by Sybil Bartel
I gave her my attention.
Her dark eyes pleading, she did the same thing she did the last time I saw her before everything went to hell. She begged. “Please.”
My brother next to her, touching her back, holding her hand, his thigh pressed against hers—I wasn’t angry. I was fucking irrational.
“We’ll be in touch,” Luna reiterated, answering Sanaa.
Silas appeared and opened the door before scanning the airport. “Clear.”
His customary smile missing, Vance stood. “I’ll walk you out.”
With one last glance at Sanaa, I went down the airstairs.
Luna paused on the tarmac, and I stood next to him as Vance joined us.
“Give us a minute,” Vance directed Luna.
Luna played hardball. “Whatever you have to say, you can say in front of me.”
Vance smiled dismissively at Luna. “This is personal.”
Luna switched to Spanish. “I don’t like any part of how this went down, especially when they said they have no idea who this is. I call bullshit, and where’s the rest of her security detail? I don’t care how good they are. The three of them will lose control of the situation the second it gets out she’s in Miami. She needs a damn army.”
“I warned you,” I answered him in Spanish before switching to English. “I’ll meet you at the SUV.”
Luna stared at my brother for a beat, then he nodded once. “Conlon.” He turned and headed for the terminal.
Vance smirked. “I can handle security for her.”
If he could, I wouldn’t be standing here. “You learned Spanish.”
“And Russian,” he bragged. “How about you?”
Our mother, convinced we’d fall into a life of crime with the Irish mob if we didn’t have a good education, did two things religiously with us growing up. She gave us encyclopedias to read, and she made us listen to CDs to learn different languages. By high school, we both spoke German, French and Italian conversationally.
Vance used his linguistic skills to fuck his way through the cheerleading team.
I used mine to learn Trinidadian Patois.
Then I’d listen through my open window at night to the shy wisp of a girl next door who’d sit on her back stoop and speak to her grandmother and sing songs in a language I’d never heard before.
I named her Songbird before I’d ever met her.
“What do you want, Vance?” Not in a competition with him, I didn’t let on that I also knew Dari and Pashto now, courtesy of five deployments in Afghanistan.
A mirror image, he stared at me for a beat. “How long are you going to do this?”
I turned to leave.
“Wait, wait, wait.” He dropped the pretense. “For fuck’s sake, how long are you going to blame me? I’ve apologized, repeatedly. What happened after was a fucking accident. It’s been a decade, brother. I think you’ve punished us all long enough. If you don’t want to talk to me, fine, but she needs you. Do the right thing.”
“Do the right thing.” Facing him, the impenetrable wall of ten years of anger and guilt I’d built detonated like an IED, and rage exploded. “Is that what you did when you tried to fuck my girlfriend at my going-away party the night before I deployed?” My virgin girlfriend. The Songbird I’d delayed enlistment for because she was still in high school and had no one to protect her if I left. The girl who’d decided to give herself to me but then couldn’t even tell the fucking difference between me and my brother. The girl I was so wrapped up in, I’d lost control.
Vance didn’t bother to look apologetic. “Come on. I was drunk. We all were. It was an honest mistake. You were never going to hold on to her anyway. We both knew that. She’d already signed the recording contract.”
“Honest?” Hold on to her? I’d bought her a fucking ring. “You took her into my bedroom.”
“She took me,” he threw back.
“You went.” Fuck him. “And how the fuck did you know that night she’d already signed the contract?” She hadn’t even told me yet.
Vance threw his hands up. “What the hell do you want me to say anymore? You want me to fucking lie so you can hang on to your bullshit anger and tell you she told me? The window was fucking open. After you stormed out, I heard the same goddamn shit you did. And for the record, we were wearing the same fucking T-shirt that night. She mistook me for you. Said she had a surprise for me in your room, and yes, I followed, but I didn’t fuck her. You know that. I stopped the second I found out she was still innocent.”
“You didn’t stop shit. She was naked, and your hands were all over her when I walked in on you.” The image was burned into my fucking psyche, reminding me every day why I didn’t trust a single damn person.
“Was I fucking her?” Vance challenged, raising his voice.
Fuck this. Nothing had changed. He was still the same entitled asshole I’d grown up with, and I was done engaging. I didn’t give a shit that he’d covered up my mistake. I didn’t ask him to, and that shit had been hanging over my head for ten years. Given the same situation, I wouldn’t have done anything different, but it still didn’t make it right. Nothing would make any of this fucked-up situation right.
I turned toward the terminal.
“She wasn’t sticking around,” he called after me. “She wasn’t going to wait for you while you deployed.”
Maybe, maybe not.
I’d never know.
Pissed that I’d come here, I walked into the terminal.
Luna pushed off the counter he was leaning against and fell into step beside me. “I’m beginning to understand your choice on the next-of-kin notification form.”
“I’m not discussing it.” We exited through the front of the terminal.
“Fair enough. But know familia isn’t always blood, hermano.”
“Understood.” Luna was more of a brother to me than Vance ever had been.
Luna unlocked the armored Escalade. Getting behind the wheel, he cranked the engine and the AC. Then he leaned back in his seat and glanced toward the jets before looking back at me. “Gotta admit, not much surprises me anymore.” He broke out in a grin. “But goddamn, amigo. Sanaa? The Sanaa?” He chuckled. “Mierda. That’s next level, brother.” Still grinning, he shook his head. “It’s always the quiet ones.”
I stared straight ahead. “She’s not mine.” She never was.
“Yeah, but at some point she was. And by the look of it, she wishes she still was.” Luna threw the SUV into gear. “So what do you want to do?”
I glanced at the two private jets as Luna pulled away from the airport. “Nothing.”
The irony wasn’t lost on me that the one brother I never wanted was the only one who’d ever seen me naked.
Yes, Ronan had seen me in my bikini and, I was pretty sure, my panties and bra all those years ago when I changed out of wet clothes after we’d gotten caught in the rain walking home from school. We’d laughed about it at the time, dripping summer rain all over the kitchen floor.
Then the laughter in his eyes had died and his seriousness, the deep-rooted kind that came from too many responsibilities at too young an age, had taken over his beautiful features and his throat moved with a swallow.
It was the first time I’d been brave enough to reach out and touch it.
The memory surfaced.
“Do it again,” I whispered, placing my hand on his throat.
“Do what?” he asked quietly.
My heart ached at the soulful quietness to his voice. “Make it move.” I stroked his Adam’s apple with my thumb. “This.”
His hand covered mine, and he swallowed again. “I have to tell you something.”
My fingers tickled at the vibration from his voice, but my heart fluttered from the intensity in his stormy eyes. “What?”
His throat moved again. “I’m in love with you, Songbird.”
“Sanaa?”
I blinked and the memory faded, but I was staring at almost identical eyes on a man wit
h the same Adam’s apple. “What?”
Vance smiled, and tiny lines formed that I didn’t know if his brother had because Ronan hadn’t smiled at me.
“You didn’t hear a word I said, did you, love?” Vance brushed a knuckle across my cheek.
I wasn’t his love. But he’d been in London long enough to pick up certain endearments, and I was too tired to argue with him about it. “I’m sorry, can you please repeat yourself?”
Dropping his hand to my arm, Vance glanced at Adam. “It’s been a long flight. I need to get her to the hotel.”
I didn’t want to go to another nameless hotel. I’d lived in hotels for a decade. I wanted to stay on this plane until the very last whisper of his scent disappeared. Dry cedar, salty air and the unmistakable musk that was all him, Ronan smelled exactly how I remembered, and I wanted to stay here and breathe it in forever.
I wanted to drown in it.
I wanted memories that were bittersweet to give me hope, and I wanted to embrace him in the only way I could, because no one smelled like Ronan Conlon. There was nothing that felt more like home than his scent. Not even his twin came close.
Which was why I should’ve realized, all those years ago, the unforgiveable mistake I was making. Except I’d been so nervous and so desperate to make the man of my dreams mine before telling him that I’d done the unthinkable and signed the contract, that I didn’t think. I’d put my arms around him from behind, and I’d whispered I had a surprise for him.
I should’ve known it was Vance and not him. And Vance should’ve stopped me before I was dragging him to his brother’s bedroom, stripping, and pawing at him with all of my inexperience and desperation. Vance was partially at fault, but I blamed myself for all of it, including what I’d just witnessed.
“You’re still not speaking to him.” Vance had lied to me.
He chuckled. “I speak to him, darling. He just doesn’t answer.”
“You lied,” I accused. “When I first saw you in London, I asked after him, and you said he was fine.”
Vance stood and adjusted the cuffs of his custom-made shirt. “And he is.” He smiled without warmth. “You saw for yourself.” He glanced at Adam. “Are you coming with us to the hotel?”
His ankle resting on his knee, his suit pressed despite him also having flown here, Adam Trefor focused piercing ice-blue eyes on me. Looking every bit as imposing as he did when I first met him in a sterile office on a dreary English day, he spoke with a calmness that never touched his eyes. “Miss Narine, we need to speak about the very real possibility that this plan won’t work.”
The plan.
Hastily concocted, rushed to put into play, and wedged between two ticking time bombs. It wasn’t a plan. It was a fool’s mission.
Barely more than twenty-four hours ago, I’d given my second-to-last concert on the tour. In seven days, I would play the stadium where I’d started the tour. Unbeknownst to my fans, it was going to be my last live performance. I couldn’t afford for anything to go wrong.
“The plan’s going to work,” Vance reassured.
Adam tapped his fingers together in a repetitive pattern. “Assuming the person behind this follows us here, assuming he decides to plant another bomb, and assuming we find it before he detonates it, is a lot of assumptions.” His focus unwavering, he paused for a moment. “The prudent move would be to alert authorities in London, hand this over to them, and take their advice on safety protocols before proceeding with the concert. Then we do our job and keep you protected.”
“Protecting me doesn’t protect my fans.” The placement of the third bomb proved that.
Barely lifting his right shoulder, Adam shrugged. “If you’re not on stage, there’s no audience.”
“She’s still under threat whether or not she’s performing,” Vance interjected.
Adam stood. Addressing Vance, he tipped his chin toward me. “Her, we can protect.”
Even though Vance met my gaze with a locked expression, I could still surmise what he was thinking. They could protect me, but I wasn’t the only one at risk. Which was why Vance wanted us on US soil, why he’d come up with this plan, and why we were here. Vance suspected who it was.
I didn’t suspect, I knew.
The moment I read the first note, I knew. But Vance had wanted more information, so he’d done his due diligence over the past couple months. Now he had all of his intel neatly stacked up and pointing toward the suspect, but we had one problem.
We couldn’t find him.
So Vance wanted to give the bomber another target, one he thought the sick bastard wouldn’t be able to resist.
One that looked exactly like him.
“You know what I don’t like?” His arms crossed, Luna stared at the wall of monitors in the control room at base. Scanning all the feeds for the clients we surveilled, he seemed distracted.
I didn’t answer.
We’d been back at Luna and Associates headquarters for thirty minutes, and I was waiting for him to say something about the meet at the airport. I knew he wouldn’t be able to drop it. Luna didn’t turn his back on people who needed help.
He glanced at me. “Trefor isn’t sloppy.”
How Trefor operated was irrelevant if my brother was running this. “You don’t know that Vance isn’t. He could be running this solo.” Which would not only fit his MO and ego, but dragging out something like this only extended his time with her.
Luna scrubbed his hand over his chin. “Maybe, maybe not, but Trefor’s name, his resources, they’re behind this, and I don’t buy it for a single second that he doesn’t know who they’re dealing with.” His dark eyes met mine. “Trefor’s thorough.”
“I know.”
“So which one of them’s lying?”
“Vance.” Lying or withholding information.
“Because?”
“He’s up to something.” Or he has ulterior motives.
Luna nodded slowly. “You curious?”
“No.”
Luna studied me a long moment. “I am.”
“No, you’re not.” At least not about Vance. “You want to help Sanaa.”
Luna grinned. “Sanaa, huh?”
I didn’t bite. I knew what he was getting at.
He chuckled. “Okay, I admit it.” His expression turned Marine lethal. “If there’s a bomber in my city and that woman is in trouble, I wouldn’t be a Marine if I let that shit happen when I could do something about it.”
“You think Trefor and company can’t handle it?” It was a rhetorical question. We both knew Trefor could.
“I think they’re not handling it. Big difference. And I want to know why, besides the obvious that operating on home turf always gives you the advantage and Trefor’s from Florida.”
“Maybe that’s the key.” The idea of home turf nagged at the inkling of suspicion that’d surfaced in the back of my mind when we’d been on the plane.
Luna frowned. “You think the threat is someone from her past?”
The inkling of suspicion grew, but I gave Luna a vague answer. “Could be.” It didn’t make sense, not after all these years, but there was someone who came to mind that could potentially be capable of this.
Luna glanced back at the monitors. “You want to call Trefor, or should I?”
“And say what?” Luna didn’t know my past, and I wasn’t going to tell him now, not if my suspicions about who it could be were unfounded.
“Depends.”
“On?”
Luna’s shrewd gaze cut to mine. “If you want in or not.”
I gave the simplest of answers that wouldn’t incriminate me. “I’m not stepping on the past.”
“I wouldn’t step on it either.” Luna leveled me with a look. “I’d fucking crush it.”
It was my turn to stare at the monitors.
Ten years.
I knew who I was back then, and I knew who I was now.
I regretted my actions, but the truth was I wouldn’t have done
anything different, not given the same situation. And if she’d come to me before signing that contract, I would’ve talked her into another avenue, and she never would’ve become who she did. She was famous now because she didn’t listen to me.
I don’t know what would’ve happened if fate hadn’t intervened all those years ago, but in moments of weakness, I selfishly thought about it. Wondering how our lives would’ve been different if I hadn’t taken that video of her sitting on my back porch, the sunlight on her face and the guitar I’d bought her in her lap.
The memory came back like it was yesterday.
Humming to tune her guitar, she made a slight adjustment, strummed, then sang a low note.
I pulled my phone out and aimed. “You’re beautiful.”
Shielding the sun with her hand, she looked up. When she saw I was recording, she laughed. “Ronan Conlon, what are you doing?” Her accent lilting, her words meant to be scolding, she couldn’t hold the sentiment because her cheeks flushed and she smiled shyly.
I loved the way she smiled at me. “Play for me, Songbird.”
Waving her slender hand at me, she made a dismissive sound. “Put the phone down, you silly man.”
“No.”
Her laugh was short but bright. “Did anyone ever tell you you’re bossy?”
“Only you.” Only for her.
“I think you like telling me what to do,” she teased.
She had no idea. “I like taking care of you.” There was a difference. I would teach her. When she was ready.
Her smile faltered. “You’re leaving soon.”
Taking control before she became sad, I issued a quiet command. “Play, Sanaa.” I reached out and stroked her cheek. “We have plenty of time before I deploy. Sing for me.”
“I don’t want you recording me,” she protested, averting her eyes. “You know I’m shy.”
“Give me something to take with me.” I rubbed my thumb over her full bottom lip. “And never be shy with that sexy voice.”
“Silly man,” she whispered, heat flushing her cheeks darker as she dipped her face. “But all right.” She smiled wide. “Just for you.”
I stopped the recording, then started a new one.