by Christa Wick
Her lips sealed tightly together as soon as the veiled protest left her.
"Come with me, Miss Archer," he ordered, his voice dipping low before he said her last name.
With a feeling of deja vu from the Colorado flight home washing over her, Melanie planted her legs apart and crossed her arms over her chest. "Where are you taking me?"
She could vividly imagine how the officer at the front of the line would have responded to her flash of resistance. But the man standing before her looked like he wanted to pass out.
"To my office, where I will explain why I pulled you," he answered, his voice low and intended for her ears only.
Before he turned, she caught a flash of several badges hanging on a lanyard attached to his right shoulder button. There was the magic green LAX card that would open all the doors in the airport. In front of it was his TSA badge identifying him as a supervisor. Beneath the picture was his name.
M. Greggs
By the time they reached the office, Officer Greggs' earlier perspiration had turned into a waterfall. She'd never seen someone sweat so much just from walking at a slow pace.
"I'm not sure you're cut out for this kind of work," she said, taking the seat he offered.
Snorting, he sat down after removing a handkerchief from his back pocket. He dabbed at his moist forehead and upper lip.
"Catching bad guys, keeping the skies safe," he answered after a few more dabs. "Piece of cake, I assure you."
Reaching under his desk, he hesitated a second. "I need to step out for a moment. Can I get you anything to drink?"
"I'll wait until I'm on the plane."
The look on his face as he stood and reached into his pocket before leaving the office told Melanie she wasn't getting on the plane, at least not the one listed on her boarding pass.
Alone, she folded her hands in her lap and looked around the room. It clearly wasn't a temporary work space for him. Pictures lined the wall. She saw what looked like a younger, more muscular version of him in desert camouflage, another of him completing TSA training of some kind, and a third with him standing next to a wheelchair occupied by a young boy.
After a glance over her shoulder, she reached forward and rotated one of the picture frames on the man's desk. Same boy, a few years older, the wheelchair newer than the one in the picture on the wall and pimped out in the same colors as the Boston Red Sox cap she had left in Cammie's care.
She turned another frame, the man and the boy on the deck of a large boat with what looked like deep sea fishing rods behind them and maybe a marlin, the boy's hand gnarled into a thumbs-up gesture and a grin on his face that was bigger than the fish.
Rotating the frames to their original positions, she folded her hands in her lap once more and waited for the officer's return.
He came back a few minutes later with a sealed water bottle that he placed in her hands before taking a seat on the other side of the desk. She thought about reminding him that she couldn't take the bottle past the security lines, but they both knew that was no longer a consideration.
"So you went from the Army to the TSA," she said with a nod at the pictures on the wall behind him.
His throat bobbed nervously and then he nodded.
"Pay sucks," she mused, her gaze pointedly sliding to the third picture. "But I imagine the healthcare coverage makes up for it."
His face pinched forward but he remained silent.
"Does your son like movies?"
"Doesn't everyone?" he asked, his expression shifting yet again, the guilt momentarily washed away to be replaced by caution.
"Does he like Declan Bain movies?" she clarified.
He blinked and she knew she wasn't paranoid.
"The ones he's allowed to watch," the man admitted. "Funny thing, we had no idea who Declan was until the first time he helped Jamie out with a fundraiser."
First time...
Melanie closed her eyes for a few seconds, searching for composure and an extra measure of resolve. When she looked at the man again, she nailed him with a firm stare.
"I'm not interested in getting you in trouble," she started. "I just want to get to Atlanta."
"I've been assured you will," he answered, his return gaze unwavering. "Since that's what you want."
Her head dipped. Trying to outstare the man was tiring, especially after the last few days of torment.
"Did he call you?"
"No, ma'am," Greggs answered. "I called him. Tim -- the officer who checked your documents at the front of the line, is new. I was evaluating him on camera when he asked you to remove your hat and glasses. I recognized you immediately."
Great, she was famous.
Infamous, rather, and for all the wrong reasons.
Greggs' phone vibrated in his pocket. He fished it out, tapped at his screen for a second and silenced the device. Rising from his desk, he jerked his head at the office door.
"I need to step out again."
Passing where Melanie remained seated, he thrust his hand toward her. "I'm Mike, by the way."
She sighed, hesitated the length of a slow blink, then accepted the handshake. Whatever happened next, she wasn't going to cost Mike his job -- or the healthcare he needed for his son. She just wished he wasn't already certain she would not complain. She knew he was certain, too -- he had stopped sweating.
Hearing the door shut, she tried to relax her shoulders. She considered praying that Declan had come to his senses since her text to him at Cammie's place, but someone had assured Mike that she would get to Atlanta despite her getting held up in security. And she knew he had already talked to Declan at least once.
She didn't want to talk to Declan at all. She was too weak, would be too weak for a long time.
The door opened and she turned in her seat to make one last appeal to the TSA supervisor's common sense. Instead of the starched medium blue shirt with its black and gold TSA epaulets and black polyester pants, she saw an expensively tailored silk jacket and dress slacks.
Having memorized the narrowed waist and muscular thighs, she didn't need to look up to know that she would be having her talk with Declan after all.
She looked up anyway.
Less than nine hours had passed since she last saw him. He looked like it had been nine years. His eyes seemed hallowed out. The skin, warm and golden even when he wasn't being bronzed on set, looked pale and jaundiced under the yellow fluorescent lights of the office.
Which meant that she looked even worse than he did.
Cammie's words from that afternoon swam up and slapped Melanie.
They'll stop reminding you that you don't look like that Shayna bitch.
Right, she chided. She didn't care how washed out she appeared or how good Declan looked despite the sudden gaunt cast to his face.
She waited until Declan closed the door and sat down before she said anything.
"You should have told your friend to go back to doing his job when he called."
"Desperate men do stupid things."
His comment earned a snort from Melanie. "So do grateful ones."
The snort turned into an annoyed huff. "I'm not going to report him."
"I didn't think so," Declan confessed. "That's not who you are."
Right, she had proven herself to be a pushover any number of times, first on the set with Suzanne then with the way she had let Declan treat her at the last airport they'd been in together and how she had let him boss her into leaving her apartment on Normandie.
Not wanting to think about all the lesser surrenders she'd made in the past few weeks, she directed her thoughts elsewhere.
"If the press finds out about this, they'll draw a parallel to what Strake is claiming you did."
His hand slid to wrap around the arm rest of her chair. "But we both know differently. Isn't that what's important?"
"I keep trying to save your career--"
His fingers curled lightly around her wrist. "I'm happy to be one of those 'Whatever Happene
d to' headlines if it means being with you."
Freeing her wrist, she planted her head against her hands. "You are--"
Her mouth snapped shut as thoughts of Skye and Willie surfaced.
"Crazy?" he supplied. "It's okay to say it, Mel. I don't mind cluing you into the fact that you are at least a little bit crazy, too."
"No." She fluttered both hands at him. His feelings, whatever they were, depended on her being sane, an even keeled pushover who didn't introduce any drama into his life.
Her whole damn theory depended on her being sane.
"You are here with me, risking your heart," he argued. "It's the craziest thing I've ever done."
She tried to turn away, squirming in her seat, but he reached across her lap with one hand, seized the other arm rest and wrenched the chair so that they faced each other, her shorter legs tangling with his.
He leaned forward until his gray eyes were a hand span away from hers, their noses even closer.
"Since I brought you into my bed," he scolded, "I've been attacked professionally and personally on a daily basis. If I wanted a quiet, drama free life, I would have dumped you back in your Normandie Avenue apartment."
Melanie straightened and slunk as far away as the chair's back would allow her to move.
"Since I've met you," he pressed on, "I've done things no rational man would. Including allowing Mike to risk his freedom and his ability to support his son."
Her face corkscrewed, the lips pushing out in a quiver. "You don't have to shout."
"You don't listen when I say it softly," he countered, his tone gentling. Releasing his hard grip on the arms of her chair, he cupped her chin.
"Touch my nose."
Melanie felt her brain swoosh and tilt inside her perfectly immobile head at the odd command.
"What?"
"Touch my nose."
She hadn't misheard him and he appeared earnest in the command.
"Why?"
He pulled away, his hands returning to rest against his thighs. His tongue swiped once between his lips and then he rolled them together.
"From the first time I realized there was something deeply wrong with my mother until you told me you love me, I've been waiting to find out that I was a late bloomer for schizophrenia or some other mental illness."
She shook her head. She had more or less accused him of acting like a crazy man, but she didn't think he was actually crazy. He was creative, intense, and a great many other things, but Declan Bain was not mentally ill.
"Think about how I was raised in a paranoid atmosphere. You remember what I said to you at your mother's house -- the very first thing that left my mouth?"
"It had to be you," she repeated.
"Skye didn't just think the government was out to get her, or the aliens. She thought the entire universe was sentient and targeting her. When I turned around to find the woman I'd been fantasizing over for two months standing next to my father's new wife, I felt like the universe was out to get me. That scotch I threw back while you were inhaling the peppermint schnapps was the first alcoholic drink I've had since Willie's apartment fire."
She stared at him, eyes misting, but couldn't get her mouth or any other muscle in her body to work.
"The alcohol makes things that are already too vivid in my mind even more real," he explained. "It makes me walk and talk in my sleep and blurs lines between dreaming and an awake state."
Reaching up, he touched his nose, rubbing at the bridge between his eyes, his fingertip catching each time he hit a particular spot. It was a gesture she'd seen him make many times over, but not when he was stressed.
"When I was sixteen, I broke my nose trying to levitate," he explained, his Southie accent thickening. "I had dreamt that I learned a technique, quite by accident, that worked one hundred percent of the time. All I had to do was lean further and further forward and then I would be floating on air."
Declan paused and studied her for a second before he went on.
"Sometimes, I remember my dreams as fact days or months after I've had them."
He dropped his hand back to his lap. "So I learned to build in little reality checks. When I touch my nose in a dream, it's never been broken, so I know I'm asleep."
Feeling the last of her resistance crumbling, Melanie sagged in her chair. She searched her memory for all the times she'd seen him rub his nose like that, just more discreetly.
In the limo at the private airfield -- that was the first time she could remember.
In the screening room was another.
And that first walk to his bedroom stood out in her mind because of how his cheeks had colored when she caught what he was doing.
The rubbing was one of those details she hadn't been able to fit into her picture of who Declan was and what he wanted until that very moment in Greggs' office.
Every time Declan had stroked that small spot, he was asking himself one question.
Was he dreaming? Was he dreaming she was with him, not running away, opening to him, accepting him, loving him?
Declan leaned forward, his body careful to avoid contact with hers.
"There are parts of me I was never willing to cede to my mother or Willie, Melanie. I have ceded everything to you."
Slowly, she lifted her hand, one finger tentatively extended, and stroked the bridge of his nose, the bump invisible but detectible by touch.
Closing his eyes, Declan grinned.
"I was actually itching to do that," he confessed.
Her finger slid lower, then she brushed three of them against his lips.
"All that time on set, I didn't think I deserved you," he whispered. "Or that you didn't deserve my baggage. I was afraid you wouldn't walk out of my life to save yourself if..."
Retreating, he glanced away.
"You bloomed late," she filled in.
His Adam's apple bobbed erratically, her heart bobbing with it.
"I'm sorry," she said, covering his hands with hers and leaning far enough forward she could rest her cheek against his. "I love you. I'm sorry I was too much of a coward to admit it this morning."
Before Declan could respond, a discreet knock sounded at the door and then it pushed open. Entering the room, Mike found Declan and Melanie pressed cheek-to-check.
"Either I need to hustle Miss Archer through security, or I need to record a reason why she has a boarding pass but isn't boarding."
She looked at Mike over her shoulder. "A reason?"
Was it illegal to lie to a TSA officer if he knew she was lying?
"Well," he answered. "You didn't check any bags, so that's good. If, say, you forgot prescription medicine--"
"Yes!" she blurted then her cheeks colored. "Do you need to know wh--"
Mike shook his head. "We have the discretion not to pry unless certain factors are present, and they are not present for you."
Exhaling, she realized she had been holding her breath. Freeing a short giggle, she softly brushed the side of her nose against Declan's cheek.
"I'll just clear you in the system and then you can leave," Greggs said, emphasizing the leaving part before he walked out of his office, closing the door so that they were alone again.
Hesitating for a few seconds, Melanie rolled her lips.
"What is it, love?"
"I know there are paparazzi all over the world, but I'm getting pretty sick of Los Angeles."
He nodded. "I should have at least a few weeks' reprieve from anything to do with the lawsuit. We could visit your mother in England. "
She had been fishing for that exact suggestion, but she quirked her mouth to the right. "Visiting my mom also means visiting your dad."
Declan offered a quick lift of his brows and a side glance, his lips curving in a smile and his nose crinkling. "Where would you and I be if he hadn't finally showed up?"
She matched his smile with a broad grin then closed her eyes, her head bouncing with too much emotion. Opening her eyes, she gave him an impetuous peck just
below his ear.
"When can we go?"
"A day or so," he answered. "I'll need to arrange a charter."
Looking down, his foot nudged her two bags.
"And we might want to pack a few more items. Maybe there's even time for you to finish that red dress?"
Her face lit up at the suggestion and she bobbed her head.
"Plus there's one more thing I want to do before we leave."
She looked at him, not only the question of "what" but complete trust stamped on her face.
He flashed another grin, his shoulders pushing forward for a second.
"The Alfa Romeo is parked in the lot outside. If we get out of here as fast as Mike wants us to, I think we can squeeze in a sunset drive up the coast."
She winked at him. "Top down?"
"Of course," he answered, closing in on a kiss that didn't end until Mike opened his office door and kicked them out.
Chapter Forty
They finished their drive at Oxnard, stopping for the night at the Mandalay Beach hotel. Dinner was brought up to their suite. Sitting on the balcony, curled around one another, they ate and watched night drape the ocean.
"I didn't think I was going to be this happy ever again," Melanie said when the meal was finished.
"It was good sushi," Declan teased.
Pouting, she shook her head then buried her face against his shoulder. "You know what I mean."
"Sort of." He traced the curve of her jaw with the back of his fingers. Reaching her chin, he tilted her head up. "But I hoped I could find you before you gave up on us."
Ashamed of how she had run, she eased her chin out of his grasp and hid her face against his neck, softening her retreat with warm kisses that Declan relaxed into. Feeling something vibrate against her hip, she pulled back.
"Your phone again."
Tension glazed her voice. The attorneys had called Declan twice since they had left the terminal at LAX. Technically, they called him half a dozen times, but he had turned the phone off after the first call and only turned it back on when he was registering for the room.
Declan had offered the barest of explanations as to why the attorneys were concerned. He promised more detail when the lawyers were done freaking out.
Which totally freaked her out.