by Vicki Hinze
Mark seemed to totally grasp their situation. Could he really understand? “Under the circumstances, I considered being asked no questions vitally important. I wanted Tim distant from me.”
“No, you didn’t. You wanted him safe,” Lisa corrected her.
“Yes.” Mandy wouldn’t apologize for that. She’d done nothing any of them in a similar situation wouldn’t do. Protect loved ones. Of course, they would. Well, maybe not in the same way, but they’d protect them.
“I have a couple questions.” Joe rubbed at his neck. “The call last night. The voice. Did you sense even a hint of recognition?”
“None. I don’t think I’ve ever before heard it, which is another reason I don’t think Charles Travest is Jackal. I’d know my own father’s voice.”
“Maybe. Maybe not, especially if he didn’t want you to. Mechanical alterations are easily assessable and commonly used.” Tim looked at her down the slope of his nose, his eyes shielding his thoughts. “Let’s go back to the conversation at your mother’s nine months ago. Was your father in on the Jackal discussion with your mother and you?”
A little baffled, Mandy admitted the truth. “No.”
“Why not?” Nick pushed. “Surely your mother told him about it.”
“I—I don’t know if she told him or not.” Mandy thought about it, then added, “I doubt she did. It would have been reasonable to go to him, of course. He’s a very successful criminal attorney. But my mother never bothered him with anything, so I doubt she told him.”
“Bothered him?” Joe sounded perplexed. “But you’re his daughter.”
Heat rose to Mandy’s face. “He didn’t get involved in minutiae.”
“Minutiae? A man’s daughter’s life being threatened isn’t minutiae, Mandy.”
She spared Tim a glance, kept the heat out of her voice. “When it’s this daughter, it is to him.”
Nick tapped his black-framed glasses on his nose. “Was he like that with your mother, too?”
“I think not,” she admitted, fighting against falling to the old fear that something was wrong with her. That he didn’t love her because he couldn’t. He’d measured her worth and she’d somehow fallen short. “He seemed very loving with her. At times, even doting.” Mandy let the pain of admitting that out loud subside. “At least, that’s the way it always seemed to me. But who knows what really goes on between two people? Especially considering their special circumstances.”
“Loving. Doting. But he couldn’t be bothered when his daughter’s life was threatened?” Until that moment, Tim had seemed more surprised than angry. Now, he looked outraged. Suddenly, he stilled and his expression turned dark and dangerous. “Wait. I understand now.”
“What?” Sam asked.
“He’s married.” Tim frowned. “Charles Travest is married to someone else.”
Shame flooded her. Mandy nodded, unable to meet his eyes. “Yes.”
“Oh, no. How long have you known?” Lisa asked, her voice gentle.
“I wondered most of my life, but I didn’t dare ask,” Mandy said. “Then, when I was seventeen, I didn’t have to ask.”
“What happened?” Joe asked, his voice tender.
“I went to St. Augustine. I like to visit the fort—the Castillo de San Marcos—down in the historical district. It inspires me. You know, in my jewelry designs.”
“You designed even then?” Mark asked.
“I don’t remember a time when I didn’t design.” The memory of that day had her eyes stinging. “I came out of the fort, stepped onto the street, and there he was.”
“What did he say?” Tim asked, clearly trying to get a grip on this.
“Nothing.” Her breath hitched. “He passed right by me.” She forced herself to go on, to speak aloud words she’d only allowed herself to speak once, later that same day when she had asked her mother for the truth about him.
“He didn’t say anything at all?” Nick asked.
“No.” And how that had hurt. “He stared through me as if I were a total stranger.”
Mandy paused, took in a deep breath, hoping when she exhaled, the pain of that day would be expelled with the spent air. “His wife was with him.” Mandy squeezed her eyes closed. “So were their children.” Her half-brother and sister—people she didn’t know who certainly didn’t know she existed. “I didn’t know for fact who they were then.”
A knot lodged squarely in Mandy’s throat. She swallowed it down, forced herself to express what she’d buried deep inside herself a long time ago. “I went home and did some research. Their son and daughter are close to my age. He’s a year older. She’s a year younger.” And on the street, her father had looked at them the way she’d hoped and prayed that just once he’d look at her, but he never had: with love.
“Whoa. That had to be rough, and you were just a kid.” Nick let out an exaggerated sigh. “I bet he’d want to know if they’d been threatened.”
“Nick.” Tim shot him a warning.
“What? Facts are facts, and I do bet it,” Nick said. “Mandy deserved better than she got from him.”
“Dang straight, bud.” Sam snorted. “Sorry sack of . . . peppers.”
Odd saying, but the others found it amusing, not that they’d laughed out loud or anything. But their defending her, being outraged on her behalf touched Mandy’s heart. It felt squeezed. “Thanks. I wish I could say I never considered what his response would be if it had been one of them threatened, but it’d be a lie. I have.”
“That’s cold, looking right through you like that.” Sam swept off his cap and shook his head, sent his riot of red curls swinging. “Jackal or not, I vote we give the man an attitude adjustment.” He jammed the cap back onto his head and tugged the brim low, shading his eyes.
“No!” Mandy forced herself to calm down. “No, but thank you. Don’t waste your time. He’s not worth it.”
“He’s your father.” Mark slid a look at Lisa. “He should man up, right?”
“He should,” Tim said. “But if he didn’t man up for Liv and attend her funeral, he’s not going to man up on anything.”
Nick frowned. “A little gentle persuasion could show him the error of his ways.”
The Alabama redneck stood ready to rock and roll. “Works for me,” Sam said.
Lisa stroked Mark’s face. “He should man up, but let’s all leave it to Mandy to decide how she wants to deal with Charles Travest or to not deal with him. He is her father. She knows what she wants or needs or expects from him, and what he’s capable of giving her. We should trust her and accept whatever decisions she makes.”
“I still want to smack him around, but all right.” Sam gave in. “Anytime you want his clock cleaned, Mandy, you just say the word.“
Moved, Mandy nodded. “Thank you, Sam.”
“Fine. But count me in on the clock cleaning.” Nick closed the laptop. “Accountability is warranted.”
Tim’s jaw tightened. “I don’t like it. Sorry,” he said sliding a glance at Lisa. “It’s reasonable, but you can’t deal rationally with irrational people. It won’t work. Men like him understand one thing. Power through strength. We need to take him down.” Tim glanced at the guys, clearly avoiding Mandy, then back at Lisa. “Yet, there’s merit in respecting Mandy’s decisions. I agree with that. So I’ll bow to her wishes. Reluctantly.” He shifted his gaze to Mandy. “But if he makes one more step toward you, we do this my way. I won’t have him treating you like this, Mandy. It’s unacceptable.”
After all they’d been through, and all she’d done, that Tim stood ready to defend her awakened strange, new emotions in her. It was so far outside her realm of experience. She’d never had a man as her protector. None had considered she needed one or that she might want one. And she had. Desperately, because it proved she was worthy of protection. She’d adjusted, true, and lived without it, but also without feeling worthy.
Now she had not only Tim but his team, which spoke to their feelings for her but even more abou
t their feelings for Tim. “Thank you, Tim. All of you. I—I’m grateful.” More at ease now that the tone of this interrogation had shifted, she continued. “Back then, I decided to let him live. I’ll stick with that now—unless we find out he’s Jackal, which I really don’t think he is.” She sipped from her water, then returned it to the table. “It hurt then. But I’ve adjusted. I don’t need him.”
“No, you don’t. But you wanted him,” Joe said. “He’s your father. He was supposed to be your first hero.”
Tender, she smiled. “Tim was my first hero.”
He met her gaze, held it.
Nick sniffed. “So Travest didn’t say anything to you, but did you say anything to him? On the street in St. Augustine or afterward, I mean.”
“Not then, no.” The shock and pain had been too intense. It’d overtaken everything else. The crowd, the noise, the traffic—it all had faded away. Nothing she could say now could begin to explain how she’d felt then. Betrayed. Hurt. Heartbroken. Abandoned. Rejected. And guilty. So very guilty.
“What about later?” Nick persisted.
“I rarely spoke to him after that. Never, if I could avoid it without being rude.”
“How’d he take that?” Sam asked.
She shrugged. “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure he noticed.”
“How the spit could he not notice?”
“Getting loud there, Sam.” Tim shot him a warning.
Joe stepped in. “So you went home, did some research on him and his family, then asked your mother about him, and she told you the truth.”
Mandy nodded, blinked hard but couldn’t stop the fall of silent tears spilling down her face. “She said that, until I was born, she hadn’t known he was married or that he had children. They had often talked of marriage. Then I was born and . . . she realized . . . She thought he’d marry her, but of course he didn’t. He couldn’t. She told him to get out and stay away from us. But over time, he somehow convinced her he would marry her if he could, but he was stuck.”
“Stuck.” Lisa grunted. “I hear that a lot—at the crisis center.”
“Yeah, well. He didn’t look stuck on the street that day.”
“How did he look?” Nick asked.
She looked him right in the eye. “Happy.”
“His kids, too, I’ll bet.”
“The two that he parents, yes. They looked very happy. I was a wreck.”
Sam swiveled his hat around so the brim rested on his neck. “Man, we have got to do something about this. It ain’t right.”
“We don’t, but thanks, Sam. It’s never been right.” Mandy shook off the weight of the whole sordid mess. “The bottom line is it doesn’t matter. My mother knew the truth and she didn’t leave him.” Mandy had so many issues with that. It had remained a bone of contention between them and especially one between her and her father. How could he do that to either woman? Especially women he supposedly loved? Well, he had loved her mother, and he must have loved his wife or he never would have married her. Mandy tried but she just didn’t understand it. She didn’t understand him, and she’d stopped wanting to understand him a long time ago.
“I’m sorry, Mandy.”
She looked at Tim and saw the pain she felt reflected in his eyes. “I am, too. I should have told you, but all this is such a hard thing to admit.” Not honest. She tried again. “I was ashamed.”
“Ashamed?” Sam elevated his voice. “Why? You didn’t do anything.”
“Take it down a notch, bro.” Joe frowned at Sam. “The situation embarrassed her. What her father was doing. Her mom staying. Both of them lying to her.” Joe glanced at her. “I totally get it, Mandy.”
She was developing a real appreciation for Joe. Tim said he had a special way with women, and he certainly seemed to, she had to admit. “Who wouldn’t be ashamed?”
“We all get it, except for the lump.” Nick told her, hooking a thumb toward Sam. “It’s a bad situation, and you were the one stuck.” He set the laptop aside and dipped his chin to his chest. “They made the choices. You got the consequences.”
“If Jackal did kill my mother, then I’d say she suffered consequences, too, Nick.”
“But Charles Travest didn’t.” Nick said.
Tim and Mark exchanged a look Mandy didn’t understand so she ignored it. “He never suffers consequences,” she said, and then told them what little else she knew of him. Hearing herself, she realized it was pitifully little. Why hadn’t she noticed that before now? Had her anger at him since St. Augustine blinded her to everything involving him? She had attempted to blot him out of her life in every possible way. Civil when unavoidable, but always distant. Different planets would have been close enough for her liking. If not for her mother, Mandy would never have spoken to him again. She had avoided him, except for command appearances. Had he noticed the difference in before and after St. Augustine? If so, he’d given her no sign of it. And that might hurt most of all.
The questioning continued, back and forth and on and on, until everyone felt they had a firm grip on the whole situation and Mandy had laid her soul bare for them to pick over her proverbial bones. Yet, as strange as it seemed, emptying the skeletons from her closet hadn’t been as awful as she’d feared it would be or imagined it could be. And now that it was done, the absence of the secrets she’d harbored for so long about her father . . . That heavy burden finally had been lifted. She felt more relieved than violated.
Sam claimed the floor and looked at Mark. “So what now, bud?”
“You and Nick run deep background on Charles Travest and on his wife and kids. If they’re grown and found out about Mandy and Olivia . . .”
“Got it.” Nick’s dark expression turned even grimmer. “Any are possible suspects.”
“Yeah, they are. And them aside, there’s Jackal and his threat.” Sam tugged at his cap, focusing on Mark. “You know they’re going to come after us.”
They? Who did he mean? Mandy couldn’t imagine. “I doubt the Travest family has a clue about me or my mother, Sam. But Jackal . . . I have no idea. If he hasn’t bothered you in the last nine months, maybe if I disappear, he will leave you all alone again,” Mandy said, praying she hadn’t put them all in greater danger by telling them what she knew. “I don’t know who he is or why the idea of Tim and I as a couple freaks him out.” If Tim knew, he would have said something by now.
“He won’t leave us alone,” Tim told her.
“He’s right,” Nick added. “That isn’t going to happen.”
Before he could add more, Mark looked at Tim. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”
Tim nodded that he was. “We need to force him to come to us.”
“My thoughts, exactly,” Joe added. “The question is how?”
Tim held up a wait-a-second finger then looked at Mandy. “I’d prefer to talk to you privately about this, but with the situation being what it is, there isn’t a snowball’s chance of that happening.”
“Say whatever you like.” After everything she’d disclosed, what could he possibly ask that would hold a candle to that humiliation? Anything else had to be uphill from where she’d been with this group.
He worried his lip a long second, then forced himself to meet her gaze. “Do you love me, Mandy? I mean, still. Right now.” He stammered and sputtered, his expression changing to show his disgust with himself, then he asked her again. “Do you love me now?”
Nothing but honesty. Not ever again. “More than anything.”
Pent up tension melted from his face. “And you’re still in love with me, too, right?”
“Definitely,” she confessed. “Since the first time I saw you.”
He smiled and pivoted his gaze to Mark. “Then we’ve got a plan.”
“What plan?” Sam asked. “I didn’t hear a plan.”
She hadn’t heard a plan either.
Joe rolled his gaze. “Are you dead from the neck up, or what?”
Baffled, Sam lifted his hands, palms up
. “What?”
Mandy was just as confused.
“And we put our lives in your hands.” Joe squeezed his eyes shut, as if praying for patience.
Sam took offense. “Yeah, you do—and I’ve saved ‘em more than once. And I still ain’t heard no plan.”
“Come on, Sam. She’s still in love with him.” Joe lifted a hand, swung it between her and Tim. “Jackal doesn’t want them married. We want Jackal here, so . . .”
Sam’s face flushed. “I know you ain’t saying—“
“I am,” Tim interjected. “A wedding.”
Tim wanted to marry her? Mandy’s heart started a hard, skidding beat. Skipped like a well thrown rock on water.
“That should get Jackal here.” Joe mulled over the possibility.
Nick agreed. “And probably an army of his cohorts with him.”
“Jackal has an army?” Mandy asked. Who was this guy? That, her mother hadn’t told her. Mandy had tried everything, but her mother had flatly refused to discuss it, and she’d stuck to her silence. “What army?”
“NINA,” Tim said.
Another man with another woman? “Who is Nina?”
“NINA isn’t a she. It’s an organization.” Tim lifted a hand. “I’ll explain later. For now, it’s enough to say they’re terrorists, really bad and powerful, and they want us all dead.”
Her mother knew people like that? Terrorists? Mandy couldn’t believe it. But Tim did, and he wouldn’t lie to her. He must have good reasons for thinking Jackal belonged to this NINA group.
Mandy forced herself to still, to let the shock wear thin, knowing it’d be with her a long time, then asked Tim, “If they’re so powerful and they want you dead, then why haven’t they killed you?” She shrugged. “Not wishing it on you, but if they threatened me to get to you, then clearly they know where you are. So why drag my mother and me into it. Why not just kill all of you?”
“They’ve tried twice in the last year,” Tim told her.
Sam and Nick nodded, backing Tim up on that, and Lisa added, “That’s right. They came close both times, too.”
“Lisa, don’t.”
“Well, it’s the truth, Mark. Don’t what? I was there. I saw it.”