He still wanted to reach over and touch her, see if Nikki might melt like she once had. If he went there, no. It wasn’t happening.
Gabriel pulled into a beachfront hotel parking lot and shifted into park.
“Was that necessary?” Nikki sounded out of breath, as if she’d run the distance instead of ridden in a car.
“We have a reputation to keep.”
She let go of the door and seat, shaking her hands out. He turned to face her, grateful for the shadows that hid some of her.
“Tell me about where you are with your assignment.” She folded her hands in her lap.
She really was a great handler. It had baffled him at the time when he’d first heard her voice and realized they’d assigned a newer, female agent to him. The work he’d been doing was rough, ugly, and complicated. Back then, he couldn’t hold her hand while she processed the horrors of what they were dealing with. Except Nikki hadn’t needed any coddling. She’d turned the tables on him, becoming the gentleness in the storm, his safe haven where he could turn for a little respite. She’d shielded him, talked him through tough decisions and supported him when he had to refuse orders.
He was staring at her, lost in his own thoughts, and she was once more calmly waiting him out.
“What do you want to know?” he asked.
“What do I need to know?”
“This shit is complicated.” He blew out a breath. Cliffs-Notes. She needed the highest level overview. “We started with a simple objective, collect enough evidence to put a kingpin in prison for life. You should know that it’s personal for Aiden and Julian, but Aiden seems to have moved on. Instead of knocking it out fast, we’ve spent three, almost four years spinning our wheels.”
“Not really. You think someone has been actively stalling your investigation.”
“Yeah, we do. Otherwise, why were we never told about a hundred other connected cases? We got the boss, Michael Evers, thrown in jail, but someone was still running things for him. He got out on bail a couple months ago and has pretty much disappeared.”
“He isn’t checking in with his parole officer?”
“The officer says he has, but our surveillance says no. Matt’s working on that for us.”
“How does the assassination team factor into this?”
“Outside job, but they started working with Evers’s people then against them. It was a clusterfuck.”
“Sounded like it. I’m sorry about Kathy.”
“It’s the risk we take.”
“It is.”
“What else do I need to know?”
“Our crew has a pretty bad rep right now. We took out a rival street-racing gang purely by accident because of their involvement with Evers, and with his organization limping along, people think we’re the new bad dogs in town.”
“I see.”
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s just a point Roni was trying to make. I understand now.” She shifted in her seat and tugged at the hem of her shorts, but there wasn’t much to go around.
Now he wanted to know what Roni had said.
“What else?” Nikki prompted when he didn’t speak again.
“We need to talk about Boston.”
“Oh.” Her eyes widened a bit. Touched a nerve, did he?
“The only people here who know about us are Julian, Aiden, and Emery.” He watched her, looking for some sign that she felt something. Had any emotional attachment to him whatsoever.
“The rest will figure it out. Roni already has, so her twin probably has as well.”
“Shit.” He scrubbed a hand over his face.
“What is there to say?” Nikki’s voice was quieter, maybe sad even?
“A hell of a lot. Damn it, Nikki, we haven’t spoken since then.”
“I know. A lot went wrong. What do you want me to say? I’m sorry? I’m sorry people died. I’m sorry you took the fall for what other people did. I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to clear things up before you left.” She was so calm, so poised, he just wanted to muss her hair, hear a little passion in her voice. If he hadn’t known her so well at one point, he might believe this was her. Instead, he knew she was holding back with him.
Could he blame her?
He’d have liked to believe that she’d dumped his personal things from her place in a box and had them sent over with a breakup note. In reality, he’d pushed her away, so it shouldn’t have come as a shock when she walked out the door he’d opened.
“What do you want me to say?” Nikki asked.
Did he detect some feeling in her voice? Had he gotten through her walls?
“We both did a lot of wrong for the right reasons, cariña.”
“It was a bad situation.” She nodded. But she wasn’t getting it. Not at all.
“I’m not talking about that part of Boston.” He stared at her, searched her face for some sign of the woman he’d loved. “I’m talking about us. I cleared my conscience a long time ago. We can’t save everyone, no matter how much we want to.” He gripped the gearshift to keep from reaching for her.
“Boston. Okay.” She stared at the dashboard for a moment. “You left, Gabriel. You were very clear when you said you didn’t want me around and you were out. What else is there to say about that?”
When she boiled it down to those points, okay, he could see how she might think it was done with.
“When I said that, I was covered in blood and high.”
“I didn’t know about the addiction until later. You never said you needed help.”
“It wasn’t an addiction. I had to prove I wasn’t a Fed, Nikki. That’s the only reason I smoked the crack in the first place.”
“I’m sorry, Gabe, but how is it my fault? You never told me when you needed a break. You never said you needed help. It was always I’m fine or Everything’s great.” She leaned toward him, her finger jabbing at her sternum. “Yes, it was my job to take care of you, and I wanted to, but I couldn’t do my job when you refused to talk to me. And when you left, you finally said something, so I listened. Did I react the best way? Probably not. But people I knew died, too, and I lost you, so excuse me if I didn’t behave professionally.”
She was on fire now. Her cheeks flushed and there was a light in her eye that told him he’d finally touched a nerve. He wanted to be angry with her, but he also wanted to kiss her, to taste that passion she tried to bury behind a fake veneer.
This was the woman he’d fallen for.
Nikki pushed her door open and stood. In the dim parking lights he could make out the curve of her bottom just before she slammed the door shut.
“Nikki, Nikki, wait.” Gabriel scrambled to follow her. He locked the GTO behind him and jogged down the wooden walk leading toward the beach.
She wasn’t wearing shoes. Why hadn’t he noticed that?
Oh, right, because of those shorts.
She kept going, even as he caught up with her when the concrete transitioned to a wooden boardwalk that led to the sand and the beach below.
“Will you at least wait for me to take my shoes off?” he asked.
Nikki stopped so suddenly he took another step before pivoting to face her.
“Can we work together?” she asked.
“Yes.” And he wanted to. Some masochistic urge goaded him on.
“Then can we agree that you should have told me how bad things were, and I should have seen the signs you were holding out on me?”
“I’m not—”
“Yes or no?”
“Fine. Yes.”
“Good. Neither of us can take blame for the other agents. They knowingly stomped into our investigation with their heads up their asses. Even that cop. She knew better than to stick around once we warned her off.”
“You’re right.” He hated it, but it was the truth.
“As for our breakup.” She spread her hands. “It was going to happen. You weren’t happy. I wasn’t happy. We were tearing each other apart, and one way or another,
we were over.”
A knife to the heart would have hurt less than those three words.
I wasn’t happy.
He shoved his hands into his pockets. Before he’d landed the grants to get through school and into the academy, he’d been a poor kid living in a border town with no future. He should have known better than to want someone like Nikki. She was too good for the likes of him. How could he have ever hoped to make her happy?
Chapter Four
Nikki’s heart shriveled up inside her, dying all over again. God, she’d imagined this moment so many times, and she’d been right. Gabriel wouldn’t fight for her, not for them or what they’d had. It wasn’t worth it to him. She wasn’t worth it. She didn’t belong in his world. She’d never heard the message louder or with more clarity. Her rose-colored glasses were off, and she could finally see what she hadn’t wanted to back then. They just didn’t fit. It didn’t matter how much she loved him or wanted to make it work, some things just weren’t meant to be.
It was hard to breathe around the proverbial knife in her chest, but the oxygen did her good.
“Is that how you saw it?” By some miracle, her voice didn’t shake. It was as though her heart and body were divided, separate.
“Yeah, that sounds about right. It’s been a while, so maybe my memory is foggy.” He kicked a pebble down the boardwalk.
She felt the stone’s pain. Sure, four years had passed, but this was the real ending. Right here. Right now.
“Is it possible for us to work together?” she asked.
She didn’t want to. Being around him, it hurt. Maybe she’d been foolish when she fell for him. How clichéd was it, anyway?
“Sure.” He shrugged. “You’re cool. I’m cool.”
“Good. What else do we need to figure out now? It’s been a long day, and after tonight I doubt any of us will get much rest.” And she had to go cry into her pillow like the sad, pathetic thing that she was. The sea breeze kicked up, blowing in the salty air. She turned to face the beach, letting the breeze dry her eyes.
Tonight, she’d make her peace. She’d cry. Get it out of her system. It was time to put the silly notion that someday Gabriel would come back to her out of her head. In the real world, they were different people now, with separate lives.
“You said you’re working in a new division. What’s that about?”
She didn’t look at him; it hurt less that way.
“Homegrown threats. There’s a lot of attention on foreign terrorists attacking, so it’s incredibly unlikely we’ll see another 9/11. We run more risk from people born here turning against us. The random shooters. The revenge bombers. The militia cells. They’re our neighbors, friends, and sometimes our family. They’re more dangerous because we don’t want to see them or believe it could happen here, to us or someone we know.”
“Hasn’t the FBI always handled threats on our own soil?”
“Yes. Our specific focus is threats to multiple lives. We’ve saved people. In our first six months of operation . . . well, I can’t tell you that, but we’ve done some good.” She smiled at the memory of little arms wrapped around her neck, thanking her. That was why she’d worked so hard to follow in her father’s footsteps. She’d seen firsthand the lives he’d touched, the people his decisions had saved, and she wanted to do that, too.
Her father had shown her the photo albums of clippings documenting the people he’d saved, lives protected. Growing up she’d pored over those stories, committing them to heart, and now she had her own albums of lives saved. It was small, but growing every year.
“Isn’t that what this is all about? Helping people?” Gabriel asked.
“Yes.”
She could recall with almost crystal clarity the third conversation she’d had with Gabriel. It was when everything changed. He’d called her in the middle of the night and warned her he’d been drinking with the people he was spying on. She’d sat on her window seat with its wonderful view of a brick wall and listened to him rant about how much he hated them, but working for them was a necessary evil to help people. To save them.
They’d bonded over that, and when he’d worked the alcohol out of his system, she’d shared what drove her. If memory served her, they hadn’t hung up until close to noon, and then it was just so they could get showers and on the road to meet for food halfway between them. A face-to-face meet was dangerous, but Gabriel had been splintering and needed to see someone he could trust.
She’d been that person once.
Standing there, watching the waves beat at the shore almost empty of people, it was easy to tap into the feelings of that first time. The day when it all changed. She’d gone to see him with good intentions, but he’d checked his at the door. When he flirted with her she’d been taken aback and had no idea how to respond, but she soldiered through. Over time, he’d worn her down. If he hadn’t pursued her, she’d have stayed in the nice, neat box she’d made for herself. Following the rules, coloring inside the lines. Thanks to him, she wasn’t afraid to tear down a few walls if it meant getting the job done. She’d learned a lot from him, but now it was time to learn how to walk away.
“I want to go back to Roni’s.” The wind whipped her voice back over her shoulder, but she saw Gabriel nod out of the corner of her eye.
“Come on.” He turned back toward the parking lot.
The beach called to her. If she knew how to get back on her own, she might take a stroll, walk her problems out. It might not help, but at least she wouldn’t be cooped up inside with only her broken heart for company.
She turned and almost walked straight into Gabriel’s chest.
“You haven’t got any shoes on.” He scowled down at her. Numerous broken noses and a couple thin scars had roughened up his face just enough so he wasn’t someone you wanted to meet in a dark alley—or a secluded breezeway between hotels—by yourself.
“I’m fine.”
“There’s glass in the parking lot.”
“I didn’t step on any. It’s fine.” She hadn’t seen any, either, but she’d only had one thought when she got out of the car: get away.
“Yeah, whatever.” He bent his knees, and before she could process what he was doing, Gabriel hoisted her up in his arms.
“Gabe! Put me down.” She could feel the cool breeze on her ass now. Damn these shorts.
“Quit your hollering.” His scowl lines deepened and he kept his eyes focused straight ahead.
She opened her mouth to protest again, but what was the point? She’d learned to pick and choose her battles with Gabriel. Besides, this was her parting gift. One last chance to feel his arms around her.
He didn’t speak to her all the way back to the GTO. She was too wound up to enjoy the strength of his arms or the feel of his chest against her, which was a pity.
Gabriel set her down gently next to the passenger side.
“Thanks. You didn’t have to do that,” she said.
He unlocked the door and held it open for her. Once, he’d told her how manners were required in his mama’s house, and when he was being himself, he made sure to follow her rules.
“No problem.” He shut her door, and for a brief moment she was alone.
Nikki squeezed her eyes shut. She couldn’t cry. Not yet. Not until she was alone. She studied the dashboard while he got in and started the car. What had he said about it?
“Did you do the upgrades yourself?” she asked to fill the silence. For a moment she’d felt a bit of their old connection back there, but it was gone now. This conversation was stilted. Awkward. As if they were strangers.
“Yeah. The other guys complain about it, but they’re big into restoring cars.”
“Not you?”
“Nah. Why not upgrade it?”
She asked about the details without caring about the answer. What mattered was that they were talking. It was silly to imagine him in her life again for anything but a brief moment. He’d left the FBI, and her life was the bureau.
&nb
sp; “Thanks for the ride,” she said as they pulled up in front of Roni’s condo.
“Thanks for talking to me.”
Thanks for breaking my heart.
“Talking was always one of the things we did best.”
“I don’t know about that.” His lips curled up at the corners, and for a moment his brown eyes heated.
Yeah, they’d done other things well, too, which she was trying to forget.
“Good night, Gabriel.” She pulled the door handle.
“Gabe. You always called me Gabe.”
Nikki paused getting out of the car.
“That was then.” She stared at her hand against the white leather interior.
“You called me Gabe earlier.”
“I shouldn’t have. You aren’t that person to me anymore.” She pulled up her walls, calling on every shred of professionalism she could scrounge up and surrounded herself in it.
“That’s cold.”
“It’s the truth.”
“You always were good at pushing people away.”
She shouldn’t look at him. But she did. His features appeared even more broken up-lit by the dash lights.
“I learned that from you.”
Nikki stood before he could make some sort of reply and closed the door. Straightening her spine, she took the first step toward the condo. It was time to make a new life and stop living in the past. She felt his gaze on her all the way to the front door.
Was she running away from him?
Yes, yes she was.
She knocked on the front door, repeating the pattern Roni had shown her, and waited, listening to the sound of the GTO’s engine chugging in the background. The condo door opened a crack and Nikki shoved past, into the house. She needed to get away from him before she shattered.
Chase Page 4