When Love Intrudes (When the Mission Ends)

by Christi Snow

  At that moment, Nathan’s line tightened from a fish. He whooped and fumbled with the fishing pole with his cast while Sam barked and Brian scrambled up with a net, instructing Nathan the whole time on how to reel the fish in. Forget dinner out, this was what Nathan needed to heal…just some pure fun.

  She slipped back inside so she wouldn’t disturb them, but she needed an alternate plan for dinner. The back pond was a catch/release zone so fresh fish were out, but it was such a fantastic night. Brian had an outdoor fireplace. She looked down at her watch. She could run to the grocery store real quick and pick up some premade hamburger patties they could cook out and continue to enjoy the evening.

  Decided, she left a note on the counter and slipped back out of the house.

  * * *

  The shopping didn’t take long to get done, but Toni still gazed down worriedly at the clock on her phone as she strode out of the grocery store doors into the empty parking lot. The guys would be getting hungry soon. She completely missed the mammoth man standing in front of her until she ran into him.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she stammered, righting herself and using him for balance so she wouldn’t crash to the ground in her high heeled boots.

  When she lifted her eyes, his threatening scowl was more than a little intimidating. She took a step back and ran into another brick wall of a man. The man behind her grabbed her upper arms and dragged her a few cars down and behind a nondescript van. She dropped the bags and opened her mouth to scream, but the first guy slapped a piece of duct tape over her mouth before she could make a sound. Frantically, she searched the parking lot for help, but it was surprisingly vacant.

  The first guy leaned down and growled in her ear as he picked her up and carried her. “Relax, our boss just wants to talk to you for a moment. Don’t fight us and no one will get hurt. Yet,” he added with a malicious chuckle.

  For some reason that didn’t reassure her, especially as the van door slid open and they unceremoniously tossed her onto the hard, metal floor. She sat up, brushing her hair out of her eyes and came face to face with a clean-cut man in a business suit, smiling patronizingly. This had to be the boss they’d referred to.

  “Ms. Vincent, it’s so nice of you to join us.”

  She scowled. Like she had a choice in the matter. She reached up to pull the tape off, but the guy in the suit tilted his head at one of the goons who still hovered nearby. The huge guy grabbed her arms again.

  “Now, don’t do that. Right now I just want you to listen and consider what I’m saying to you. This is simply an offer and like any offer, you should think about it for a few days. Nod if you understand what I’m telling you.”

  She nodded, glaring daggers at him.

  “Good, good, I can already see that you are going to be most accommodating and that’s very good, especially for your continued health.” He leered down for a moment to where her chest heaved against her T-shirt with the force of her anger. That look of lust sent a chill of revulsion skittering across her nerves.

  “Well, anyway.” He seemed to recollect what he was doing here. “You have people in your life you care about and that’s good. My boss is also a man in that same situation. Unfortunately one of those people he cares about made a poor choice. As a result, he could go to jail. But you, Ms. Vincent, could keep that from happening and at the same time, keep those you love safe, too.”

  A ball of dread built in her stomach. Who was this man?

  “You see, Ms. Vincent, life is so very unpredictable. I understand your detective has only a single kidney. He could get hurt in the line of duty. A single stab wound from a drugged out punk to his only kidney, and his life would be over.” He shook his head and tsk’ed. “That would be such a waste. Or the young man, Nathan Morrow. Well, we would hate for him to get depressed about the events that have happened and decide to end it all like the young Mark Hunter did.”

  Alarm raged through her as she met his flat eyes. Was Mark Hunter actually murdered? Did these men kill him and then make it look like a suicide? They were threatening Brian and Nathan. Dizziness swamped her.

  He chuckled lightly as he brushed a finger across her cheek. “Ah, yes, now you understand the seriousness of my offer. My boss thinks you look like you need a nice, long vacation. He’s willing to be very generous to make sure that you have plenty of funds to take it.” His voice hardened with threat. “As long as it lasts until after the trial, so you can’t testify. You could even take the young Nathan with you. It might help with his recovery because we do want him to recover completely now, don’t we?”

  He gave her an evil grin before instructing, “Nod yes if you understand my offer.”

  She nodded, but glared daggers at him as she did so. Her insides had turned to jelly from her terror, but there was no way she would let him know that.

  “Ah, such fire in your unusual eyes. You are a beauty, one I would enjoy breaking, but alas, that isn’t in the cards for us.” He shook his head in regret. “You have two days to consider the offer my boss is making. We will call you at that time and make arrangements with you. In the meantime, do not tell anyone about this conversation, including the police department. We have people working for us there and we will know. We would hate for some unfortunate incident to happen to the detective or young man. Yes, that would be a pity. We’ll be in touch.”

  Rough hands again pulled her out of the van, lifting her as if she weighed next to nothing. As soon as her feet touched the ground, her grocery bags were shoved at her and the van sped off. She ripped the tape off her mouth, frantically searching for the license plate on the van. Of course, there wasn’t one. She sank to the ground as her legs refused to hold her any longer.

  It took several minutes for her to overcome the panic zinging through her system so she could get to her car. Once inside, she locked all the doors and palmed her phone, which must have been put back into her purse by one of the thugs after she dropped everything. But as she began to dial 911, she looked down at it, rubbing over the scratched edge, and thought back over the encounter. All that happened this time was a banged up phone, but next time that damage could be done to Nathan or Brian. They’d promised a much higher price than a little scratch if she told anyone.

  She couldn’t risk it. What was she going to do? Panic surged, but she tamped it down. That wouldn’t help anything right now. She had to think, because if she didn’t make the right decision here, Nathan and Brian could die. But she wasn’t going to be like a dumb heroine in a romance novel and hide this. She had to be calm and smart.

  The first way to do that was to get the food home, before Brian became worried. And then hope for inspiration. Not the best plan in the world, but it was all she could do right now. Taking a deep breath, she squared her shoulders as she pulled out of the parking lot. She could do this.

  * * *

  Brian frowned as he looked at the clock for what felt like the hundredth time in the last ten minutes. Where was Toni? Even if she’d done a full-on two weeks’ worth of groceries shopping, it shouldn’t have taken this long. He began typing another text for her when the crunch of tires echoed on the gravel drive.

  Relief flooded him as he caught sight of her car headed toward the house. Rubbing down the back of his neck, he tried to settle the nerves that had been blasting at him for the last half hour. He called out, “Nathan, Toni’s back. I’m gonna go help her unload the car.”

  They’d been fishing, but then Nathan had gotten an urgent text from one of his computer customers so he had come in to take care of the issue. Brian found the note and realized Toni had been home, only to leave again. But that was more than an hour ago. As the minutes slowly passed, his nerves became more and more itchy. Instinct told him something was wrong.

  He jogged out to meet her at the car. As soon as she stepped out of it and he saw her pale face, he asked, “Are you okay?”

  Alarm slammed through him as he saw unmistakable fear flash through her eyes, but she immediately shuttered the
look and gave a brittle laugh. “I’m fine. Last I checked the grocery store wasn’t dangerous.” She reached into the backseat and shoved a couple of grocery bags into his hand, but she didn’t meet his eyes.

  Something happened that she didn’t want to tell him about. He stood and studied her for a moment before she pushed him toward the house. “Come on. I know that teenager is hungry. Let’s get cooking. And by us, I mean you, on the grill. I thought we could eat out in the backyard tonight since it’s so mild out.” She gave him a smile but was forced.

  There was an unmistakable wobble in her speech that wasn’t normally there, and everything about her body language said ‘back off’ right now. But she was here and safe for the moment so he could be a patient man. He knew enough about Toni to know she would be better capable to handle it after she had time to recover from whatever rattled her. Those two weeks when she’d taken care of him had taught him that. She needed time to process things before reacting.

  They both set their bags on the kitchen counter and Brian dug through the contents while surreptitiously watching her. “So, what did you get us to eat tonight?”

  She didn’t hear him as she continued to pull things out and set them onto the counter as if by rote. He gently touched her shoulder. She jumped, swung around and dropped the jar of pickles she held. It shattered.

  “Oh my God.” Her voice was high-pitched and panicked sounding. “I’m so sorry. Don’t move while I clean up the glass.”

  He grabbed her to hold her steady and was surprised to find her shoulders shaking. She tried to pull away, but he held her firm. “Hey, what happened to you at the grocery store?” Putting a finger under her chin, he lifted it so she had to look him in the eye. “Toni, talk to me.”

  Her eyes filled with tears and she opened her mouth, but then Nathan and Sam came barreling into the kitchen. Toni dashed at the tears in her eyes before Nathan spotted them.

  “Nathan, grab Sam,” he instructed. “There’s broken glass on the floor and neither one of you need to come in here and get hurt.”

  “What happened?” Nathan narrowed his eyes as he glanced between the two of them, taking in the tenseness of the scene.

  She gave a slight brittle chuckle. “My bad. I wasn’t paying attention and dropped it. Give us a moment and we’ll have it cleaned up. Then we’ll cook some burgers out on the grill. Sound good?” At Nathan’s nod, she instructed, “Take Sam outside while we get this cleaned up. We’ll be right there.”

  She waited for the door to snap closed as Nathan and Sam left the house before turning back to Brian. “I don’t want him to know anything about this. Can we talk about it after he’s gone to bed?”

  She still didn’t want to look him in the eye and that gave him a really bad feeling. “If you tell me one thing—are you really okay?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  She was shaking, so he pulled her into his arms. He shouldn’t enjoy holding her like this when she was upset, but she felt so right here. Closing his eyes, he inhaled her distinct cinnamon scent, enjoying the press of her breasts against his chest. He didn’t know what had happened, but it had definitely rattled her. Feeling powerless to help, he just held her. She began to pull away, so he brushed a slight kiss across the top of her head, trying to ignore how much he really didn’t want to let her go.

  She shoved a package of meat into his hands. “Go outside and start the cooking. I’ll clean up this mess in here.”

  * * *

  A half an hour later, the three of them sat circled around the built-in campfire pit in the yard, chowing down on burgers. Well, Nathan and he were chowing down, while Toni picked at hers. The food sat like a rock in the pit of Brian’s stomach though as he watched her. She stared out over the massive yard. He hated how quiet she’d become and it worried him about what happened, but she obviously didn’t want Nathan to know anything about it.

  “How long have you lived here?” she asked him.

  “Seven years.”

  She waved a hand over the heavily landscaped yard. “Did you do all this?”

  “Yeah, the entire thing’s been a work in progress, inside and out. When I bought it, the house had been abandoned for a while, so I started work on the inside first. It was definitely a fixer-upper.”

  He looked back at the house, remembering. He’d bought it as a surprise for his longtime girlfriend, Anna, right after he made detective and right before he asked her to marry him. The house was a mess, but they spent many hours lovingly working on it in those early days. It had sat empty for years and had been home to many woodland furry creatures and a few homeless two-legged creatures who hadn’t thought twice about building fires in the middle of the rooms on the gorgeous original wood flooring.

  They worked hours and hours, bringing all those floors back to beautiful. He hadn’t realized at the time, though, that the only thing keeping him and Anna together was their common work on the house. After the first floor was complete, they had decided to take a break on the house and he began to fill those hours with work. He’d been so busy that when she left him, it was three days before he even realized she was gone and then it was only because he noticed the dog was missing. It had been an awful lesson in self-discovery to find that he could be that oblivious. That wasn’t right. She deserved better, and he couldn’t begrudge her leaving.

  There was a very good reason he was single. He did relationships with inanimate objects much better than real people. This house just proved that.

  “I spent the first few years working on the inside, then the last couple of years, I’ve gotten the yard where I want it. I have an album somewhere with all the before pictures. Remind me and I’ll find it so you can see. It truly was a mess.”

  “Well, it’s beautiful now,” she murmured, as she snuggled back into the pillow cushions on the stone bench and watched the fire.

  “So you have this huge house and piece of property,” Nathan mused, “but you don’t have a family, right? You’ve never been married?”

  Brian silently nodded.

  “This isn’t exactly a typical bachelor pad. Why’d you buy it?”

  Brian looked back over the property. “I had just become a detective when I bought the house. It was my little celebration…” he paused, “…and my way of proposing to the girl I was dating at the time.”

  Toni’s shocked eyes flew to his face and her mouth dropped open. He wasn’t sure whether to be offended by that or not. Was it so hard to believe that he could have been that serious about someone once upon a time?

  “For the first couple of years, she lived here with me although we never got around to the wedding part. In the end, she got tired of placing second against my job, so she took the dog and left.”

  “She took your dog when she broke up with you?” Nathan asked.

  Brian nodded.

  “Man, that’s harsh.”

  Brian gave a dry laugh. “It is what it is. I’m just glad she was smart enough to realize we wouldn’t make it before we got married. I didn’t see it like she did at the time.” No, at the time he’d thought he was heartbroken.

  It took him another seven years before he found out what heartbroken really was. And then it was because of a girl who he’d never even been romantically involved with. But she managed to break his heart anyway. In fact, he was pretty sure neither one of them came out of that unusual relationship with their hearts unscathed.

  He looked over at Toni who watched him with compassion filling her eyes. And that right there hurt. She was such a wonderful, giving person. She gave a bit of her soft heart to every person she came in contact with, while he had no heart to give. He couldn’t be her latest stray. Never again. Been there, done that. Not doing it again. He wouldn’t be with her just because she felt sorry for him.

  The night darkness started to settle around them, so he stood to collect their plates. Toni stood to help, but he waved her back down. “Stay here and enjoy the fire. Nathan and I can take care of this. We�
�ll be back out in a moment.”

  When the two men reached the kitchen, Nathan grabbed Brian’s arm. “What happened? Something’s wrong with Toni. She’s tense.” Nathan narrowed his eyes at Brian. “Did you do something to her?”

  Brian shook his head and tried to shake off the immediate exasperation at Nathan’s assumption. “No, I think something happened at the grocery store to upset her, but I don’t know what it is yet. She didn’t want to talk about it earlier, but I plan to ask her again in a few minutes.”

  Nathan watched him for a moment, passing judgment, but he must have seen what he wanted from Brian’s demeanor because he gave a sharp nod. “Okay, I’ll leave it alone for tonight. She made it obvious earlier that she doesn’t want me to know what’s going on, but I want to help if I can. I owe her.”

  “Noted, but I don’t think it’s anything for you to worry about, Nathan.” At least that’s what Brian hoped. They deserved some calm for a bit here.

  The two of them made quick work of throwing away the scraps and loading the dishwasher. Then Nathan headed down the hall toward his bedroom. “I’m out for the night. I have an online meeting with a customer.” He turned around, walking backward and he cocked an eyebrow at Brian. “Now, don’t go wild out there with our girl. Just because it’s dark, doesn’t mean you can get frisky.”

  And just like that, erotic thoughts of Toni underneath him flooded Brian’s mind. Immediately, his erection flared to life. Standing in front of a seventeen year old with a half-hard cock was wrong on so many levels. He scowled at the smart-ass, but Nathan wasn’t too intimidated as he tilted his head at Brian with a wide smirk.

  “Detective, I do believe you’re blushing.”

  “I do not blush,” he growled.