Max closed his eyes, rubbed his forehead. “Ah, crap.”
“This is about you running from her, Max. Not about you really wanting to marry me.”
“You’re wrong,” he said, but he sounded exhausted. Almost defeated. “Seeing Gina was a major motivator, yes, but … Alyssa, we’d be so good together and you know it.”
She’d put her cell phone between her legs, and it vibrated. Sam. Calling back.
“Our lives would run like a precision automobile,” Max told her.
Alyssa laughed. “That’s supposed to make me want to marry you? We’d bore each other to tears.”
“Oh, yeah?” he said, and he kissed her.
Unlike his approach to the car, she saw it coming. He leaned across the parking brake and gently cupped her cheek, drawing her mouth to his.
And oh, Max could kiss. He could suck her breath right out of her lungs and …
She pulled away, angry at him and angry at herself for momentarily considering that precision automobile thing. Max didn’t love her. He said he did but he didn’t love her. “You’re in love with Gina. You told me you were.”
“That’s not love,” he countered. “That’s something else, something possessive, something, Christ, I don’t know, greedy and twisted and obsessive and chaotic and … I want to own her, Alyssa. I want to wrap her up and keep her safe and put her in … in … some closet somewhere and take her out when it’s convenient for me to … to … Okay. Yes. Sex. It’s about sex and it’s about power and control and it’s about her looking at me with those Bambi eyes and adoring me when she should goddamn hate me, and … that’s not love.”
He pulled her closer to him, so that their faces were mere inches apart. Alyssa could practically smell his desperation.
“Love doesn’t have to eviscerate you,” he told her, using that word on purpose, because she’d used it in the past to describe how she’d felt when Sam ended their relationship. “Love can be something good, something gentle—like what we’ve got.” He kissed her, so sweetly, again and again, punctuating his words. “It can be something that allows us to sleep at night, instead of torturing us and keeping us awake.”
“And you’re just going to forget about Gina?”
He didn’t try to be flip and say, “Gina who?” even as he licked the inside of her mouth.
“I can’t have her,” he said instead. “The same way you know you can’t have Starrett. He’ll rip you to shreds, Alyssa.”
He kissed her again, harder, deeper this time, and God, it would be so easy to just give in. She knew Max. She trusted Max. She even loved him.
But she didn’t want her life to run like a precision automobile. She wanted …
Chaos.
She wanted to be with someone who burned for her the way Max burned for Gina. If that meant she would be incinerated—or ripped to shreds—so be it.
Her phone rang again, and she knew Sam was out there, watching her kissing Max.
She pulled back. “Max—”
“Marry me,” he said, and it wasn’t a question but rather such a possessive demand that she wanted to laugh.
But she didn’t dare. “Marry you,” she repeated instead. “And be forced to leave the team?” Married personnel weren’t allowed to work together. It was true in the military and in the Bureau as well.
“No,” he said. “I’ve figured out a way to get around that. I’ll expand the team. I’ll break it down into four separate groups. I’ll head one, Peggy’ll head one, I’ll bring in Manny Conseco from Sarasota for the third—I really like him—and you’ll head the fourth. With the unspoken understanding that I’ve got ultimate control.”
She was breathless at what he was offering her in terms of her career. He was right. Their lives would be perfect.
In every way but one.
She would always know that Max loved Gina. And it was love, despite his argument otherwise. He just had to figure out a way to flip it around and turn it into something more healthy, something more equal. And maybe then it wouldn’t scare the hell out of him quite so much.
But probably not. If Max could get to the place where he’d let her in, Gina was probably going to scare the hell out of him for the entire rest of his life.
And he’d sleep far better because of it.
Alyssa opened her mouth to tell him that she couldn’t marry him, that she didn’t want perfection, but he cut her off. In true Max fashion, he’d read her mind.
“Don’t say no,” he said. “Just think about it, all right?”
His phone shrilled. Still holding Alyssa’s gaze, he pulled it out and answered it. “Bhagat.” His lips tightened. “Well, hey, Sam, what a surprise. Ready to turn yourself in?”
There was a longer pause then, and something shifted in Max’s eyes. “Wait,” he said. “Hold on. I want Alyssa to hear this, too.”
He pushed the buttons on his phone that would conference her in, and she opened her own phone when it vibrated. “Locke.”
“Sorry to interrupt.” Sam’s voice was tight. “But I thought I should share this information before you and Max took it into the backseat. You know, that’s some interesting stakeout technique you got there, Max.”
“Just tell her what you told me,” Max ordered. “About your neighbor in San Diego.”
“So I went to the McDonald’s here on base, where Mary Lou worked,” Kelly told Tom without so much as a hello as the guards let her into his temporary prison in the BOQ. “I spoke to the manager on duty, who gave me the phone number of the other managers, too. Everyone agreed that Mary Lou kept to herself while she was at work. She didn’t have any friends among her coworkers, and she apparently spent her breaks reading.”
She kicked off her sandals while she talked, and …
Slipped her panties off from under her dress?
“Uh, Kel,” Tom said as she hiked up her skirt and straddled his lap, right there at the table where he’d laid out all of his notes. The door was ajar. The guards couldn’t see in, but they sure as hell could hear every word they said.
“We have only thirty minutes,” she told him, starting to unfasten his pants.
He caught her hands. “Kelly.”
“Wow, that was fast. We’ve only been married a few hours and already you don’t want to have sex with me.”
She was just kidding. Wasn’t she? “The door’s open,” he said, holding her gaze, trying to make it clear with his eyes that if it was only about what he wanted, he’d be inside of her already.
Oh baby, the panties on the floor thing always made him crazy, and she knew it.
Kelly didn’t look away from him as she raised her voice. “Is it going to bother you boys out in the hall if my husband and I have sex on our wedding night?”
There was a pause, then one of the two guards—they couldn’t have been much more than twenty years old—said, “No, ma’am!”
But then the door closed with a definite-sounding click.
“Hey!” that first guard said.
“We can take a few steps down the hall,” the other guard said. “I think it’s safe to say he’s not going anywhere.”
Kelly laughed.
Tom let go of her hands. “See, that’s not SEAL thinking,” he told her as she … oh, yeah. “A SEAL would assume this is the time I’m going to try to get away.”
“That’s just an excuse to listen at the door.” She kissed him.
“We shouldn’t be doing this,” he said, pulling down the front of her dress to discover that she wasn’t wearing a bra. “It’s going to make it harder to get an annulment if we need to get—”
“I lied,” she told him. “I’m not going to let you annul our marriage.”
“If I’m convicted—”
“I’m not going to let you be convicted.”
Tom looked at her as she sat with him buried deeply inside of her, little pieces of her hair falling out of her French braid, her cheeks flushed, her eyes flashing, and her magnificent breasts bare and all b
ut heaving as she breathed hard and fast, unafraid to let him see that he made her pant with desire.
His wife.
“God, I love you,” he gasped. She wasn’t the only one panting.
“I went to the library,” she said, and he had absolutely no clue as to what she was talking about. She’d started moving, that long, slow slide up off of him, and the even slower slide down that made his eyes roll back in his head. “And I asked the librarians if they knew Mary Lou.”
Who?
“They said she came in … a couple of times a week,” Kelly continued raggedly. “One of them told me … she saw her once with a man. She remembered it because it was so unusual—Mary Lou was always alone. But then … there was this one time, with this one guy who was flirting with her … and even carried her books out to her car. The librarian thought they maybe knew each other. And—get this—the library has a surveillance camera … out in the parking lot because—Oh yes!”
He’d let his mouth take over for his hands, drawing her breast into his mouth and swirling his tongue across the rock-hard pellet of her nipple. What an incredible turn-on, knowing she was so hot for him. But it was hard to say if that was what had elicited her enthusiastic response, or if it was the fact that, at the same time, his hand had slipped lower, touching her lightly between them.
“Don’t stop doing that,” she ordered.
And then she was silent for a moment, and it wasn’t until she started talking again that he realized she had been collecting her thoughts, which was pretty damned amazing, since his thoughts had been narrowed down to “Oh God,” and “Oh yes,” and “Hold on, hold on, don’t come yet …”
“There’s a camera in the library parking lot,” Kelly told him, “because there was a … a bunch of robberies and vandalism about eight months ago. The librarians told me … the camera probably acted as a deterrent … because there were no further problems, but they’ve kept it running. And … you’re going to love this—”
Yes, he definitely did love this.
“They never recycled the videotapes,” Kelly announced. “They just labeled them and filed them. Don’t you just love librarians? I’ve got a month and a half of … surveillance tapes from the library parking lot in the trunk of the car. To take home and watch. And see if I can’t find a picture … of Mary Lou with this guy.…”
“Unh,” Tom said, because although none of what she’d said seemed to make sense to him, it seemed obvious from the triumphant ring in her voice that she wanted some kind of response.
“I know,” Kelly said. “It’s probably nothing, but I need to do something … and finding people who actually knew Mary Lou … seems to be a good place to start. I spoke to Max Bhagat on the phone tonight, and he thought that was a good idea, too.”
Max …
“Max suggested … I talk to the other wives and girlfriends of the guys in Team Sixteen … and try to remember the weeks or even months prior to the assassination attempt. If a terrorist targeted Mary Lou as a potential way to get weapons onto the base … he had most likely done some surveillance on the rest of us, too. You know, created additional contacts … that he might be able to use as a backup plan. Max thought we should compare names and even descriptions of people we’d met during that time … see if there’s anyone we all knew.…
“He said to tell you … he’ll get out here to see you as soon as he can,” Kelly continued.
But then she pulled his head up and kissed him, which was good, because it meant that neither one of them had to talk or listen for a while.
It was long after midnight before Sam’s cell phone rang again.
He knew it was Alyssa calling, and he answered by saying, “What’s the situation in San Diego?”
“We’ve got two agents inside of Donny DaCosta’s house,” she reported, “with him since he’s refused to leave, and we’re attempting to locate Mary Lou’s landscaper friend without tipping off the entire city to the fact that we’re looking for him. If someone—Don’s ‘alien’—is following him, it could well be in an attempt to locate Mary Lou. If we do it right, we can pull both men in for questioning at the same time.”
“Max go to San Diego?” Sam asked, trying not to think about that kiss he’d seen. The thought of Alyssa with Max had always been hard to cope with, but seeing them together like that had been unbearable.
“No, he sent Peggy and Yashi out there for now. He went back to Sarasota, for—” She paused. “—a number of reasons, one of which has to do with some political bullshit about some Senate investigating committee.”
“It must be tough, having to spend so much time apart from him,” Sam said.
She didn’t answer, instead taking a conversational turn to her favorite subject. “Are you ready to come in yet?”
“Please don’t hang up on me,” he said.
“That sounds like a no.”
“Let’s not play this game.” He was so freaking tired. “Please? I just want to talk to you.”
“Okay,” she said. The clarity of their satellite connection was so good, it was almost as if she were sitting right beside him. “Tell me about Ringo.”
That caught him by surprise. “What’s to tell that you don’t already know? It was a nickname.”
“I want to know about Ringo, the person. Your sister said that starting around eighth grade, you stopped answering to Roger—that you became Ringo.”
“You called her.”
“Yes,” Alyssa said. She didn’t mention his revelation about his father, although he knew she must’ve talked about that at length with Elaine, who was always more than willing to discuss her theories on the topic. “She wanted me to tell you to turn yourself in. She’s worried about you.”
“She shouldn’t be.”
“She is. She still calls you that—Ringo.”
Back to this again. Sam sighed. “Yeah. Noah and Claire do, too.”
“Were you into music or something?”
“No,” he told her. “It was just a nickname Uncle Walt gave me. That was all he ever called me and, you know, I actually thought at one point that he’d forgotten my real name.”
“That’s pretty unlikely, considering you spent a lot of time at his house, hanging with his grandson. He probably had a copy of your rap sheet.”
“Yeah, well, I was a stupid kid, what can I say?” Sam laughed softly. “Shit, I was dumb as a stone. I still am, sometimes. But I didn’t have a rap sheet,” he added.
“I was kidding, Starrett. So why did you refuse to be called Roger? And why did you drop Ringo and turn yourself into Sam?”
“I didn’t drop Ringo. I just … stopped hanging around with the people who called me that. After Walt died, I just …” He’d found it hard to keep up their friendship after Noah had married Claire. They suddenly had completely different lives. Sam, in the Navy, working his ass off to achieve what had started out as Noah’s dream—to become a SEAL. Then, when he did, it was hard to visit. It seemed almost as if he were rubbing Noah’s nose in it.
And yet the few times he had come back, Nos had seemed so happy with his family and his job. Working for Walt …
“I’m still Ringo,” Sam told her. Although every time he caught sight of himself in the rearview mirror, he gave himself a scare. With his haircut and clean shave, he looked like a total stranger. And forget about the clothes he’d picked up on sale at the Men’s Warehouse. He’d transformed himself into someone completely unrecognizable.
“I don’t think you are,” she said. “I think you took Ringo and packed him up and stuck him in some storage box somewhere—same as you did with Roger back in eighth grade.”
“Okay,” Sam said, trying to pretend that her words hadn’t shaken him. Was it possible she was right? Had he really done that? He tried to keep his voice light. “You now know too much about me.”
“Do you have any pictures?” she asked. “Of you as a kid?”
Sam leapt upon the tangent eagerly. This was much easier to talk about
. “I think Lainey has a bunch. Probably Noah, too. Walt liked taking snapshots. He had a couple of drawers filled with old photos and letters and all sorts of stuff. Documents. I remember he and Dot got this dog, it was probably back around 1962, and they saved the records from the vet from when he was treated for worms. The dog had been gone for years, but that piece of paper about those worms was in that drawer. I used to love to sift through that stuff. You never knew what you would find. And then one day I found—”
He stopped. Was he actually going to tell Alyssa this story?
Yes.
If he told her about this, then she’d understand why he’d purposely packed Roger into a little box—just like she’d said. And maybe she’d also understand why he was still Ringo—why he’d always be Ringo.
At least he hoped he still was.
“One day you found what?” Alyssa asked.
He was going to have to start closer to the beginning.
“Uncle Walt walked with a limp,” he told her, “because Dot’s brother didn’t like the idea of her marrying a black man, and the motherfucker went after Walt with a sharpened shovel and damn near cut off his leg. Walt had just come back from the war, and he’d flown God knows how many missions without being injured, and this little racist prick goes and cripples him for life.
“Noah and I hated all of Dot’s brothers, but we particularly hated the one who cut him—her younger one. We used to imagine what we would have done if we’d’ve been there. We used to rant and rave about vengeance and justice, and Uncle Walt would just chuckle and say he’d gotten the ultimate revenge by living a long and happy life. He had the love of a woman he adored and his two boys to look after him in his old age.” Like Walt hadn’t been the one who’d looked after Sam and Noah right up to the day he died. “That’s what he called me and Nos. We were his two boys.”
Sam had to clear his throat.
“I can’t begin to tell you what it meant to me to have Uncle Walter claim me as his own,” he told her. “Before I met Noah, I was kind of, like, I don’t know, this little wild animal, I guess. I mean, in hindsight it’s pretty obvious that my father was fucking with my brain—although it sure as hell could have been worse, huh? My mother spent most of the time stoned on Valium and Lainey was great, but she was so much older than me.…”
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