by Angel Payne
She closed her eyes for the same peaceful moments. Her nostrils filled with pine and ocean, even a light tinge of coffee being brewed inside the rambling ranch house. The slight chill in the air gave her a tiny shiver, and she welcomed it. For six days, her world had been only twenty-five-hundred square feet of enclosed space, with occasional peeks at a patch of sky. Getting greedy about all this was her due.
And, God willing, her eraser.
Like that was going to happen, now that John sneaked into a corner of her mind. Then commandeered a bigger chunk. Stomped into the one next to that.
Shit.
Shit.
John Keoni Franzen.
He wasn’t just the dragon slinking into her space anymore.
He was the knight who’d lowered her drawbridge and ridden right into her keep. Who commanded her desire and then taken her orgasms as his trophies of war.
Then went even farther.
Strutted into her damn throne room and walked up to the seat at the front.
Where he still ruled, whether she liked it or not.
Who the hell was she trying to fool?
She liked it. She liked it too damn much.
“It’s pretty out here.”
No. She hated it.
His murmur, quiet as the breeze in the oaks and sycamores, roped that truth in with perfect timing. So what if that dark-chocolate voice spread to the farthest reaches of her body, coating her like the most decadent dessert on the planet? So what if his footsteps, slow but steady on the wide stone veranda, reverberated through every nerve ending she possessed? So what if his presence, consuming more of the air as he moved, woke up her sex more sharply than the tang of the ocean on the air?
John moved up next to her. Stretched an arm up, bracing his forearm against one of the natural log support beams. She dared a glance over. While he was still dressed in his date night/Dominant/life-saving warrior clothes, he’d washed the grime off his face and arms and had even cleared the dust out of his dark hair—not helping her libido calm by one damn bit. Biscuits and effing gravy. The man’s rugged beauty reached whole new heights in natural light. The sun, now reflecting off wispy peach clouds, mellowed his features and brightened the gold in his gaze. The wind, gusting a little stronger, flattened his T-shirt against his T-shaped torso.
Damn it.
She really needed to hate him right now.
She really longed to jump him right now.
More than that. She yearned to drag him off into the bushes and mount him.
There was a creative option for an uncomfortable silence. Definitely hadn’t ever been an option she’d gone for on the Hill—though she doubted any man in those chambers even remembered the definition of silence.
She liked what Franz did with this one.
God, God, she didn’t want to—but she did.
He simply let it rest. For a long minute and then two. Just let the morning surround them, as the dawn shifted from pastel to primary hues and the air warmed from chilled to pleasant, before he finally spoke again.
“Whole place belongs to Ethan,” he said, actually attempting conversation. She added a craving to hug him, on top of the monkey sex. The man “enjoyed” chit-chat about as much as she once “enjoyed” trips to Cheesy Chuck Pizza Land with Luke. He was trying, though. It was a start. “Far as you can see, nearly to the Morro Bay city line.”
“Oh.” Before she could retract it, her surprise underlined the reply—though the revelation should’ve been anything but. The soon-to-be ex Sergeant Archer wasn’t at ease discussing himself, but she at least learned he was one of the Archers, heir to a sizable fortune already. “Well, that makes sense, I suppose. He’s about to become Hollywood royalty. This’ll be a nice place to get away from all that stress.”
“Stress.” He flipped her expectations by echoing it on a chuckle. “It’s just…ironic,” he addressed to her open gape. “That you use that word.”
“Why?”
“Because the guy’s end goal isn’t addressing his stress.” He looked out over the horizon. “He wants to turn this all into a working ranch. Seriously. With dudes in Stetsons, horses, cows, chuck wagon barbecues on the weekends…” He pointed toward steeper slopes off in the distance. “He’s even thinking of putting in a vineyard, somewhere over there. Grape-growing ju-ju’s supposed to be great.”
While she was glad for the distraction from gawking-but-not-gawking at him, her brows pushed together in deeper puzzlement. “So what does all of that have to do with the stress-that-isn’t-his-own?”
“Because the place is going to welcome others, free-of-charge. It’s going to be like a working retreat for former soldiers, and others who qualify, who are fighting PTSD.”
“Oh.” Her reiteration of the word was doubly stunned—but in all the best ways. “That’s…”
“Pretty cool, right?”
“Better than cool.” She meant it and hoped he could tell, before she turned and sobered once again. “Hopefully that’ll also apply to survivors of the Oval Office.” She tried to add a wry laugh, but it never materialized. They were talking, but the elephant on the porch wasn’t listening. “If I ever get to the damn place.”
Which, she was beginning to think, might not be such a tragedy…
“Okay.” He stretched out the word a little, almost tilting it toward a question, before asserting, “That’s fair subtext.”
“Subtext?” Now she did laugh. Bitterly.
He hurled back a huff. Also bitterly. “Tracy—”
“John.” She was tempted to just end the bullshit there. A blunt middle-finger salute, a sharp turn right, and she’d be on her way toward the oak grove, ready to enjoy a peaceful morning’s walk. When was the last time she’d done something like that? When was the last time she’d been able to enjoy anything normal, stable?
The answer actually hit right away. It had been a little over a year ago. After the meeting in which Craig declared his intention about her appointment, she’d taken Luke home for the weekend, to Corpus Christi. Nobody but Norene, Luke, and the appropriate staff members knew, and she had a couple of days before her world blew up. She’d talked to Dad a lot, walking along the bay, skipping stones, and throwing sticks for his two dogs.
After two days, she’d nearly lost her mind.
Even Dad had noticed. He’d chuckled heartily over Sunday morning coffee, muttering words laced with love—but, right now, felt like some bloody cosmic curse.
You’re not wired for normal, Trace. Never have been, never will be.
And over the last week, for the first time in a long time, the man in front of her made that okay. Showed her that sometimes, many times, alternative wiring could be exactly what the world needed. She believed him too. Trusted him.
Right up to the instant she realized he’d been keeping shit from her.
So no, there wouldn’t be a middle finger for him. There’d be this. Her stare, full of her hurt and raging tears. Her words, full of the challenge she stabbed at the high-and-mighty Franzen in his beautiful, brooding throne.
“Look at me,” she dictated, moving to lock herself directly in front of him. “Look at me, damn it, and tell me why.” Her lungs burned, getting in the air to keep speaking, but she imposed mind over matter, forcing them to keep functioning. “Why did you know there was a crack in our cover and not tell me—”
“Because I didn’t know.” He shoved off the pole so violently, she almost checked for the spear clearly skewering him through the back. “Because I didn’t know, Tracy. Not for sure, at least.”
She pivoted, narrowing her gaze. “What the hell does that mean?”
“I was only running on a hunch.” His hands lifted, dragging in tandem across his skull. “A really crazy one.”
“All right,” she said slowly. “A hunch you couldn’t share with me?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
His hands lowered. His whole frame became unnaturally still. He was, in really trite ter
ms, like a glorious statue just added to the ambiance of the ranch. “Because if it was right,” he finally returned, voice filled with just as much stone, “you would have given it away…when you were talking to Sol.”
“Sol?” For a second, it felt as if the wind had stolen the word before it even got to him. That was the moment before she knew her gut had beaten it to the punch.
The really huge punch.
She slumped to the stoop, legs giving out, as the blow fully hit.
“Sol.” Vaguely, she felt her head shaking. Her mind fighting. “You—you think Sol gave us away?” But that same mind filled with a flashback of Franz seething into that burner phone, back in the garage. Ranting at Sol. Calling him an asshole. John wasn’t exactly a Ps and Qs kind of guy, but that was beyond stretching the norms. It had snapped them.
Somewhere in the middle of the mini movie replay, Franz turned back to her. Gazed now, as if reliving that exact scene with her. “It was only an instinct,” he muttered. “But the more I turned details over and over, the more shit didn’t feel right—a feeling that got worse every time I got on the line with the guy.”
Tracy hugged both arms around her middle. She compelled herself to keep listening, no matter how huge the boulders got in her belly. The man had logged eleven years in Special Operations. That was over four thousand days of reading people purely on vocal cues and wonky-strange evidence. His “hunches” were better than most people’s hard facts. “Wh-What kind of a feeling?” she finally managed to stammer.
“Plain and simple?” John volleyed. “The feeling we were being played. Started back in Vegas, even before the explosion at the villa. What the hell was with his huge technical glitch at the Vegas Convention Center? You want to tell me that army of trained audio technicians hadn’t backed up the sound settings for that presentation?”
“That…is odd.” She said it while a family of rabbits sought the shade beneath one of the helicopters. Had she been like one of those clueless creatures? Looking only at the grass, when larger things were happening right over her head?
“Well, that was only the beginning,” John persisted in a tight growl. “Didn’t come close to the alarms that went off when I talked to him after the blast.”
She focused a stare up at him. “I remember. He was baffling the hell out of you. At the time, I was still so rattled, I didn’t think…”
“And why did you think you had to?” He lowered to the step, sitting next to her. “You’ve always trusted him.”
Tracy said nothing, though that didn’t negate a reaction. She kept it to herself, choosing to contemplate how he gritted the word trust harder than the rest. Trust. To his warrior’s spirit, the word meant so much. To his Dominant’s soul, it meant everything. No matter what, he’d never taken the word lightly. Deciding to hide all this from her… It had been a shitty burden on him. A lie of omission, in order to honor the trust she’d given him.
“He was adamant that I not tell him where I took you—but as the days went on, I began to wonder if he didn’t already know.”
She clutched her stomach, now aching to the point of a hard throb, tighter. Dreaded blurting the one word on her lips. “Why?”
John looked out toward the oaks. His jaw hardened and then jutted. “Nothing glaring. Like I said, just enough for a hunch. One night, I called him around eleven. That would have been around two a.m. in Washington, but the guy was wide awake.”
She sent a scoffing huff. “Nobody sleeps a lot in DC, John.”
“With a local news feed on in the background? Talking about all the cranberry harvest festivals?”
“Oh.” The trend was getting ridiculous. But when the syllable fit…
“Later the next day, you were on the line with him, joking about forgetting what the sky looked like. His response surprised even you for a second.”
She unfurled her arms. Pushed them to the cool stones as she jolted, recalling the same exchange. “Because he joked back that I could stand in the shower and get the same result.” She jerked her stare at John. “I figured he was just referring to the weather in DC.”
“Even though it’d been pouring all day in Seattle?”
“Oh my God.” She shoved all the way to her feet. Stumbled a couple of steps, hands cupping her face. “Oh my God. He—he did know.” Stopped, wheeling back to fire the dispute taking over her mind. “But…how?” Freezing panic set in. “Did I say something by accident? Give something away?”
Franz rose too. Swept over, reaching her after one powerful stride, and hauled her close. “And why would that have been so awful? Your safety has been in the palm of that man’s hand. Your life. And Luke’s. Fuck.”
The man’s wrath, however quietly gritted and tightly coiled, was as welcome as the sun to her psyche. And his body, wrapping around her and against her… Yes. Oh, yes. This. He was her sun right now. Burning into her. Sustaining her. Huge and brilliant and strong for her as she started shivering from the inescapable truth of this. The truth her own gut confirmed. All the stress she’d heard in Sol’s voice. All the cryptic subtexts she’d wondered about, only to write them off as ramblings due to helping on a worldwide manhunt.
A search for terrorists he already knew about?
Criminals he was helping?
“Was that why you laid into him?” she finally whispered. “During that call, in the garage last night, when you went all Hamilton on his Burr?”
“Burr? Sir?”
It was all the permission she needed for two seconds of a necessary laugh. He joined her, indulging an inhalation of the new day’s air, holding it for several telling seconds before it came back out with leaden meaning.
“I had to string out the call,” he clarified, his voice once more a taut steel cable. “And pounding him was the only realistic choice, given I didn’t have him there to actually take down.”
She supplied the obvious conclusion to that. “Because Ethan was still upstairs, trying to reverse trace the call.”
He slid in a hand, delivering praise in a squeeze to her neck. “My smart, sexy popoki.”
“Was he successful?”
He pushed another breath out—ten times more brutal than the first. “Sort of. We locked the device down to somewhere in the northwest.”
All hail the Titanic of her bloodstream. New iceberg of dread, straight ahead. “So he not only knew where we were but led that crew to us.”
John gathered her even closer. Muttered with dark resignation, “Yeah. Seems that way, beautiful.”
“Asshole.”
“Seems that way too.”
She no longer wondered how or why he’d brandished the word in the garage. She could’ve spat it twenty more times and not be done spewing her wrath. Instead she stepped back, kicked violently at the grass, and sputtered, “But—I still don’t get it. I mean…how? How did he know?”
John grunted. “Better question is, how could he not know? Not with the technological resources at his disposal—the FBI, CIA, NSA, DHS—all firing at full thrusters and all likely crashing into each other because of the global manhunt for these bastards, whoever they are. Nobody would have noticed him performing some extra ‘side searches,’ even if they weren’t approved or validated.” His spine stiffened, and he looked ready to jab a new hole of his own into the grass. “And since he’d already checked out my background before I even hit the ground in Vegas, he likely narrowed his searches to all the homes of the guys in the battalion.”
The explanation made sense—but no way in hell did it comfort her. The opposite effect began with a grenade to her heart and then shot panicked shrapnel along her extremities. “Shit. That means he’ll follow us here too.”
Franz shook his head. “Archer made the purchase through a third-party broker, using the name of the nonprofit he already set up. Nothing but a deep paperwork search will trace any of it back to him.” His lips twisted in a wry grimace. “And right now, I don’t think Sol has time for deeply doing anything. He knows we’re onto him.
He’s the one running now.”
She let out a whoosh of relief but only halfway. “For now,” she uttered, truly wondering if this was all going to end up like bad experimental theater, with no clear ending ever supplied. What happened when one couldn’t leave the show and hash out plot opinions over cocktails with their friends? What happened when the plot loop was one’s freaking life? “So…what do we do now?” she asked anyway, hoping he had a much better metaphor for an answer.
“We figure out the rest of the story.” His obstinate tone, joined by his arrogant soldier stance, already had her ditching the off-Broadway experiment for his in-your-face Lloyd Webber overture. “We dig up not only Sol Wrightman’s role in this insanity but what the hell the insanity is.”
“Yeah.” She borrowed some of Luke’s post-fifteen-roller-coasters energy, mellowing to a sheepish grin when Franz stopped her fist pump with his enveloping grip. “Yeah,” she repeated past her growing blush. “Good plan.”
She lowered her fist. His hand descended with it.
She unfurled her fingers. John meshed his with them.
Just like that, reconnecting all their circuits. Retying all their knots. Reigniting every flame of their cosmic combustion…the inescapable, indelible force that was uniquely, beautifully them…
For one perfect second, she surrendered to it once more. Gave herself to him once again. Showed him so by dipping her forehead to the middle of his chest and then leaning closer to him. Leaning against him. Letting him accept her whole weight and all the racing emotions of her spirit. Giving him all her confusion and fear, her weariness and apprehension, her trepidation…but her trust.
He knew it too. She heard the confirmation in the deep, thundering breaths consuming his lungs.
He accepted it. She felt it in the mighty pull of his arms, wrapping her like giant ti leaves around a tiny flower.
And yes, he treasured it. Just like he always had. Just like her own soul confirmed now, emboldened once more by his strength, humbled once more by his devotion.