by Cherrie Lynn
“You can’t go by yourself. What if something happens? What if I never hear from you again? If these people can make you disappear like she has, I’ll lose it, Jace.” At his odd look, she added, “You’re the only hope I have in this. Who would I go to then?”
“That isn’t going to happen. You have my word.”
“Oh, bullshit. What’s your word worth if bullets start flying?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve faced a bullet, Linz. It probably won’t be the last.”
She sat back, chewing on her bottom lip.
“Look, if it’ll make you feel better, I can tell you who to get in touch with if you don’t hear from me after a few days.”
“That won’t make me feel better.”
“You’ll be a liability, all right? I can’t focus on my own safety if I have to be worrying about yours, too.”
“But—” Her doorbell rang again, cutting off her protests. “Grand Central effing Station,” she muttered, unfolding herself from her chair and stomping over to the speaker. “Hello?”
“Hey, sunshine. Got a minute?” It was her dad.
Lindsey drew a long, tortured breath. Wonderful. “Sure. Come on up.”
Jace raised his eyebrows as she sat back down.
“That was my dad.”
“Oh yeah? Is he a big guy? Should I be worried?” That cocky grin showed he wasn’t worried at all, but the implication made Lindsey jump to her feet again.
“Shit. What will he think? You’re here, and I look like I just tumbled out of bed.”
The grin widened maddeningly. “I can answer the door shirtless, if you want.”
“Dammit, Jace.” Lindsey looked around in a panic but then forced a few calming breaths through her lungs and put her palms out to mimic pushing her worries down to a tolerable level. “Okay. Who are you, and what are you doing here?”
“Quit worrying about it. If you answer the door with a bloodred face, you’re only going to arouse more suspicion. Act normal. I’m a friend. Nothing more.”
Right. He was totally correct, but the little pang that went through her chest hurt regardless. “Oh, so now we’re friends?”
“Or not. It’s up to you.”
Before she could bite back at him, she was opening the door for her dad, trying to look normal…most likely failing miserably.
“Merry Christmas!” He held up a little wrapped present that would fit into the palm of her hand, his blue eyes twinkling.
“Dad! You shouldn’t have.” She stepped back so he could enter, getting on her tiptoes to kiss his scruffy cheek, which was still cool from the chill outside. “We always open presents on Christmas Eve.”
“I know, but I wanted this one to sit under your tree and torture you for the next week.” His perceptive gaze landed on Jace over her shoulder. “Oh. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you had company.”
“Um, Dad, this is my friend Jace. He just stopped by a little bit ago. Jace, this is my dad, Edward.”
Jace stepped forward with his hand offered, cool as ice. “Pleased to meet you, sir. I’ll get out of your way so you can visit.”
“Oh no, that isn’t necessary at all,” her dad said, his sudden eagerness as he pumped Jace’s hand bringing Lindsey’s head around to him incredulously. God, even her dad realized how dry her dating pool had been lately. “In fact, I was going to ask Lindsey if she wanted to ride home with me and have dinner tonight. You should come, too, Jace; you’d be more than welcome.”
“Mom didn’t say anything about dinner,” Lindsey protested helplessly, that panic swelling up in her throat again. “I just got off the phone with her.”
“Do you really think Mom would mind? She’d be thrilled to have you. Both of you. Let’s surprise her. It’ll make her day.”
Jace’s dark eyes were laughing as he took in Lindsey’s absolute sputtering confusion at the turn of events. “Dinner sounds great with me. I appreciate the invitation.”
Lindsey stared at Jace as if he’d lost his mind, while he looked like the cat who’d eaten the canary. He might think this was funny as hell, but she hadn’t brought a man to meet her parents since… Oh, it didn’t even bear thinking about. This was a cruel thing to do to her, and he didn’t even realize it.
“Fine,” she relented. “We’ll be there. I need to get ready. Is a couple of hours okay?”
“That’s perfect. Nothing fancy, though.”
“Okay. Thanks for the present. I’ll put it right under the tree.” She’d finally gotten around to putting it up a couple of days ago.
“No peeking,” her dad said sternly. Then he said his goodbyes and was gone.
Trying to maintain her composure as best she could, Lindsey walked over to her little tree and placed her gift under it. Then she whirled on Jace, wishing she had something to throw at his head. “How dare you do that.”
“What?” he asked innocently, surveying some pictures of her family on her wall. Of her and Lena, the same one that had gotten broken and stolen at Lena’s apartment.
“Going to dinner at my parents’? Really?”
“Consider it investigatory,” he said casually, not even looking at her.
“Investigatory? What for? They didn’t kidnap their own daughter.”
“Maybe not, but any little clue might lead to something. Does Lena still have a bedroom at your parents’ house?”
“We both do, but you aren’t going to find anything there. She hardly ever visits them.”
“All the more reason for her to keep something there.”
“I doubt it. But we’ll do it anyway.” She stalked toward her bedroom. “I have to take a shower. Wait out here.” Or please don’t; I wouldn’t object, even if I’m mad as hell at you.
“Why are you snapping my head off? What’s the big deal?”
Hadn’t he seen it? Couldn’t he tell? Did she really have to stand here and spell it out that her parents were getting on up there in age? They’d lost all hope in one twin daughter ever reproducing before they passed away—Lena flat-out refused to ever have a child—and now they were quickly losing hope in her. Her dad finding a man in her apartment was probably a cause for a damn celebration. He might be on the phone to her mother right now, who would be brimming with hope that her daughter had gotten spectacularly laid today.
But Jace wouldn’t understand that at all. He would think she was insane; he didn’t feel those pressures, no parents waiting on him to present them with a chubby-cheeked grandchild.
And Lindsey herself wasn’t necessarily in any hurry to do that. But her parents were another story. They were always trying to set her up, get her out of her apartment, introducing her to their friends’ sons and even grandsons. She’d walked into that trap more than once and had spent most of the time hiding in the bathroom or staring at her plate throughout painfully awkward dinners.
She just wasn’t good at it. If Mr. Right didn’t fall in her lap, she wasn’t ever going to find him. Because she wasn’t about to go out looking. Constant rejection and reminders of her social ineptitude were too emotionally taxing. Who needed it?
“You just don’t get my parents. They’ll be planning a wedding shower by the time we get there. I don’t want to give them any ideas, but I know how they are.” She sighed. “And they’re going to embarrass me. I feel it.”
He turned to look at her then. “What do you have to be embarrassed about around me?”
Everything. “There will be something. I promise.”
“Afraid they’ll break out the baby pictures? Be glad you have some. It should make you feel better knowing I’m not there as a date.”
It should. But it didn’t. Even as she was in her shower, shampooing her hair, she imagined opening her eyes to see him standing on the other side of her fogged-up shower door. As built as he was, he would have no trouble lifting her
against the wall. As hot as he was, he would have no trouble getting between her thighs; she would gladly wrap them around him. A gasp escaped her lips at the mere thought of his cock sliding home, hard and forceful, pinning her against the wall.
It had been so long. It would hurt. She would want it to. His body would invade hers, hard and slick and unforgiving, driving her wild, forcing a cry from her with every thrust, obliterating the loneliness, the fear, until nothing existed but the two of them—
Shit. Lindsey yanked herself from the fantasy, one she might happily revisit tonight while she was under the sheets with her vibrator, but not right now while the man was two rooms away and about to be sitting next to her at dinner with her parents, of all things.
Get it together.
She had to convince him to let her in on the stakeout.
When she emerged half an hour later feeling somewhat presentable, he glanced up from the couch where he sat thumbing through his cell phone. “You look nice,” he said.
Nice worked for her about as well as fine, but she supposed she shouldn’t expect miracles from him. She wore jeans and tall boots with a long black sweater, leaving her hair in its natural waves.
“I need to go with you when you move on this building,” she said in place of a response. “I mean it, Jace. What if I can see things that you won’t? What if, for instance, Griffin is part of this whole thing, and I see him on the premises? You wouldn’t know him if you saw him. I have information you need.”
“Maybe you have a point there,” he said. “If this guy approaches you again, though, snap a picture of him—if you can get away with it. We’ll see if he’s someone I recognize.”
Enemies. The first time she’d asked him if he had any, he’d turned the question sharply aside, but that only proved to her it was an avenue worth investigating. If they were going to work together, he couldn’t keep these kinds of things from her.
“Why do I get the feeling there’s something you’re not telling me?”
He unfolded from her couch, stretching to his full height. “Not sure.”
God, he was frustrating. She put a hand to her forehead. “Are you sure this is the best idea? We can always cancel. It’s not you, really, it’s that I’m afraid I won’t know what to say if they start asking too much about Lena. I’m afraid I’ll break down and tell them everything.”
“I always advise against bringing in too many people when there’s trouble. But you know them best. Will it do any good to make them worry yet?”
“No,” she said sadly. What he said was the best course of action. It was the idea of sitting with them under the weight of this knowledge, this danger, while they were completely oblivious.
“You’ll be fine,” he said casually, strolling toward her door. “Should we go now? Do we need to stop for a drink or something first, maybe get our stories straight?”
A drink sounded magnificent. “Maybe. Actually, yeah. Let’s do that.”
He chuckled as he shrugged back into his jacket. “Of course, alcohol acts as a truth serum for some, so you’d better watch out for that.”
“I’ll take it easy,” she said as she slipped into her own coat. Maybe at some point, she needed to get him good and wasted.
Chapter Thirteen
He was still amazed this woman could have an identical twin sister in the CIA. How could these two have turned out so different from each other? One of those mysteries of life he would ponder from now on. Maybe some of the pieces to this puzzle would start to come together tonight. He was actually looking forward to getting to know her parents.
And she was damned adorable.
They’d made a quick stop for one drink before heading over to her parents’ house. Jace watched her as she surveyed the bar around them and wished, completely out of nowhere, that there weren’t any walls between them. They’d been erected by him and were necessary, but it would be nice if they could dispense with them just for a night. Have a real conversation. But there was so much he couldn’t divulge, and everything he said seemed to rub her the wrong way.
“So, Lindsey. Why is it I don’t remember you from MIT?”
“What, do you want to see my transcript?” she asked warily, and there it was again. He sighed.
“No, that’s not what I meant at all. Maybe I just want to get to know you a little better.”
He’d already seen her transcript, anyway. Impressive.
“Why?”
Blunt, wasn’t she? He thought carefully about his answer. “Any girl who wears a Zero Wing shirt is worth knowing.”
“Oh, please. That’s like the dorkiest thing I own.”
Dorky, maybe. But it had made him want to strip it off her and see what was underneath it.
“I already told you,” she said in answer to his question. “I kept to myself in college. I focused on my work. I didn’t party or even date much. I’m still that way.” She screwed her face up in a rueful expression. “That’s sexy, isn’t it?”
“What if I told you that was incredibly sexy?”
She’d been fiddling with her drink coaster, but she fumbled and dropped it as soon as he said the words. “I’d tell you that you have odd ideas of sexy.”
“Sexy is relative. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that. Fuck what anyone else thinks, right? You should have approached me. You’re the kind of girl I would’ve loved to hang out with back then.”
She blinked at him. “Really?”
“Well, you know. I was a pretty happy-go-lucky guy. I mean, here I was, a kid a step away from living on the streets, and somehow I managed to land one of the most prestigious universities in the world. It was a dream come true, and I was so glad to be there, I walked around feeling like I had hit the jackpot.”
“I bet,” she said, a note of sadness entering her voice. “You must have worked your ass off to get there, and—”
He waved the words off. He didn’t want to rehash all of that tonight. “No use going over it again. What’s done is done. Point is, I was a stupid kid walking around on cloud nine with no fucking clue what was coming my way. Anyone could have screwed me over. I try to be more perceptive these days.”
“I know you don’t want to talk about it, really,” she said, still fiddling with that coaster, her eyes on it instead of his face. “But…I might have mentioned to Lena that I had a thing for you. I have no idea why she would target you that way. She did have a habit of flirting with my boyfriends. I mean, not that you were or anything.”
It was dim, but the color rising in her cheeks was plain to see.
“There weren’t many for her to go after. But you…” Trailing off, she lifted her eyes to him again. “Maybe she thought she would move in first. And then maybe something went wrong and for whatever reason she wanted you out of the picture. I don’t know. I honestly don’t. But there it is.”
“You had a thing for me, huh?”
“Oh God.” She dropped her face into her hands, propping her elbows on the table. “All that I just said, and that’s what you focus on?”
Not only was that his focus, but he’d barely heard anything else she said. “Why didn’t you ever talk to me, then?”
“Because I was dorky and shy and awkward, and there was simply no way in hell I could’ve walked up to you and started a conversation. I can barely do things like that now.”
Hell. And he’d acted like such a fucking asshole to her pretty much since she had knocked on his door. “I’m sorry, Lindsey.”
Surprise registered across her face. “For what? You couldn’t have known. You don’t even remember me, and I don’t blame you.”
“No, I’m sorry for how I’ve acted since you came to me. I’m sorry I don’t remember you. I’m—fuck, I’m just sorry for everything. You don’t deserve any of this that’s happening to you.”
She waved a hand as if it were
no big deal, but he knew better. “It’s okay.”
“It’s not. I wish there were some way I could make it up to you.”
“Help me get my sister, Jace. And let me help. That’s all.”
He would do his damnedest.
…
Lindsey’s father beamed as he answered their knock at the door, and her mother threw her arms around Jace’s neck as if he were a long-lost relative. He had long enough to see Lindsey’s stricken expression, but she had nothing to be embarrassed about. As she gave her mother a hug of her own, he let his gaze tangle with hers and sent her a wink.
The table had already been set in the dining room, and it was all he could manage to not stop and gawk for a moment. Roast chicken, an abundance of veggies, mashed sweet potatoes, even lemon pie for dessert. How many times in his life would he have killed for a meal like this?
“I hope it’s enough,” Mrs. Morris fretted, standing behind her chair and surveying the spread critically.
Enough? He could have invited the whole team and fed them all.
“It looks great, Mom,” Lindsey said. As she moved to the chair to Jace’s left, he stepped over to pull it out for her. She blinked at him but didn’t comment, letting him push it in as she sat. In the soft lighting—hell, anytime really—she was a stunner. He barely took his eyes from her as he pulled up his own chair, but she kept her gaze fastened to her plate.
He hadn’t missed the approving glances her parents kept exchanging. Maybe it only meant he was playing right into Lindsey’s biggest fears, but he enjoyed the fantasy of being the guy she was bringing home to meet her folks. Maybe a little too much.
“Well, dig in,” her mom said brightly.
Her parents kept the conversation light, which was fortunate because Lindsey was wound so tightly next to him she was ready to launch into space. They talked about the weather. About Christmas. He noticed there was no mention of Lena whatsoever.
Just as Lindsey seemed to go off alert, her dad wiped his mouth with his napkin. “Where are you from, Jace?”
