Covert Christmas

by Marilyn Pappao

  His landing was harder, jarring his bones all the way up to the top of his skull. For a moment he lay dazed, teeth rattling, ears ringing. Then she was pulling at him—Get up, get up!—and Davison was leaning out the window above, weapon in hand.

  “Hey, Saldana.” Davison’s voice was nasally for so big a guy. “Long time, no see.”

  Natalia heaved, and Josh willed every ache in his body to move with her, rolling to the side an instant before the bullet bit into the ground where he’d been. He got to his feet, staggered a few yards until he shook off the impact, then grabbed her hand and ran.

  The yard on this side of the house was even more overgrown than the other. Crape myrtles tangled together, big ones sending out runners to form little ones, and weeds covered the ground. Natalia led the way, ducking branches, weaving around saplings, pausing when they reached the sidewalk.

  “Do you have a car?”

  He shook his head. He hadn’t held a steady job since he’d gone on the run with the Feds three years ago. Since parting company with them last spring, he’d worked odd jobs, gambled and stolen to make his way. He couldn’t afford a car, couldn’t register a tag in his name or buy insurance.

  A ruckus came from the back of the house: feet pounding down the stairs, angry voices, creative cursing.

  “This way,” she said, and they ran along the cracked sidewalk to the north. They turned at the first corner, and she skidded to a stop.

  Parked along the curb was a black SUV with tinted windows. It looked like a thousand other SUVs until he noticed what she’d seen right away: the Illinois tag. Releasing his hand, she yanked up the left leg of her jeans, removed a blade from a leather sheath and, in swift, powerful movements, sank it into first the right rear tire, then the front one.

  A knife, a gun and Natalia. He couldn’t reconcile the weapons with the woman he’d thought he knew. She’d been so delicate, so feminine, so in need of him. He’d wanted to take care of her, to protect her.

  What a joke. She didn’t need protection, and she’d damn sure never needed him.

  The hissing of compressed air mingled with the buzz of the streetlamps. He guessed the temperature was about thirty degrees, not bad if you were dressed for it, which neither of them were. When the Feds had hustled him out of Chicago, he’d taken little enough with him: one suitcase of clothes, a single family photo, a new identity and a boatload of guilt.

  He’d left all of that behind when he’d escaped protective custody, except for the picture and the guilt.

  With the knife resheathed, Natalia started running again and he followed a few paces behind. She’d slung the duffel strap over her head and one shoulder and held the bag with one hand to keep it from bumping against her. At the next corner, she turned right again, doubling back toward her house, then darting into an alley halfway down the block. They continued to zigzag from alley to street and back again. His lungs were burning, his legs protesting, when she moved into the deep shadows behind an unlit office building and stopped, crouching to catch her breath.

  He bent at the waist, hands resting on his thighs, and gulped a lungful of cold air. His scalp was itchy under the wool cap, and sweat was trickling down his spine. His brother was the athlete in the family. Josh had always preferred less strenuous pastimes, like counting cards or perfecting a con.

  Or, he remembered, glancing at Natalia, charming a woman right out of her clothes.

  She’d been incredible out of her clothes.

  She’d been incredible in them.

  She’d made him think—

  Grimly he shut down that avenue of thought fast. If he focused too much on what he’d thought, how he’d felt, he might lose sight of the fact that Davison and Leeves were somewhere out there looking for him, and they weren’t wanting to relive the good ol’ days.

  Little more than a blur in the darkness, she set the duffel on the ground, then the zipper rasped open. A tiny penlight she’d produced from somewhere illuminated the contents, and he crouched to get a better view of what she’d considered too important to leave behind.

  It was her version of an emergency kit. There were a couple sets of clothes, all in dark colors. A pair of black running shoes. Travel-size toiletries. A box of ammunition. And what she was after right now: a wad of cash. If it was all twenties, like the bill visible, he’d put it at about two grand. Not bad for an emergency getaway.

  She flattened the money, then shoved half into her left front jeans pocket, the other half into the right pocket, before going still, head cocked to one side. Josh listened, too, and heard footsteps approaching. It wasn’t the solid thud of rubber-soled sneakers, but more of a slap. Dress shoes. No matter what the job, Clive Leeves always wore suits and pricey loafers. The clothes made the man, he claimed.

  Other than the shadows, there was no hiding place—no trees nearby, no convenient Dumpster, not even a car to hunker down behind. They had only two options: run like hell or get inside the building.

  Natalia fumbled in the duffel again, finding a small zippered case. She tossed the duffel to him, then jerked the zipper open, the sound harsh on the night air, as she trotted to the nearest door.

  The case held lock picks, he saw when he joined her against the brick building. A knife, a gun, plenty of cash and lock picks. She definitely didn’t need him to take care of her.

  Leeves was closer, visible in a streetlight half a block away, when the lock tumblers fell into place with a quiet click. Natalia opened the door wide enough to slip in, then closed it the instant Josh cleared the frame, locking it again.

  Total darkness enveloped them. He could hear her breathing, slow and steady, and his own heart thumping, anything but steady. Somewhere a clock ticked, and the furnace hummed, then came the scuff of shoe sole on pavement. His breath caught, and he strained to separate real sound from the overwhelming magnification of the total blackness around him. Was that a footstep? A voice? A hand clasping the door knob?

  The door rattled, and Josh’s heartbeat skipped. Leeves muttered something before his footsteps faded into the distance. Josh slid to the floor. “Jeez.”

  The penlight came on again, cupped in the shelter of Natalia’s hand, moving up to the corners and along the walls. “No cameras outside,” she murmured. “None here.”

  Her fingers were pale, delicate. The first time they’d met, she had offered her hand, and he’d thought it soft, amazingly feminine—functional, of course, but more. He’d held it longer than he should have, had wondered how it might feel against his flesh, not just touching but stroking, caressing, arousing.

  His wildest imaginings hadn’t come close to reality.

  The light and those talented fingers gestured away from the door. “Let’s find a place where we can hide out for a while, at least until Leeves and Davison give up for the night.”

  Nodding though she couldn’t see, he pushed to his feet and started moving, his right hand trailing along the wall for security. “Do you know where we are?”

  “In general, yes. Do I know this building? No.”

  When the hall ended, she turned, passing several closed doors on the left—the side that would likely have windows—before easing open a door on the right. The beam of the flashlight panned across the room: a break room, small, the only window frosted and opening on the corridor, with tables and chairs, a sofa, a microwave and vending machines.

  Josh closed the door, felt for a lock but didn’t find one, then flipped on the lights. His eyes immediately narrowed in response to the brightness, but he forced them back open to take in the room. To stare blankly. “Damn, it looks like Santa’s workshop exploded in here.”

  Everything was red and green or held something in those colors. An artificial tree against one wall was decked with red satin balls, and fake garlands with red velvet bows looped from one corner to the next. Fuzzy red stockings with white cuffs were taped to one wall, names spelled out in red glitter: Doris, Tom, Jimmie, Amy, Anna, April. A two-foot-tall Santa occupied the nearest t
able, with smaller versions, plus angels and reindeer, sitting on every other flat surface, and unlit red and green candles gave off the sickly scents of manufactured cinnamon and pine. All that was missing was music, and even that started when Natalia passed too close to one table.

  Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the faux Bambi at the table’s center sang as its head bobbed and its nose flashed red.

  Natalia fumbled with the reindeer, stopping the song mid-chorus, then stood in the sudden silence, arms hugged to her middle. She’d made a few efforts to change her appearance in the months since she’d left Copper Lake. Her hair gleamed a brassy red in place of the light brown that was natural, and instead of the super-short cut she’d favored, it brushed her shoulders, shaggy and uneven. She’d traded her colored contact lenses for glasses, which meant her eyes were the hazel she’d been born with instead of the violet, green or turquoise she’d preferred, and her clothing was baggy, dark, drab. Nothing that said Look at me; I’m a pretty woman.

  The changes might have fooled someone else, but not Josh. He would’ve known her from a mile away. Hell, he was pretty sure he’d felt her presence long before he’d actually seen her.

  Right now she looked about as happy as she had the first moment she’d recognized him in the yard outside her apartment, and he remembered abruptly that he was pissed with her. Hell, he’d passed pissed seven months ago, when he’d found out that she was one of the Mulroneys’ people.

  He pulled a chair from one of the tables and shoved it in her direction. “I’ve got an idea, Nat. Let’s pass the time with a game of Twenty Questions. I’ll ask, and you’ll answer.” He forced all the anger inside him into his next word, making it an order, a threat and a promise all in one. “Sit.”

  Chapter 2

  Natalia’s hand trembled just the slightest bit, not enough for Josh to notice, before she wrapped her fingers around the back of the chair and pulled it nearer. She didn’t sit, though, not right away. Sitting made a person subservient. It put her at a disadvantage, adding one additional movement to anything she did. “Like I said earlier, we have nothing to talk about.”

  Prowling the room, looking inside cabinets, he laughed. “Right. Just your lies, your deception, your dishonesty, your general lack of trustworthiness.”

  “Interesting insults, considering who’s making them.”

  He shot a look at her over his shoulder. “I never lied to you. I never betrayed you.”

  Never, ever lied? So all those times you said ‘I love you,’ you meant it? But wanting to believe he’d felt something for her seemed pathetic, and asking for reassurance of it seemed really pathetic. “You never admitted to working for the Mulroneys.”

  “I never denied it, either.” His expression was smug. “You never asked.”

  She hadn’t, because she’d known before she’d met him. Patrick Mulroney had given her that information, along with plenty more, when he’d asked her to get close to Josh. He’d given her pictures, too, and she’d taken one look at them and been…

  It didn’t matter now that she’d been vulnerable enough to be infatuated or stupid enough to dream. She wasn’t that woman anymore.

  Wearily she sank into the chair and asked, “What do you want to know?”

  At first he paid her question no mind, as if he’d known she would fold. As if it wasn’t really that important to him. He continued to root through the cabinets, assembling a small cache on the countertop: containers of microwaveable soup, a sleeve of crackers, a canister of coffee. He popped the top off a tomato soup, stuck it in the microwave and set it, then started coffee brewing. Within five minutes, dinner was ready, and her question still hung in the air between them, as impossible to ignore as the Christmas trimmings around them.

  With the meal on the table, he sat across from her, crumbled a handful of saltines into his soup, dusted his hands and fixed his gaze on her. “Why were you working for the Mulroneys?”

  She crumbled crackers into her own soup and stirred until they disappeared beneath tiny chunks of vegetables and tomato-flavored broth. “Why were you?”

  He shrugged. “Because that’s what I did. I worked for people who gave me opportunities I couldn’t find in the law-abiding world.”

  “That’s what I did, too.”

  He didn’t miss a beat. “Bullshit.”

  “You’re saying women can’t appreciate opportunities not found in a law-abiding world?”

  “I’m saying you can’t. You’re about as Goody Two-shoes as they come.”

  Natalia practically choked. He knew now that she’d been working for the Mulroney brothers when they’d met. She’d been at least partly responsible for two attempts on his life. Even now, she was hiding out, working a minimum-wage job with twenty-eight-hundred dollars in cash stuffed in her pockets, a knife strapped to her ankle and a gun in her pocket, and he was calling her Goody Two-shoes? “You’re delusional.”

  His expression didn’t change as he asked again, “Why were you working for the Mulroneys?”

  Lie or tell the truth. She’d done a lot of lying in the past few years. She could do so now. What difference would the truth make? None to her. Once he heard it, none to him. But it would make him move on and leave her alone. Again.

  “I moved to Chicago about five months before we met.” She’d been running scared, with one small bag holding everything she owned and thirty-seven bucks and change. Less than twenty-four hours after she’d arrived, she had been dragged into an alleyway, robbed, beaten and damn near raped. She wouldn’t trust him with that detail, though. She didn’t want his pity or, worse, his accusation that she’d make up such a lie.

  “Right away I got mugged, and Patrick Mulroney rescued me. I had no money, no place to go, no one to turn to, so he offered to help. He let me stay in one of his apartments. He loaned me the money to get back on my feet. He even got me a job with a friend of his.”

  Josh’s gaze raked over her, from the top of the shaggy red hair she hated over her ill-fitting clothes to her chunky boots. She knew he was remembering the expensive clothes she’d worn back then, the pricey car she’d driven…and the pretty, well-dressed prostitutes who contributed greatly to the Mulroneys’ bottom line. The cynicism in his eyes echoed in his voice, cold and hard. “What kind of job?”

  Her stomach muscles clenched. “Secretary. For a plumbing supply company.” She’d earned about a tenth of what that expensive apartment must have cost each month, but she’d thought Patrick was helping her out of the kindness of his heart. She’d been so naive. Given the family she’d grown up with, how had she convinced herself that there were people with kindness in their hearts?

  It was impossible to tell if Josh believed her. Though on the surface he appeared as easygoing as ever, there was a subtle stiffness to his movements, born of anger, resentment, hostility—all the ugly emotions he’d never shown her in the past. “So you live off Patrick’s generosity for a while, and one day he comes to you and says, ‘It’s time to pay up?’”

  “No.” Natalia would like to think such bluntness would have been enough to send her on the run again. Yes, she’d taken advantage of everything he’d offered, but she’d worked hard. She had paid back every penny of the cash he’d loaned her. She’d rarely driven the car he’d provided, and she had been saving to get her own place. She had intended to get back on her feet, in accordance with his original offer, and live on her own.

  She had never guessed he had other plans.

  “He came to me one day and said there was a guy who worked for him who was up to something. He didn’t know if it was just stealing from the company, or using it to cover up something worse. He wanted someone to keep an eye on him—on you—but you knew everyone who worked for him. He asked if I would do this favor for him.”

  Again, it was impossible to tell if Josh believed her or thought she was lying to make herself sound less culpable. She wasn’t trying to get rid of the guilt; it had become such an ingrained part of her that she wouldn’t know how
to live without it. She just wanted to answer his questions and get him out of her life because it had taken her too damn long to learn to live without him the first time, and she was older now. Wearier.

  “And you owed him so much, you just couldn’t tell him no.”

  She shrugged. Patrick Mulroney had been the first person in her life who’d cared. He’d truly saved her that night in the dimly lit alley. He’d restored her faith in people.

  And he’d had an ulterior motive all along. Maybe he hadn’t immediately seen her as a way to control Josh, but he’d known that someday, somehow, she would come in handy. All he’d had to do was show her a little kindness, and she’d been so grateful that she would have done anything he asked.

  Even betray the man she’d fallen in love with.

  “So spying on me, screwing with me, sleeping with me—that was all just payback for him taking care of you.” He was trying to keep his voice level—she knew him well enough to recognize it—but there was an edge to it that he couldn’t control. Anger? Disgust?

  Hurt? Had she hurt him?

  The thought had never occurred to her. She’d known he would hate her when he found out the truth, had known he would be angry at her betrayal. But hurt? He’d cared enough to be hurt?

  A lump formed in her throat, forcing her to swallow hard. “It was a job. Just like every job you did for them.” In the beginning, it hadn’t even been that. A favor, Patrick had called it. A chance to repay the man who’d saved her, she’d thought. But after the Mulroneys’ first try at killing Josh, it had become a mess she couldn’t get out of.

  Because she had made her usual check-in that day. She’d told them where to find him. By the time she’d realized that Patrick and his brother weren’t merely protecting their business but trying to silence a witness against them, it had been too late. She’d been in it up to her pretty little neck, Sean Mulroney had pointed out.