It seemed like a stretch to me. But then I looked at the list of items missing from the Smith home.

  An Alienware laptop.

  A Canon camera.

  A tripod.

  Silk sheets.

  It was a strange collection of things—a seemingly specific list of things—to be taken from someone’s home. Especially since that was all that had been taken.

  As I stared at my original notes, I realized what it was that bothered me about the police report on the robbery. One of the cops had noted that when they were searching Brendan’s room, the found some heavy work boots that seemed to be covered in construction sand. However, Brendan hadn’t held a steady job ever. And his father wasn’t into construction. Plus, there was no construction on any of the family’s properties. There was no reason for Brendan to have construction sand on his boots.

  But Jack Peterman owned a construction company. And he was working on a site not far from the Harmons’ home. I saw the signs twice, each time I drove up to the Harmons’ home to talk to Brendan’s parents. It was a new residential development, one that boosted large, luxury homes.

  Was it possible that Brendan Harmon had taken the Peterman girl? And was it possible that he was hiding her inside of one of the nearly complete homes in her own father’s development?

  It seemed too wild to be possible. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  I kept digging through the notes and the reports, searching for something to make me believe that my client was innocent of everything the cops were accusing him of. But the more I dug, the more I began to doubt.

  There was another report. This one was from the cop who arrested Brendan the night he was caught with the marijuana in his pocket. When they booked him, they made note of all his possessions. In his pocket, Brendan had a pocketknife, his wallet, and a set of keys. What stood out to me, however, were the packets of food they found in his pockets. Small packets of animal crackers and raisins and nuts. The kind of packets that a parent might pack for their child to have for snack time at school. It didn’t necessarily mean anything. Maybe Brendan had low blood sugar issues. But it just seemed odd.

  There were other odd things, too. I stayed up most of the night looking at maps and reports and things that I never would have thought to look up when I was working this case in my office, surrounded by order and logic. The chaos that my life had suddenly erupted into, and the guy who came to me and beat me for not getting Brendan out on bond, made me want to look closer at the information that was right there in front of my face.

  Was Brendan guilty of the kidnapping? Was I helping some delinquent torture a little girl?

  Alexander was getting to me. His instincts about Brendan put a bee in my bonnet. And meeting his sister…she was a part of the criminal justice system I’d never allowed myself to consider before. She was the collateral damage that I tried not to see. But I’d seen it now and I couldn’t forget.

  I asked Knox for poster board and I began putting it all together, all the evidence the police had collected, all the things that pointed to and away from the possibility that Brendan had that little girl. I felt a clock beginning to tick in the back of my head. If he had this child, if he was holding her somewhere, there was only so much time left to find her and rescue her.

  It’d already been twenty-five days.

  I no longer cared about the case. I wanted to find that little girl.

  Chapter 16

  Alexander

  David put me on a case following a state senator. His wife, apparently, was concerned
that the man was cheating. She paid David twice our usual fee to find proof one way or the other. David argued with her, said that we weren’t private investigators—at least, that’s what he told me—but the woman insisted. And twice the fee? Who could argue with that?

  This was my punishment. David was punishing me for falling into bed with Tierney. And I probably deserved it. I knew it was wrong when I did it, but I couldn’t resist her any longer. There was just a need there that wouldn’t be ignored. I was sure David could understand. I’d seen him with his wife. But that didn’t mean he could let me go without some sort of punishment.

  So I sat in my car and watched this senator, taking pictures of every woman—and man—who could be a potential lover.

  Tierney texted me late in the afternoon, asking what I knew about construction sand. I texted back, telling her absolutely nothing.

  Is it a special kind of sand? What do they get it?

  Idk, babe.

  Is it possible that some other kind of sand could be mistaken for construction sand?

  Idk. Wish I could help.

  It’s okay. I’ll figure it out.

  I studied the messages when they stopped coming, wondering what the hell she was up to. I started to call Knox, but the senator came out of his office building and headed uptown in a hurry. He lived downtown.

  Was it stupid to feel elated to catch a man cheating on his wife? The senator drove to a hotel downtown and went straight upstairs, suggesting whoever he was meeting already had a room. I slipped onto the elevator behind him and watched him get off on the ninth floor. I got off on the tenth and ran down the stairs, stepping through the heavy fire doors just in time to see him slip into a room down the hall.

  “Got you!”

  I went to the door and slipped a teeny camera through the space under the door and moved it around with a little remote until I caught an image. Sure enough, the senator was sleeping with one of his aides. Wouldn’t his wife be thrilled to get these pictures?