Barrel Proof (Agents Irish and Whiskey)

by Layla Reyne

  “Aidan, listen, please,” Mel whispered.

  “Just get out. I can’t.” Aidan’s unchecked brogue sounded ragged and tired. Between the smoke inhalation and screaming over the blaze, Jamie was surprised any of them had a voice left. Would he, once he opened his mouth and spoke?

  “I ordered him not to tell you,” Mel said.

  “One problem at a time. Right now, I just need him to wake up.”

  “When he does, let him explain.”

  “I said get out.”

  Jamie desperately wanted to lay eyes on his partner, but he kept his lids closed, dreading the anger that accompanied that vibrating voice. Mel wisely fled, the click-clack of her heels fading as Aidan’s heavy footfalls approached. A warm hand ran up Jamie’s good leg. “Come on, Whiskey. Wake the fuck up.”

  Jamie’s mind reeled back to the Galveston crash, to the last time he’d woken to the smell of smoke and Aidan’s urgent voice. He doubted Aidan would greet him with the same desperate kiss this time.

  Air whooshed near his side, a chair cushion compressing, then a light weight hit the bed. The smell of citrus soap tickled Jamie’s nose, cutting through the smoke lingering there. He peeked through his lashes, taking in the room. Gauzy nets tied around wooden bedposts, adobe cream walls, doorless entries and glassless windows, shutters thrown open to let in the outside air. Still in Cuba, then, or somewhere nearby in the tropics.

  Gaze trailing closer, he spied Aidan at his side, head pillowed on folded, bandaged arms. His wet hair was the color of bricks—deep, rich, warm red—like the clay dirt back home in North Carolina. Aidan was no less handsome with his usual dyed-blond locks, but the reversion to his natural auburn for their last case had been one of Jamie’s fantasies come true. He loved the red, wanted it to stay that way forever. It wouldn’t, especially now. Chances numbered, Jamie lifted his hand and tunneled his fingers through the dark strands while he still could.

  Aidan let out a huge breath and reached up a hand, covering Jamie’s and tangling their fingers. He didn’t speak, didn’t lift his head, and Jamie savored the reprieve. The both of them alive. Together.

  Several long minutes later, Aidan laid their entwined hands on the bed and straightened. He had a few scrapes on his face, a bruise at his temple, but most haunting of all were this glassy, stricken eyes. “Your legs?”

  “In pain.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Your arms?” Jamie asked, eyeing his gauze-wrapped forearms.

  “Burns, and some scratches from the fall.”

  “Who patched us up?”

  “Mel had a private doctor meet us here.”

  Jamie glanced around the room. “Here?”

  “Santiago still. CIA safe house. Mel called in a favor.”

  Jamie wriggled his toes again, grimacing. “Or two.”

  “It’s only temporary. You’ll need surgery back home. As soon as you’re stable enough to move, Mel will fly you back.”

  Jamie squeezed his hand reflexively. “Not you?”

  “I’m taking the boat back with Danny, now that you’re awake.” Aidan retreated, sinking into the chair. Jamie felt his absence, in presence and spirit.

  “Thank you for getting me out of there,” he said.

  “You’re my partner. I wasn’t leaving you behind.”

  “Am I still your partner?”

  Aidan leveled him with a hard stare. “Tell me.”

  Jamie struggled up to one elbow, wincing as the movement sent waves of pain to his head and down his side. “Maybe we should wait until we get back.” He didn’t want to have this conversation—this inevitable argument—while he was too weak to move and without the hard evidence he’d collected to present to Aidan.

  Too bad his own dead man’s confession had forced the issue.

  “Tell me,” Aidan repeated, voice gravelly and glare cold as ice.

  Jamie’s arm gave way and he fell back onto the bed, staring up at the mosaic-tile ceiling. “Project Angel.”

  “I saw that file on your remote server. I was going to ask you about it... Wait, Angel, as in Gabriel?”

  Jamie nodded; it’d seemed clever then, silly now. “I’d planned to tell you when we got home from Charlotte.”

  “How long have you known?”

  He looked at Aidan and flinched at the anger staring back him. “Baby...”

  Aidan slapped the chair’s armrests and shot to his feet. “Back at the compound, you said Gabe and Tom. How long have you known my husband and my former partner conspired with Renaud?” He paced the length of the room beyond the foot of the bed.

  “About Tom, two weeks. About Gabe, Mel showed me a picture of him and Renaud together in Morocco, right after we got back from Galveston.”

  Aidan halted at the end of the bed, spread his arms, and wrapped his hands around the bedposts, as if he were holding himself back from attack. “Five months? Five fucking months? The entire time we’ve been sleeping together?”

  Jamie gulped and took up ceiling-staring again. He couldn’t bear the betrayal in Aidan’s eyes or in his taut frame. He fought to keep his voice steady, to hide his own rising anxiety. “The picture was on the flash drive she received. Houston postmark.”

  “Not on the one she gave me.”

  “She didn’t copy everything over.” He lowered his voice. “I’m not even sure she gave me a complete copy.”

  “She gave you a separate flash drive?”

  “The same night she showed me the picture.”

  Jamie chanced a glance, as Aidan’s knuckles grew white. “Why’d he do it?” he gritted out, jaw clenched so tight Jamie saw the muscle jump.

  “Gabe or Tom?”

  “Both.”

  “Tom, because Isabella’s grandmother is illegal.”

  “Renaud found out?” Aidan pushed off the posts, yanking the gauzy nets down as he went. “That was the leverage. Fuck!” He balled up the nets and heaved them at the corner. “I tried so many times to help them. To get it fixed once and for all.”

  “I’m sure you did.” Jamie wanted to reach out, to soothe Aidan, but his partner was pacing again, hands fisted in his hair.

  “And Gabe?”

  Jamie laid his hand over his chest, trying to keep his racing heart from breaking through his ribs. “Renaud came to him as an investor.”

  “Because Robert sent him there.”

  “That part was news to me.”

  “And the leverage?”

  Jamie stated the obvious first, hoping to soften the blow. “That his uncle had ties to Renaud.”

  Aidan came to the party with a sledgehammer. “He could have disavowed Robert. It wasn’t worth the relationship to him.” He marched to the side of the bed, looming over him. “There had to be more.”

  Rotating his head, Jamie stared at the opposite wall and fought back another wave of nausea. He’d dreaded delivering this blow every day for the past five months. Had avoided it, knowing the delay, the secret kept, would cost him the most important relationship of his life.

  Calloused fingers gripped his chin and wrenched his face back around. Aidan didn’t have to say the words; his eyes demanded the truth.

  “KAG Holdings,” Jamie forced out.

  “I don’t—”

  “Kathryn, Aidan, Gabriel.”

  Aidan’s hand fell away, slipped off the bed, as he stumbled back into the chair.

  “Renaud turned it around on him,” Jamie explained. “He had Martin Westley, his corporate paralegal on payroll, put all the other companies he used to leverage his pawns under KAG’s umbrella and set up accounts in KAG’s name to launder his money. You and Katie were the account beneficiaries.”

  Aidan blanched, no doubt worried most about his niece and goddaughter. “But we didn’t
find those?”

  “Gabe shut them down, as soon as he learned what was going on. He was protecting you and Katie.”

  “After he got in bed with a terrorist.” Aidan covered his face with his hands and crumpled, forearms to his knees, shaking. “He put Katie in danger. Oh, fuck.”

  Jamie couldn’t just lie there, not while Aidan hurt like this. Grinding his teeth against the searing pain, he righted himself and swung his legs over the side of the bed, careful of the braced one. He leaned forward and wrapped his hands around Aidan’s wrists, pulling his hands away from his face. He waited for Aidan to give him his eyes.

  “Gabe didn’t know. As soon as he found out, he closed the accounts and consulted an attorney at Eldridge. She advised him to confess everything, to you.”

  Aidan’s horror morphed into resignation. He was an attorney too. He knew well enough where things had gone from there. “And she wrote up meeting notes and opened a file, which Westley routed to Renaud.”

  “That’s why you all were targeted, the night Tom and Gabe died in the accident. Renaud was cleaning up loose ends. The attorney’s dead too.”

  “So this whole time, Gabe was the link. Not something I did. Not some old case.”

  Jamie nodded.

  “I’m the last loose end,” Aidan said.

  “You were, but now...” Jamie flicked his eyes to the doorway, to where Mel’s and Danny’s voices were raised in an argument somewhere else in the open house. “There are more.”

  Aidan snatched his hands away. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “She ordered me not to.”

  “Wrong answer.” He rocketed out of the chair, snatched a tumbler off the table by the door and hurled it at the opposite wall, glass shattering.

  “Aidan, please, stop.” Jamie used a bedpost to haul himself to standing, swaying. He moved toward his partner, putting as little weight as possible on the braced leg, the pain excruciating but not as unbearable as the thought of losing Aidan. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”

  Aidan grabbed another glass and heaved again, keeping him back. “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t want to break your heart until I knew the whole story.”

  “Too late, baby.” He spat the cherished endearment, full of spite and hatred.

  The verbal punch landed right where he intended, robbing Jamie of breath. “Irish, please,” he whispered hoarsely. “I’m sorry.”

  Aidan shot forward, forcing Jamie back to seated. “I trusted you, with my back and my heart, and you lied to me for months.”

  “I’m sorry, I thought I was protecting you.” Jamie reached for him, and Aidan batted his hand away.

  “Wrong! We protect each other. Keeping critical information from me about our case, about Gabe and Tom, about my family, is not protection. It’s lying. And me not knowing the full story means I can’t protect them or you.” His shrill voice pained Jamie’s ears.

  “Baby, please.”

  “Renaud came after my husband, he came after my partner, he came after me. Fuck, Jamie, he keeps coming after me, and now he’s coming after you too. And my brother and my best friend. Maybe even my goddaughter. You didn’t think I needed to know that? I could lose them. I could lose you! I told you what would happen if I loved and lost you.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Jamie stood and reached for Aidan’s arm again.

  Aidan wrestled him off, shoving his chest two-handed and sending him splaying back on the bed. “I can’t, Whiskey.” Chest heaving, his harsh breaths and harsher words came out a strangled blow. “I can’t do this.”

  * * *

  Aidan poured the last of his Macallan 18 into a tumbler and tossed the bottle into the bin, the glass clanking against the other empties inside. He took a long swallow, savoring the sherry-finished burn. Heat suffused the cavernous holes in his chest, but only for a fleeting moment, vanishing completely as he eyed the manila folders on his dining table.

  No color.

  An accurate depiction of the past week. Nothing but a sea of black and red bleeding out to numb lifeless beige. He’d assembled the folders himself, their contents downloaded from the Project Angel file on Jamie’s remote server. Aidan hadn’t seen or spoken to his partner since Cuba. Hadn’t responded to any of his calls, texts or emails. But he had followed the instructions in Jamie’s encrypted email for accessing the remote server.

  Sipping his scotch, Aidan slid into a chair and dragged the file labeled Gabe in front of him. He opened it and flipped through the pages he’d read a dozen times over, a vicious cycle he couldn’t break out of.

  First was the picture. Renaud in a Moroccan bazaar, but unlike the picture Aidan had seen before, the terrorist wasn’t alone in this one. Next to him stood tall, dark and beautiful Gabe. Aidan trailed his fingers over the strong lines of his late husband’s face, over the pressed ecru linens covering his long limbs, over the attractive smile stretched across his handsome face. This was Gabe’s first meeting with Renaud, before he realized the mess he’d waded into. He would have been excited to hook an international investor on the line, a whale of a client.

  Aidan’s heart swelled with remembered pride and admiration. Gabe could effortlessly work a room, striking up conversations with potential clients and gathering business cards with ease. He made millions playing the Silicon Valley game. Like a natural, like a pro, not like an immigrant’s son who’d spent the first half of his life washing dishes in his father’s restaurants and scrapping on the football field.

  He flipped the page to Gabe’s intake sheet. His husband’s willingness to shortchange proper due diligence in favor of speed—something that flew in the face of Aidan’s legal training and had led to more than one heated argument between them—had gotten himself and Tom killed. And had put Aidan and Katie in the crosshairs.

  Bypassing the KAG documents, he swapped Gabe’s file for Tom’s, the thinner of the two. Aidan skimmed Tom’s bank records and his stomach soured, recalling similar spreadsheets tagged to the SFPD detectives who’d shut down the crash investigation. For their part in the conspiracy, they’d bled out on the courthouse steps. Renaud cleaning up loose ends. Aidan flipped over Tom’s balance sheet, revealing the phone records showing Tom’s signal call to the SUV that’d rammed them that night.

  His husband and his partner. They’d both lied to him. And his current partner had too. For months. The man he’d risked his heart to love again had kept the truth from him, had lied to him for virtually all of their partnership.

  All of the time they’d been sleeping together.

  Aidan slammed the file shut and tossed back the rest of his whiskey, burning away the betrayal that stung his gut, boggled his mind and wrecked his heart.

  The doorbell rang. Near midnight on a rainy Friday night, he wasn’t expecting visitors. Rising, he stepped toward the garage, to the gun safe there, but then a familiar voice called through the door over the pitter-patter of the late February rain.

  “Hermano, it’s me.”

  Instead of going to the door, he took his tumbler into the kitchen and set it in the sink, out of easy grab-and-hurl range. He’d been on a destructive roll lately, grabbing whatever was in reach when betrayal and regret overwhelmed him, when the simmering anger boiled over.

  “Aidan, I know you’re in there,” Mel called again, and he knew it’d only be a minute more before she used her own key.

  He crossed the living room and swung the front door open, glaring at his unwelcome visitor. “You’ve got some nerve showing up here.”

  “You’re my brother,” Mel replied.

  “In-law,” he corrected. “Former.”

  She flinched—a direct hit—but rallied, shoving past him into the house. She tossed her coat and purse on the couch and spun on her high-heeled boots, her wide-leg slacks and handkerc
hief-hem tunic swishing around her. Impeccably dressed as always, a casual observer wouldn’t notice anything amiss. But to Aidan’s trained eye, her curly hair lacked its usual bounce, her brown skin didn’t glow with warm undertones, and the lines around her eyes and mouth were etched deeper, more pronounced.

  “You weren’t at the office this week,” she said.

  “Did you miss the part where we almost died? I took some time off.”

  “We’re FBI agents. That’s always a possibility.”

  Arms crossed, he leaned a hip against the far end of the couch. “Don’t I know it.”

  Another flinch. She talked over it. “You haven’t been by the hospital either.”

  “I called.” Every day, harassing Jamie’s care team for updates since he’d gotten word Mel and Jamie were back from Cuba and Jamie had been checked into the hospital for surgery. Nothing snapped in his knee or ankle, only severe strains, and they’d reset the fracture in his lower leg. He’d spent a day in recovery, a couple with in-patient physical therapy, then been discharged this morning. “He’ll be fine. Six to eight weeks and some rehab. Nothing he didn’t go through with the prior injury.”

  “Desk duty will be good for you two.”

  Aidan shot off the arm rest, stalking toward her. “You’re crazy if you think I’m sitting at a desk anywhere near him.”

  She held up her hands, palms out. “Aidan, please.”

  “He lied. I can’t trust him.”

  “I ordered him not to tell you.”

  “I don’t care,” he snapped, tired of this refrain. Jamie had still made the choice to obey, to not tell him the truth. So had she. “And how the hell am I supposed to trust you?”

  Rather than argue, Mel reached into her pocket, withdrew a flash drive, and set it on the bar on her way into the kitchen. “That’s a complete copy.”

  He approached the bar, regarding the stick warily. “The last one wasn’t. Maybe also not the one you gave Jamie. Why should I believe you this time?”

  “I’ve got nothing left to lose.” She opened the liquor cabinet, pushed around bottles, and withdrew the aged tequila she favored. “I’ve lost my mentor, my brother, my colleague, my best friend and my lover.”