by Nika Rhone
“She any good at it?”
“Very.” And that wasn’t just loyalty talking. Thea had not only done over most of the rooms in the main house over the past few years, she’d also put her hand to his own bungalow as well. Doyle didn’t know much about decorating or design, but he did know that she’d managed to turn a temporary living space into a real, comfortable home.
“Sounds to me like she plans to earn her own paycheck rather than live on Daddy’s money for the rest of her life.”
Doyle frowned, thinking that over. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“And what about you?”
“What about me what?”
“When are you going to get off your ass and get your business up and running?”
Doyle winced when he considered the loan papers still gathering dust in his desk drawer. “I’m still nailing down a few details.”
“You’ve been ‘nailing down a few details’ for the past year.”
“I’ll get to it. Right now, I’ve got more important things going on.” Like keeping Thea safe.
Austin was immediately contrite, even if he wasn’t willing to give up his point. “Sorry, man, I know there’s a lot of shit going on right now that you need to worry about. But you had everything for your security firm figured out and ready to rock and roll a year ago. This other stuff is only a few months old. So, you have to ask yourself, what kept you from following through back then?”
The very question he’d asked himself any number of times when he’d gotten a call from the business officer at the bank who preapproved him all those months ago based on his business plan, asking if he was going to be filing his loan package soon, or when the real estate agent he’d asked to keep an eye out for decent commercial properties in the price range he could handle called with a new listing.
He gave his brother the only answer he’d had to give either of them, as well as himself. “The time just wasn’t right.”
Austin snorted. “You’re either blind or so deep in denial you’re going to start shitting pyramids. What wasn’t right was the fact that Thea was still away at college, and if you left to start your own company while she was, you wouldn’t get to see her when she finally came back home for good.”
An argument rose on Doyle’s lips, but he paused, considering his brother’s words. Had he subconsciously been subverting his business plans in order to have access to Thea? No. Impossible. He hadn’t thought about her in terms of anything other than his employer’s young daughter until just recently.
Or had he? Memories of a dark night and a very naked Thea flashed through his head. He hadn’t been able to see anything under the midnight water, but he’d imagined it and it had been enough to torment him for weeks afterward. They’d both acted as though the skinny-dipping incident never happened the next time they’d seen each other. But had his own subconscious hung onto that image, that instant of desire, and filed it away under unfinished business?
He just didn’t know.
Austin wasn’t done hammering away at his point just yet. “Have you considered that if you were running your own security firm, you wouldn’t have to worry about whose money you were living on because you’d both be earning paychecks that didn’t have the name Fordham anywhere on it?”
No, he hadn’t. The idea held some appeal. A lot, in fact. Granted, he wouldn’t be drawing much money from a brand new business at first, but security paid extremely well and he’d nurtured a great many contacts over the past few years that would let him assemble a client list that consisted of some very heavy hitters. He wouldn’t be rich, but he wouldn’t exactly be making minimum wage, either.
And then he remembered Thea’s bombshell.
“She got a job offer.” His voice was flat and monotone, betraying none of the turmoil the words caused. “In California.”
“Did she take it?”
“Not yet. But she’s thinking about it.” And somehow, that felt like a betrayal, even though he couldn’t explain why.
“So?”
“So?” He really hated when his brother got that ‘take the slow child by the hand so he doesn’t get lost’ tone.
“So make her think about why she should say no.”
“It’s a good job.” Doyle forced himself to admit that much. “Maybe she should say yes.”
“Then maybe you need to think about whether you’re willing to drag your ass to California with her to start up your business out there. You know that would really chafe Mom’s butt.” He added that in the cheerful way only siblings could when someone else was the focus of their mother’s ire. “She already hates that you moved more than halfway across the country.”
“Thanks for the reminder,” Doyle replied, but his brain was spinning around the idea his brother had lobbed out there like a hand grenade. He could open his business pretty much anywhere. California had more than its fair share of rich and famous that required security. But that would mean committing to something he wasn’t sure he could—or even wanted to—commit to. Everything was still too crazy and surreal when it came to Thea.
“Look,” Austin said into the silence, “stop getting ahead of yourself. Just start at the beginning and let the end take care of itself. Ask the girl out. She wants you to. You want to. So just do it. See where it leads. Maybe you get together. Maybe you don’t. What’s the worst that could happen?” The unmistakable wail of a child echoed over the line, causing Austin to heave a martyred sigh that didn’t fool Doyle for one second. His brother loved his kid to pieces.
“Looks like my peace and quiet is over for the afternoon.” The wailing got louder, indicating Austin was walking toward his daughter’s room. “I swear, one day this kid is going to break the sound barrier.” He sounded more proud than aggrieved at that pronouncement.
“I’ll let you go.” Austin would need both hands for diaper duty. His niece was thirty pounds of unrepentant trouble, who’d managed on more than one occasion to elude both her parents while in the middle of a diaper change, but most often her father who tended to underestimate the mischievous spawn of his loins.
The last time she’d made it all the way to the living room before being corralled, but not before mooning old lady Tevstock and her visiting sister the Sister across the street through the full-view glass door his sister-in-law had been so proud to have installed just the week before. Sister Mary Alice had told his brother that she’d pray for them.
The way the little demon seed was going, Doyle was pretty sure they’d need it. “Give Chelsea and Becca kisses for me.”
After pocketing his cell, Doyle wandered through his small but comfortable bungalow. He tried to picture Thea living there, sharing his space, sharing his bed… God! He dragged a hand down his face. He had to stop thinking about the sex part of this equation.
The worst part was he could see it, all of it. And he liked it. A lot.
Was he so wrong to worry about the disparity in their social standings? Austin had made a good point, one Doyle had avoided admitting to on his own. Thea wasn’t a snob. So why did he expect her to balk at his desire not to live on any more of her father’s money than what came in his paycheck?
Pride.
Small word. Nasty aftertaste. And, if he was being honest with himself, the root of his current dilemma. He’d worked hard all his life, first in the Corps and then at his security job. He’d known when he’d come to work for the Fordhams that it was temporary. After a year, he’d known he’d found something he enjoyed enough to make into a career.
Always driven and just a little anal about control, he’d started making plans to one day open up his own business. He could have moved ahead with things any time in the past year, but as Austin had pointed out, for some reason—and he wasn’t willing to admit that reason had anything to do with Thea—he’d never found quite the right time to actually get the ball rolling. Once he did, though, money would be tight. All new businesses operated in the red for at least the first year. He’d have to find a place to live,
too. Even if Thea found a job with a decent salary, he couldn’t expect her to carry the brunt of the household expenses. He’d have to…
Whoa! He took a huge mental leap backward. Austin was right again. He was getting way ahead of himself here. He hadn’t even kissed Thea. Why was he worrying about marriage?
Because deep in his mind lurked the specter of his brother Donny’s miserable face whenever he talked about all he’d given up to marry his high school girlfriend when she’d suddenly turned up pregnant the week before graduation.
Pride had been his brother’s downfall as well. He hadn’t told anybody his reasons for the sudden marriage when he should have been planning to head off to LSU. Hadn’t asked for help when the bills became an overwhelming burden and he was forced to drop out of community college and take a second job. Hadn’t leaned on any of his brothers—or his sisters, for that matter—when his marriage had started to implode, taking his already shaky relationship with his daughter, Meagan, into the shitter as well thanks to his ex’s venomous influence. His pride had made him stand alone for all those years. And he was still standing alone.
Pride was a damned fool thing, Doyle realized with painful clarity. And he’d be a damned fool as well if he let his get in the way of finding out if there was something to this attraction between Thea and himself.
He was heading for the door to corner the object of his sudden revelation and apologize for being such an idiot when his cell phone rang.
“Doyle,” he answered impatiently and then listened to Red Fields speak the only words that could have deterred him from his chosen course.
“We got another letter.”
Chapter Fourteen
“That dress is perfect for you.”
“Mm-hmm.” Thea stared absently into the fitting room mirror, not seeing anything of the elegant sapphire blue sheath she was wearing. All she could concentrate on was the shattered shell of her hopes and dreams. It was all she had thought about, all she could think about for the past three days.
“Céline was right when she said the color would make your eyes look like ‘fathomless pools a man could drown in.’” Lillian drawled in a fair imitation of the boutique owner’s over-affected Parisian accent.
“Mm-hmm.” Thea had taken a chance on Doyle and she’d lost. Big time. Really big time. So big that there felt like a huge crater had been dug into her chest and hollowed everything out that used to belong there. A dinosaur-extinction sized crater. Which was actually pretty fitting, since life as she knew it had ceased to exist.
“But the outfit won’t really come together until we glue the big horn onto the middle of your forehead and hang you from the ceiling of the reception hall like a piñata.”
“Mm-hmm.” She needed to stop putting off sending her reply to accept the job offer from Madison Helmsworth at Matrix. Moving to California would be hard, but it might be the first step to starting the healing process. Maybe when she got home she should…
Lillian’s words penetrated the fog that had surrounded her brain for the past seventy-two or so hours.
“What?” Thea looked into the mirror at her friend, who was standing a few feet behind her with a half-pitying, half-exasperated look on her face. It was the pity that hurt the most.
“Sweetie, I’m sorry things didn’t work out the way—”
Thea threw a hand up to forestall the rest. “I knew it was a risk. I’m a big girl. I can handle it.” The look Lillian gave her in the mirror said they both knew she lied. Thea tried again. “It hurts to know I gave it my best and still didn’t walk away with the prize, but I’ll live.” Alone. Without Doyle. Without the beautiful little babies with black hair and long-lashed hazel eyes she’d started to dream about holding. Another spasm of grief tightened her chest.
An arm slipped around her shoulders, and Thea leaned her head against her friend’s with a sigh, accepting the hug but fighting the tears. She wasn’t a pretty crier. If she let loose now, she’d be facing Céline and her assistants with red, puffy eyes and blotchy skin. Not her best look.
Thea had spent half the previous day with a cold washcloth on her face trying to undo the damage of the crying jag she’d indulged in after getting off the phone with her mother. As much as she’d wanted to unburden herself to the one person in the world she knew would be on her side and give her unquestioning support no matter what, Thea had bitten back the words that had trembled at the tip of her tongue, begging for escape.
Instead, she’d listened with honest awe to her mother’s descriptions of the Great Wall and the Forbidden City, the highlights of the third leg of their four-destination world tour. Their final stop was a restful week in Fiji, with them making it back home with just two days to spare before Amelia’s engagement party.
Her mother had sounded so happy, so re-energized, so healthy. After everything she’d been through, both medical and emotional, there was just no way Thea could spoil that sense of contentment for her. The problem with Doyle was hers, and she’d find a way to deal with it.
Eventually.
Just as she had then, Thea pushed her hurt away to its own private corner to be picked at later. She bumped her head against Lillian’s again in a thank-you-but-I’m-okay-now gesture and blinked the silly moisture—they were not tears—from her eyes. Straightening, she looked into the mirror.
“So, think we’ll blow the socks off those stuffy politicians or what?” She grinned and then did a double-take at the image bouncing into the mirror from the ones behind them. Lillian’s classically cut Versace might be as demure as her own in front, but there was a whole lot less of the back than Thea remembered.
In fact, there was no back, at least none to speak of. The opening in the deep fuchsia silk that had once been screened by lace now dipped in a wide, open V that ventured far enough down so as to hint at the upper curves of Lillian’s butt cheeks.
Thea couldn’t help it. She gaped.
Noticing her reaction, Lillian grinned. “Like it? I had Céline do a few last-minute alterations.”
Thea choked on a laugh. “Holy hell, Lil, Mrs. Westlake is going to shit flying monkeys!”
The grin turned evil. “Good. Serves the old witch right for badgering Mellie into picking bridesmaids dresses that make me look like Stumpy the No-Legged Pumpkin.”
Wincing in sympathy, because the poofy cut of the melon-colored dresses really had been the worst choice possible for Lillian’s petite stature, not to mention that the color turned Thea’s own healthy bronzed complexion a rather sickly sallow color (she was pretty sure both had been contributing factors in the final choice), Thea said, “Somehow I don’t think that anybody who sees you in this will even care what you look like in the other one.”
Not that it really mattered to Lillian; she was merely using the outrageous dress as a way to focus the dragon’s spite onto herself rather than let it rain all over poor Mellie, as usual. They wanted to give her a chance to enjoy her engagement party, despite her mother’s best efforts, conscious or not, to ensure otherwise.
With that in mind, Thea mirrored Lillian’s evil grin and did a slow turn for her friend’s benefit. The soft sapphire silk gown flowed over her body like a caressing hand. Except where it parted company from her body altogether along the deep side slits that rode her long legs almost all the way to their tops. The alteration was unnoticeable while she stood still. But when she moved, there was a whole lot of leg action going on. Thea was rewarded for her like-minded thinking by a whoop of surprised delight.
Throwing a conspiratorial arm around Thea’s waist, Lillian gave a decisive nod at their reflection. “Definitely flying monkeys.” And for the first time that day, Thea felt the pain threatening to strangle her loosen just a little bit.
****
“He’s not our man.”
Frozen in the act of pouring his fourth—or maybe tenth—cup of coffee, Doyle took a long second to digest the words he had not wanted to hear. He turned his chair back to face his desk. Red Fields stood in his
open doorway, file in hand, and looking none too pleased with his own pronouncement.
“Hastings fits the profile,” Doyle said, even though Red was as familiar with that fact as he was. “His lack of personal relationships, his solitary work, a higher than average intelligence, his extensive travel…”
“The travel is the part that gets him off.” Red stepped forward and dropped the folder on Doyle’s desk. “Rick verified Hastings’s work itinerary against credit card records and hotel, airline, and rental car reservations. Not one of the cities Hastings was in matches up to where the letters were postmarked from, not on the dates they were mailed or within a month prior.”
“He could have made a side trip to mail them, a layover or a car ride or something.”
Red was already shaking his head. “Rick tracked all the layovers, and none matched. As for taking a drive to a postmark city, the cities Hastings was in on and around those dates were far enough away that it’s practically impossible for him to have made it there and back in less than a day, and the records reflected no unexplained absences from his scheduled meetings.”
“Son of a bitch!” Doyle slammed down his mug, sending hot coffee sloshing over the brim, scalding his hand. With hiss of pain, he shoved the injured web between thumb and forefinger into his mouth to soothe the burn. Red vanished and reappeared with a stack of paper towels, which Doyle took with an ungracious nod of thanks.
He spent the next few moments cleaning up the mess, all the while spinning this new information around in his mind. It had to be Hastings. It had to be! He had shown up in Boulder right around the time the gifts had started to accompany the letters. He had “bumped into” Thea at not one but two different locations and been invited along to a third because of it. Thea had made plans to go to dinner with the man—an actual date, dammit!—before Doyle intervened. He was working his way closer to her, ingratiating himself, plotting for the ultimate moment when he’d have the chance he wanted to get her alone and—
He pushed the rest of that thought far away. The last thing he wanted whirling around in his head was a picture of what that sick bastard described in his last letter as “their coming ultimate union.” In detail. Details so graphic and depraved that even a hardened ex-SEAL like Red paled when he read it.