“Interrupting anything?” someone asked. Though she hadn’t heard him, Vince was standing in the doorway.
Dana stepped back, jerked down her top, but Vince had no doubt gotten an eyeful. “We were just talking,” Dana said. And because she didn’t want to talk scars with Vince, she changed the subject. “Where’s Jack?”
“He said something about taking a catnap. But I suspect he’s reading more reports. He took the other laptop from the living room.”
Dana suspected that Vince had suspected correctly. She also figured that her sister and Vince needed to discuss that almost orgasm he’d delivered the night before.
Dana set her coffee back down. “I could use a catnap myself.” She started out, but Vince followed her into the living room after giving Grace a wait-a-second lift of his index finger.
“Is Grace okay?” Vince whispered. He glanced in at Rusty who was working in the office on the left side of the house.
Dana looked back at Grace who was trying to hear what they were saying, but she was also pretending to pour herself more coffee. “Seems to be.”
“And you?” he pressed. “Are you okay?”
She couldn’t help it, she smiled. “I seem to be.”
He leaned in, and much as Jack had done to Grace earlier, Vince planted a kiss on her forehead. It was chaste. Or rather it would have been if Vince hadn’t been the spitting image of Jack. He even had Jack’s scent. Something Dana’s body wouldn’t let her forget.
Dana quickly stepped away, but Vince caught onto her arm. His right eyebrow swung up. Yet another gesture that reminded her of Jack.
“Yeah, I’m attracted to you,” she whispered. “My body is anyway.”
“But not the rest of you?”
She shook her head. “I want Jack.”
"I want Grace.” He skimmed his finger down her cheek. “Sounds as if that makes things all better, huh?”
Dana wasn’t sure anything short of catching the killer would make this better. It was as if their fates were sealed.
She prayed that fate wasn’t for all of them to die.
“When you first saw Jack, what was the first thing that came to your mind?” Vince asked.
Now, there was a question she hadn’t expected. It’d only been two days since that first meeting, but Dana figured she’d remember that first thought even when she was too old to remember anything else.
“It’s you,” she said. “That’s what I thought when I saw him.”
“That just popped into your head?” Vince pressed.
Confused, Dana nodded. “Why?” And why did he look so alarmed? Not much of this had made sense so why would that first thought have been any different?
“It’s you as in you’re the one from my dreams/genetic memories/fill in the blank?”
“I’m not sure,” Dana answered honestly. “I was scared of him at first. I wanted to be scared,” she amended. “But more than I that, I wanted to know why it felt as if I’d been looking for him my whole life.”
Vince mumbled some profanity and scrubbed his hands over his face. “I’m a top-notch sniper. Can hold my own in a bar fight. And I think I’m a pretty good fuck. But this It’s you rattles me.”
“I can tell.” If the circumstances had been different, she might have enjoyed watching Vince squirm a little. “My advice? If you’re waiting for this to make sense, give up. I’m a wuss, my old baggage has baggage, and I’m terrible in bed. Yet, Jack still seems to want me more than his next breath. Even worse, I want him more than that.”
“That much, huh?” Vince’s gaze drifted to Grace before it snapped back to her. “You’re a bad fuck?”
“The worst.”
He chuckled. “I’ll let you in on a secret. To a guy, there’s no such thing as a bad fuck.”
They shared another smile. A too brief one. Because while Vince might be right about that, there was such a thing as a bad plan.
“I don’t want Jack to go to this meeting with Rory Sullivan alone,” Dana tossed out there.
“Is that what he’s planning?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
He shrugged, but she saw the confirmation in his eyes. Despite his job in the CIA, Vince and Jack were indeed a lot alike and not just when it came to their looks. Both were alpha males. Both were hell-bent on protecting Grace and her. Both, stubborn to a fault.
That fault could get Jack killed.
“Please,” Dana said, “don’t let him go alone.”
Vince nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.” He cupped her chin, lifted it and forced eye contact. “You’re falling in love with him?”
Dana swallowed hard. “Yes. Should I tell him?” Because she figured however Vince would react to that, so would Jack. It was like having a real life sounding board.
“It’ll scare the shit out of him,” Vince confessed.
Yes, that’s what she was afraid of. “It scares me, too.”
He glanced at Grace, probably wondering if Grace was having these same thoughts. Maybe she was.
“It won’t scare him because he doesn’t want it,” Vince continued. “It'll scare him because he does. He wants you.”
“But not my love," she quickly fired back.
“He might not want it because it complicates things, but he wants it.”
Dana thought she might actually understand what he was saying. “So, you believe Jack is just as screwed up as I am right now?”
“Well, just as screwed anyway,” he drawled. They shared a brief smile before he tipped his head to the laptop. “Anything new?”
“Just reports on Alyssa’s parents. Anything new you’ve learned?”
His silence was just long enough for her to know there was, and that it wasn’t good news.
“A friend at the FBI managed to get into the computer that Dr. Hartwell’s dead attorney used to write the letters we all got.” Another short silence. “It’d been hacked, and the trace led to a dead end. It means any of our suspects could have hacked in and found our names before we even received our copies of the letter.”
So, it meant, well, nothing. They were back to square one again, a place where they seemed to be stuck.
“Does Jack know about this?” she asked.
“Yeah. I just told him. He’s in the bedroom. And I think he’s waiting for you.”
Dana glanced back at Grace who seemed to be getting more anxious with each passing second. Probably because she thought they were talking about her and that damn phone call that she kept obsessing about. Maybe they’d live long enough for her to believe that no one blamed her for that.
“Check on Grace,” Dana whispered. “I’ll check on Jack.”
She didn’t have to go far, and the door was open. Jack was sitting on the bed, not napping as he’d said. He had the computer on his lap.
“I just spoke to Vince,” she volunteered. “He told me about the lawyer’s computer being hacked.”
“Yeah.” He nodded. Stared at her. “Did he say anything else?”
Dana went through everything that Vince and she had discussed from bad sex to falling in love and everything in between. They’d crammed a lot into that short conversation.
“Not much,” Dana lied.
Jack knew it was a lie. The flat look he gave her confirmed that.
Dana huffed and went for a condensed version. “He’s still attracted to me, but hotly attracted to Grace. And he’s scared about his feelings. He said you’d be scared, too.”
“I am,” Jack readily admitted. He moved the laptop to the nightstand and maneuvered his feet to the floor.
Before he could stand, Dana locked the door and went to him. She stood directly in front of him. “Scared about your feelings for Grace?”
He shook his head. “About you.”
The relief was there. Boy, was it. The logical part of her should probably question what he did feel for Grace, but logic was pretty much shot when it came to Jack and her.
Dana put her knee on the bed, directly between his legs and pus
hed him back onto the mattress. She leaned down and kissed him until they were both more than a little hot and more than a little breathless.
“The second thing I’m going to do is talk you out of meeting Rory Sullivan alone."
He frowned, but the frown faded significantly when Dana lowered her kiss to the front of his pants and then unzipped him.
“And the first thing?” he asked, the corner of his mouth hitching to that half smile.
Dana smiled, too. “I promised you a blow job, and I think it’s time you got it.”
Chapter Twenty-two
Jack hated pretty much everything about this meeting--including his own attitude about it. He blamed that in part on the mind-blowing blowjob he’d gotten from Dana. And from the equally mind-blowing follow-up oral sex on her that’d left them both sweaty, drained and possibly stupid.
Why else would he have agreed to this plan that required them to meet a stranger at a remote location? A stranger he wasn’t even sure he could trust.
But he’d gotten pressure from all sides. Especially Dana. And Vince, too. Even Grace had gotten in on it and insisted that he not do this meeting alone. Rory Sullivan had exercised his own kind of pressure by digging in his heels. No four of them, no meeting.
Of course, Jack was just pig-headed enough to believe he could have eventually changed the man’s mind if the others hadn’t ganged up against him. Damn Dana.
Damn her blowjobs.
He shot her a glare, and since she was on the middle seat of the SUV right next to him, she didn’t miss it. She just shrugged and kissed him.
Damn her kisses, too.
Behind them in the back seat, Vince had the same sort of disgruntled, concerned look on his face. Unlike Grace who was beside him. She just looked afraid. Which probably made her the smartest one of the bunch. Well, hopefully Rusty and his other PI, Anthony Garza, fell into that smart category since they’d been the ones to deal with the details of keeping them all safe.
Anthony was behind the wheel, and Rusty was on the phone doing some last minute checks.
Jack had some last minute details of his own to cover. He looked at Dana. “You know you’re not to take any chances, right?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “You’ll stay behind me, and if anything goes wrong, you’ll let Vince and me handle it.”
“Ditto,” Vince grumbled to Grace.
Grace huffed. “Dana and I aren’t exactly built for combat,” she reminded them. “But for the record, I do know how to use a gun.”
Vince gave her a flat look. “Jack and I are handling this.”
She didn’t argue. Neither did Dana. Thank God. But even with all of Rusty’s precautions and even with Jack's reminder for her to stay behind him, that didn’t mean they were safe. Far from it.
Anthony stopped the SUV in front of a rustic one-story building that sported an equally rustic sign for Joe’s Catfish Diner. The sign like the metal roof was scabbed with rust. It wasn’t a place Jack wouldn’t have wanted to have dinner, but he could see why Rusty approved it. No trees within a hundred yards. No other buildings nearby. Just a huge concrete parking lot with weeds poking up through the cracks.
“Rory Sullivan’s already here?” Jack eyed the three cars in the parking lot.
“Yes, and he came alone,” Rusty answered. “The Jeep is his vehicle. The other two belong to us.”
Us, as in one of Jack’s PIs who was on the front porch. Another was no doubt on the back.
“Sullivan’s okay with all this security?” Dana asked.
“Didn’t give him a choice on that,” Rusty explained. “Really, the only demand he had was that he see all of you.”
“Then, he sure as hell better have answers that’ll make this visit worth our time,” Vince grumbled.
Jack agreed. He was tired of runarounds, tired of hiding out. He’d never had normal, not really, but he was thinking he might like to give it a try.
They got out, with Dana and Grace positioned between the men. Jack didn’t consider it overkill because while the area would make it hard for the killer to launch an attack, it wouldn’t be impossible.
Jack went in ahead of the others and spotted the man he recognized from the photo that Rusty had managed to get. Rory Sullivan was in his late fifties, iron-gray hair and enough wrinkles that his face was past just having character. He certainly didn’t look like a man who’d been genetically engineered to have a superior bloodline.
Sullivan was seated at a table, but he stood when they entered. He looked past Jack. Past Vince, too. And stared at Dana and Grace.
“Wow,” he said, swallowing hard. “You look identical to Alyssa.”
“Yeah. We’ve heard that,” Dana mumbled.
Sullivan kept staring until the silence went a little beyond the awkward stage, and he finally turned to Jack. “Just like Layton. You, too.” He tipped his head to Vince and mumbled something. “Cornelia Hartwell got her wish. She’s got another chance at getting a third generation baby for her sick project.”
Well, that told Jack loads about how the man felt about eugenics. And Dr. Hartwell. “You didn’t approve of what she was doing?”
“No, I did not. " His mouth tightened. "A lot of people disapproved. August Janski, for one.”
“You know him?” Vince asked.
Sullivan nodded. “He calls at least once a month. In fact, he called right before I left to come here.”
Vince and Jack exchanged glances. “What'd he want?” Jack pressed.
“To talk, I guess. He said two of you had visited him and wanted to know if I’d seen you yet. I told him I was meeting you tonight.”
Jack cursed and knew he wanted to hurry up this little meeting. “You said you were anxious to speak with us. Why?”
“To warn you.” And that was all he said.
“We already know someone’s trying to kill us,” Vince verified. “Is that someone you?”
Jack watched the man, figuring he’d jump to deny it, but Sullivan just calmly shook his head. “I’ve never killed anyone.” He lifted his wrists to show them to thin white scars. “Tried to kill myself once but failed at that, too.”
There hadn’t been anything in the man’s background check about the suicide which meant Rusty needed to dig deeper.
“Who wants us dead?” Grace asked.
Sullivan looked at her, and for more of those awkward silencing moments, he seemed mesmerized.
Jack groaned. “You were obsessed with Alyssa, too.”
He just nodded. “Rightfully so. She was to be my match. Our parents put us together from the time we were babies. Alyssa and I were best friends a long time.”
“Friends, not lover,” Vince concluded.
“Lovers, too, when we were teenagers. Yeah, I knew it was a sin, but Alyssa was a hard girl to resist. Plus, we thought we’d been paired up by God, especially after what happened to Eric in that car wreck.”
“God?” Grace questioned.
The man nodded. “ Cornelia always said we were part of God’s plan. Well, first the plan was with Eric and Alyssa, but when Eric got hurt, Cornelia said I was God’s backup plan, proof that she was doing what she should be doing.” He mumbled something again. Not profanity, Jack realized.
But a prayer.
Sullivan sank back down into the chair. “Layton was paired with the other woman, Lori Davidson. I’m certain they did their own share of fornication.”
“And then Layton met Alyssa,” Jack said, to move the conversation along. Sullivan was no doubt going back down memory lane, but Jack only wanted those memories if it would help save them. “You couldn’t have been pleased when Layton and Alyssa hit it off.”
“I wasn’t. She was mine. We committed ourselves to each other when she was sixteen. Then, Layton breezed in and all she could think about was getting in his pants.” He made a sound of disgust. “They went at each other like animals.”
Dana, Grace, Vince and Jack all looked at each other.
“How’d you know tha
t?” Vince demanded, asking what they all wanted to know.
“I saw them. Took pictures of them to show Cornelia. I figured if she saw what her protégés were doing, she’d put a stop to it. She didn’t. She let them go at each other like that and tried to pawn Lori off on me. I was done with it. I didn’t want Lori or any other woman.”
Vince stepped closer, put his hands on his hips. “You're sure you didn’t kill Alyssa and Layton because you were jealous?”
“I’m sure.” Again, he didn’t seem offended that Vince had asked. “But someone did. Someone who hated Cornelia’s experiments as much or more than I did.”
Vince leaned in and get right in Sullivan's face. “And who exactly would that be?”
“Kirby Arrington, maybe.”
Him, again. Jack didn't like the way Kirby's name kept popping up. “I want more than a maybe,” Jack insisted. “Someone’s trying to kill Alyssa and Layton again. And we’re not them.”
“No.” Sullivan glanced at all them and repeated it. “You’re one step removed from humanity.”
Vince cursed. “If you’re planning to ask about our souls, my advice is don’t.”
“Why?” Sullivan got to his feet again. “Did someone ask you that?”
“Someone,” Vince confirmed, but he thankfully didn’t get into the question that’d repeated in their heads. “Now, who other Arrington might want us dead?”
Another shoulder lift from Sullivan. “Janski might. He really hated Cornelia, hated what she was doing.”
Yeah, and Janski also had an obsession with Alyssa. Of course, Sullivan had that as well, and he seemed a little unhinged.
“What about Eric?” Jack asked.
Sullivan blinked as if surprised. “He’s dead.” But he stopped. “Isn’t he?”
“You tell me,” Jack fired back.
“He’s dead.” Sullivan bobbed his head. “I know you find this hard to believe, but Eric and I became friends.”
Not hard to believe. Both men were on the crazy side.
“If he’s not dead…,” Sullivan started, but a slight smile tugged at his mouth. “Then, I want to see him.”
“You’re sure Eric hasn’t contacted you?” Vince asked.
“I’m sure.” And while that didn’t sound like a lie exactly, Jack figured this idiot was more likely to catch up on old times with Eric rather than turn him over to the police for questioning.
Dead Ringers Page 19