by Lara Adrian
John’s gaze settled on her as she took a sudden interest in the loose edge of the label on her Coors. “What about you, Lisa?”
“Me?” She glanced up and collided with his intense stare. “What about me?”
“I heard you got married a few years back.”
“Four years ago.” It felt like a hundred had passed since then. Especially tonight, in this moment, discussing it with John Duarte over dinner in his cabin while her brother’s life might be hanging in the balance.
John grunted, the sensual line of his mouth pressed flat for a brief second. “Kyle mentioned it to me around that time. Some kind of doctor up there in Cincinnati?”
“Pediatric heart surgeon.” Lisa went back to picking at her bottle’s label. “Parker and I met when I organized a charity event for the hospital. We got married six weeks later at his parents’ estate.”
“Sounds fancy.” And John sounded thoroughly unimpressed.
“Yeah, it was. The divorce two months later was fancy, too. Lots of lawyers and engraved letterhead to sign. Lots of fancy legal agreements to ensure I didn’t profit off our brief farce of a marriage.”
“What happened?”
“He cheated on me.”
John bit off a low curse, his dark brow furrowing. “Idiot.”
Lisa shook her head. “In hindsight, I probably should’ve seen it coming. We were too different. From different worlds. I never should’ve married him.”
John studied her now. “So, why did you?”
“Good question. I was asking myself that very thing a month after walking down the aisle. That’s when my newlywed husband came home from a five-day seminar in Boston with another woman’s panties in his pocket. I guess he forgot to check his suits before he left them for me to send out to the dry cleaner. He didn’t even try to deny what he’d done. Maybe infidelity was acceptable in his world, but it sure as hell wasn’t in mine.”
Why had she married him? All she’d ever really wanted was to belong somewhere, to belong to someone. She wanted to feel she mattered, and that her life counted for something.
That was why she’d gotten involved in charity work. The need to feel that she was contributing to something important, while giving others less fortunate some of the care and benefits they needed.
She was still searching for that sense of purpose. That sense of belonging. Maybe she always would be.
Lisa lifted her shoulder in a shrug and went back to peeling the label off her beer. “I suppose if anyone was an idiot in my brief marriage, it was me. Like a fool, I bought into the whole knight-in-shining-armor, white-picket-fence, country-club illusion that I thought a man like Parker represented. None of it was real. You’d think I’d know not to believe in that kind of fairy tale, given how Kyle and I grew up, bouncing from one foster home to another as kids.”
John grunted as he set down his freshly drained bottle. “Doesn’t mean you don’t deserve the picket fence and the whole nine yards. Doesn’t mean you don’t deserve all that and more.”
He was trying to make her feel better, and his soft-spoken sympathy rubbed her like sandpaper. The last thing she meant to do was sit there whining about her pathetic childhood and equally messed up adult life, even though he already knew the basics, and from what she understood from her brother, John’s early life hadn’t been a bed of roses either.
She stripped off the last piece of curling foil label and crushed it into a tiny ball. “Well, I’ve given up looking for the fairy tale. Apparently, when it comes to men, I’m the queen of bad life choices, because the guys I date always turn out to be losers.”
As soon as the words left her mouth, she winced. Glancing up, she met John’s unflinching stare. “Don’t think I mean you...What I mean is, you and I never dated, so...”
One of his dark brows rose. “Technically, it was a date.”
“Okay, true,” she hedged. “But I’m not sure it counts, since you only did it as a favor to Kyle.”
John grunted. “Some favor. He’d have my balls—and rightly so—if he ever found out I let things get so far out of hand that night.”
He had let things get out of hand? If that’s how he preferred to remember it, fine by her. What Lisa recalled was a far more even-handed slip from platonic stand-in wedding date to off-the-charts one-night stand.
The details of their time together five years ago swarmed her uninvited now. John showing up unexpectedly at her apartment a couple hours away from the base in his Marine dress blues, announcing he was there to pick her up after learning that her date had gotten sick the day before and cancelled. Handsome, heart-stopping John, with his regulation-trimmed dark hair, his face tanned from time on deployment in the desert, his strong, squared jaw clean-shaven, even near the tail end of his two-week liberty back home in the States.
She’d been furious with Kyle for drafting his friend to rescue her from going stag to the wedding, but any humiliation she’d felt had evaporated the instant John smiled at her and told her she looked beautiful in her peach bridesmaid’s dress and upswept hair.
They’d danced together, laughed together... and after one too many champagne cocktails on her part, she’d kissed him on the dance floor. A moment of pure spontaneity, a reckless, unstoppable impulse that had taken hold of her and given her courage she never would have had otherwise. Their kiss had been electrifying, astonishing. And too hot to contain.
They’d left the wedding to avoid the prying eyes of friends and fellow servicemen, John explaining he had somewhere private they could go. This cabin, nestled high on the side of a mountain in North Carolina, had been branded into her memory as permanently as the night they’d shared together inside it.
Followed by the awkward morning after, the silent ride of shame back to her apartment the next day, and the stinging knowledge that John shipped out a few days later without so much as a phone call or word of goodbye.
All of that was indelibly burned into her memory, too.
She and John had gone on with their lives as if the night hadn’t happened, which was apparently how he’d preferred to keep it. A fact that made talking about it now all the more uncomfortable.
Of course, it didn’t help that he was still the same dark, sexy warrior he had been before. Her heart still raced every time she looked at him. Her skin still felt tight and too warm, her senses far too tuned in to everything about him.
As he looked at her from across the table, she could have sworn she saw a flicker of heat in his dark gaze, too. But it was there and gone, leaving his expression that same rigid, unreadable warrior’s mask she’d seen the morning after they’d made love all those years ago.
John cleared his throat and dropped his gaze to the empty bowl in front of him. “I owe Kyle a lot, Lisa. He’s pulled my ass out of danger more than one time, same as I’ve done for him. He was—is—like a brother to me, too.”
The slip to past-tense hadn’t escaped her. It put a fresh chill in her blood, and brought her back to reality as effectively as a physical blow. She swallowed the knot of misery that threatened to climb up her throat. “You don’t think he’s...”
She couldn’t finish the sentence, but John didn’t make her. “I don’t know. That’s the shittiest part of this whole thing.”
“Yes, it is,” she agreed. “And I need to have that answer. I need to find my brother, and I don’t know how to do that alone.”
He lifted his head and stared at her for a long moment. Then he blew out a long sigh, punctuated by a low curse. “What if he doesn’t want to be found? Have you considered that?”
“Then why would he send me that text?” She slowly shook her head, certainty building as surely as her dread. “He’s in danger. I know it. I feel it in my bones, in my heart.”
“Jesus Christ.” John’s bleak gaze verged on pity, but she didn’t let it dissuade her. She sat unfazed as he raked his fingers through his thick, coffee-brown hair. “He didn’t ask you to go looking for him. Hell, we can’t even confirm that
text is from him in the first place.”
“It is.” She had no doubt in her mind at all about that. “It’s from Kyle, and he’s in some kind of bad trouble. He needs help.”
“No, Lisa.” Anger flared in those unnerving brown eyes. “If your brother sent that text to you, then all he wants is for you to obey it. He told you to hide. Not run for help from me. Not set out on some reckless course to try to find him. Just hide.”
Fury sparked to life in Lisa now, too. “So, you’re saying you won’t help me? You won’t help Kyle?”
He leaned across the table on his muscled forearms. “I’m saying you don’t have any idea what you’re asking. You don’t know what’s going on.”
“Then tell me. Obviously, you know more about Kyle than I do—more than you’ve been willing to let on with me so far. So, tell me. You owe me that much, dammit.”
“No, I don’t.” He cursed again, more vividly than before. “You’re up here in my world, intruding on my life. Stirring up shit that you don’t want to hear. For fuck’s sake, you’re asking me for answers I’ve sworn I’d kill to protect—”
“I think my brother is working for the CIA.”
“Jesus fucking Christ.” John pushed back in his chair, then stood up to pace a tight path near the table.
“I’m right, aren’t I?” Lisa weathered a sharper pang of worry. “Of course, I’m right. Or is it something even worse than that?”
John didn’t answer. He paused and stared at her, a tendon ticking visibly beneath the dark whiskers that covered his jaw.
“I’ve had my suspicions for a long time that my brother was doing some kind of covert work. Dangerous work. That feeling only got stronger the last time I saw him. I could tell something was wrong, but he wouldn’t tell me anything. In fact, he tried to deny it, but I didn’t believe him.”
John listened without reacting as she spoke, considering her in measured silence. “You said earlier tonight that the last time you saw Kyle was three years ago?”
“On my birthday,” she said. “October twenty-fourth.”
Her fingers went to the silver bracelet she wore on her left wrist. Kyle had given it to her that day, a gift that had never left her sight for a minute since then. The sterling chain was hinged to a grinning, artisan-sculpted gecko.
For my Little Lisa Lizard, Kyle had said, as she’d opened the gift. It wasn’t an extravagant present, but she didn’t own anything she treasured more. She stroked it now like a touchstone, drawing hope from Kyle’s gift, which made her feel somehow that he was still out there. That she would be able to find her big brother and make sure he was safe.
That is, if she could convince John Duarte to either help make that happen or point her in the right direction.
“What did Kyle do while he was with you that made you think something was wrong? Was it anything he said that made you worry?”
Lisa shook her head. “No, nothing specific. He seemed nervous. Paranoid, actually. He said he couldn’t visit for long, that he just wanted to wish me a happy birthday and then he had to go. We had a quick lunch, then he left.”
John’s brow furrowed deeper. “He didn’t mention where he was living? Didn’t say where he had to go when he left that day?”
“No. And when I asked him both of those questions, he was more evasive than usual. Which is saying a lot where my brother’s concerned.”
John grunted in agreement. He seemed lost in thought for a second, then he began collecting the empty bowls and beer bottles from the table. He didn’t say anything more. Didn’t even make eye contact as he cleared their meal and walked everything to the sink.
“What about you, John?”
He kept his back to her. “What about me?”
“Now you’re the one evading me.” She followed him into the kitchen area and got in his face, leaving him no choice but to talk to her. “What is it that you’re not telling me about my brother?”
He took a slow breath, then pushed it out on a growled curse. When he swung his head in her direction, his eyes locked on her with a look she’d never seen in him before. He had been holding something back from her—something big and unpleasant, by the way he was locking her in a gaze that was both resigned and deadly serious.
“Yes, you’re right. Kyle was working as a covert CIA operative.” He let that admission hang between them for an agonizingly long moment, his mouth pressed flat, eyes assessing her. Was it possible he didn’t trust her? Or was he afraid she couldn’t handle whatever it was he planned to say next?
“Tell me,” she coaxed woodenly, needing to hear the whole truth from him. “What was Kyle doing for the CIA?”
“He was part of a highly classified, counter-intelligence program.”
It was a confirmation of something she’d suspected, but hearing it made her worry deepen now. John’s grim expression only added to her unease.
“The operatives employed by this program all had a very unique, specialized skill. Including your brother.” His gaze bored deeper into her, searching for her reaction. “He never told you what he could do? He never confided in you about his ability?”
Lisa frowned, feeling her head shake in slow denial. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Kyle is a precognitive. He has ESP.” John said it with a perfectly straight face. He said it as if he hadn’t just told her the most ludicrous thing she’d ever heard in her life. “Your brother is one of the most powerful psychics I’ve ever known, Lisa.”
“Is that right?” She choked on a humorless laugh. “One of the most powerful, you say? And just how many other, less impressive psychics have you known?”
“More than a few. Most of them also worked covertly for Phoenix under codenames.”
He wasn’t laughing. Not even cracking a hint of a grin to clue her in that he was messing with her. Or that he was feeding her some epic line of bullshit just so she’d head back down the mountain and out of his life for good.
No. He was utterly, incredulously sober.
“Three years ago, Phoenix went dark. Someone murdered its founder and put the lives of all its agents in the line of fire, too. We had to scatter, go deep underground—those were our orders if anything were to happen to the program. I don’t know who betrayed us, and I don’t know who wants the rest of us dead, or why. Hell, it could’ve been someone from the inside for all I know. When Phoenix went down, we were instructed not to trust anyone, not even one another.”
Her mind was struggling to process all of the astonishing things she was hearing, although not enough that she missed the full breadth of John’s admission. “Are you telling me that you were a part of this program, Phoenix, too?”
“I was.”
“You’re telling me that Kyle is some kind of psychic covert agent—”
“A precognitive,” John calmly clarified. “The same as me.”
She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You see the future.”
“More or less,” he said. “Precognitives get psychic glimpses of future events in their minds. Sometimes we see only pieces of those events, disconnected, erratic images. Sometimes the visions are intact and fully actionable.”
“Actionable, as in—”
“As in, there is considerable power in being aware of an event before it occurs. Through Phoenix, our government shared the gift of that power. They had the ability to prevent certain events from occurring, and the power to know ahead of time and decide whether to allow various events to happen anyway.”
She gaped at him, stunned. Confused. Scared as hell. And not a little pissed off, too. “If this is your idea of a joke—”
“It’s no joke, Lisa.”
She knew it wasn’t, and in light of that, she felt a bubble of hysteria crowding in on the rest of her churning emotions. “I have to try calling Kyle again. I need to try his number again and see if he’ll text me back or pick up this time.”
She pivoted, glancing around the open-concept room of the cabin, s
earching for her phone. She found it—or rather, what was left of it—on the far end of the kitchen counter. It had been taken apart, some of the circuitry smashed to bits.
“Your cell phone was a risk I couldn’t afford,” John stated in an even tone. “It was a risk to you and to Kyle, too, Lisa. If he believes he’s been compromised and is worried about your safety, he never should’ve chanced sending you that text. An assassin would need far less than that to trace him. Or they could use you to get to him instead.”
Assassins. Covert CIA programs. Her brother living a double life, hiding an extraordinary ability she’d known nothing about. An ability that now might get him killed.
And John Duarte, her unwilling escort into this hidden, terrifying world she never dreamed could exist.
It was too much suddenly.
She’d never thought of herself as a weak person, and God knew she wanted to be strong now, when she needed a clear head and a steel spine to deal with whatever her brother was mixed up in. But she couldn’t process anything more right now.
She leaned against the counter, numb from head to toe. Exhausted.
She didn’t realize John was touching her until she lifted her gaze and met his tender eyes. He stood before her, smoothing her damp hair off her forehead and cheeks where it drooped into her face.
“I know this is a lot to take in,” he murmured, the rough pads of his fingertips gentle on her skin. “You okay?”
She managed a wobble of a nod. “I’m scared for him, Johnny. Really scared.”
“I know.” He caressed the side of her face, his thumb tracing over her jaw line, then slowly drifting across her bottom lip. “I’m scared for him, too. But we’re gonna figure this out. We’re gonna get through this together.”
His reassurance pushed her over the edge. Tears stung the backs of her eyes, started to well. She kept them at bay with furious determination, but damn if one fat drop didn’t spill over to run down the length of her cheek.
John swept it away, his gaze fastened on hers. “I’m going to keep you safe, Lisa. No matter what. I gave Kyle my word on that a long time ago. Tonight, I’m making that promise to you.”