The Pregnancy Plot (Brothers In Arms: Retribution Book 2)

by Carol Ericson

  One sentence glared back at her and sent a chill up her spine. She whispered the words. “‘It was a dark and stormy night and a tempest was headed for Break Island.’”

  With her hand trembling, she closed out of the file and slammed the laptop shut and then remembered that he’d left it open. She opened it again with a sinking feeling. She hadn’t made any changes to the file, but would the computer record that someone had opened it?

  Too late now.

  She raised her eyes to Jase working in her yard. Who was he? That couldn’t be his entire book, could it? She felt like the wife in that scary movie with Jack Nicholson when she’d read pages and pages of the same phrase over and over again in her husband’s tome.

  A shattering noise from the front yard made her jump back from the window. Jase had split a cord of wood with an ax. Jack Nicholson’s character in the movie had an ax, too.

  Crossing her arms, she backed away from the computer and the window. She retreated to the kitchen, her eyes flicking toward the laptop. Maybe that file didn’t represent his book. Maybe his book was in a folder somewhere else.

  She hadn’t even checked when he’d last saved the file. Maybe he was just playing with a new idea based on all the stuff going on since his arrival on the island. The sentence itself was a joke, not a serious attempt at writing.

  She paced while hugging herself, the flannel pajamas no longer warm enough. She’d snooped and paid the price. If she confronted him about it, she’d have to admit she’d accessed his laptop on the sly. If she didn’t confront him, she’d have to continue to suspect his motives—and his sanity—just as with Simon.

  She heard him stomping his boots on the porch and took the best course of action. She retreated to the rooms in the back and cranked on the shower. After locking the door.

  The warm water calmed her nerves. She hadn’t stumbled on his book. Jase Buckley didn’t pose any threat to her. He’d saved her on the water and had been there for her when Lou had attacked her and then wound up dead on the deck. He’d come to her defense when he thought Chris Kitchens meant to do her harm and then had insisted on accompanying her when Chris texted her his warnings.

  Jase was one of the good guys.

  She finished her shower and dressed in the bathroom. When she entered the sitting room, Jase turned from staring out the window, his hand resting on his open laptop.

  Keeping her eyes pinned to his face, she asked, “Did you get a lot of work done this morning? The fence is looking pretty good.”

  “What?”

  “The fence.” He knew. He knew she’d been snooping.

  “Oh, yeah. Coming along, and I picked up the boat.” He swung his head back toward the window. “Did you have breakfast? I was kind of hoping for more blueberry pancakes.”

  “I was...busy.”

  He turned to face her, his gaze raking her from head to toe. “Taking a shower? You must’ve slept in. That’s good. Did you sleep well?”

  “Yes, because...” She closed her eyes and dragged her fingers through her damp hair. “I went onto your laptop.”

  His eyebrows jumped. “I have a password.”

  “I saw you enter your password last night before I went to bed.”

  “Why did you use my computer?”

  His soft voice made her swallow. “M-mine is corrupted and I wanted to search for tempest.”

  “Did you find it?”

  “I found— No, I didn’t find out anything about that word.” She twisted her fingers in front of her. “I found your book. Is that your book?”

  “That’s it.”

  His flat admission sent adrenaline surging through her body and she flung her arms out to her sides and took a step back. “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m not Jase Buckley, Nina, and I’m not a writer. I’m Jase Bennett and I’m an agent for an undercover ops organization—just like Simon was.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Her arms fell to her sides. She took another step back. Why did she attract the lunatics? She’d had this man in her bed, in her heart.

  She folded her arms over her baby bump. No wonder he’d reminded her of Simon. Two sides of the same crazy coin. Jase had done a much better job of disguising his madness, though.

  “Jase, I think you’d better leave now.”

  His dark eyes widened and he threw back his head and laughed.

  She jumped.

  “I thought you’d be angry with me, maybe throw something at me—but you just think I’m crazy.”

  “I don’t think that.” She shook her head back and forth, her hair whipping from side to side. “Not at all. But I think it’s time you left and did your covert ops stuff somewhere else.”

  He reached behind his back. She ducked.

  The look on his face gave her pause—gave her hope. He held his hands in front of him, clutching a thumb drive. “Don’t be afraid, Nina. I know it sounds crazy to you, but it’s the truth. I would’ve told you sooner, but I wasn’t supposed to reveal my identity to you or tell you what was going on until...until a later date. But with everything going on—Lou, Chris, Tempest—we need to tell you.”

  “Don’t be afraid? You ask me not to be afraid and then bring up Lou and Chris?” She jabbed her finger at him. “What’s that?”

  “Proof.” He pulled out the chair in front of the laptop. “It’s proof that everything I’m saying is true. Have a seat. I don’t bite.”

  He’d used the same phrase she’d used on him last night when inviting him to join her in bed. Was it deliberate? She studied his face, and his mouth turned up at one corner.

  A little bit of tension seeped from between her shoulder blades and she walked to the chair. She sat on the corner of it, gripping the edge of the table.

  Jase leaned over her to insert the thumb drive into the side of the laptop, and her shoulders stiffened.

  “Sorry about this.” He moved the cursor to the Book file and deleted it. “It was my attempt to add some humor to our situation.”

  “Our situation.”

  “You’re not in this alone, Nina. I’ve always been on your side.”

  A man this sincere couldn’t be a whack job, could he? But the alternative he was proposing wasn’t much better.

  He opened the thumb drive, which was populated with multiple folders. “I’m really not supposed to be sharing this with you, but you deserve to know what’s going on and I’ve kept you in the dark long enough.”

  He double-clicked on a folder, and she held her breath. If this folder contained more of his bizarre attempts at writing a book, she was ready to sprint.

  Instead, a photo of her on the phone and getting into her car on the street in front of her LA condo filled the computer screen. She jerked her head to the side. “How did you get this?”

  He clicked the mouse and another picture of her appeared and another and another, all going about her daily business.

  She gasped, half out of her chair. “You were following me in LA?”

  “Not me personally. I don’t do surveillance like this.”

  The photos were professional, taken with a high-powered telephoto lens. There’s no way she wouldn’t have noticed someone that close taking a picture of her. But maybe she sensed the scrutiny.

  “What do you do?

  “I’m on the personal security end. My job right now is to protect targets.”

  “I’m a target? Why?”

  He closed out her personal photo album and opened another folder. Some sort of document or report flashed on the screen with Simon’s picture prominently displayed in the middle.

  She covered her mouth with one hand. “You knew all about Simon.”

  He tapped the monitor. “Probably more than you did. Simon Skinner was a covert ops agent, like me,
but for a different agency.”

  Her eyes scanned details of Simon’s life, including a map pinpointing his locations over the past few years.

  She squinted at the red dots. She knew he’d traveled a lot for his so-called government security job, but she had no idea he’d traveled to Yemen, Beijing, Libya.

  She slumped back in her chair. Jase couldn’t be just a garden-variety nut job with all this info and high tech at his fingertips, but that meant he was telling the truth. She didn’t know which frightened her more.

  “When you say covert ops agency, do you mean the CIA?”

  “Both of our agencies are offshoots of the CIA. The average citizen has never heard the names and is unaware of our activities.”

  “Who is aware of your activities?”

  “It’s on a need-to-know basis—sometimes the military, sometimes the CIA, sometimes the president.”

  “Only sometimes for the president?”

  “Do you believe me now? The book was just a cover to take me to Break Island.”

  “Why are you here? Just because I’m Simon Skinner’s ex-fiancée? Was I right all along? Is he the one stalking me? And because he’s one of these secret agents, you guys had to get involved?”

  “It’s more complicated than that, Nina. It’s Tempest.”

  She slammed her palms down on each side of the laptop. “What’s Tempest? What is it? You know, don’t you? That’s why you got so freaked out when I showed you that slip of paper from Lou’s pocket.”

  His broad chest expanded as he filled his lungs with air. When he’d released the last bit of breath, he double-clicked another folder. An image of dark, swirling clouds took over the screen and an unaccountable feeling of dread thrummed through her system.

  “Simon worked for Tempest. It’s one of the covert ops agencies I was talking about.”

  “Then it is Simon following me. He has something to do with the deaths of Lou and Chris. That’s why they knew about Tempest.”

  “It’s not Simon, Nina.”

  “How do you know that? How can you be so sure?”

  “Nina.” He crouched beside her chair and took both of her hands in his, still rough with dirt from his work outside. “Simon’s dead.”

  “No.” Her belly flip-flopped. “He can’t be dead.”

  “He is. I’m sorry, Nina. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you before. It’s been hell listening to you voice your suspicions about him, knowing all the time how false they were.”

  She snatched her hands away from his. “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not lying, Nina.”

  A laugh bubbled up from her throat and she jumped up from the chair, knocking it over. “Because you’ve been so honest about everything else?”

  “I had no choice in the matter. We’re talking national security issues.”

  She drove a thumb into her chest. “I have something to do with national security?”

  “You do now.”

  She paced away from him, her hands settling on her stomach. “How did he die? When did he die?”

  He ran his hands across his face and for the first time she noticed the deep lines on both sides of his tight mouth. “I’m telling you this because he was your fiancé, because you’re carrying his baby and because your life may be in danger because of that.”

  Her heart fluttered in her chest and for a brief moment she wanted to run away and pull the covers over her head, but this was Will’s father, a story she might well have to tell her son someday.

  “What happened to him? Is it related to his PTSD?”

  “It’s related to his behavior but Simon didn’t have PTSD.”

  “What did he have? Why did he go off the deep end like that?”

  “He’d been drugged, programmed, and in trying to break free from the mind control, he lost his mind.”

  Her body swayed as if she was on the deck of a sailboat, and Jase was immediately at her side. “Sit down. Do you need some water?”

  He led her to the love seat where they’d been so close last night in front of the fire. And all along he’d known these terrible truths about Simon, her baby’s father.

  She sank into the cushion, and Jase returned with two glasses of water. She downed half of hers with one gulp.

  “Are you telling me that Tempest did that to him?”

  “Not just to Simon. We have reason to believe that Tempest had all of its agents on the same program. They’re still on it. Simon was one of the strong ones. They could never completely control him, and when he and another agent figured out what Tempest was doing to them, they went rogue.”

  “Another agent?”

  “He’s the one who came in from the field and told us this story. We had plenty of reasons to doubt him, but everything he’s claimed has checked out.”

  “Max Duvall.”

  His hand jerked and he spilled his water all over the front of his flannel shirt. “How do you know that name?”

  “I met him once. He came to our condo when our relationship was on the precipice. Simon introduced him as a coworker and then they went outside to talk.”

  “That’s the agent.”

  She nodded. “You still haven’t told me what happened to Simon.”

  He looked away and cleared his throat.

  “It’s bad, isn’t it?”

  “He died, Nina. He died as a result of what those bastards did to him. He died trying to break free from the yoke of servitude that Tempest imposed on him.”

  “Why is Tempest doing this to its agents?”

  “According to Duvall, Tempest is creating a cadre of superagents—strong, invincible, impervious to pain, devoid of conscience.”

  “That’s crazy.” She dipped her fingers in her water glass and rubbed her temples with the cool moisture. “It’s like science fiction.”

  “That’s why it took a while to verify Duvall’s story.”

  “But why me? Why did you land on my doorstep?”

  Jase wiped his hands on the seat of his pants. “I told you. I’m the protector. I came here to watch over you.”

  “Why would Tempest care about me? Simon told me nothing about his work. I obviously didn’t even know the name of his agency.”

  “We’re not sure. My boss had an intuition about you and sent me out here.”

  “To pose as a writer-handyman.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And it seems that your boss’s intuition was correct. Tempest is here. Tempest is watching me. Tempest was watching me in LA. You both were. No wonder I felt stalked.”

  “I don’t know how they contacted Lou and I don’t know how Chris found out about them, but it’s clear they had a hand in their deaths.” He scratched the stubble on his chin. “And your boat accident.”

  “What?” She choked on her last sip of water. “The boat?”

  “The first day I met you. We both assumed Lou was responsible for damaging your boat, but she never admitted it. Why not? She’d admitted everything else.”

  “You think Tempest put a hole in my boat?”

  “Yeah.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “To scare you, put you on edge. They don’t know you or this area. Maybe they thought that would be enough to drown you, but if they wanted to kill you, I think they would’ve done so by now.”

  She pushed up from the love seat. “That’s a lovely thought. What now?”

  “I need to get you out of here, off this island. My agency can offer you refuge.”

  “I think it’s a little too late for that.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  As if to punctuate her point, a flash of lightning lit up the room and a rumble of thunder shook the floor.

  “Nobody’s getti
ng off this island.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Jase flung open the front door and stepped onto the porch. The dark clouds that had been threatening from a distance all morning had moved in swiftly to envelop the island. A gust of wind slammed against the house, ripping off the shutter that had been hanging by a thread.

  Backing up, he stepped over the threshold and clicked the door shut on the encroaching storm. “That came in fast.”

  “Not really,” Nina called from the kitchen, where she’d put on the kettle for hot water. “The weather guy on TV has been forecasting it all week. All the signs were there.”

  He strode to the kitchen. “Why don’t you sit down? You’ve had a huge shock this morning. If you give me directions, I can try to replicate those pancakes from yesterday.”

  She kept her back to him and hunched her shoulders as she braced her hands against the stove. “You can stop now, Jason Bennett.”

  Uh-oh. He had a feeling he’d been experiencing the calm before the storm when he told her about Simon and Tempest...and his own deception.

  He wedged his shoulder against the wall. “Stop what? And everyone calls me Jase anyway.”

  She snorted. “At least that wasn’t a lie.”

  “I thought you understood why I had to lie.” Folding his arms, he dug his fingers into his biceps.

  “Of course.” She flicked her fingers in the air. “National security.”

  “We didn’t have all the facts, Nina.”

  The whistle on the kettle blew, piercing the thick air between them. She grabbed the handle and dumped the boiling water over her tea bag in the cup and then jumped back as drops of water must’ve splashed up and scalded her wrist.

  He shrugged off the wall and then stopped as she turned with her cup in hand, her blue eyes blazing. “You can stay here because it’s going to start pouring rain in the next thirty minutes, but you don’t have to pretend to care about me and the baby anymore.”

  “Pretend? There was no pretense on my part.”

  Biting her lip, she moved away from the stove and squeezed past him, holding her steaming cup aloft. She stopped at her office door and turned. “Was there ever really a pregnant girlfriend? A baby lost?”