by Dianna Love
“It’s not like that between us.”
“Only lust. Good. I would not like to see you go through a second divorce.”
Valene snarled low and quiet, “At least I was willing to stick it out.”
Henri huffed impatiently. “I will say this one time and be done. You still blame me for quitting. You want to know why I ended that farce we called a marriage? Not because I wanted a man more than I wanted you. I wanted someone who was completely in the marriage with me. You may not have been the one to leave, but you never really committed to us.”
“How can you say that?”
“Shh! The barbarian is staring as if he intends to pummel me. I will not tolerate that in my own shop!”
Valene calmed down and turned around, giving Dingo her I’m-okay smile then waved him off as if he’d been standing too close. He nodded and walked toward the front of the shop.
She swung back to glare at Henri. “I was there day and night.”
He scoffed. “You might have been physically present, but not in spirit. You couldn’t really love me, not the way I wanted, because you loved someone else. You still love someone else. Do not get me wrong. I wish you would tell me who the man is that left you. I would go find him for you and you would be happy again, as you were before we ruined a perfect friendship by getting married.”
Was he right? Had she failed to do her part from the start?
“We were good friends, Valene,” he said gently. “We just weren’t good spouses.”
“I do love you Henri.” She blinked away tears. “I really tried…”
He leaned forward and took her hand in his. “I love you too, but not the way I love Geoffrey and not the way you loved some crazy guy who let you get away.” His Adam’s apple moved with a hard swallow. “Your father had just been diagnosed with cancer. My cousin had overdosed. I’d lost my closest family, the only one who not only accepted me but loved me, and you were terrified of losing the one person who you lived and breathed for.”
That was a horrible time. A dark smear of misery they’d both suffered through. “I wouldn’t have gotten through that without you.”
“Nor I without you, but somehow we confused comfort with love and both of us were terrified of being alone so we insured we would not be. You must admit that what little sex we had was not memorable, and I say that even though I had much experience with women and am a skilled lover.”
“And humble. Never forget how humble you are.”
His eyes twinkled at the jab, then softened with remorse. “The worst part of all that was after our divorce, I missed my good friend. Geoffrey is my best friend and all that I could ever want for a partner, but you and I? We go back to high school when you were my first real friend. I hated losing that most of all.”
She swiped at a tear, nodding. “I’m an awful person. I’ve been blaming you all this time because… well …”
“Because you didn’t want to admit the truth about loving someone who left you. And you thought I’d left you too.”
She did love Dingo in a way she’d never felt about Henri.
At least, this was what she’d expect love to be, but Dingo was not someone who would allow any woman to love him. Without that acceptance, all the love in the world was nothing but heartache on her end.
“I’m sorry, Henri. So sorry for all the time I’ve let bitterness damage our friendship.”
“You’re forgiven only if you promise to be my friend again.”
Dingo cleared his throat.
She twisted around to find him eyeing Henri’s hand on hers with a black look in his gaze as if Henri’s touch might contaminate her with a deadly disease.
Henri removed his hand and leaned back. His phone buzzed. “About time. I have been calling Geoffrey for an hour. He is normally much more considerate about calling back.”
Valene shot Dingo a back off look that he ignored.
She sighed and turned around to find Henri making a call, which must not have gone through because he was texting next. He grumbled at the phone, “Why aren’t you calling me?”
“What’s wrong, Henri?”
“Geoffrey. He hasn’t returned a voice mail I left a few minutes ago, but he sent me a text that he left me a surprise on my desk.” His smile was intimate when he spoke of Geoffrey.
“Go see what he left you or you’ll obsess.”
“I do not obsess.”
“Yes, you do. Go,” she chided him just as she once had when they’d studied together and he’d obsessed over whether he should ask someone out who had grabbed his attention.
“I shall return promptly.”
While Henri was gone to his office in the back, Valene walked over to where Dingo glowered. She angled her head in question. “What?”
“Are you two still together?”
Dingo was bothered by Henri.
The imp in her said, “It’s been an amicable divorce.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“We’re still friends.” Just saying that felt good all the way to her toes. She’d missed Henri so much, but she craved being with Dingo. Henri had been spot on.
She’d never been in love with him.
She’d just needed someone to hold on to in the shit storm her life turned into the week Dingo vanished.
Dingo’s jaw muscled flickered. He kept looking at the door to the back then at her as if he’d just figured something out.
Valene hooked her thumbs in her jeans. “Spill.”
“Did you divorce him because you figured out he was gay?”
“No, I knew that.”
“Huh?”
“Henri left me.”
“For a guy?”
“Not really. Henri is bisexual and we became friends back in high school. He’s always been comfortable with either sex and became involved with a man named Geoffrey sixteen months ago, but that had nothing to do with why he left me. We married for the wrong reasons.”
“What reasons?”
She didn’t think she could handle explaining that to Dingo, because she might slip and say something she’d regret.
“Valene! Valene!” Henri rushed toward them from the back. He was ghost white.
“What’s wrong?”
“Geoffrey’s note. It says he is speaking to someone who asked Geoffrey to validate a Galileo scroll for which he wishes to find a buyer.”
Valene should have known better than to trust Geoffrey just because Henri did. “He was supposed to tell me so I would meet with the seller.” She wanted to strangle Geoffrey and Henri now, because Henri had opened his big mouth in front of Dingo.
But first she had to keep Henri from going into full drama mode.
Henri was babbling. “Geoffrey’s not answering my call. I sent our emergency code of 999 that means to call immediately. I can’t reach him.”
Valene grabbed Henri’s shoulders. “Calm down. He’s fine. The cell connection might not be going through. Your call to me was all jumbled up.”
“You don’t understand.” Henri’s eyes were wild. “Geoffrey is going to meet this man. Geoffrey said he wants to prove to me that he is just as tough as you. He found out the scroll is rumored to be an Orion Hunter artifact so he told this man he was with the Orion Hunters. Geoffrey said the man who called him got the referral from Aram!” Tears poured down Henri’s face.
Oh, shit.
Dingo stepped in. “Give me Geoffrey’s cell number.”
“Why?” Henri stared at Dingo as if he’d forgotten anyone else was present.
Dingo’s entire demeanor shifted from his earlier adversarial one to a tone used to talk someone down who was hysterical after a catastrophic accident. “Finding him requires information. Everything you can give us from that note, to anything else he told you and his cell phone number is a good start.”
Henri still panted in panic but he started nodding. “Yes, yes. I will get everything. The note is in the back.”
Valene still had a grip on Henri
’s shoulder that she used to hold him in place so she could look him in the eye. “Look at me. We’re going to bring Geoffrey back.”
Henri’s eyes floated in tears. “Please. You have to. He is everything.”
She hugged him. “I know what it is to lose that one person. I won’t come back without him.” Then she let him rush off to gather what Dingo needed.
She hadn’t made an empty promise.
Dingo had connections with people capable of stopping a national disaster. Surely all Dingo had to do was call the secret bat cave phone and Arthur would locate Geoffrey.
Chapter 31
Dingo thumbed keys on his cell phone as he led Valene from Henri’s business, across the parking lot toward the car he’d have to swap tags on soon. He had two more in the trunk of the GTO.
Valene’s footsteps tapped close behind. “You can find Geoffrey, right?”
“Maybe.” He sent the text and crossed his fingers that this was one of those times Nick being an unorthodox black ops player would work in Dingo’s favor. With Nick, you might have to dive through the jaws of a whale to rescue the key to a mission, knowing the only way out depended on getting shot out of the whale’s blowhole.
“What do you mean maybe?” she snapped. “Don’t you have people you can call?”
“I’m not on good terms with my people right now. I’ll do what I can, but there’s no guarantee that I can find him.” Dingo reached the car and unlocked both doors from the driver’s side.
She argued with him over the roof of the car. “That’s bullshit. You work with some agency that can track GPS and crap like that, right?”
“I did and it’s not something I want announced to the world. Can we discuss this in the car?”
She had the decency to look chagrined and glance around, then dropped into the car.
He slammed the door. “I’m trying to get some help, but this situation might not have happened if you would just trust me enough to tell me what you’re involved in.”
That buttoned her up.
What the hell did Rikker want with the scroll? Or did the scroll even have anything to do with Rikker? Dingo thought back over the meeting right before he took off from Sabrina and the team. Nick had gotten intel that the Orion Hunters were looking for an artifact. An important one.
A scroll and something to do with Galileo maybe?
History had not been Dingo’s strong suit in school. He’d majored in getting into trouble and the only school record he’d ever set had been for the most suspensions.
But he did not forget details when it came to a mission.
He said, “I know you’re hunting for a scroll.” Then he made a wild guess based on the way Henri had described why Geoffrey was at this meeting. “A rare one from Galileo.”
Still she said nothing.
This was his chance to convince her to tell him what was going on and break through to get her on his side. He hated to go after her weak point, but Valene had few and one was clearly her relationship with Henri, as a friend.
She didn’t explain the wrong reason she got married, but Dingo could pursue that later. First he had to figure out the connection between the scroll and Rikker.
He asked her, “Why are we going after Geoffrey?”
She looked at him like he was delusional. “He’s in danger. Why are we still sitting here?”
“I’m waiting on someone to contact me with a fix on Geoffrey’s location, if my friend can do it,” Dingo explained, then went right back on point. “Why is Geoffrey in danger?”
Here came Tornado Valene. She leaned forward and he was pretty sure she was straining to keep from lunging at him. She shouted, “Didn’t you hear Henri? Because the man Geoffrey’s meeting said he got the referral from Aram and Aram is dead. D.E.A.D! Navarro killed Aram so Navarro might be the person meeting Geoffrey.”
“And why does Navarro care about this scroll?”
She opened her mouth and clamped it tight.
“Godammit, Valene! I’m trying to find Geoffrey and keep you alive!” Dingo had his arm pressing so hard on the console that it should have cracked when he shoved up close to her. “Now is the time to be straight with me.”
“Why are you interested in all this? You wouldn’t even have known about the scroll if not for Navarro and Henri.”
Because Rikker was in the middle of this whole fiasco, but Dingo couldn’t breathe Rikker’s name or tell Valene that he knew about their meeting in the restaurant. “The bottom line is that I’m here right now and I’m–”
His phone buzzed.
The energy inside the car stilled with a mutual truce as Dingo read the text that had Geoffrey’s location as of six minutes ago. He shoved the phone into his lap and put the car in gear, peeling out of the lot.
“Did you find him?” Valene asked, voice coming back down to earth and riddled with anxiety.
“Maybe.”
“Enough with the maybe already!”
“Look, Val. I’m trying to tell you the truth. I need you to trust me to do my job. I have a location from six minutes ago, but his phone is moving. We’re headed west. I’ll get updates as long as the signal is moving. That’s all I’m telling you until you meet me halfway on this.”
She flopped back against the seat, elbow propped on the door and her head against her hand. “I have everything on the line with this deal. I need this, Dingo. You have no idea how much.”
Because her dad was sick. “Then tell me.”
“Why? And before you get cranky, I’m asking why because you don’t want the messy part of being involved with someone. You want to come and go. I get that, but you can’t expect me to share everything that’s going on in my world just because you decide to drop in out of thin air and you need the information. You want to know why I married Henri?”
Talk about a switch in topics, but Dingo couldn’t stop himself from saying, “Yeah, I do.”
“Because the week you disappeared, my dad was diagnosed with lung cancer, stage four. He’s living with one lung right now. Henri and I have been best friends since high school, but you didn’t know that because you didn’t want to know that. Henri’s closest family member was a cousin he loved dearly who died of a drug overdose the day after I heard about my dad. We were both hurting and had nobody except each other.”
Her words cut over and over, slicing deeper each time.
Dingo had always been there for Sabrina and Josh.
He’d never stuck around any female long enough to learn her last name, much less meet anyone in her life. But in fairness to him, those women hadn’t wanted anything else from him. They wanted someone who made them feel like they were playing with fire and forgot about him before the door hit him in the ass. If he’d stuck around, those women would have left first.
He was not being shoved away again. Ever.
But then he met Valene and she screwed up his wiring.
Or maybe she untangled it and he didn’t know how to be with someone who acted as though she wanted him to stay.
His cell phone buzzed. He pushed the button to hear the text from Nick. “Your target is still heading in the same direction and you better have something to tell me after you find him. Sabrina’s turning into Attila the Hun and Josh looks like the Grim Reaper. My next text is going to be coordinates for saving my ass after I go off on one of them.”
Dingo put the phone down and drove from memory of the area, but he had at least another seventeen or eighteen minutes to get close to Geoffrey. He had to say something. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here when that happened. If I could have been here, I would.”
“How can you say that when all I’ve ever had were temporary numbers for you? I called your number back then. A lot. Your phone should have exploded from the texts blowing up on it.”
“I told you I–”
“I know. You went undercover with Garcia. There were no phones undercover, right? Because you were off on another mission and you couldn’t risk contacting me.”
“Exactly. And that’s why I ended up marrying Henri. I was terrified of losing my dad who has been the only constant in my life besides Henri. But more than that, you became a part of my life and I wanted you there. Even though you couldn’t give me anything back that I wanted to give you. I still wanted you there.”
“Why want someone who isn’t worth keeping?”
“Is that what you think, Dingo?” she asked with soft sincerity.
“Think about it. You just said I couldn’t be depended upon and I wasn’t there when you needed me.” Now he was getting jacked up.
“But you care about me. Whether you can admit it or not, you do. I just don’t understand why you came back and never told me.”
He slowed to get off the interstate and make a right into a busy flow of traffic. “I saw you two walk out of your apartment. You were smiling and laughing. He had his arm around you.” It hurt all over just seeing that in his mind. “I was trying to figure out when would be a good time to drop into your apartment when your finger flashed. Left hand. The only ring you used to wear on that hand was a black onyx carved with hieroglyphs or something.”
“From my dad,” she whispered.
Right. Another thing he hadn’t known. “Once I knew for sure you were married, I saw no point in interfering.” He’d figured one of them might as well be happy.
“We were hardly together. My dad required a lot of time. Henri was busy keeping up with my clients and trying to develop his rare map business. He told me today that I was never in love with him and he was right. I love Henri as a close friend, but I didn’t hurt as bad when he packed up to leave as I did when I realized you were never coming back.”
Dingo’s heart pounded like a boxing match going on in his chest.
Was she saying what he thought she was saying?
His phone buzzed and he fumbled it, lifting the phone to hear the text from Nick telling him the signal was stationary and giving him information on the mall where the phone was parked. Dingo dropped the phone and wheeled hard to cut left against traffic and lurch into the mall parking area that spread out forever.