Highly Charged!

by Joanne Rock

  “You think Harold could be guilty of something…like that?” Nikki’s jaw fell open, her voice lowering as if someone was watching from the bushes.

  He shrugged. “I have no idea. But there’s a dark secret in here the Ralston family wants to hide. I’m just pointing out possibilities.”

  “Eduardo did make a point of telling Chloe he couldn’t speak plainly.” She pondered a moment then rose to her feet. “It would make sense if he hid something with vague words after a comment like that. Almost like he was warning her that he was understating, right? I’m going to retrieve the rest of the diaries.”

  Standing, he followed her toward the screen door leading to the kitchen.

  “Maybe we should grab a bag so we can carry it all down to a copy center.”

  He almost slammed into her back, not realizing she’d come to a dead halt in front of him.

  She spun to face him, her pretty mouth parted in an “oh” of surprise.

  “I thought we agreed this was going to be a reading day?” There was an edge to her tone he couldn’t quite interpret.

  “It has been.” Where had she been for the last four hours? His eyes ached from studying all those pages. “But if we don’t make copies of everything today, we won’t have anything to overnight to the publisher in the morning.”

  Her lips pursed, then flattened in a thin line.

  “And then I’ll be safe,” she monotoned, not sounding nearly as relieved about that as she should.

  “Exactly. Then things can get back to normal—”

  “That will make it easier for you when you go, won’t it?” She gripped the stone wall ringing two sides of the patio, her fingers clenched in a crevice where a rock had fallen out of place. “It’s good to have no loose ends.”

  He understood the tension between them now.

  Damn it. This wasn’t how he wanted to spend his time before shipping out—arguing and drawing boundaries. “I thought we agreed not to let this get too complicated.”

  “And it hasn’t.” She bit the words out with crisp articulation, but he guessed there was real hurt behind them. “You’re making sure to remind me every day how simple this needs to be. But it doesn’t feel all that simple to me. And if you’re already looking for the exit four days after we met, maybe that’s a sign you ought to just leave now.”

  He blinked. She wanted him gone?

  “How did this go from a discussion of making some copies to you trying to show me the door?” His chest tightened and he felt like he couldn’t get quite as much air as he wanted.

  “You can’t deny a certain coolness descended over things today, can you?” Nikki propped a hand on her hip, her tank top riding high above her green and purple floral shorts. “I offered to play sex games with a flower and you know what your response was?”

  He remembered her saying something about that. And he recalled himself salivating before he tried to rein himself in.

  But had he ever replied?

  “Nothing,” she informed him. “Absolute silence. You can’t pretend that you’re not pulling away. And I’m okay with that if this is too much too soon, but I wish you wouldn’t pretend like things are the same between us when I can see your thoughts are already a few thousand miles away from me.”

  “Nikki—” The word stuck in his throat a little and he had to clear it. “You don’t understand.”

  He’d hardly had time to wrap his head around what he was feeling. This week had been like a pressure cooker, their days together all the more intense for him because of the bad dreams and lack of sleep. What could he say to her that wouldn’t send her running even faster?

  “Actually, I think I do.” Her voice softened and he thought she blinked away some moisture in the corners of her eyes. “I understand too well. Why don’t I go get the diaries and we’ll make the copies tonight?”

  He took a breath again, grateful she’d decided to be reasonable.

  “We still have time to make an announcement to the local press,” she continued, outlining the plan. “We’ll spread the word about the journals being in the mail and you’ll be free to sleep in your own bed tonight.” She leaned closer to give him a kiss on the cheek.

  The brush of her lips on his skin was so quick he hardly had time to enjoy it. But then again, as his brain processed her words, he realized he wouldn’t have enjoyed it anyhow.

  Nikki hadn’t come to some equitable compromise.

  She’d just kissed him goodbye.

  IT WASN’T LIKE SHE WAS MAD as she pounded her way upstairs to the bedroom, taking the steps two at a time. It was more like she was wounded. Deeply.

  She flung herself into the bedroom and onto the bed, taking refuge in the chenille that had covered them just the night before. She’d get up in another minute. For now, she needed to catch her breath before the big bubble of emotions swelling in her chest threatened to burst like a raincloud and pour tears down her cheeks as if she was five years old again.

  Crap. She would not, could not let this happen to her. How could she have given a man so much power over her heart in such a short space of time? Dragging in deep breaths, she released the blanket and forced herself upright. The wide-eyed ginger kitten that Brad had rescued snuggled on a pillow near the headboard. He stared at her with the same eerie animal empathy that had sucked Nikki in the first time one of her distant cousin’s dogs had licked her tears away after her parents had dumped her off on their relative’s doorstep.

  That dog had been her best friend and her security blanket rolled in one for the next six months. And she’d been okay then. She would be okay again now, too. Even after Brad left. Which made her wonder—if she was so freaking strong, why couldn’t she have at least tried a relationship with him?

  Maybe after all the time she’d spent fending for herself, she was actually really well equipped to deal with Brad’s deployments. What if she’d been seriously underestimating herself, only looking at safe relationships that didn’t begin to fulfill her emotionally?

  The ginger kitten mewed at her and marched closer, lifting little paws high on the squishy bed, perhaps trying to keep her claws from getting stuck in the chenille. Nikki scooped her up, remembering how Brad had gone out on that limb for her.

  Yet, when the opportunity had arrived, she hadn’t done the same for him. She’d confronted him out of fear, suggesting they break things off the minute she sensed he was pulling away. Not exactly healthy to strike first to avoid being hit yourself. In fact, that sounded juvenile and not at all like the woman she wanted to be.

  Would Chloe have ever behaved that way?

  Cuddling the kitten closer, Nikki rose from the bed. Leaving the diaries on the bookshelves, she went downstairs, her heart picking up speed along with her feet. She didn’t quite know what to say to Brad, but she’d think of that once she saw him. Once she assured herself he hadn’t already left.

  Hurrying into the kitchen, she was about to head for the screen door when a big, bulky object on the kitchen counter caught her attention. Had it been there when she came in and she hadn’t seen it?

  For a moment, she wondered if it was a package from a delivery service that Brad had brought inside for her. It looked like a box from the back. But as she rounded the butcher block counter top island and saw the front, she froze.

  The face of the object revealed a wire contraption with simple circuitry attached to fat sticks covered in brown paper. A digital timer with bright green numbers ticked away softly in the quiet kitchen.

  1:45, 1:44, 1:43…

  She could actually count along with it and know how many seconds it took her to find her voice. Honest to God, nothing came out at first when she tried to scream.

  Squeezing the kitten tight in her arms, she bolted for the screen door just as a shriek finally rose from her throat.

  14

  “BOMB!” NIKKI’S SCREAM was a nightmare come to life.

  Brad sprinted toward the house as she bolted through the screen door onto the patio.
Face drained of color, she shouted as she ran toward him with the kitten in a stranglehold.

  “Where?” He halted her and held her steady long enough to get the answers he needed. “Where is it exactly?”

  “Kitchen counter.” She breathed hard. Possibly the start of hyperventilation. “It’s counting down. Only a minute and a half left.”

  “Take the animals to my house. Get in the basement. Call 911.” He spent a precious extra half second waiting to see if she understood, waiting to be sure she would do this.

  At her nod, he took off running toward the house. Someone must have entered her home while they’d been out digging or at the rental place.

  He leaped a patio chair like a hurdle, never slowing down. The screen door damn near came off the frame as he wrenched it open and skidded into the kitchen.

  He saw it immediately. Bulky, homemade construction. Simple wiring. The kind of thing they might have made back in the Second World War…

  Timer ticking down.

  1:15, 1:14, 1:13…

  Not enough time to transport it elsewhere for safer defusion. Not enough time to call in a team of specialists.

  Sufficient dynamite to level Nikki’s house to rubble.

  Worse, there was a good chance this much firepower could take out his house next door. Where he’d sent her for safety. While he trusted she would be more protected in the basement, that didn’t mean she would escape without injury. Flying debris, falling beams, sudden fires…

  He couldn’t let anything happen to her, not to mention anyone who might be driving by their properties.

  Sweat beaded on his brow. His nightmare was playing out just as he’d seen it in his dreams so many times over the last weeks. He was face-to-face with a bomb. Lives were in his hands. The life of someone he cared about.

  He had to defuse it.

  Wiping his hands on a kitchen towel, he dried the sweat so nothing slipped. Precision was everything. Sinking to eye level with the bomb, he tracked the wires to see how they went together.

  1:01, 1:00, :59…

  Three months ago, he would have done this in the blink of an eye. But since the premature detonation in a barren field in Iraq? He quaked inside like the San Andreas fault even though his hands remained rock steady.

  He cursed every foul oath he knew in a slow, purposeful stream. Sort of like the release valve on a pressure cooker. Then, he retrieved a pair of butcher’s scissors from the block on the counter and hoped they were sharp.

  They were his wire cutters.

  :40, :39, :38…

  Why hurry now? He had time to think about whether or not he was doing the right thing. He could still sprint back to join Nikki in the basement next door. But then, he’d be writing off this house that was the only home she’d ever known.

  A home he’d even—briefly—pictured himself in one day. With her.

  It didn’t matter that Nikki had given him his walking papers. He would sleep better knowing she was here, in this house she loved, safe.

  Because so help him, he would defuse this freaking bomb and deliver it to the local cop shop with a red ribbon tied around it to bring down whoever had placed it here. That was the best reason of all to defuse it.

  The possibility of fingerprints.

  :10, :09, :08…

  Brad slid the lower blade of the kitchen scissors under a faded red wire. You had to respect these homemade bombs cobbled together by people who didn’t know what they were doing.

  Taking a deep breath, he closed the scissors.

  Snip…

  HAD A MILLION YEARS PASSED or did it just feel that way?

  Nikki checked her cell phone in the dim light of Brad’s basement. The digital clock display said it had been a minute since she’d called 911, so surely if the bomb was going to go off it would have already happened by now?

  The thought made her ill. She should have stopped Brad from going into the house. She should have insisted they both run like hell down the street. Good God, how did he make such quick life-and-death decisions for a living? She would be a basketcase by lunch the first day on the job.

  No wonder he had nightmares.

  Beside her feet, the blue jay squawked in his cage, thoroughly furious at being dragged across the lawn and shoved into a dark basement. The kitten had leaped from her arms to explore a shelf of paint cans and Killer stood on the washing machine to stare out a high window with her, his nails clicking impatiently on the metal as he danced in place and waited for something to happen.

  And waited.

  When another minute ticked by on the clock in her phone, she knew the bomb must not have gone off. Brad had defused it, thank God. So where was he?

  Whistling to Killer, she turned away from the washing machine while the dog jumped down. In the distance, she could hear sirens wailing, a speedy answer to her call for help. What could have happened to Brad?

  Fear clogged her throat. She’d only just started breathing again after the shock of finding a bomb in the kitchen. Now this? She hurried up the steps and through Brad’s living room to the front door. Pushing out into the bright afternoon, she rushed toward Chloe’s farmhouse. Her house now.

  The home Brad had saved.

  Killer raced at her feet as the sound of the sirens grew louder. The dog jockeyed to stay ahead of her and nearly tripped her as they leaped up onto the patio of the farmhouse and practically fell through the screen door.

  Inside the house, she couldn’t think through what she was seeing. Harold Ralston—Chloe’s stepbrother, the prominent city councilman—held a knife in his hand. For a split second, she’d glimpsed a view of the weapon pointed in Brad’s direction, but with the distraction of her arrival, Brad gripped the old man’s arm in a vise and snapped his wrist backward.

  The butcher knife clattered to the floor.

  Nikki screamed as the men continued to grapple. Behind her, cop cars flooded the driveway. Uniformed officers shouted to one another as they hurried toward the house and shoved past her.

  In no time, the police had Harold and Brad surrounded, although even then they appeared hesitant about cuffing a local war hero. Nikki couldn’t point to the knife and the explosives fast enough, encouraging the officers to check the old man’s truck for tire prints that matched her torn-up yard.

  While she vented about being terrorized by Chloe’s stepbrother, she noticed Brad explaining quietly to one of the senior officers that the IED and the knife would both be covered with Harold’s fingerprints.

  Finally, the officers removed Harold Ralston from the farmhouse while the older man cursed them, Nikki and his “slut” of a stepsister the whole way. Clearly, there’d been no love lost between Harold and Chloe.

  Indignant on her friend’s behalf, she followed the cop and his captive out the door.

  “What did you hope to accomplish by blowing up the house?” Nikki guessed the answers must be in the diaries, but she wanted to know now.

  Harold strained at the cuffs, surprisingly strong for his age and more than a little pissed off.

  “I wasn’t going to blow up the house. I knew your boyfriend could defuse a bomb. I just wanted to scare you off so you didn’t find Chloe’s diaries.” His face contorted into a look of rage. “I told Chloe’s fiancé I’d kill him if he ever showed his face around my sister again. Who’d have thought the little prick would get his revenge after he died?” Harold snarled at her, a line of spittle hanging from one corner of his lip as on a rabid dog. The councilman’s comb-over stood high in the spring breeze.

  An officer nearby scribbled notes on the exchange.

  Nikki felt Brad’s presence behind her, listening, and longed to lean back against him and feel his solid warmth. She was just thankful he was alive. Brad had won the day, his smarts and quick reactions overriding any crap from his past after what happened in Iraq. He’d proven to himself he was healed. He would be cleared to return to duty, free to do the job he loved.

  As much as she would miss him—miss them—she
was glad for him.

  “The pen is mightier than the sword,” she reminded no one in particular, understanding Eduardo’s revenge must somehow be part of those missing diaries.

  But Harold wasn’t done. And the cop who held him seemed as interested in what he had to say as her, his feet glued to the flagstone path while the old man talked.

  “Soon the whole world will know Chloe’s fiancé was the hero and not me,” Harold groused. “Did you know, back then, they didn’t give out as many medals to the mixed-breeds who fought in the war? So I made a lot more out of old Ekualo’s act of bravery than he would have if he’d tried to claim he saved all those half-drowned men. The infantry guys he pulled on the ship were too frozen and confused to know who saved them.”

  Nikki tried to take in what he was saying.

  “Ekualo?”

  “Eduardo,” Harold clarified, rolling his eyes. “She called him that all the time, but her fiancé was just an ordinary Hawaiian-Philipino she met when she saw me off in California. We thought the guy looked like a Jap anyhow—”

  “Enough.” Nikki shook her head, not wanting to hear even one more syllable of a racist rant about Chloe’s beloved Eduardo. Ekualo. No wonder the name hadn’t been on the ship’s registry. She hadn’t been looking for the Hawaiian version of Eduardo. Chloe’s fiancé had been the war hero all along and Harold Ralston had stolen the tale of his bravery, while he’d kept his sister far away with a man the family didn’t approve of. “You’re lucky you soaked up someone else’s glory for as long as you did.”

  The police officer who held Harold’s arm nudged him forward as the councilman kept muttering.

  “Never did understand why he didn’t take the credit for what he did that day,” he told the young officer. “Who the hell jumps into ten-foot swells to drag a whole infantry unit to safety and never tells anyone?”

  Ekualo had, Nikki thought. He hadn’t needed glory or recognition for his heroism because he had Chloe to come home to. She’d bet anything there wasn’t one word about his heroic deeds in Chloe’s diaries—that’s why she and Brad hadn’t found anything in those hours of reading. Some men did their duty with honor, and the reward of a job well done—a life saved—was enough. Chloe hadn’t hidden the diaries because she was worried Harold would try to defend the proof he wasn’t a hero. Nikki suspected she’d hidden them because they revealed the truth about her relationship with Eduardo that her own family still didn’t know to this day.