by Janie Crouch
They both finished their meal and pushed their plates toward the center of the booth. “I’m not making it complicated. I just want to make it perfect.”
They both got up from the booth and walked over to pay the bill.
“It’s on me,” Noah said. “I want to be the one who buys you your last meal as a single man.”
“I’m trying to keep this under wraps,” Tanner muttered. “You know how the gossip mill is around here. I—”
Tanner stopped talking as Mrs. Andrews came back through the swinging kitchen door.
“You boys done?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Noah said. “I’d like to buy my brother’s lunch.”
“How about lunch is on the house.” Mrs. Andrews winked at them. “As long as Tanner doesn’t take too long asking Bree to marry him.”
Damn it.
He gave the older woman a tight smile. “I’m trying to keep that on the down low, Mrs. Andrews. I don’t want Bree to figure it out.”
“My lips are sealed. And you know Bree, this is all so new to her she’ll never see it coming.”
But was she ready? Tanner didn’t have any doubt about their love for each other, but was this the right time to even ask this of her? Maybe she needed more time. A chance to be on her own without anyone chasing after her, trying to trap or kill her. It was all she’d ever known.
Tanner was ready to start their forever right away, putting all that behind them.
“Where you heading now?”
“I’m supposed to meet Bree and Cassandra over at that abandoned office building on the south side of town.”
“What are they doing over there?”
“Honestly, I’m not 100 percent sure. Bree just said Cassandra had a plan for expanding.”
Noah looked at him with concern as they walked out of the diner.
“You don’t think she’s planning on having another baby, do you?”
Tanner shook his head. “It’s our sister. Hell if I ever know what she means.”
“I’m coming with you. In case you need backup.”
Tanner chuckled. Cassandra had certainly talked the two of them into a number of stupid things over the years. Backup wasn’t a ridiculous idea.
“Well, for God’s sake don’t mention the engagement ring to Cass,” Tanner said. “You know how close she and Bree have gotten. And Cass definitely can’t keep any sort of secret.”
Tanner never would’ve thought that his sister and his hopefully soon-to-be fiancée would ever get along so well with one another, particularly after their rocky start a few months ago. Cass, when she found out about Bree’s computer skills, had immediately demanded Bree teach computer classes at Risk Peak’s women’s shelter.
Bree had laughed at her.
Cassandra hadn’t understood Bree’s complicated history with computers. How she was both so good with them and terrified of them at the same time.
But Bree had agreed to try.
She might’ve been frightened to teach classes at the beginning, but there was no doubt she was incredibly talented when it came to sharing her skills with others. It had basically become her full-time job over the past few months. And Cassandra had become one of Bree’s best friends.
Risk Peak was not that big, and it didn’t take Tanner and Noah long to walk from the diner to the office building. The building itself had sat empty for nearly a year since the owner had died right at the end of construction, causing legal hassles as the property was left to his children, both of whom were going through a divorce.
Tanner had no idea what his sister could have planned here.
“There he is,” Cassandra called out when he and Noah entered. “And he brought my other favorite brother.” Cass stepped closer to Bree and nudged her with her shoulder. “Probably because Tanner felt like he needed backup.”
Cass and Noah immediately started joking with each other but Tanner ignored them. All he could see was Bree and her soft smile. He walked over to her and wrapped an arm around her waist.
“Hey,” he whispered. Had it really just been a few hours since he’d seen her last? Noah was right. He did have it bad.
“Hey, yourself.” She pressed closer. “I missed you.”
“Cass is right though. I did bring Noah as backup. You never know what sort of craziness is going to result when Cass announces she has news.”
Bree smiled. “This is pretty good news.”
“Okay, lovebirds, keep it in your pants until you get home,” Cass called out.
Tanner rolled his eyes, but stepped away—slightly—from Bree. “Mom didn’t discipline you enough as a kid.”
Cass hooked a hand on her hip. “That’s because she was too busy chasing around after you two hooligans. Besides, I was an angel.”
Everybody broke out in laughter at that.
“All right, so what is the big expansion surprise?” Tanner asked.
“This is,” Bree said, stepping away from him and spinning around with one arm out.
“Are you guys going to open an office?” Noah asked.
Cass smiled. “No, even better. We’ve gotten a grant and approval to renovate this building and use it as a long-term women’s shelter.”
Tanner stepped away from her, looking around, trying to picture it. It wasn’t difficult. Tear out some of the walls, add more bathrooms... The place was already in great structural shape overall.
But doing this would be a much-bigger commitment for Bree and Cassandra than the shelter. He looked over at Bree. “So someone will need to be living here full-time?”
Was that what she wanted? She seemed to love the ranch, but maybe it was too isolated for her. For the first time in her life she was starting to make friends. Maybe she didn’t want to be thirty minutes away from the town and the people here.
“We’re still working out the details of that,” Cass said. “But the point is, we’re going to be able to help a lot more women.”
He wanted to argue, to ask for details, demand how this was going to fit into the life he’d been envisioning, but realized how unreasonable that would be. Especially given the excitement on both Bree’s and Cassandra’s faces.
Teaching these classes and helping these women was important to Bree. She knew what it was like to live in fear and not have many options.
Far be it from Tanner to try to limit her empowerment by stopping her from empowering others.
“I think it will work great,” he finally said.
“Really?” Bree studied him, obviously picking up on some of his initial hesitation. “I think it could really be amazing.”
“Absolutely.” He gave her a nod.
“See? I told you.” Cass said, turning to Noah and Tanner. “Bree didn’t want to make any decisions until after Tanner had seen the building.”
Tanner walked back over to Bree, feeling the engagement ring in his pocket as he reached to put his arm around her. If this was really what she wanted, maybe engagement was going to have to wait.
Maybe a long time.
Damn it. That wasn’t what he wanted.
“What?” she whispered up to him as Cassandra started showing Noah how the space would be utilized. “What aren’t you telling me? Do you think this is a bad idea?”
He hated the look of worry on her face. She’d already carried so many burdens and so much pain. He’d be damned if he was going to add to it.
“I promise I think this is a fantastic idea. I would tell you if I didn’t.”
She relaxed. After what they’d been through, she knew he wasn’t going to start keeping the truth from her now.
And it was the truth. He did think this place was a fantastic idea. What Bree and Cassandra could create here would be amazing.
“I know you’ve got to get back to work,” she whispered. “But I couldn’t wait to
show you this.”
He wrapped his arm tightly around her waist. “And I’m so glad you did. You and Cass have a lot of decisions to make.”
He did too. Just different ones than he’d been expecting.
Chapter Three
“When I was eight years old, I was invited to participate in a computer coding class provided for free by the charity Communication For All. My father died when I was just a baby and my mother worked really hard just to make ends meet. There were no finances for tutoring or extra lessons. Everyone, including my elementary school teachers, knew I needed to be challenged, but no one knew how to do it. By eight years old I had already figured out more than what most of them had learned in their computer science degrees.”
Bree ran a hand over her eyes, then stared at the laptop screen in front of her on the kitchen table at Tanner’s ranch house.
Gregory Lightfoot, one of the federal prosecuting attorneys for Michael Jeter’s case, had been working with her two or three times a week for the past month on her witness statement for the prosecution.
Gregory was located in Dallas, where the federal trial against Jeter would take place. Eventually Bree would have to go there, but for right now they were working via teleconferencing. Her testimony in Jeter’s trial in a couple months would play an important role. The case against the members of the Organization was very complicated and intertwined.
Bree wanted to help ensure the conviction of Michael Jeter, but this part wasn’t the way she wanted to go about it.
She let out a sigh. “I just don’t understand why I have to go back so far into my personal Bethany Ragan history. Why can’t we just focus on me talking about the crimes I can prove Jeter and the Organization committed, and how I brought them down?”
As far as she was concerned, Bethany had ceased to exist once she’d gotten away from the Organization.
Gregory’s face filled her screen. “Because what they did to you and your mother will be the nail in the coffin. Terrorist activities can sometimes be vague in a jury’s mind. But picturing little eleven-year-old Bethany being tortured in order to get her to cooperate? That’s the sort of thing that will guarantee a conviction.”
“Right.”
But did it matter that she didn’t want to relive that? That there were times when she could still hear her own bones snapping in her dreams? That she could still remember what it was like to hold her mother as she vomited up blood from the beatings the Organization inflicted on her?
“Let’s just focus on Michael Jeter,” Gregory said. “Let’s leave the more painful stuff out for today and focus on when you first met him.”
Gregory didn’t understand. It was all tied to Jeter. He’d been the face of her nightmares for nearly a dozen years. There was no separating him from the horror of what happened to her, even if most of it hadn’t actually happened by his hand.
She attempted to focus.
“I moved up the ranks at Communication For All pretty quickly. At the time my mother didn’t realize that the free courses were being utilized by the Organization to discover children who had natural hacking abilities. We just thought they were giving kids in poorer neighborhoods a leg up.”
“And when did you meet Michael Jeter?”
“I’d been inside the Organization for over a year before that happened. He didn’t get involved with the classroom programs in any regard except the highest possible levels. He met maybe one child per year.”
“And you were that child?”
Bree nodded, glancing away from the screen. “Yes. I’d aced every class and test they’d given me. I was already living on the Communication For All compound with my mom, and honestly was a little bored.”
She could still almost perfectly remember the day she met Jeter. His office had been on a high floor in a Chicago skyscraper. She and her mother had grinned at each other all the way in the ride up the elevator.
“What happened at that meeting?” Gregory asked, yanking her out of the memory—one of the last clear good ones she had of her mother.
“I was brought into his office. It had unbelievable views from the window, and I wanted to look out them. But Jeter told me I had to do a test first before I could.”
On the other end of the screen, Gregory jotted something down. “And what was the test?”
“To most people it would’ve looked like a computer coding game. That’s how Michael presented it to me.”
Thinking about it all now, with such hindsight, was difficult. If she hadn’t wanted to show off so much, impress the bigwig in the fancy suit with the grandiose office, how much different her life would’ve turned out.
“I almost missed the true test,” she finally murmured. “I was so used to everything coming so easily to me with computers that I almost missed the Trojan horse Jeter had put inside his little game.”
The defect had been placed deep inside the coding, and couldn’t be fixed with a simple rewrite. Almost the entire program had to be refitted, and had to be done quickly and creatively because of the countdown the system was on.
“He was testing to see how I could adapt. He wanted to know what I would do when a system’s walls started closing in around me. If I could think outside the coding box.”
“And how did you do?”
“I passed.” She said it with a shrug like it was no big deal.
It had been the hugest of deals.
She would never forget the look in Jeter’s eye when she completed his little coding puzzle and turned the laptop back around toward him with time to spare.
Until that moment she’d been nothing to him. Just another kid who, with the right guidance, would probably grow up to do pretty advanced programming, or maybe even start her own business.
But once she’d turned the laptop back around to him and he’d seen what she’d done, she had become something much different to him.
Much more interesting.
From that day forward, until the day her mother had finally broken them out, there wasn’t a single day that Bree could remember that didn’t have Michael Jeter in it.
“Were you aware of his illegal activities at the time?”
She let out a sigh. “I was eleven. And for the first time being challenged to my fullest potential. To me, it was all a game. In the beginning at least.”
“And when did things take a turn for the worse?”
She stared at the screen, almost unable to focus on Gregory’s friendly face. She tried to force words out of her mouth—once, twice—but they wouldn’t come. Panic bubbled inside her.
All she could see was Michael Jeter.
All she could hear was his voice.
All she could feel was when her leg had been broken at his command.
The room began to close in on her, the past threatening to swallow her whole.
“Hey, freckles.”
Tanner. She felt his hands on her shoulders, his strong thumbs moving gently up and down the back of her neck.
The terror faded. He was here and would help hold her demons at bay. She leaned her head back against his abdomen.
Without taking his hands off her, Tanner crouched down so Gregory could see him in the screen.
“Hey, Tanner.”
“Hi, Greg. Looks like we might need to take a break for tonight.”
Frustration floated over the lawyer’s features. “Being able to talk about this on the stand will make a difference in the case. Bree’s already written it all out, so it’s just a matter of being able to say it.”
Tanner’s voice was calm but firm, and his fingers never stopped rubbing her neck. “You read it, so you know what sort of trauma we’re talking about. You’re going to have to be more patient. Bree will get there, but it’s going be on her timetable and nobody else’s. And besides, if she decides she doesn’t want to talk about all this, you’
re going to have to find a workaround. You’ve got plenty of other stuff.”
Bree rubbed her eyes. She should be able to do this. “I’m sorry, Gregory...”
He held up a hand. “No, Tanner is right. You shouldn’t push yourself too hard. God knows you’ve done enough to take the Organization, and Jeter, down.”
“Some days it’s easier to process the past than others.”
“Well, like Tanner said, we’ve got plenty to go on even if we don’t include details from your childhood.” Gregory’s voice dropped, and he gave her a sympathetic look. “But what he did to you so very clearly proves he’s a monster. If we can use that to our advantage, I think we should.”
Bree gave a tight smile and a nod, standing up and walking away from the table, as Tanner talked a few more moments with Gregory. She moved over to the front living room window, wrapping her arm around her midsection. She couldn’t see anything in the darkness—dark came early here in the heart of winter—but her mind could perfectly envision the beauty of Tanner’s ranch and the Rocky Mountains behind it. But right now the beloved scenery didn’t help.
She knew Michael Jeter was a monster. She just didn’t know if she could bear to relive it all.
Strong arms wrapped around her waist, and she leaned back into Tanner’s strength once again. He didn’t say anything or ask her to try to voice her feelings. And she loved him more for it.
“Seems like it’s always one of our pasts coming back to haunt us,” she finally said.
Just a few months ago, it had been someone from Tanner’s past trying to hurt them. Now it seemed like it was back to being Bree’s turn.
His arms tightened around her. “You stuck with me through my monsters. You can be damn sure I’ll be doing the same for you with yours.”
“I know it happened so long ago and I shouldn’t let it affect me now.” She’d always thought herself so strong since she’d managed to survive on her own, but maybe that wasn’t correct. “I’m not really a survivor. I’m just a victim on the move. I haven’t really faced any of it.”