I was far more interested in the stories of other people and places. They were far more interesting.
* * *
It was late afternoon when my desk phone rang. The office had been so quiet that I jumped, my heart racing. I glanced around, but no one seemed to have seen me. I grabbed the phone and hoped my voice would stay even.
“New York Times, Tess Gardener speaking.”
“You’re not an easy person to get ahold of.”
I frowned. “Mom? Why’d you call work?”
“Because I’ve been calling your cell for the past hour and you didn’t answer. I figured you must be at work. You’re always at work.”
I closed my eyes and pressed my lips together. I loved her, I really did, but sometimes, the way she thought drove me nuts. I inhaled slowly through my nose, calming myself before speaking. “Did you need something?”
“Have you talked to Brianne today?”
Her voice cracked when she said my sister’s name, and I heard the concern in her voice. I sat up straighter. Mom might’ve annoyed me with her nagging, and I sometimes thought she was a bit overdramatic about some things, but this was different.
“No. We had a brief conversation on Christmas right before I talked to you, but that was it. I assumed she was deployed somewhere. You know she can’t always call when she’s with her unit.”
“She’s in Costa Rica,” Mom replied promptly. “She’s been there with Red Care since Thanksgiving. Didn’t she tell you that?”
“No. We didn’t really talk long.” I didn’t add that the few times I’d talked to Brianne over the last decade, the conversations had been stilted and awkward. We loved each other, but we hadn’t liked each other in a long time.
“She’s in San Jose, or at least she was the last time I talked to her. That was four days ago, and she’s been calling me at least every other day.” The concern was back, deeper now. “She wouldn’t just stop calling for no good reason.”
“That’s exactly what Brianne would do,” I said dryly.
“Tess, will you stop being snarky and listen to what I’m telling you? Something’s happened to your sister.”
I sighed, telling myself that Mom was overreacting. That was the only valid explanation. “Nothing’s happened to Brianne, Mom. She’s just caught up in whatever it is she’s doing. That’s all.”
“Then why haven’t the other members of the group talked to their families in the past four days?”
That got my attention. “What are you talking about?”
She didn’t even try to not sound smug. “I remembered a couple of the names that Brianne mentioned and did some digging. I think you got your reporter instincts from me.”
I chose not to comment on that subject. I preferred to think I wasn’t like either of my parents.
“I managed to find the mother of one of the young men over there, and that led me to others…you know how it goes.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose and reminded myself that if Mom wanted to compare herself to me, I didn’t need to address it right then. I needed to focus on her idea that my sister was in trouble.
“A dozen people and not one of them has been heard from in four days.”
Okay, that was a little concerning.
“We tried calling Red Care, all of us, and we all got the same runaround. ‘When dealing with overseas networks, it’s reasonable to expect outages.’ Blah, blah, blah. You know how they are.”
“Are you sure that’s not what it is?” I asked, chewing the cuticle on my thumb. “A network outage.”
“It’s San Jose, Costa Rica, not the Middle East or the middle of a South American rainforest.”
She had a point.
“And…” She paused, and I knew this was the real reason Milly Gardener had reached out to me. “Someone called me, all right,” she said finally. “I got an anonymous call two days ago saying that the Red Care group Brianne was a part of had vanished.”
“Who called?”
“I figured someone with a journalism degree from NYU would know the meaning of the word anonymous.”
That was a nice reminder that I did get my sarcasm from her.
“The voice was muffled, as if the person was trying to disguise it. I couldn’t tell if they were a man or woman. They didn’t give their name, and they didn’t answer any of my questions. They said what they had to say and hung up. That’s what made me think something was wrong.”
Shit.
Mom might’ve been prone to exaggeration, but she wasn’t crazy, and she didn’t make up stories. If she said someone called her, then that was what had happened. Why it had happened, that was still a mystery.
“Can you call her?” Her voice had grown small now. Quiet. Filled with an undercurrent I could feel, even from so far away. “Maybe I was getting on her nerves calling so much, and she’ll answer a call from you.”
She didn’t believe that. I knew it, and she knew it, but neither of us was going to say it.
“You have contacts too, don’t you? I mean, you meet people in all sorts of places, right? You can reach out to people that I can’t. You can find out what’s really going on.”
This time, I heard something else in my mother’s voice that I hadn’t heard in a long time. Desperation.
It was that more than anything else that made me agree to help. I loved Brianne, but I really didn’t want to talk to her. But, if she really was in the sort of trouble that Mom thought she was, I needed to find her. Nothing in our past could make me want her to disappear.
“I’ll do whatever I can.”
Three
Clay
I sighed as I looked at the stack of papers I’d finished filling out. I’d barely made it a third of the way through the shit I had to do, and as much as I liked how it numbed my mind, my hand was starting to cramp. Even though parts of this case were personal for me, paperwork still needed to be done. My own feelings had to be put aside until I was finished.
Bureaucracy.
Ray told me that I could keep my information limited to the things that had happened when I’d been working in an official capacity, but I didn’t want even the slightest hint of impropriety in this case. I needed to provide every detail of my role in both the human trafficking case and the escape of Rona’s father. Willis Jacobe wasn’t going to be put on trial, but if anyone suspected Rona had killed her father intentionally, she could be in trouble. She hadn’t, of course, but sometimes people saw what they wanted to see despite the evidence right in front of them.
I paused in the middle of a sentence. Shit. That’s what I’d done with Rona. Seeing what I wanted to see rather than what the evidence told me.
I needed a vacation.
Before I could finish my thought, someone knocked on my door. I cursed under my breath as I stood and went to answer it. I wasn’t in the mood to see people. Hell, that was the whole reason I’d brought my paperwork home with me. Even the handful of people in the office today was too much.
A quick peek through the peephole showed my partner on the other side. I frowned. Ray had been to my place before, but only ever after calling first and telling me why he was coming.
“Is something wrong?” I asked as I opened the door and stepped aside to let him enter.
“You could say that,” Ray replied.
As I went to get our usual beers from the fridge, Ray followed. We stood in the tiny kitchen, me leaning back on the counter while he paced. Six steps one way, then six back the other. I watched him for a minute, wondering what it was that had him wound so tight, and then I asked, “What’s going on?”
“I haven’t told you much about Ellie, have I?”
It took me a moment to place his ex-wife’s name. He talked about his kids, Abby and Steven, all the time, but he rarely spoke about Ellie.
I shook my head in answer to his question and waited for him to continue.
“Ellie’s cousin is Fares Ganesh.”
There was a name I recognized. A lot
of people might not have been able to name the Secretary of State, but everyone in the FBI knew of him. Former army, he’d started running for office at the local level, campaigning as an Independent. He had a reputation for being a genuinely good guy, and no one had ever been able to dig up any dirt on him.
After he’d been appointed Secretary of State, a lot of people in both major political parties had tried to take him down, but his popularity had only grown. Rumor had it that he’d be the first Independent to win the White House if he ever decided to run. At this moment, however, he was in the news for his bold proposal to combine the CIA and the FBI. He wanted to eliminate a lot of the red tape, jurisdiction disputes, and miscommunications that happened between the two agencies by making them one unit, able to work both domestically and internationally.
The opinions on that were varied and rarely discussed beyond a quiet word here or there. Ray and I had never talked about it, not wanting to bring tension into our partnership if we happened to be on opposing sides of the issue, and I doubted he’d come here this evening to bring it up.
Still, his statement about his ex being related to Secretary Ganesh caught me off-guard.
“I didn’t know that.”
Ray gave me a sideways look. “I figured not since I don’t talk about it. They’re like second cousins or something. She’s not really close to him, but they’re not estranged either. They’ve kept in contact good enough for him to call her and ask her to reach out to me.”
I set my half-empty beer down, intrigued. Why would the Secretary of State need his cousin to talk to someone in the FBI?
Fortunately, Ray didn’t keep me in suspense. “The Secretary’s sister-in-law needs a favor. Off the books.”
Interesting.
“There’s a group of Red Care workers who haven’t been heard from in a while. The sister-in-law is involved with someone in the group – a Taylor MacIntosh – and was worried enough to call Secretary Ganesh. He wants us to investigate it, but he can’t send anyone to Costa Rica in an official capacity. As far as we know, there are no signs of foul play, but we both know that doesn’t mean anything. Technically, as a member of the FBI, you can’t be sent on an assignment to another country, which is why you’re the perfect person to go. If something did happen, anyone involved would be looking for the CIA, not the FBI.”
The expression on his face as he said the last statement told me what he wasn’t saying. That if something happened, I was fucked. I would have no backup, and more importantly, no government support.
The best I would get would be an acknowledgment that I was a U.S. citizen. They might admit I was an FBI agent, but that’d probably only make things worse. Costa Rica wasn’t China or Pakistan, but it sure as hell wouldn’t be like getting in trouble in Canada or the UK.
What Ray was asking me to do was dangerous, no matter how he couched it, but I knew my partner well enough to know that he wouldn’t have asked if it wasn’t important.
“Look, it’s probably nothing.” He shoved his hands into his back pockets and turned to face me. “The group went somewhere that didn’t have a network, and they didn’t let their bosses know. Miscommunications happen. By the time you get down there, you’ll probably find them right where they’re supposed to be.”
“Why aren’t you going then?” I asked. “I mean, I know you’ve got a shitload of vacation time piled up, and you’re always complaining about getting nagged to use up that time.”
Ray came over to stand next to me. He mimicked my pose and stared straight ahead. “Look, kid, we both know that you’ve been through a lot since you got here, and you’ve handled it better than I would have.”
I doubted that but didn’t argue.
“When Danvers gets back, there’s a chance he’ll send you to the shrink to make sure all this shit won’t lead to you snapping. I think if you decide to take a trip for a few days, use up some of that vacation time that you transferred in with, by the time you get back, Danvers will have forgotten all about you maybe needing to talk to someone.”
Ray had a point.
“You know,” I said slowly, thinking through all my options at lightning speed. “I’m feeling a little burnt-out. A vacation might be exactly what I need.”
“Here.” He held out a few sheets of paper. “I took the liberty of filling out the necessary paperwork and backdating the submission date. Sign them, and I’ll hand them over to Danvers on Monday, tell him that it’s my fault they weren’t in on time.”
Ray bent the rules now and then, but only when necessary. The fact that he was willing to lie to get me to Costa Rica quickly told me that no matter how much he tried to downplay the seriousness of the situation, he was worried.
That, as much as anything else, had me taking the papers and scrawling my signature on every line. It would be difficult to get a flight, but I’d do what I had to. I was heading to Costa Rica as soon as possible.
Four
Clay
The flight from Denver to LAX had been a bumpy one, making us land fifteen minutes after our scheduled arrival time. Since my flight to Costa Rica was on time, I had to practically run from my gate to the next one. The woman behind the desk was making a last call when I slid to a stop in front of the ticket taker and pulled my ticket out of my pocket.
“You’re just in time,” she said as she scanned my ticket. “A few more minutes and you would’ve missed it.”
“Thanks.” I gave her the most charming smile I could manage under the circumstances, then rushed down the corridor and past the flight attendant who seemed to be waiting for the door to close.
I’d worried about being able to get a last-minute seat, but there’d been a single first-class one available. I would’ve taken economy if necessary, but my legs were grateful that there hadn’t been. I couldn’t imagine anyone over five and a half feet tall being able to fit into those seats.
I quickly shoved my bag into the overhead compartment and settled in the aisle seat next to a bored-looking teenager. With his earbuds in, I doubted the kid could hear the polite hello I gave, but I didn’t bother repeating myself. The flight attendants were walking up and down the aisle, checking for loose bags, which meant we would start moving soon.
I brought out my phone and turned it on airplane mode before tucking it back into my pocket. When I looked up, I saw that I hadn’t been the last one to get on the plane after all. A petite brunette with dark brown curls tumbling over her shoulders was moving to the window seat four rows ahead of me. I couldn’t see her face, but she had a grace in the way she moved, captivating my attention. She turned slightly, giving me a glimpse of her profile. Not so much that I knew what she looked like, but enough to tell me that she was an adult, though I couldn’t quite tell her age.
I kept watching her as various instructions were given, something about her drawing me in, fascinating me. I was dimly aware of the usual plane patter and then of the rumbling beneath me as we began taxiing into position. Everything else was focused on her.
I supposed this meant what Ray had said was true. I couldn’t have been in love with Rona, not if this other woman had captured my attention so soon. Not that I thought I was in love with a stranger, but at some point, during this six-hour flight, I wouldn’t be opposed to saying hello, maybe some light flirting.
I smiled as I leaned back in my seat and closed my eyes. I hadn’t slept well last night, and while there would be only two hours of jet lag to deal with, a short nap now would give me a clearer head when we landed.
Her skin was silky smooth beneath my hands, and my fingers trembled with anticipation, ready to memorize every inch of her amazing body. She was so small and delicate that I should have been worried about hurting her, but she was stronger than she appeared. I didn’t know how I knew that, but I did.
Up, over her ribs. Small, firm breasts that fit perfectly in my palms.
My thumbs moved over her hard, little nipples and she gasped and writhed against me, her bare ass pressing agains
t my stiffening cock. I pinched her nipples lightly, then brushed aside the soft curls that tickled my chest. I pressed an open-mouthed kiss to her neck, tasting the sweetness of her skin.
“Do you taste like that all over?” I asked, my voice a low whisper in her ear. “Like honey and sunlight.” She moaned as I slid a hand down her stomach. “Shall I explore and find out?”
My finger dipped between her folds, gaining a squeak of surprise as the tip passed over that little bundle of nerves. As my finger entered her, I found her slick and hot, making my cock harder than it had ever been before. I traced the shell of her ear with my teeth, and she shivered. I pumped my finger once, twice, then removed it. She made a sound of protest, but I ignored her as I put my finger in my mouth. I licked it clean, savoring the essence of her arousal.
“Honey and sunlight,” I repeated. “One day soon, I’ll have you taste yourself on my cock.”
She let out an unintelligible groan, and her nails dug into my forearm, telling me without words that she needed me as much as I needed her. I returned my finger to her tight heat, caressing her with firm, purposeful strokes.
Having my dick inside her was going to be pure bliss, and I didn’t want to wait anymore. I lifted easily, cradling her against my chest as I walked down the hall to where my bedroom was waiting.
“I’ve wanted this from the first moment I saw you,” I confessed. “I dreamed about what it would be like to be inside you, to have you underneath me.”
I put her on the bed, and she rolled over onto her stomach. Her hair fell around her face, obscuring her features, but I didn’t mind. The next time we made love, I’d look her in the eyes when I slid inside her.
Right then, I wanted to take her fast and hard, pounding into her until she’d feel me for days. For years. I never wanted her to doubt who she belonged to. She was mine. Always had been, always would be.
Finding Brianne: New Pleasures Book 4 Page 2