Searching (PAVAD- FBI Romantic Suspense Book 18)

by Calle J. Brookes

  Ed sprawled unconscious next to him, blood at his damned temple. A roar sounded behind them again.

  Max didn’t stop to think. They were too damned close.

  He grabbed the director, pulled the smaller man over his shoulder, and ran.

  Just ran.

  To the field behind the now burning house, fifty yards away. The house on the left of Andy’s, unoccupied, was engulfed now. People were yelling from somewhere. Neighbors, coming running.

  They’d have to keep them back somehow.

  Max lowered his boss to the ground as the rest of the men that had been there crowded around them. He checked quickly: Hellbrook, Mick Brockman, three Lorcan brothers. Max and the director.

  They were missing one. There had been eight of them.

  Max counted again. “Where’s Mal?”

  Mick bellowed his older brother’s name, then swore when he saw the other man lying a few feet from the back porch. Mick and Sebastian ran back and lifted Malachi, almost dragging him away from the flames.

  Malachi was mostly walking on his own, but it looked like he’d taken a hit to the shoulder.

  Max turned back to the director. Ed was still out.

  Hell, it had probably only been a minute or two since the blast.

  Seth held a hand to his own bleeding forehead. “We’re all out. But every last shred of evidence was blown to the damned moon now. All we got is what was on our phones.”

  “Even the computers were in my car,” Sebastian said, lowering Malachi to the grass next to the director. “It’s burning now; I’d parked it nearest the drive. I don’t know if Carrie will be able to do anything with what is left of the hard drives after the fire’s out.”

  They had nothing. Son of a bitch.

  Except for the memory cards in the pocket of Max’s Brynlock sweatshirt. And that might be absolutely nothing.

  “We need to get him to the hospital,” Hellbrook said, leaning over his father-in-law. The director was starting to come around. “I think he was struck in the head. Malachi needs checked out, too.”

  “Who all has injuries?” Max took stock of their people. He had some burns on his back and his arms, but nothing a cold shower and some burn gel wouldn’t fix. Seth was bleeding from a wound near his hairline. Sin Lorcan stood there with a damned piece of shrapnel lodged in his right shoulder, looking like the coldly invincible hunter that he was.

  Nothing appeared to phase that guy.

  Malachi was propped up against the damned side of Andy’s garden shed. Hellbrook was covered in ash. They all were. But they were all there. Alive.

  They’d gotten damned lucky.

  Had Malachi or the director been any closer to the house when it blew, Max probably wouldn’t have been able to say that at all.

  “Let’s get the director the hospital. We’ll regroup when we can.”

  He looked back, to where Andy’s body had been.

  It was gone. He’d been right outside his back door.

  There would be nothing left of his friend but ashes.

  And three little girls who deserved to know what had happened to the father who had loved them so much.

  6

  Jac rolled over, grabbed her gun instinctively, and checked the clock next to the bed. Someone was pounding on her door, at two a.m. That could never be good.

  Jac checked on the little girl sleeping in her guest room—Emery was an extremely deep sleeper—then crept to the front door. She peeked out the window carefully. Jac never used the peephole. She’d seen people get shot that way.

  Jac flipped on the porchlight when she saw who was standing there. She’d recognized the tall, muscled man illuminated in the nearby streetlight immediately. Jac threw open the door.

  Her former partner stood there, covered in soot, eyes burning with a pain she couldn’t identify. She immediately tensed even more. “Max, what—?”

  Before he could answer, or she could say anything else, he grabbed her. Just grabbed her.

  Max’s hands went around her waist and he jerked. He scooped her right off her feet and into his arms. His strong, perfect, smoke-saturated arms.

  Jac found her face pressed into his rock-hard chest.

  At any other time, she would have enjoyed it.

  He reeked. She coughed.

  He just wrapped his arms around her even tighter and held her. Rocked. Right there on her front porch. Shaking and holding her as tightly as he could.

  This was a far cry from the man who had run from her over a little kiss between friends weeks ago.

  Jac didn’t say a word about that. He was hurting. Broken.

  She hated not knowing why. “Max? Talk to me. Tell me what happened.”

  “Inside.” He pulled back and stared at her. Right there on her porch, as thunder boomed overhead, and rain pelted down around them. “I...can I come inside?”

  “Yes. But lose the shoes. I just had new carpet laid. And you are filthy. What happened to you tonight?” They were whispering. It somehow just called for whispers, even though they both knew Emery slept like the dead. “Is everyone all right?”

  He shook his head. “Andy Anderson, from Seth’s team. He’s dead. Executed tonight. In his home, Jac. Place blew up while we were first on the scene. Andy’s body was burned beyond recognition.”

  Terror for her friends and colleagues had her practically choking. “Your team? Are they ok? Anyone else? Was anyone else targeted?”

  She’d held Andy’s daughter in her own arms tonight. Thank God the kids had been with their mother instead of their father. Andy and Angie had full shared custody. The girls were with Andy just as much as they were with their mother.

  If those girls had been there tonight… Jac couldn’t think of it.

  They’d had agents targeted before. She and Max had discussed that before. Had discussed what they had to do to watch their own backs, since a friend had been abducted in back in August. Jac never forgot that.

  She knew Max hadn’t either.

  No one at PAVAD was forgetting that right now.

  The ones responsible for hiring an assassin to go after members of PAVAD hadn’t been caught yet. Jac’s friends Shannon and Cody had almost died by that assassin’s hands.

  Everyone had been living on edge, since.

  “Not my team. I was with the director. Working on...a special project. Me, him, a few others.”

  “Is everyone you were with on scene ok?”

  He shook his head slightly. Ash and debris fell from his shaggy brown hair to his broad shoulders. The man seriously needed a shower. “The director is going to be kept overnight at the hospital. He took a hard knock to the head. I’m...not supposed to be telling you this. But...it was so damned close. And I need to see Emery. Before I can sleep tonight. I just need to see her. Make certain she’s ok. Then I’ll head home and get out of your hair.”

  “Don’t be crazy. You have a bag here. I found it when I moved last month, at the back of my guest room closet. I’ve been meaning to bring it to PAVAD. I just keep forgetting,” Jac said quietly. That bag had taunted and tormented her for weeks. Now she was just glad she still had it. “I have another spare room. There’s a bed in there. Take a shower. We can talk. You can go home in the morning. I’m off the entire weekend. I can keep her with me.”

  He just looked at her.

  There was so much pain in the man’s eyes. Jac just said to hell with it. She wrapped her arms around him and held him until the shaking stopped.

  There would be time to deal with the kiss that should have never been later. Right now all that mattered was that Max was in pain. And he had come to her.

  Jac wasn’t going anywhere.

  7

  Eugene Lytel had worked for the FBI for fifteen years. He’d seen a lot of dead bodies since then. That he’d seen one all nice and toasty tonight didn’t drag him down.

  Far from it.

  He was riding a high better than the time he’d done LSD during his undergrad years.

&nb
sp; That he’d known the man as a colleague and a friend for over eight years didn’t matter to him. The exact opposite.

  That juiced him up even more. He’d walked right in and then watched the life fade right out of a friend’s eyes.

  Just like he’d done before.

  Eugene didn’t kill for any ideological reasons. Nor was he doing it for strictly cash reasons. Or revenge.

  He wasn’t stupid; he’d done his time learning everything he could about what motivated people to do what they did.

  Lytel wasn’t doing it just because he couldn’t fucking stand Ed Dennis and his team of perfect boys and girls.

  No. He was doing this because he’d learned the first time he’d taken a life while on duty that he enjoyed it.

  Oh, he’d wanted PAVAD when he’d first learned of it. Everyone had been talking about the specialized unit. It had started off with eighty-two people. People handpicked by the director for whatever reasons known only to that sanctimonious prick.

  He’d gotten that appointment. Two years later. When they needed some cannon fodder and someone to lead those no-name agents to fill in wherever good old Ed wanted them. None of those auxiliary agents were ever going to move up. They hadn’t yet, even though PAVAD kept expanding.

  Good old Ed was on a real power trip now.

  Lytel had always hated assholes like that.

  He’d been digging up whatever dirt he could find on all the key players of PAVAD. Especially the director. The director knew exactly what had happened twenty-three years ago.

  Lytel would never forgive Ed Dennis for that.

  Lytel knew his way around computers, and thanks to Ed himself, he had access to whatever he wanted to poke around in.

  All in the name of duty.

  Someone had caught on to him, though.

  Maybe he’d sold information to the wrong person—but Lytel didn’t care. They’d offered him far too much cash to refuse.

  All he had to do was take care of a few people whenever he was asked to.

  Then, he’d get a cool million deposited into his grandmother’s account each time. She was so senile she’d never know any damned thing about it. He had the power of attorney and had been using her accounts to play the stock market for years.

  Lytel knew exactly how to make it all work. How to make the numbers all add up.

  He’d been outsmarting Ed Dennis and PAVAD for years, after all.

  Lytel waited. The call came just as he expected.

  His team was needed.

  A fellow agent’s home had been bombed. Someone needed to guard the perimeter and all those cute little scientist pets of the director’s.

  Duty called.

  Lytel was laughing the entire drive.

  He pulled up in front of Anderson’s engulfed home and studied his handiwork.

  Damn, he loved his job.

  8

  The next morning when he woke, Max heard the sound of his daughter’s laughter. There was no better alarm clock than that, and it had him smiling before he was fully awake—and cognizant of where he actually was.

  Jac.

  He followed the sound of laughter to the small kitchen of the house Jac had bought a month ago. He hadn’t seen the place before.

  She’d been searching for the house she wanted for a good eighteen months. Max had promised that when she found it, he would help her move. She’d told him she wanted it to be absolutely perfect as it was where she planned to spend the rest of her life. Or until they transferred her out of St. Louis.

  She had never said it, but he understood. He’d profiled her thousands of times over the years they’d known each other. Max had spent a lot of time trying to figure out how Jaclyn Elise Jones thought.

  He had once thought he understood her almost as well as he understood himself. Jac wanted a life outside of PAVAD, but she was too afraid to go for it, yet.

  Jac wanted to put down roots more than anything. Her stepfather’s diplomatic position had meant their family traveled frequently. When they were stateside, they had stayed at the colonel’s home in Virginia.

  He suspected those times had been extremely dark for Jac.

  She had never said. But she had nightmares; and not just when she was sleeping. There were parts of that woman she kept so close to her chest, he doubted she’d shared them with anyone other than her younger sister Natalie.

  He had wanted to be there to help her celebrate the milestone of buying her own home.

  Max was sorry he’d missed it. A quick look around him told him the place reflected the beautiful, feminine woman that she rarely showed at the office. The softer side.

  The side Max adored.

  There were floral accents everywhere. Jac could take a broken twig and turn it into a beautiful flower with just a touch, it seemed.

  That was something else she kept hidden from the world. That and her love of the piano. She’d started teaching Emery to play years ago.

  He found Jac at the stove, cooking breakfast. She had on thin little pink shorts that revealed tanned legs. He’d never really been into legs, but Jac... Jac was beautiful. Every inch of her.

  The tank top she’d slept in was soft yellow and dotted with tiny pink flowers. Perfect.

  She was summer bright in the midst of November gray. His hands actually trembled. There was a thin pink bra strap just visible on one shoulder. Out of place. He wanted to touch, right there. To slide his fingers along the satin, along the silky skin beneath. His gut tightened at the thought.

  There was no woman on the planet he’d rather touch more than this one.

  Max kept his damned hands to himself before he screwed things up between them even worse than he had weeks ago.

  He hadn’t meant to kiss her and run.

  She hadn’t had to help him out with Emery last night. Jac was well within her rights to have told him to take a leap for the way he’d acted after that kiss. But she hadn’t.

  He should have known she wouldn’t. Not when it came to Emery. “Hey, Jones ladies.”

  They both looked over at him.

  He liked calling them that. It made it sound like Jac was a Jones because of him, instead of random coincidence. He had never analyzed why he liked those simple words—until the weeks after he’d ruined everything between them.

  Now, he knew why that coincidental connection between them mattered to him so much.

  His inner Neanderthal was rearing his head again. Saying, “Claim your mate. Now!”

  Her being a Jones made the subconscious part of him think she was his. That she was meant to be his in some odd way he hadn’t yet defined.

  Primitive, but true.

  He knew exactly how he felt about the quietly beautiful redhead currently teaching his little girl how to flip pancakes at just the right moment.

  They were the ones who mattered to him more than anyone else in the world.

  “Hi, Daddy!” Emery finished her task carefully, then bounced over to him for morning hugs. “Jac said you spent the night here, too. I made three baskets last night, including my free throw. Abbie fouled me. We’ll have to update my chart at home from last season. Livy made two baskets. Tabby puked, though, so they had to stop the game for like twenty minutes to clean it up. She had to go home. That’s why the coach let Livy play most of the game this time.”

  “It was close to the half-time mark.” Jac said, amusement in her tone. “I think her friend had too many hot dogs before the game.”

  “She only had two hot dogs, but bunches of cotton candy.” Emery hugged him again. Jac gave him a tentative smile over his daughter’s head. Emery was extremely tall for her age—both Max and his ex-wife were over six feet—and only about eight inches separated Emery’s height from Jac’s five six.

  They looked perfect together. Like they belonged together, right down to the red in their hair.

  He’d always thought so.

  Jac was more of a mother to his daughter than his ex-wife had ever been. Even Pamela had said that
on the occasions she breezed through town and had seen Jac and Emery together.

  Part of the reason he’d flipped so badly after the kiss had changed their relationship had been because of that very thing. The last thing he had ever wanted to do was screw up the relationship his daughter had with Jac. But he’d done just that, to the point that Jac and Emery hadn’t seen each other in several weeks. His fault.

  His stupid, cowardly asshole fault. The last thing he ever wanted to do was hurt the two of them.

  Well, he was ready to change that now. He’d had some damned time to think while lying in her purple guest room last night. It had been either think about Andy and what had happened, what Andy would miss with his daughters now—or think of the woman Max had long admitted he wanted. Knowing she was just down the hall had made his choice clear.

  The look Jac was giving him was beyond wary. It told him one thing: Jac didn’t trust him any longer. Not at all.

  Max had to find a way to fix that.

  He’d had a lot to think about on the twenty-minute drive to Jac’s home after leaving the hospital where he, Seth, and Hellbrook had taken the director and Malachi. The shrapnel that had been lodged in Sin Lorcan’s left shoulder had been removed on scene.

  Sin had refused to go to the hospital; his wife was the supervisor who had been called in to deal with the remains of Sebastian’s car. Sin hadn’t been about to leave her there with the potential for more explosives. Not after what had happened.

  Max hadn’t blamed him.

  Max had seen the look in Sin’s eyes when Cody had first stepped out of the bureau SUV. Max had understood. He’d known he’d have felt the same if it had been Jac walking over the broken sidewalk toward the inferno.

  All he had been able to think about was Jac and Emery.

  Since the moment he’d hit the ground in Andy’s backyard, he’d thought about Jac and Emery.

  About how he had come close to dying. His first thoughts had been for Jac and his daughter. Because they were the ones who mattered most.

  Jac didn’t know how he felt about her. He’d been too much of an idiot to realize, to tell her.