by Jenna Mills
He found her at the edge of the clearing, standing as still as a statue, except for the dark hair blowing wildly in the warm breeze. She had her back to him, but he could tell she had one arm lifted, a hand to her throat.
The pose horrified him. Recognition flowed hard and fast and brutal. He knew that pose, he’d lived that pose. For one fraction of one second, as he’d skidded to a halt at the police line half a block from his burning house. He’d stopped, and he’d stared, and in that one chilling instant, his whole life had flashed and crashed.
Then he’d run.
But Danielle was just standing there. Staring.
He approached her from behind, cautiously, much like a negotiator might approach a jumper perched on a ledge hundreds of feet in the air. The urge—the need—to touch almost blinded him. He wanted to lift a hand to her back, lay his palm against her shoulder and pull her against him.
But even more, he wanted to see what she saw, what had galvanized her so. All he saw was life and vitality and happiness, and—
A carnival.
“Danielle, honey?” Unwanted compassion choked him, but he kept his voice low and calm. “Tell me what you see.”
At first she said nothing, just kept staring in the direction of the carnival, where a giant Ferris wheel revolved slowly against the soft crimson streaks of the early-evening sky. Families surgedhem, moved as though drawn by magnets to the entrance, where lively music blasted.
He moved in front of her, turned to face her, felt the quick slice somewhere deep.
“Danielle?” he asked again, and this time he couldn’t stop himself. It was her pain, but it swirled around him, sucking him closer, deeper. He lifted a hand to her face, eased back her hair. “I can’t help if I don’t know what’s going on.”
Slowly her eyes, those deep, distinctive pools of green, met his, and in them he saw a hell he’d hoped to never see again. He’d never had the chance to meet his child, to know if the baby Kelly carried was a girl or a boy, if the baby looked like him or his wife or some incredible combination of them both. But those four tenuous weeks between learning of her pregnancy and her death had been enough to trigger a ferocity in him unlike anything he’d ever known. He’d loved that child, the one he’d never seen, never touched, never held.
He could only imagine how deep that love must grow with each passing day, as the years rolled by. As a parent held a child, soothed them when they cried, read bedtime stories and sang silly nonsensical songs, taught them to walk and talk and love and laugh.
“I promised,” she whispered, and the ragged edge to her voice assaulted him somewhere deep inside. “I promised him we could go to the carnival this weekend.”
But now he was gone, and Danielle stood here alone, on the periphery of the carnival, staring at evidence that life marched on, even when hers stood still.
“Don’t do this to yourself,” he said, and just like that, his determination to stand back from the line between them shattered. Only a dead man could look at her and feel nothing, and even though Liam hadn’t felt anything in three long years, he was not a dead man. Not even close. He couldn’t just stand there and watch her hurt, not when she’d found a way to tap into the trickle of humanity still left within him. He didn’t know whether it was the edge to her voice or the desolation in her eyes, or something else, something he wasn’t ready to explore. He only knew he had to step over the line.
“Come here,” he murmured, drawing her into his arms. He expected her to fight, but what she did was almost worse. She just stood there, woodenly, neither rejecting nor accepting.
“Honey, you have to quit torturing yourself like this,” he said quietly.
Slowly she looked up at him. “Do you have children?”
The question lanced his heart. “No.”
Her eyes glistened. “Then don’t tell me what I should or shouldn’t do.”
The ancient pain flashed, but he pushed it aside. Now was not the time for his personal demons. “Just because I don’t have children doesn’t mean I don’t know what it’s like to lose,” he said with a rough tenderness. “It doesn’t mean I don’t know what it’s like to hurt.”
“He’s my son,” she said. “My little boy. I’m supposed to protect him, to fight for him—”
“And you are.” He wanted to brush back the hair that ble her face, but he liked the way it looked, streaking against her cheeks and her mouth. “But being here isn’t the answer.”
Slowly she shook her head. “You don’t understand.” She stepped back from him. “I feel closer to him here. I feel…” She pulled in a deep breath, let it out slowly. “I need to be here.”
He wished she was right. He wished he didn’t understand. But he did. He’d gone back to his house the evening after the fire, and the next night, and the next, until he’d lost count of how many times he’d found himself poking around the burned-out lot that used to be his home. Once, he’d seen the lady next door, a close friend of Kelly’s, seen the pity in her eyes, the concern, but even that had not been enough to keep him away.
“Then I’m going with you,” he said. No way in hell was he leaving her to face this alone. Not when he knew the dark urges that drove a person to walk unblinkingly into the fire.
Without giving her a chance to protest, he took her hand and walked with her among the crowd, toward the bright lights and whirring specter of the carnival.
Alex loved carnivals. He loved the exciting confusion of the midway, the Viking boat that rocked back and forth and always made Danielle queasy, the Fun House, but most especially, he loved the games and the Ferris wheel and the funnel cakes.
“We brought Alex to his first carnival when he was only six months old.”
“You and Ty?” Liam asked.
They walked side by side, hand in hand, down the crowded midway. Hawkers called to them, begging, teasing, but she barely heard. “And Elizabeth and Anthony,” she said, and the old warmth filled her heart. Memories tittered like the rings tossed onto the tops of row after row of cola bottles. “You could say he was a group project,” she explained. “Ty and I were his parents, but his aunt and uncle doted on him.”
“You and your brother and sister are close, then?”
Danielle glanced to the right, where children and adults lined up to shoot streams of water into the open mouths of clowns. “You could say that,” she said with a sharp twist to her heart. They’d been inseparable then. “We’re triplets.”
Liam stopped walking. “Triplets?”
She nodded, used to the surprise. “Anthony is the oldest. Liz was born twenty minutes later. I came along last.”
His lips twitched. “The baby of the family.”
It was a simple statement, and it was true, but a faraway echo dimmed her smile. “So they tell me.”
“I’d think that would be a matter of record.”
The carnival whirred around them, but above the chatter and clatter, the vendors calling out and the children laughing, Danielle heard only one sound—the sound that had haunted her during the early years after her mother died. “For the longest time Liz and I thought we had a younger brother or sister who somehow got lost in the confusion.”
Liam sidepped a herd of running adolescent boys, all wearing dirtied baseball uniforms. “Got lost?”
She shook her head, but the sound grew louder, more insistent, worming its way into her consciousness like a splinter under the skin. “Got left behind,” she clarified. Vanished with their father—or worse, met the same fate as their mother.
The planes of his lean face hardened. “You don’t remember?”
It was a simple question, a logical one. It shouldn’t have sliced through her with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel. But it did.
“We thought we did.” They’d insisted, but no one had believed them. Not even Anthony. “We thought we remembered the sound of a baby crying, of mother singing softly, trying to restore quiet.” The dull ache, one she’d trained herself not to feel, stung an
ew. “But the social worker explained that we were only imagining things.” Danielle could still see the woman’s sympathetic face as she’d looked at the two girls with what could only be called pity. The same woman had been responsible for changing the triplets’ last name from Payne to Caldwell. For their protection, she said, in case whoever had killed their mother ever went looking for the children who may have witnessed everything. “She said it was perfectly normal, given what we’d been through, that we’d want to fabricate more family, to make up for what we’d lost.”
Liam frowned. “I’ve heard of that happening.”
“So have I,” she admitted. As a teenager she’d even researched the phenomenon. “It just seemed so…real.”
“And now?”
She drew a deep breath, laden with the sweet scent of funnel cakes. “More like a dream,” she said. A dream that had infected the long hours of the night for most of her childhood. “Hazy, fuzzy.”
His eyes, gleaming like black diamonds only minutes before, went dark. “Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between what happens in our minds and what happens in real life.”
The statement was matter-of-fact and soberingly true, but Danielle sensed more to Liam’s words than met the eye. His secrets, she knew. The ones he kept deeply buried. The ones that had hurt him. “Liam—”
“Three of you,” he muttered as though she’d never opened her mouth. “I can hardly imagine.” With a tug they were walking again, still hand in hand. So seemingly normal.
And the dark waters, the ones she’d wanted to test, were left behind.
“Triple the trouble,” Danielle said flatly. She tried for a smile, for levity, but there’d been nothing funny about the conversation she’d overheard standing outside the study door.
With effort, she lifted a corner of her mouth. “At least, that’s what our last foster family said.”
The kids were wild, untamed. Got each other in trouble. They needed to be separated.
Of course, what that had really meant was Wayne Toliver didn’t want Anthony around. Didn’t want Anthony to know. Didn’t want Anthony to kill him when he found out what hereally wanted from the boy’s thirteen-year-old sisters.
Because he knew Anthony would. He almost had.
Danielle blinked against the memory of her brother breaking through the door and charging into his sisters’ small bedroom, an old baseball bat in his hands and murder in his eyes. Elizabeth, in shock and clutching a torn shirt, had silently cried. Danielle had screamed. And Anthony had roared.
Wayne had cowered.
To this day, she still remembered the sound of wood slamming against flesh and shattering bone.
“Danielle?”
She blinked, stared up at Liam. “What?”
“I asked about your foster home. You had more than one?”
Different scents now, those of deep-dish pizza and popcorn and turkey legs. But above them all the smell of sweat and beer lingered. “Countless.” Some of them had been nice. One, Danielle remembered, had given her a fairy princess room, complete with a white four-poster bed and a fluffy pink comforter with matching curtains. “The agency tried to keep us together, but no one wanted that responsibility. Then they tried separating us.”
Liam steered them around a group of teenage girls gathered at a henna tattoo booth. “Something tells me that didn’t work, either.”
The memory wasn’t funny, yet she smiled. “No.”
“How many?” he asked.
But she didn’t answer; she was done with this line of questioning. “Look,” she said, dragging him out of the throng of men, women and children, toward a bald hawker with a red bandanna secured around his head. “This is Alex’s favorite.”
Liam took the lead, inserting himself between her and the big bald man.
“I can’t tell you how much money I’ve wasted,” she mused, “trying to knock over those infernal milk bottles.”
Liam looked down at her. His eyes were gleaming again, thoughtful. “I thought you said your talent was luck.”
She shrugged. “Like I said, it ran out.”
The sun had gone down, casting the night into a darkness lit only by the artificial lighting of the carnival. Shadows played against Liam’s face, but they weren’t the dark, secretive kind. They were tempting, unusual shades of a puzzle she couldn’t figure out.
“Now, that’s where you’re wrong,” he said in a drawl she’d never heard from him, then before she could stop him, he was forking over a stack of bills in exchange for big fat softballs.
“Liam—”
He handed her two balls, tossed the third in the air. “Let me show you how it’s done.”
Behind the kiosk, the bald man’s dark eyes glowed, reminding her of a spider sitting eagerly in the middle of its web.
“I mean it,” Danielle said. “I don’t want you throwing away your money on my behalf
He didn’t even spare her a glance. He wound his arm up and slung the softball toward the small pyramid of white milk jugs with a wicked side-arm delivery she’d only seen from the occasional professional ballplayer.
“Ah, just missed,” the hawker said, smirking.
Danielle took his arm. “Liam—”
“I’m just warming up,” he said. “Now toss me another ball.”
Behind them, a little boy of no more than three tugged at his mother’s sleeve. “I want Nemo! I want Nemo!”
Danielle’s heart twisted. Last year was the first time she’d brought Alex to the carnival, just the two of them. No Ty. No Elizabeth or Anthony. He’d tried so hard to be grown up and hide his disappointment, but when the hours mounted and she failed to win him anything, not even a plastic key chain, his smile had wobbled and his eyes had dulled. “It’s okay, Mom,” he’d said on the way out, reminding her so much of her brother that she’d barely been able to breathe. “One day I’ll be able to win stuff, like Daddy and Uncle Tony did.”
Except “one day” was now, and Alex, the only one besides her mother who could get away with shortening Anthony’s name to Tony, was gone.
“You might want to aim for the bottom,” the hawker suggested.
“I might,” Liam agreed, again winding up. He fired another side-arm throw at the dead center of the triangle—and sent all three bottles crashing to the ground.
“If I wanted to lose, that is,” he clarified. He didn’t smile, though, just kept his gaze on the booth operator, steady, penetrating, much as Danielle imagined Liam might stare at a suspect during an interrogation. “But when I play, it’s to win.”
Danielle’s breath caught. Before she realized his intent, Liam had taken the third and final ball from her hands and slung it toward a second stack of milk bottles, hitting it exactly in the same spot. And once again, the pyramid toppled.
“He did it!” the little boy squealed. “He did it, Mommy! Now it’s your turn.”
“I believe that’s two Nemos,” Liam said in a voice so low and quiet it somehow drowned out the cacophony of the carnival.
“Two?” the hawker asked.
Liam nodded. “One for me, and one for my little friend.”
The man’s bald head turned a fascinating shade of red. Danielle thought he meant to argue, but he didn’t. He ducked under a counter and came up with two giant, fuzzy, stuffed clown fish.
Liam took his prizes and turned, went down on one knee and offered one to the little boy. “For you, young man.”
The little boy’s eyes went wide. “Really?” he asked with a squeal. “Mine for keeps?”
His mother stepped in. “Oh, but we can’t—”
“Of course you can,” Liam smoothly interjected, placing Nemo in the boy’s hands. “My friend here only needs the one.”
Danielle’s chest tightened. From the afternoon he’d walked into her life, she’d schooled herself to think of Liam as an FBI agent. A highly trained operative who’d barged his way into her affairs and who wouldn’t leave her alone, no matter how hard she tried to push him o
ut the door. A government man who’d ruined her first chance to get Alex home.
His blood will be on your hands, she’d scolded him, but she stared at those hands now, square palms and strong sturdy fingers, a collection of scars and calluses, holding a giant stuffed fish. Man’s hands, she thought with a twist. Attached to a man’s body.
Given life by a man’s heart.
A heart he worked hard to hide. A heart hidden behind the dark aura of shadows and secrets. A heart that had been badly hurt, as deeply scarred as his hands.
“You’re so very kind,” the young mother was saying, but Liam would have none of it. He insisted his gesture was nothing, then before she could protest, he’d again turned his attention to Danielle.
“For Alex.”
They stood in the middle of the midway of a lively carnival, with music blaring and bright lights flashing, vendors jockeying for attention and money, mothers and fathers and children laughing, but for one narrow second, there was only Liam, this impossibly tall man with the shrewd eyes and brusque manners, holding a giant orange fish in his hands. And for that wobbly moment, she didn’t see the dark aura. There was only strength and willpower, a driving, relentless passion that should have sent her running.
But didn’t.
“Thank you,” she said, fighting a ridiculous flood of emotion. Because she heard what he didn’t say. The stuffed animal was for Alex, when he came home. Because Liam Brooks, FBI special agent by trade, man by heart, was determined that he would.
When I play, it’s to win.
She took the animal and hugged it to her body but said nothing else. Words weren’t needed.
His expression unreadable, Liam slid an arm around her waist and steered her from the booth.
Move away, some voice deep inside insisted. Step away from his touch. But another voice, this one louder, urged her to ease closer, to drift into him, lean on him.
Doing neither, she walked among the whirl of the carnival, but the sights and sounds barely registered. Only the stark realization that for the first time in two years, since the night Ty had died and her world had gone dark, since she’d said goodbye to her sister and ignored her brother’s wrath, someone had communicated with her without words.