“It doesn’t work like that, Evie, and you know it. You left because you had dreams. There’s nothing wrong with that. And even if you’d stayed, you couldn’t keep her safe. You can’t keep anyone safe forever.” He spoke with the conviction of someone who knew.
“Did you see Brianna?”
“Yeah. You know her?”
Evie pushed away from him, swiping her eyes. “She was my bartender, but I guess she was a bit more than that. Another person put in place by Rivera.”
Matt looked frustrated. “I couldn’t get close enough to bug her vehicle before she left. But she’s driving a Chrysler sedan. Dark, blue or black maybe.”
“We’re back where we started, aren’t we?” Hopelessness threatened to close around her throat and choke her.
“We’ve got the card, Evie.”
“I don’t see how that’ll help.”
He took it from her and ripped it at the seams. A small device dropped into his hand. “This is a flash media device, just like that media card. The recording is digital, so it’s pretty pure. We’ll load it onto the computer and send it to my guys for analysis. If we’re lucky, they can isolate the background, maybe narrow down the area where your sister’s being held.”
She stared at him, awestruck. “This is just like one of those military techno movies, you know that? I thought they made all that stuff up.”
“Not all of it.”
“Next you’ll tell me Elvis is alive and living in Mexico or something.”
“Tahiti, actually.”
Evie laughed through her tears. How did he do it? How did he make her laugh even when she was falling apart on the inside and shaking from fear? She wasn’t sure, but thank God for it.
“Wait a minute,” she said as he opened the car door for her. “You never asked me what happened out there when I met Brianna.”
“Didn’t need to.” He grinned. “I saw the whole thing and heard most of it.”
“But you weren’t on the dock.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
His gaze strayed up and she turned to follow it. “The roof? You were on the roof?”
“Best place to watch from. I could hear her, but not you since your back was to me.”
“What if she’d pulled a gun on me, forced me into a boat?”
“I told you I wouldn’t let that happen.”
She decided not to ask him how he planned to get off the roof and thwart an abduction in the space of only a few seconds. It had to be twenty feet from the roof to the dock. Evie shook her head. There were some things she was probably better off not knowing.
“Let’s get back to Reynier’s Retreat, chère. If luck’s on our side, we’ll have this file analyzed before Brianna calls you again.”
A new awareness was dawning. “We’re not going to find David’s files, are we?”
“Probably not. Someone knows what form they take, but they aren’t sharing the information. With anyone.”
“Maybe that’s who was in the guesthouse when we returned, the person who knows what to look for.”
She saw respect in his eyes as he nodded. It made her feel warm inside. “Yeah, that’s what I think. He knows where you’re staying and thought you might have the information with you. It also means he knew we’d left, which means he was watching from the bayou. He waited, in case we returned, then broke in when he deemed it safe.”
“But if it was the person on the other end of the phone, he didn’t get what he wanted.”
“No, but he’s convinced you have it… and I think he may be right.”
*
“Mendez is asking questions, Richie.”
Matt rubbed one shoulder. He was just a little stiff after pulling himself onto that slippery corrugated roof. Not that it wasn’t something he was unaccustomed to doing, but sometimes his muscles protested anyway. Especially when he had a months-old gunshot wound on his side that still throbbed from time to time.
“What’d you tell him?”
“Nothing yet.” Kevin MacDonald grunted. “The Kid’s on board though. He knows our asses will be in a sling, but he doesn’t give a good goddamn. Hawk said he’d be glad to come shoot somebody for you.”
In spite of everything, Matt laughed. Hawk could blow a flea off a dog at three kilometers without hurting the dog. “Yeah, if I need someone shot, I’ll call. Look, this one’s more difficult, but I need you to trace a Chrysler.” He gave the make and model and the possible colors. “It’s probably a rental. See if you can find any cars fitting that description that have been rented in New Orleans or Baton Rouge lately. Look for a Brianna Sweeney on the rental, but don’t limit it to that name. We’ll expand the search if nothing appears in either of those places.”
“How big you want to go?”
“These people are from California, though Sweeney was a bartender in Florida for a few months. I doubt they drove from California, so I’m thinking they must have flown in and rented it at the airport. If they’d driven from Florida, they’d have found an opportunity to intercept Evie before now.”
And didn’t that thought just give him a shiver? No matter how tough and resourceful Evie was, she’d have been unprepared for an ambush on the road. They could have killed her. Probably would have killed her to get what they wanted.
“So we’ll check the airport rental counters first. It’s too bad about the cell phone.”
“Yeah, but maybe this digital recording will yield something.” The phone Brianna and her accomplices used to communicate with Evie was a dead end. An unregistered burner that couldn’t be traced. But maybe there was another way to learn something about these people. A long shot but worth a try.
“Hey, can you check David West’s phone? Find out who he made calls to before he came to Rochambeau.” West called Evie from phone registered to him. If he’d been in contact with his killers, and they’d been using burners, it wouldn’t matter. But maybe, just maybe, there’d be something in the log Matt could make sense of. Matt didn’t know why the guy wasn’t using a burner too, but maybe he’d been too arrogant or cocky—or too careless—to be more careful.
“Yeah, can do. Anything else?”
Matt swallowed the lump in his throat. God, was he getting sentimental in his old age or what? After everything that had happened, these guys would still risk their asses for him without a second thought. He felt like he didn’t deserve that kind of loyalty, and yet not one of them had ever pointed blame at him for what had happened to Jim and Marco. They were men, not boys, and they all knew what they’d signed on to do. Death was a constant companion in their line of work.
Matt knew it, and he knew Jim and Marco went out doing something they loved—but that didn’t stop him from feeling he should have called off the mission when he’d known in his gut that it was compromised.
“Not yet,” he said. “Keep me posted.”
“Hoo-ah. I’ll let you know if I find anything.”
“Kev,” he said before the other man could hang up.
“Yes, sir?”
“Thanks.”
There was silence on the other end of the line for a moment. “You’d do the same for me. For any of us. We all know it.”
*
Evie sat at the kitchen island, stirring up a batch of chocolate buttercream frosting. She was going to frost these cakes she’d just baked if it was the last sane thing she did. Because there’d been plenty of insane moments over the last few hours and she just wanted to feel normal, at least for a little while. So long as she did something she knew how to do, she didn’t feel so helpless while they waited for Brianna to call back.
Matt looked up from the laptop he’d borrowed from his sister. She didn’t know what he’d been doing, but he’d been silent since he’d ended his phone call with his teammate. When they’d first returned to the house, he’d checked it thoroughly, creeping off to do his military thing before coming back to tell her all was clear. He’d also procured a pistol, presumably when he’d gotten the laptop. I
t lay beside the computer along with a box of bullets. She’d been trying not to focus on it.
“You planning to beat that bowl to death?”
“Thinking about it.”
“It’s only been twenty minutes.”
Evie gave the frosting a vicious twist with her spoon. “Why doesn’t she just call and tell me what she wants?”
“Because she doesn’t know what she’s looking for. She’s arguing with whomever she called on the dock. And this guy—or gal—isn’t being cooperative. My professional opinion.”
“But they’re supposed to be working together to get David’s files. Ryan Rivera wants them badly enough to kill for them, so why wouldn’t someone tell Brianna what she’s supposed to be looking for?”
Matt leaned back on the bar chair. “I don’t think it’s Rivera. If he knew, he’d send her after it. No, this is someone else, someone who doesn’t fully trust Brianna. Someone who wants the files pretty badly but doesn’t want to negotiate for them in person. Did David have any other friends? Any girlfriends? Someone he could have told about what he’d done?”
“Not that I’m aware.” Evie gave the frosting another twist. “I can’t recall anyone he spoke to a lot or any strange calls. But I was running a restaurant, Matt. I was worried about menus, supplies, training my employees—things like that. I suppose he could have been selling Girl Scout cookies from the trunk of his car and I probably wouldn’t have realized it.”
“Girl Scout cookies?” Matt grinned at her.
Evie stopped whipping the frosting and yanked a cake toward her. “I hate to think about anything worse, so allow me my fantasy, okay?”
Not to mention she was still angry with herself for not figuring out what David had been up to sooner. Didn’t matter how good he was or how well he hid his tracks, she just felt like she should have known he wasn’t the nice guy he pretended to be.
“Sure.” His sudden smile could’ve melted an ice cube. “But tell me what other kind of fantasies you think about.”
A tendril of heat uncoiled in her belly. She found herself thinking about licking chocolate frosting off his tight abs, about him moving deep inside her again. She wanted to forget everything and lose herself with Matt for an hour or so.
But she couldn’t. Not when so much was at stake. Not when she needed to have her mind in a different place, needed to be prepared to deal with a killer.
“I can’t, Matt. Later, when this is over—”
“I know.” He got to his feet, stretched. “Can’t blame me for trying.”
“No.” She spread a dollop of frosting across the top of a cake, searched for a way out of the awkwardness she suddenly felt. “I’m sorry I’m keeping you away from your family. But if you weren’t here, I don’t know how I’d deal with this.”
“It’s okay. Chris is busy with the wedding preparations and the senator and I don’t have a lot to say to each other.”
Evie smoothed the frosting methodically. “He isn’t interested in what you do in the military?”
“No.”
She stopped. “Does he mind what you do?”
“Yeah, he does. But it’s not his choice.”
“It’s dangerous, isn’t it?” She’d known, especially as the evening went on and she’d listened to his conversations with his teammate, but she hadn’t wanted to really think about it. If she were honest with herself, she’d known it from the moment he’d disarmed Jimmy Thibodeaux and broke his arm. “You do dangerous things.”
He pushed both hands over his head and laced them together behind his neck. His breath let out on a long sigh. “I go to some pretty bad places. There’s always a chance I won’t come back.”
Evie nearly dropped the spatula. A twist of dark emotion grabbed her heart and wouldn’t let go. “Won’t come back? As in ever?” She couldn’t say dead. She couldn’t think it.
“Precisely.”
Horror gripped her by the throat and squeezed. How could he? How could he risk himself that way? And yet he’d been shot. She knew it because she’d seen the red and puckered scar on his torso. And the smaller scars that marred his perfect skin in places. “Why would you do that? Why would someone like you do that?”
The look he gave her was gently mocking. “You think people born into privilege shouldn’t serve their country since they have the means to do other things? Should it only be the poor or disadvantaged who risk their lives?”
“I didn’t mean that.” Her heart ached.
“Yes, you did.”
Okay, probably she did. But it was unfathomable. If she’d had his background, his money and access, she wouldn’t be in this predicament right now. She’d have never listened to a jerk like David, never got entangled in anything remotely dangerous. She’d be running a chain of Evangeline’s, flying from city to city to oversee her business, spending time in a test kitchen making up new recipes. Life would be so good.
Or would it?
Did money really make anyone happy? Clearly, it didn’t make Matt happy. He’d always been restless. The summer he’d been fourteen, he’d stolen his daddy’s car and talked her into going on a joyride with him. They’d gone to Baton Rouge and back, and no one ever figured out they were missing. Because he’d had a plan.
She’d never stopped to think about it then, but she knew looking back that he’d always had that daredevil streak. And it suddenly made more sense than she would have liked that he risked his life in the military.
“I would have made different choices if I had your resources.” She frosted the cake a bit more viciously than necessary. “I’m sorry if that offends you, but I refuse to believe there isn’t a better way to contribute to society, if that’s what you want to do.”
His expression grew hard. Hidden pain flared in his eyes. She wanted to go over and put her arms around him, but she knew he wouldn’t welcome it. Not right now. She’d crossed a line and he was angry with her for it. It wouldn’t be the first time. She’d pissed him off plenty when they were kids.
Except this wasn’t an issue for kids. It was serious, frightening, and she hadn’t yet figured out how to reconcile it in her head.
“I wouldn’t change what I’m doing for anyone.” He said it coolly, and her head snapped up to meet his gaze. There was steel in those eyes.
She got the hint. Not that she’d expected there was a future with him, but it might be nice if it were at least a possibility if it was something they both wanted. Clearly, Matt didn’t even want to think about it.
Well, dammit, neither did she. She had things to do, and Matt didn’t figure into any of them. “It must be a lonely life.”
“Sometimes.”
She moved the spatula against the cake more gently, smoothing the thick frosting while her heart skipped. She hated the idea of him in some foreign country, dying, and her never knowing about it until it was too late. They’d spent the last ten years not being in touch, but now that they were, she knew the love she’d always felt—and by that she meant the love of a friend for another friend—had never disappeared.
You didn’t stop loving someone you’d been attached to for so much of your life, even when you’d had a falling out. You always grieved the friendship lost. And now that she had him in her life again, she didn’t want to lose that connection.
He reached for her hand and grasped it gently in his until she looked up at him again. “I’m sorry, Evie.”
She shrugged, though she felt anything but lighthearted. “For what? You don’t have to explain yourself or apologize. I was out of line.”
“No, but it came as a shock to you. I shouldn’t have told you that what I do is dangerous.”
She laughed. It wasn’t a humorous sound. “I think I already knew that, Matt. It’s kinda obvious to someone who saw you in action last night, and then again just now at Charlie’s.”
“Chris doesn’t know. I’d rather she didn’t.”
Evie swallowed the lump in her throat. “She won’t hear it from me. But you were
captured, Matt. She knows that.”
“Yeah, but I’m back now. She has no idea that kind of thing could happen every time I go out with my team.”
“And your father?”
He looked down at the counter for a long moment. “I don’t think he’d care either way.”
She squeezed his hand. “I think he would.”
“You’re a sweetheart, Evie. Always have been. But the senator and I don’t get along very well. I think you know that.”
They both knew what he was talking about. The time shortly before his mother had died when the senator had come out into the garden and railed at him for tracking dirt through the house. Evie had cringed on the garden seat where she’d been playing and pretended not to hear. That was the first time she’d realized that Matt’s life wasn’t perfect.
After that, there were many times when Matt had been red-faced and sullen. Usually, after an hour or so, he was himself again. After his mother had died, Evie’s trips to Reynier’s Retreat became more infrequent. He had come to her then. Until, one day, he noticed other girls and hadn’t come anymore.
She set the spatula down and licked chocolate from her thumb. Then she reached up and skimmed her fingers over his cheek. “I do know. And you’ll just have to forgive me for caring what happens to you, okay? I won’t tell Chris, but I also won’t stop worrying about you either.”
He caught her fingers and sucked the tips into his mouth while she felt the sensual tug all the way down to her sex. “I don’t deserve your worry, Evie. I betrayed our friendship.”
She sighed. “Maybe we both did. I shouldn’t have asked you to be my first. That was the first step over the line.”
He growled and pulled her toward him until she was standing between his legs. “I’m glad I was your first. I just wish I’d taken more care with your heart.”
His mouth fitted over hers and she melted into him. They kissed for a long minute, but then a phone rang and she jumped away from him, scrambling for the phone she’d laid on the island. But it wasn’t her phone ringing.
Matt put his phone to his ear, his voice clipped as he spoke. “Yeah.”
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