by Cynthia Eden
She’d nearly died.
Jasmine blinked. “I, um—”
His arms wrapped around her and he hauled her as close as he could get her. She was warm and soft against him. Alive.
“Sending you away isn’t an option,” he snapped. The smoke had turned the sky black.
His phone stopped ringing.
Jasmine looked up at him. “Noah was going to be on that plane.” Her words trembled.
He couldn’t look away from her.
“He’s at risk now, too, because of me.” A tear slid down her cheek. “I never wanted him in danger.”
Him? Still on Noah? “What the hell is the connection?” he demanded.
His phone rang once more.
Swearing, he pulled away from her—just a few inches—and yanked out that phone. He didn’t recognize the number on the screen.
Sirens were screaming once more. Story of his life these days. Where he went, police cars followed. “We need to get out of here,” Drake said.
“We’ll handle things,” Trace told him, giving a hard nod. He stood just a few feet away. “You get her out of here.” He motioned toward the two men who were slumped at Noah’s feet. Trace and Noah had made sure those men didn’t flee the scene. The “mechanics” hadn’t gotten away. “We’ve got this,” Trace said simply.
Drake didn’t want to leave. He wanted to interrogate those SOBs and force them to lead him back to Maxwell.
But Jasmine had to be protected. He’d nearly messed things up royally just then. He’d been the one to demand that she get on that plane. If he hadn’t gotten suspicious in those last moments, the plane would have exploded with her inside.
Then what would I have done?
Jasmine was staring at Noah. A-fucking-gain. He wanted to slug his friend and drag Jasmine away.
So he did drag Jasmine away.
But she called out, “I’m so sorry!”
She was apologizing to Noah?
“I never wanted this to happen. It wasn’t supposed to touch you.”
He pushed her into his car. Had that Porsche purring and bursting out of the lot in seconds.
“What is the deal?” Drake demanded between gritted teeth. “Why him?”
His phone rang. He yanked it out as a motorcycle passed them. “What?”
“Don’t let her on the plane!”
His hold tightened on the phone.
“Do you hear me? This is Agent Victor Monroe. I’ve got intel that York’s private plane is going to be targeted. Do not let Jasmine get on that flight—”
Drake’s gaze slanted to his rear-view mirror. “Too late,” he muttered as he stared at that smoke-filled sky. “The plane’s burning.”
There was a swift inhalation of air. “But you have Jasmine. You have Jasmine!”
His stare drifted to her. She sat stiffly next to him. “I’ve got her.”
“Good…good…if you want her to stay alive, you’ll listen very, very carefully because I am the only one who can help her.”
“Cause you did such a stellar job last time,” Drake snapped at him. “The way you had her safe in the city—oh, wait, she was being taken by those jerks in the van—”
“St. Laurence Street. Five-oh-eight. Get her there, understand? I’ll meet you, and this will end.”
The line went dead. Asshole agent. He shoved his phone aside. Jasmine didn’t ask any questions, she just sat there in silence, and that silence was driving him crazy.
Why Noah? “He’s got a wife.” Yeah, so Noah was the one who laughed easily. Who didn’t scare small children. Who—
“I’m not…interested in him that way.”
“You cried for him.”
From the corner of his eye, he saw Jasmine’s fingers twist in her lap.
“Tell me why he matters. Why he changed everything for you.” And maybe he’d stop wanting to punch his best friend.
“You won’t believe me.” Her words were so soft that he had to strain to hear them. “I keep seeing the plane…if he’d been on it…”
“Screw Noah! You were the one nearly blown to hell!” And he couldn’t get that image out of his mind. Jasmine should have been safe. This wasn’t the way the plan was supposed to work. Not at all.
Drake had underestimated his enemy. Maxwell’s reach was greater than he’d realized. Were you watching Noah and Trace? Hell, if Maxwell was looking for payback because of Anna Jean, then, dammit, yes, Maxwell would be keeping eyes on them, too. There was no telling how long the bastard had been putting them all in his crosshairs.
Rage churned within Drake. Rage and…fear. I almost lost Jasmine.
“The pilot nearly died, too.” Her voice was even softer than before.
“No, he didn’t,” Drake snarled back. “Because you risked your life to go back in after him! You should’ve gotten out, you should’ve—”
“That’s not who I am.”
He spun the car off the main road. They hit dirt and gravel and flew forward toward the swamp. It was a path most wouldn’t have known. It was a path he took every time he needed to escape.
He kept driving, kept going until he was sure they were out of sight and that all the fire trucks and cops wouldn’t see him.
Good thing he knew the area so well. Once upon a time, he’d spent summers on all these back roads when he stayed with his grandfather. They’d hunted. Fished. Stared at sunsets and snakes.
“I couldn’t leave him to die. I-I couldn’t let anyone just…die.”
He braked the car. Dust shot into the air around them.
“Um, I’m not so sure this is the best place for your Porsche…”
He jumped out of the car.
She followed him, much, much more slowly. “Is that a cabin?” She was staring at the dense vegetation around them. The swamp had nearly swallowed the cabin. “We should get out of here. This is someone’s property—”
“Mine.”
She glanced at him in surprise. “What?”
“The cabin is mine.”
Her eyes squinted as she looked at the cabin once more. “You drive a Porsche, you have luxury homes in Vegas and New Orleans and you-”
“I grew up dirt poor in Mississippi until I was ten. Then my dad cut out on me, and my mother and I moved in with my grandfather.” He pointed to the cabin behind him. “I spent the best years of my life in this place.”
Her expression softened.
“Other than Noah and Trace, no one else knows about this cabin. We’ll be safe here until I can make contact with Trace again.” He knew that Noah and Trace would be able to handle the cops. Trace had connections all over the place. “Let’s get inside.”
She glanced toward his now dirt-covered Porsche. “You surprise me.”
He paused on the first wooden step. Sure, the cabin might not be much to look at, but he felt at home there. Always had. He came out there at least four or five times a year, when the city was about to choke the life out of him, and he remembered who he’d been a lifetime ago.
A boy who fished on the dock. A boy who jumped into the water and laughed at the freedom. A boy who looked up at stars and dreamed.
Not just a man with too many nightmares.
“I…didn’t see this for you,” Jasmine said as her hand waved toward the cabin. “It doesn’t seem to fit.”
“Then maybe you should’ve checked more into my past, and not just my present.”
She gave a jerky little nod at that as she came closer to him. “My past is so screwed up. I have a rule that I try not to poke too far into anyone else’s—”
He caught her hand in his. “Because you don’t want them knowing about yours?”
“Yes.” So soft.
“I want to know everything.”
She smiled, but her dimples didn’t flash. “Isn’t that what Trace is for? So he can give you a file on me?”
“I want you to tell me.”
He waited a beat.
“You will tell me.”
One wa
y…or another.
***
Saxon braked his motorcycle a good distance from the old cabin. The Porsche waited, covered in dirt and dust, about fifteen feet from the place. Drake’s car. He’d recognized it on sight.
So he’d followed them. Carefully.
His eyes slid over the cabin. Drake and Jazz were in there.
This was the perfect opportunity. Just what his boss had been waiting for.
Now, if he could just get the go-ahead to act.
Saxon pulled out his phone. “Guess who I’ve got in my sights…”
Chapter Eleven
“So I’m supposed to reveal all my secrets to you?” Jasmine asked as she rubbed her arms. There was no reason for her chill, but she still felt it. “Is that the way this works?”
He was seated at a small, wooden table. His legs were stretched in front of him.
“I tell you mine,” she heard herself say, “and I’ll want to know yours.” She thought those words might scare him. She should have known better.
His head inclined and her heartbeat raced.
“You first,” Jasmine blurted because she was a coward at heart. Had he realized it? Sure, maybe she could walk on a three inch ledge to a balcony ten feet away, but sharing anything personal?
Terrifying.
“What do you want to know?”
She sucked in a deep breath. “The woman…Anna Jean…did you love her?”
“No.”
Such a flat response.
“I wanted her, I cared for her, but…I never loved her. I don’t think I’ve loved any woman.”
Jasmine cleared her throat.
“Have you slept with them?” Drake demanded.
“Them?”
“Victor Monroe. The too familiar agent.”
Jasmine shook her head.
“And Maxwell?”
“No. He was an assignment, nothing more.”
His eyes narrowed and she realized that she’d slipped up. Jasmine hurried toward him. “Why casinos? You were in the military, and going into the casino business seems like a serious one-eighty to me.”
“Life’s a gamble.” He shrugged. “You realize that when you spend your days and nights dodging bullets. When you cheat death over and over again, you realize you’ve hit a lucky streak.”
Hell, his whole life was a gamble. Now it made sense to her.
“Then your luck runs out.”
She stopped near his side and stared down at him. “Is that what happened to you?”
A faint smile tilted the corners of his mouth. “My turn now.”
Oh, right.
“Why did you run away at fifteen?”
Talk about getting right to her darkest, most carefully guarded secret. “I don’t like this game anymore.”
He caught her hand. Held it in his. “It was never a game.”
His touch scorched her.
“Tell me.”
She stared at their entwined hands. She didn’t want to look in his eyes when she revealed her shame. “My mother…I realized what she was when I was nine years old. Before that, I just…I thought she had a lot of boyfriends. That was what she called them, you see. Her boyfriends.”
Mommy’s going out with her boyfriend tonight. You just stay inside and keep the lights turned off. I’ll be back soon.
“She liked drugs and she liked to drink and she needed money…so she got it the only way she could.” Had her mother been different once? Maybe before Jasmine had been born? Long ago, she must have been different.
Drake’s hold tightened on her.
“When I was fifteen, she tried to give me to one of her boyfriends.”
His hold became painful.
“She said she was tired and that he liked me, and it would just make things easier if I…if I…” No, Jasmine would not say it. “I left, and I never looked back.” Her breath whispered out. “Maybe ease that grip a bit?”
“Sorry.” He immediately lightened his hold. Then he brought her hand up to his lips. Kissed her wrist. Her palm.
Jasmine could only stare at him. “That wasn’t how you were supposed to react.”
He looked up at her.
“I’m the daughter of a drugged out prostitute. She overdosed a week after I left her. She died and they found her naked and alone in that trailer park.” She shoved back the pain. “You’re not supposed to react this way. You’re not supposed to just sit there and stare up at me and—”
He kissed her hand again. “The first time we talked, I realized how strong you were. I thought you might just be the strongest woman I’d ever met.”
She shook her head. She wasn’t strong. She was weak. A—
“You should see what I see,” he told her, tilting back his head. “When I look at you.”
“A liar and a thief.” She already knew what he saw.
“No.” He pulled her down, and Jasmine sprawled over his lap. “I see a beautiful, smart, strong woman who needs to believe in herself. Life’s been hard, damn brutal to you, but you’ve survived.”
He was making her heart hurt. “Like life hasn’t been brutal to you?”
“We all have our scars.” His thumb moved lightly along the inner column of her wrist. Jasmine knew he had to feel her racing pulse.
Yes, they did have their scars. “When I was a little girl, I wanted another life. Any other life but the one I had. I would dream of starting some place new. A new name. A new past.” She swallowed. “A new future.”
“Is that why you’re still running? Because you want that new life?”
Her lashes lowered. “Sometimes it doesn’t matter how long or hard you run, there’s no escaping the past.”
“Don’t I know it? You can’t even bury that shit sometimes.”
Her gaze jerked back up to his. “Is that what you want to do? Bury your past? Forget about Anna Jean?”
“Her blood will always be on my hands.” His voice roughened. “I hate what I did. I hate that I got drunk and screwed my friend’s girl. Tucker and I…we were close and that destroyed him. Tucker mattered to me. Tucker, Noah, and Trace—they were my family after my mother and grandfather died. And I wound up hurting them all because I couldn’t keep my pants zipped.”
“Drake…”
“She was the only woman who ever got close to me. She looked at me and lied, and I didn’t even realize it.” He paused. Studied her with a hard gaze. “I know when you lie, but the problem is…I don’t seem to care.”
She needed to pull away. Instead, she leaned in closer.
Their lips were almost touching.
“Why do you stare at Noah York and look as if you’re losing your whole world?”
His question sank into her, nearly piercing her heart. Too late, she did try to pull away, but there was no place to go.
“I won’t betray my friends. Not ever again,” he vowed. “There’s something there, between you and Noah. He doesn’t remember you—”
“Why should he? We never met.” He was the lucky one.
“What is he to you?”
She didn’t want to answer him.
“Jasmine…”
“Promise not to tell.” Her whisper. Like a child’s voice.
Surprise rippled across his face.
“He doesn’t need to know, so promise me. Promise that you won’t tell. When all of this is over…” And it would be, one day. One day soon. “Don’t tell him.”
He gave a curt nod.
“I think he’s my brother.” Such a quiet confession. One that made Drake’s muscles tense beneath her. “I know he is.”
“What?”
“My mother…she had a little boy before me. She gave him up at birth. She was just sixteen then.” The words tumbled out in a rush now. “She gave him up, gave him to a family who couldn’t have kids of their own.”
“You don’t—”
“She regretted giving him away. She told me that, she’d scream that at me when she drank. So when she got pregnant again, sh
e…she kept me.” And I’d wished, so many times, that she hadn’t.
Just as Jasmine had wished, so many times, that her brother would come back for her.
A girl, dreaming of a rescue that never came.
“Why do you think Noah is your brother?” No emotion was in his voice.
“Because she had one photo of the family who took him. I found it when I was six and…when I was fifteen, it was the only thing I took with me when I left her.” Because she’d thought—stupidly then—that she’d find her brother. That he’d take her in.
And she had found him. But Noah York had been fighting in battles overseas then, and she…she’d found her own wars.
“You’re certain?”
She stared into the warmth of his eyes. “Tracking him wasn’t hard. I had a photograph of his parents. Of him. And when I got access to the right computer equipment…photo imaging software, hospital databases…it all fell into place for me.” Her lips tightened. “He even has her eyes.”
“Shit.”
Just like that, Jasmine found herself off his lap and back on her feet. And Drake had paced across the room, putting a good ten feet between them.
“Drake?”