by Lora Leigh
Two Weeks Later
“That is so not fair, Dad.” The teenager’s voice could be clearly heard outside the office door as Zoey Mackay pushed into the Mackay Marine Convenience store from the rental and fuel office attached to it.
Whatever her father said was muffled, but there was no mistaking the edge of frustration in the quieter response.
“I’m fifteen, not a baby,” Annette Mackay cried out. “And you don’t let me do anything.”
Zoey winced as she turned to Annette’s mother, Kelly Mackay, to see her propped back on a stool behind the sales counter, sneaker-clad feet resting on the counter, arms folded beneath her breasts, a look of long-suffering patience on her face.
Whatever Annette’s father, Rowdy, said in reply to the accusation had his daughter jerking the door open moments later and stomping into the store, tears turning her summer-green eyes the color of brilliant jewels, though not the first drop fell to her suntanned cheeks.
Shoulder-length, ribbon-straight black hair was pulled into a ponytail, her pretty features set into an expression of stubborn teenage fury, her fists clenched at the sides of the white sundress she wore over her bathing suit.
“Momma, you have to do something with him,” Annette cried out, her heart shattered into a million pieces if her voice was anything to go by. “He’s being completely unreasonable.”
Kelly dropped her feet from the counter, slid from her barstool, and glanced at the open doorway where her husband stood, amusement gleaming in his eyes, before her gaze moved to her daughter.
“Unreasonable? Again? Not your father, Annie. Such an idea shocks me.” And she sounded shocked too, Zoey thought as she ducked her head and moved behind the counter to join Kelly.
“It isn’t funny, Momma.” Annette was obviously within seconds of stomping her delicate little foot if her expression was anything to go by.
“Of course it’s funny.” Her father stepped out of the office, his expression mocking as his daughter turned to him with a look of such teenage disgust he stopped and narrowed his eyes on her. “The very fact that you actually believed I’d give you permission to go is the funniest part. I’m still laughing.”
Zoey smothered a smile as Kelly gave a little sign while throwing her husband a chiding look.
“You are just like Uncle Natches,” Annette cried out furiously, her face flushing in anger. “You would just lock me up until I’m fifty if you could.”
Rowdy seemed to consider the accusation. Bracing his hands on his hips he stared down at his delicate teenage daughter, the look on his face thoughtful.
“Fifty’s going a little far,” he finally retorted. “I’d settle for thirty. Maybe by then I’ll be so senile that the shenanigans you and your cousins get into won’t bother me near so . . .”
He stopped.
Zoey watched curiously as his head jerked up, his eyes meeting his wife’s as she seemed to choke before turning her back on him.
In Kelly’s eyes was such a wealth of laughter that Zoey was suddenly dying to know the private thought they’d obviously shared.
“Aren’t you supposed to be helping your cousins outside?” Rowdy gave his daughter a “daddy” glare, arms going across his chest in a display of pure male command. “Get to it now, before I start checking out those convents your uncle Natches keeps finding.”
“You are ruining my life,” Annette cried, the tone of pure teenage drama causing her mother to choke on her laughter again.
Tossing her thick black hair Miss Annette Theadora Mackay lifted her determined little chin and stalked out the door, pausing outside only long enough to slip her feet into colorful sandals before stalking along the side of the building.
“God.” Rowdy plowed his fingers through his hair in disgust. “I’m starting to repeat the same crap Dad used to yell when he was arguing with me, Dawg, and Natches.”
Kelly turned to him with a laugh. “Better lock the windows tonight. She was more determined to attend this party than the last few she’s demanded to go to.”
Rowdy’s look was filled with disgust. “She thinks she wants to go dance with that little brat that’s been hanging around the marina the last few weeks.” He turned his head to glare at the door before stepping closer and peeking out to check to be sure the brat in question wasn’t there. “He’s going to keep it up I’m going to call Natches.”
Zoey’s eyes widened at the threat.
“Rowdy Mackay, you will not,” Kelly exclaimed. “He’s a kid. Natches would traumatize him.”
Rowdy snorted. “So? He traumatizes me and Dawg on a daily basis; let him spread it around a little.”
“Not to mention his wife and daughter,” Zoey pointed out. “And me and Doogan.”
Rowdy turned back to her, his expression curious. “What did Doogan do?”
Zoey rolled her eyes as she turned to Kelly. “Notice he doesn’t ask what his cousin has done, it’s what has Doogan done. That is just wrong.”
Kelly laughed at the comment, her brown eyes warm and filled with laughter.
A high-pitched scream cut the laughter off.
Before Zoey could think she and Kelly were racing behind Rowdy as he all but tore the door off the front of the store to get to the parking lot.
The scene that met Zoey’s eyes was horrifying.
Terror dragged a weak cry, filled with complete blood-freezing horror, from her as she watched the overly large male trying to drag Natches’s daughter, Bliss, into a van as her cousins, Laken, Annette, and Erin screamed and attacked the heavily muscled assailant. Annette was holding on to Bliss’s arm for dear life, screaming for her dad, her voice filled with such overwhelming fury Zoey knew she’d never forget the sound of it.
At the sight of Rowdy bearing down on him, the dark-clothed, masked assailant pushed Bliss into her cousin and jumped into the van as it tore away, tires screaming.
Annette wrapped her arms around her cousin as the other girls surrounded her just as Rowdy, Kelly, and Zoey reach them.
“There were no plates, Dad, but he smelled like fish and smoke.” Annette was flushed, her green eyes darker, the anger in them a sight to see.
“Get inside.” Rowdy didn’t pause to get details.
Pushing the girls from the marina, he was on his cell phone.
“Get to the dock,” he yelled into the phone, and Rowdy never yelled. “Now, goddamn it. Get here now.”
He’d called either Dawg or Natches, who would call the other. Soon, the marina would be swarming with reinforcements. Grabbing the cell phone from her back pocket, Zoey hit the first number programmed in.
“Babe?” Doogan answered immediately.
“Get to the marina.”
The line disconnected. Doogan didn’t waste time with words; he was a man of action. He’d be there within minutes.
Pushing the girls into the store wasn’t enough. Rowdy didn’t stop until they were safely behind the reinforced steel-and-wood barrier of the walls that surrounded it, his wife and Zoey dragged in behind them.
Kelly rushed to the girls, her hands catching Bliss’s shoulders as her gaze went over the girl. “Are you okay, baby?”
Her voice was trembling, adrenaline and fear crashing through her as Zoey watched Rowdy move to the safe.
The guns were there.
Zoey rushed to him, catching his arm as his gaze snapped to her.
“No,” she whispered. “Not while they’re here.”
She glanced at the girls, especially his daughter as she watched him.
“Let him get his gun, Zoey.” Fury still raged in Annette’s voice. “Uncle Natches will have his. Bet me.”
Zoey felt like knocking her and her father’s heads together.
“Stop being so bloodthirsty Annette,” she ordered the girl. It was an order she heard often. “Your father isn’t getting a gun. . . .”
Tires were screaming outside, and the rev of an engine accelerating from the marina entrance and more rubber howling in protest as the vehi
cle was forced to a stop had them all pausing.
“Bliss!” Natches’s voice thundered through the store.
“Dad. Dad.” Tears choked the teenager’s voice as she tore away from Kelly and met her father at the doorway of the office. Instantly, she was pulled into his arms, lifted from her feet as Natches sheltered her against his chest, one hand at the back of her head as he held her with his other arm, his eyes closing as Bliss wrapped her arms tightly around his neck, the fear finally hitting her.
She was sobbing against her father’s shoulder as such agony creased Natches’s face that it clenched Zoey’s chest.
“Where’s Chaya, Natches?” Rowdy questioned him, his tone icy as Natches opened his emerald-green eyes, and focused on his cousin.
“Dawg . . .” He cleared his throat as his hold tightened on his daughter.
Moving to the chair next to him Natches sat down as though afraid his legs wouldn’t hold him much longer. He cradled his daughter in his arms, her head still buried in his shoulder, her arms locked around his neck. “She was with Dawg and Christa.”
At the same time the sound of tires screaming again just outside the marina had Zoey jumping in fear and moving quickly to look outside the large glass window where Dawg’s truck nearly touched the glass.
Moving aside as Chaya raced inside, tears streaming down her face, Christa and Dawg moving behind her.
“Bliss. Bliss.” Chaya nearly fell as she tried to get to the door, caught herself, then went to her knees in front of her husband and daughter.
“Mom. I’m okay, Mom.” But she was still crying.
Bliss’s looks were nearly identical to Zoey’s but for the emerald eyes and Zoey’s celadon green ones. They were often mistaken as twins to those who didn’t know them.
Behind Dawg, Doogan pushed into the office, his features hard, his brown eyes ice until they found hers. Warmth blazed in them, then relief and love filling them as he moved to her, his arm sliding around her to pull her to his chest.
Still holding her hand over her lips Zoey realized Bliss wasn’t the only one crying. Tears dampened her own cheeks, and as Christa ran to her daughter, the other woman was crying as well.
“Someone tried to abduct Bliss,” she whispered, lifting her gaze to him, the horror of it still resounding through her. “They almost took her, Doogan. Someone nearly took her.”
“And now they’ll die.” He shrugged, that ice lingering in his gaze, his voice. “Soon.”
—
Angel packed slowly, not that she had much to pack. The saddlebags that secured to the back of the motorcycle didn’t hold a lot. The rest of their gear, supplies, and various weapons had shipped out that morning with Tracker’s ’vette and the black Range Rover that traveled from job to job with them.
She wasn’t ready to leave Somerset yet. She wasn’t ready to turn her back on the last dream that had survived her childhood. The dream already slowly dying in her soul.
After securing the pack and setting it next to the door, her gaze was caught by her reflection in the full-length mirror there. Shattered sapphire eyes. Once, when she was a child, her eyes had been a soft gray, her hair dark blonde rather than the sunlit color she kept on it.
She’d resembled her father then, but once she’d hit her teens, Tracker, the man who had saved her, said she began looking like her mother. She could see her mother in her features now. The shape of her eyes, the curve of her brow. The set of her chin.
She was shorter than her mother though, her frame more delicate than the former Homeland Security agent’s. She had her mother’s smile, Tracker would tell her sometimes, when she allowed herself to smile.
Pulling back from the mirror and blinking, not to hold back tears—Angel never cried—but to fight back the hurt, the pain that leaving brought.
Tracker was right; they had no reason to stay. They’d been away when Zoey had needed them, arriving back in town only days after Jack Clay had been killed. Two months was too long to stay in one place without a job. The Mackays were going to start asking questions, and Angel didn’t want questions. She had wanted recognition. A recognition that hadn’t come. All she saw was suspicion, and Tracker was right, it was killing her.
Picking up the pack and opening the door she stepped into the small living room of the cabin they’d taken after returning, her gaze narrowing on the three men standing tensely by the door.
“Eli?” Her gaze flicked to Tracker and their partner, Grog. Both men were tall, imposing, not so much handsome as roughened.
And she knew both of them. Something was wrong.
“Angel.” Eli nodded his dark blond head before turning back to Tracker. “I have to go. I just thought I’d stop on my way.”
He was in a hurry. Moving quickly from the cabin he left Angel with the two men who had rescued her when they were little more than boys themselves. They’d sheltered her, protected her, trained her to fight with them.
“Tracker?” She could feel the tension growing in the room, the knowledge that neither man was explaining Eli’s visit.
“Gear up.” He sighed heavily. “I’m sure you’ll want to stop at the marina before we ride out of town.”
“The marina?” she asked carefully. “What’s happened?”
“Someone tried to kidnap one of the Mackay girls just minutes ago . . .”
She didn’t wait to hear the rest.
She didn’t have to gear up. Her weapons and thigh holsters were in the customized, hidden carriers built into the chest rest of her motorcycle, extra ammo stored with them. She raced outside, Tracker and Grog close on her heels.
Jerking the leather jacket and protective helmet on she was racing from the gravel drive in seconds, fear racing through her system with a shock of adrenaline pouring into her bloodstream.
This couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t be . . .
“Angel, get control of yourself,” Tracker advised smoothly into the radio link built into the helmets. “Let’s see what’s going on before we do anything.”
See what was going on? They knew what was going on. She should have expected this. She should have known it would happen.
“I’m cool, Track,” she promised, her voice even, without the panic she could feel rushing through her. “I have to be sure, though. I can’t leave without being sure they’re okay. You know that.”
“We’re just making sure everything’s okay then,” Tracker repeated. “Friends checking on friends, Angel. Remember that.”
Her heart was in her throat, fear pulsing through her and threatening to steal the small shred of control she possessed.
“Friends checking on friends,” she promised. “That’s all. Nothing more.”
—
The chief of police, Alex Jansen, and his wife, Natches’s sister Janey, were rushing inside to their daughter Erin. Behind them more than a dozen police cars were pulling in, their sirens thankfully silent.
“Zoey.” Mercedes Mackay, Zoey’s mother, followed minutes later with her lover, Timothy Cranston, and Rowdy’s father, Ray, with Christa’s mother, Maria.
The office was packed and still more cars were arriving. Her three sisters and their husbands, hard-eyed, dangerous Homeland Security agents moved in behind their mother. As Zoey’s sisters rushed to check on Bliss, their husbands moved with predatory danger to the doorway, their gazes meeting Rowdy’s before they turned and walked outside.
Rowdy, Dawg, and Natches, along with Alex and Janey were still holding on to their teenage daughters, their embraces tight, protective.
“What happened?” Dawg was the first to ask that question as he tucked his daughter close between his and his wife’s sides.
“We saw the van coming and tried to hurry and get across the parking lot,” Annette assured her father. “Just like you taught us, Dad. As soon as it turned toward us we were moving. The guy jumped out and grabbed Bliss, though, and I think we just went kind of crazy.” She shook her head before giving her father a fierce look. “We were
n’t letting anyone take Bliss.”
Bliss mumbled something at her father’s shoulder.
“What, baby?” Natches’s voice was thick, a hoarse growl as Bliss lifted her face from her mother’s shoulder.
“I lost my knife, Dad.” She pouted. “I did what you taught me to do, but he moved too fast and pulled it from my hand.” She lifted her hand. “And he got his nasty blood on me.”
She had her fingers fisted as though to hold the blood in her palm, and it wasn’t just a smear.
“God love your little Mackay hearts.” Tim sounded like the evil leprechaun her brother and cousins called him, Zoey thought. “Alex, get me an evidence kit.”
“I have it, sir.” The officer standing guard at the door stepped into the room, the evidence kit with its vials and cotton swabs, plastic bags and plastic tweezers was pushed into Tim’s hand.
Tim turned to Bliss, pure pride beaming in his expression as he tore the pack open.
Joining him, Alex Jansen, the chief of police, helped the former DHS agent collect the blood from Bliss’s hand as the adults stared among the teenagers in shock.
“When did you give her a knife, Natches?” Rowdy asked faintly.
“When she asked me to teach her to shoot a gun.” Natches grimaced.
“She was ten,” Dawg drawled, amused as he glanced at Rowdy.
“And she knows how to use it.” Chaya touched her daughter’s cheek gently, her voice trembling nearly as hard as her fingers were. “I taught her how to use it.”
“I’m okay, Momma,” her daughter promised, her expression solemn. “See? I told you teaching me to use the knife was a good idea.”
She was damned proud of herself, Zoey thought, trying to dry her own tears. And she should be. All of them should be.
“Dad, the guy driving was yelling at the guy that tried to take Bliss,” Erin Jansen spoke up. “He said, ‘That damned Mackay is here. He’s not supposed to be here.’”
Rowdy turned from his wife and daughter slowly. “What did he say, Erin?” he asked carefully.
“For the other guy to hurry because you were here and you weren’t supposed to be. Uncle Rowdy, weren’t you leaving when we got here with Aunt Kelly?” Erin asked, her gray eyes narrowed speculatively. “Someone knew you weren’t supposed to be here.”