A Steel Town (A Gateway to Love #3)

by Chloe Barlow

  Leaning over, he hit play on the CD player he’d brought with him. The strains of You Belong to Me filled the room. After flopping into a leather armchair, he refilled his tumbler with bourbon and waited for night to fall.

  “I wish you were here with me,” he murmured. “I miss you so much.”

  “I’ve missed you, too,” a gentle voice said from behind him.

  Trey shot upright in his chair, reaching for his weapon, which was no longer on the table behind him.

  “I moved that gun of yours. Can’t have you accidentally shooting me,” the voice teased.

  Trey turned and his chest expanded against the cold chill encasing it.

  “Claudia?”

  Her dark hair was down, cascading over her shoulders and glimmering in the low light of the room. She looked thinner and more delicate than usual — as sad and desolate as him — but still hauntingly beautiful.

  “Yeah, it’s me,” she answered, dropping her keys and purse on a small chair beside her. She peeled off her thin, black leather jacket and tossed it on top of them.

  “How’d you get in here?” he demanded.

  “You’re not the only one who can commit a little friendly breaking and entering. Though, I wish you were a bit more cautious about your own personal security.”

  “That hasn’t been high on my list for a while,” he muttered. Finishing his drink in one gulp before placing it down, Trey attempted to regain his resolve.

  “So, what is on your list? To sit here in the dark surrounded by a bunch of boxes? Are you waiting for something?”

  “Maybe.”

  “And what would that be — death, or a moving van?” she challenged, her chin raised in defiance.

  “Right now? Trying to get drunk, if you couldn’t tell.”

  “You seem to have accomplished that feat.”

  Trey looked down at the bottle, his throat tightening with his sadness. He hated being rude to her, but she needed to leave. Having her near him fucked with all his good intentions. “Not quite, no, but working on it. It’s helping me settle into my new life. Maybe I’ll grow a beard…go full Unabomber. I just need a manifesto.”

  “Be serious, Trey,” she pleaded, sliding her hands into her pockets. Her nervousness was showing through for the first time since she’d arrived.

  “Fine. You want serious, how about this, what are you doing here, Claudia?” he questioned gruffly.

  Trey used refilling his glass as another excuse to avoid her eyes. Whenever he looked into them, he forgot all the logical reasons why he pushed her away, instead wanting to cradle her in his arms until the sun came up over the lake.

  “I should never have let you leave me,” she declared with her signature confidence.

  “It wasn’t your decision,” he clarified.

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Because I almost killed you, damn it!”

  “No, you didn’t. Stop punishing yourself.”

  “Call it what you like, but you still shouldn’t be here,” he asserted through gritted teeth.

  “That’s the thing. I know I have to be here. You were wrong.”

  “Do you think I made this decision on a whim? It fucking broke me to do it, but I know it’s what I had to do — for you.”

  She appraised him for a moment, before crossing the room. She wore a soft gray sweater and black jeans. As always, she was simply perfect.

  He wanted to push her away, but she was close enough for him to smell her. The scent blended with his tipsy brain, and the combination dulled his wits just enough to prevent him from exercising common sense.

  “You will always be the best thing for me. I’m not going to give up, so you might as well accept it now.” Claudia stated gently, as her hand ran over his stubbly cheek, before smiling. He knew he should pull away, but her skin felt too good against his. “You look like shit, Trey,” she added, removing her hand.

  He laughed coarsely, shuffling away from her. “Well, I’ve had a rough few weeks.”

  “Me too,” she responded.

  “How’d you find me?” he inquired, struggling against his pull to her. He was still trying to process that she’d come for him, even after all he’d done.

  “Stephen. He told me I was right to come looking for you…and how to get here.”

  “That sounds like him. He always was a secret romantic.”

  “What happened? Why aren’t you with him hunting down the bad guys?”

  “Were you worried about me, little one?” he queried, with a smirk, in spite of himself.

  “Of course, always,” she intoned.

  He ran one hand through his hair and looked out over the water again. After several moments, he turned back to her.

  “We got one of A.J.‘s guys in Prague. When we tracked down a second one in Thailand, he wouldn’t stop saying…” Trey paused, remembering how the bastard invoked Claudia’s name, knowing just enough about her brush with death to fuck with him. After a moment, Trey found words again. “I lost my temper. Things got a little…physical. Apparently, Stephen feels I’m too much of a loose cannon these days,” he finished, with a mirthless laugh. “He felt it was important for compliance with the Geneva Convention that I take a break.”

  “So you came here?” she whispered, approaching him slowly. Her hesitance toward him broke his heart, especially because he knew it was his own actions, which caused it.

  Clearly unsure of herself, Claudia paused to look around the room. Her eyes fell on the dining room table, littered with insulin pumps and glucose monitors, which were next to his laptop, and pages of his handwritten notes.

  “What’s all this?” she probed, approaching the table.

  “It’s nothing.”

  She turned to him, one of the sheets in her hands. “No, it’s not. Tell me.”

  Trey rubbed the back of his neck, finally meeting her eyes to say, “I’ve had some time on my hands since I got here a couple days ago…”

  “Trey…”

  “It’s just a few ideas for software I had.”

  “What would it do?”

  “It would track your glucose remotely. If it dropped too low, or went up too high, it would send an alert to a set of recipients, including 911. That part was pretty easy. I just reverse engineered some of the insulin monitoring devices already out there. But this one would have a GPS tracker, and if the monitor or pump were disconnected without the entry of a password…it would send a different alert — one that you’d been compromised.”

  “And when did you start this?”

  “Right after I met you.”

  Claudia stared at him with her mouth agape, yet she said nothing.

  “I got distracted from it. I was too caught up in our investigation…in us… I didn’t finish it in time. It’s just one more way I failed you,” he whispered.

  “You could never fail me,” she insisted, crossing to him and holding his face in her hands, as the CD proceeded to play the next song.

  He shook her off him. “Don’t you get it? I thought in the same way as A.J. My mind is just as twisted, maybe I’m even worse than that venomous bitch.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Isn’t it? It’s bad enough I anticipated the way someone would try to harm you, but I also didn’t protect you from it. I am poison.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” she exclaimed. “What happened is no more your fault than it is mine for having a condition they exploited. A.J. made her own decisions. She ruined herself. No matter how much you want to torture yourself, you have to understand that. I’ll stand here holding my breath until you see reason, if that’s what I have to do!”

  Trey suppressed a smile at her unrelenting pigheadedness.

  “Do you really believe in me that much? I left you, remember?”

  “And it was a terrible lapse in judgment on your part, that’s for sure,” she pronounced.

  Trey laughed, wondering if maybe he could set aside all this guilt and truly find joy in life.


  He frowned again. “But…”

  Claudia took his hand and moved it to her face.

  “No ‘buts.’ We deserve to be happy,” she whispered.

  Trey moved his hand to caress Claudia’s hair and allowed the soft tresses to calm him.

  “What about your career, Claudia?” he inquired, dropping his hand. “I wasn’t lying when I said being with me isn’t a good idea for you.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I told you, if I have to choose between the FBI and you, I choose you, every time.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Maybe it can be. The Bureau isn’t the only option for me. Stephen offered me a job.”

  “He did what?”

  “Well, he actually offered us a job. You game?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Not really.”

  The idea rattled around in Trey’s brain. It would be fun to be Claudia’s partner, both professionally and intimately. It also guaranteed he could keep an eye on her.

  “Stephen has been trying to recruit me for years now. I swear, that dude always ends up getting his way, somehow.”

  “As long as I get my way in the process, too, then it works for me,” Claudia joked.

  “You know this would technically make me a fed, right? I thought you liked my dark side?”

  “Oh, I’m not worried about that, there’s plenty of darkness left in you. I have a feeling your outlaw spirit will come in handy on our missions.”

  Trey placed his hands on her cheeks, gliding his thumbs back and forth on her soft skin.

  “So you’ve thought of everything?”

  “I have.”

  “You sure like to cause trouble, don’t you?”

  “Yep.”

  “You know this would mean you can’t get rid of me, either, right?” he asked.

  “That’s the plan. You see, I’ve been thinking,” she said. “Maybe it’s called falling in love because sometimes someone catches you, but if they don’t, you simply crash down on the pavement. I’m here to catch you.”

  “And what should I do?”

  “You need to catch me, too,” she answered.

  “I can handle that,” he assured her, moving his hands under her armpits to lift her up to eye level.

  Claudia wrapped her arms around his neck, allowing him to move his arms to her waist and secure her small body tightly against his own.

  Trey kissed her — tentatively at first, drinking in the taste of her sweet lips. Quickly, the need for more of her took over. He pressed his tongue against her lips, and she purred in response.

  As he explored her mouth, he found her to be even more intoxicating than his bottle of bourbon, and so much more satisfying.

  He set her on her feet, so he could peel off her sweater. She stood before him in a simple white bra, which was gaping a little at the top. Trey slid his right hand back and forth over the top of her supple breasts, lingering for a moment to explore her pronounced collarbones with his fingers. Her skin erupted into goose bumps under his touch.

  “You’ve gotten too skinny, little one,” he chastised, as he moved his left hand to run along the length of her arm.

  “You sound like my abuela.”

  “Did I do this to you?” he whispered, guilt seeping back into his conscience, as his left hand stroked her rib cage.

  “I told you I missed you. Now you’re just going to have to make it up to me,” she challenged.

  “Every day of my life,” he promised, before sealing his lips over hers again.

  Claudia slid Trey’s tee shirt over his head, breaking them apart. She ran the tip of her nose slowly across his chest, then between his pecs. The sensation was light, yet he thought he’d explode from the contact.

  Her tongue began to follow the same path, tasting him, when suddenly she took a hard bite at his left pec, and he didn’t know if he should laugh, shout, or moan. Leaning back, she threw him a mischievous smile.

  “So you plan to eat me up, little one, is that it?” he remarked.

  “You’re all mine, finally. And I plan to enjoy every inch of you,” Claudia purred, running her nails over his shoulders and chest, trailing them across each of his tattoos. Finally, she placed one hand over the bare skin covering his heart, and he could feel the pressure of it beating against her palm.

  “You deserve a tattoo right here, now. You have the strongest heart of anyone I’ve ever known.”

  “And it belongs to you. I believe I was saving this spot for you all along.”

  “What will this tattoo be?” she asked, her eyes crinkling with curiosity.

  “Isn’t it obvious, abeja?” he countered, mischief twinkling in his eyes.

  Her mouth dropped open a bit.

  “A tough guy like you is going to get a tattoo of a honeybee?”

  “Absolutely. You’re my little bee, but you have to promise me if I get lost like that bumblebee you found, you’ll save me, too.”

  “Always. I promise,” she insisted.

  Trey grinned and scooped her into his arms so he could hurry them to the bedroom. She circled her arms around his neck and giggled with a lightness he’d rarely heard from her.

  Standing beside the bed, he paused to look into her eyes. She was awake, and safe, and she belonged to him.

  Claudia ran a hand through his hair and swallowed hard, her face suddenly very serious.

  “I love you, Trey,” she whispered.

  “I know,” he retorted, with a smirk on his happy face, and an intense sense of warmth in his heart.

  EPILOGUE

  TWO AND A HALF MONTHS LATER

  “Uh…this is your captain speaking,” the pilot announced, in that slow baritone it seemed they all were required to have before flying a plane. “On behalf of the flight crew, we’d like to be the first to wish you a good morning…and happy Valentine’s Day. We hope you’ve had a pleasant night’s rest on our journey from New York City. We would like to update you on our progress. We will be landing in Nice, France in about thirty-eight minutes…”

  Claudia stretched awkwardly in her first class seat next to Trey.

  “May I, uh, be the second to wish you a good morning?” Trey said into her ear, in a perfect impersonation of the pilot’s voice, making her giggle. “Happy Birthday, little one.”

  “You remembered!”

  “It’s kind of hard to forget when your birthday is on February 14th.”

  “Seeing as I’m not very sentimental, it was never a big a deal to me. I must admit, though, whisking me away to the South of France for my birthday is quite impressive.”

  “I’ve been waiting for just the right time.”

  “I’m amazed we found any time to get away, what with Stephen’s constant assignments for us. I would be happy with just a night on the couch in Pittsburgh.”

  “You don’t like my brownstone in New York?”

  “I love it, but it’s not home to me. I think that will always be where I met you.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t sentimental?”

  “I guess you’ve made me weak,” she teased.

  “If you’re homesick, maybe we better head back right away.”

  “Oh no you don’t. You promised me France, and I am going to enjoy it — even if we have to screen all of Stephen’s calls.”

  “That guy needs something to distract him.”

  “You keep saying he’s such a romantic, then maybe he needs to meet a nice girl.”

  “Like I did?” Trey teased.

  “I’m not that nice, but yes,” she remarked with a sly smile.

  “True, you’re becoming quite a little devil. I love it.” Trey paused, and turned serious for a moment, “I don’t know. Stephen has demons of his own to deal with. My guess is being Captain Asian-America is the only way he quiets them.”

  “Speaking from experience?”

  “Yes. And one I hope never to think about again.”

  They both fell silent. Claudia’s mind coul
dn’t help but wander to thoughts of A.J. The bitch still refused to talk to any of her interrogators, but at least she was rotting in a federal cell — one surrounded by enough trustworthy guards to ensure she had no chance of escaping. There was more than enough evidence to put her away for life — or something more final — but the powers that be were eager to learn what secrets she held in that twisted brain of hers.

  Luckily, Claudia had many other things to worry about instead of A.J., such as tracking down international bad guys alongside Stephen and his incredible team. Though Claudia spent most of her time working with Trey, and she wouldn’t have it any other way.

  A.J. may not have been cooperating with authorities, but Drew certainly was. Desperate to avoid extensive jail time, he was eager to share what he’d learned about A.J., and her crew, during his stint acting as their mole within the Pittsburgh field office. Claudia accepted the assistance begrudgingly. Nothing would ever heal the damage of her former colleague’s betrayal, but she knew she had to see the bigger picture.

  Returning her thoughts to Trey’s concerns over Stephen, Claudia remarked, “Well, Stephen may be a tortured soul underneath it all, but anyone who can get your dad on board with you working with the federal government, would at least appear to have it pretty together.”

  “Dad’s always liked Stephen, and he’s freaking crazy about you. As long as I’m working with you two, he’s happy.”

  Claudia took Trey’s hand and kissed each of his knuckles. “Works for me,” she murmured.

  Trey removed his hand from hers to put his arm around her. “Now, about this vacation…” he began, his brow furrowing with sudden worry.

  “What’s wrong, Trey?”

  “I was wondering… It’s okay if you don’t want to…”

  “Come on, what is it?” Claudia insisted. “You’re freaking me out a little here,” she added, making Trey smile.

  “Would you like to meet my mom, you know…Abigail…while we’re here? She spends this part of the year living near Nice. We’ve been talking on the phone since…it happened, but she wants to see me, and she really wants to meet you.”