Finally, I get my emotions under control and remember we’ve got an audience waiting to congratulate us. Tyler is the first one in my arms. “Why you crying, Mommy?” he asks, reaching up to wipe the tears still falling.
“I’m happy, Tyler,” I tell him. “Very happy.”
The next hour is spent letting everyone have a glance at the ring on my finger, which I still haven’t had time to really examine myself; besides my hand being pulled in all directions, my eyes keep finding Matthew’s and refuse to look away. As we finish our dessert, I realize just how much of the last couple days has been prearranged, though when I glare at him, Matthew quickly tells me the incident at the bar wasn’t part of the plans, but the spa day was.
As we’re leaving the restaurant, Matthew wraps an arm around my shoulder and I look up at him, smiling. “No fireworks?” I ask, trying to feign disappointment.
His eyes narrow briefly before an acute expression of mischief crossed with desire and promise appear in his eyes. “Wait until we get back to the house,” he whispers in my ear as he helps me into the car. “I’ll give you more fireworks than you can handle…”
3
Following yet another sleepless night, though this one for much better reasons, I wake up just as the bedroom door opens revealing Tyler entering, closely followed by Matthew carrying a tray of food. I grin sleepily at them.
“What’s this?” I ask, pushing myself up to rest my back against the headboard.
“We made you breakfast,” Tyler boasts, climbing onto the bed and crawling to sit next to me.
My grin widens as Matthew sets down the tray and I see the array of fruits and muffins and bacon and pancakes, and not an egg in sight. “Considering your reaction yesterday morning,” Matthew tells me as I scoot to the middle of the bed so he can sit on my other side, “I thought we’d forego the eggs until we figure out if they trigger the nausea.”
I reach up to kiss his cheek. “Very thoughtful, thank you.”
“Do you like it, Mom?” Tyler asks, pointing a finger at the pancakes that look as though someone tried to make them heart-shaped, but failed. They look more like kidneys… “I made those!”
Biting my tongue against a laugh, I nod, kissing my son’s forehead. “I love them, baby.” I see movement out of the corner of my eye and look over to shoot Matthew a glare as his fingers inch closer and closer to my bacon. “What do you think you’re doing?” I ask, trying and failing to sound cross.
Matthew only smirks, not bothering to pretend to steal my bacon anymore as he shoves a slice into his mouth. “Delivery tax,” he murmurs through a full mouth. Tyler laughs and reaches across me to take another piece of bacon, stuffing it into his mouth, making Matthew laugh.
“He was such a sweet boy,” I say wistfully, looking down at my son who is incredibly pleased with himself for his theft. “You just had to corrupt him, didn’t you?”
Scoffing, Matthew hands me a glass of orange juice. “He always had it in him. I just brought it to the surface,” he tells me proudly.
With a sigh, I try to maintain a stern façade; even though I can’t remember a time I was this happy. Everything is falling into place at this moment. Matthew and I are getting married again. Tyler has his father who he absolutely adores with every fiber of his being. I’m beginning to imagine what it will be like when the baby arrives and just the thought brings absolute bliss.
“What are you thinking about?”
I look up at Matthew who is watching me closely as I take a bite of Tyler’s kidney-heart-shaped pancake. “That I love you and that I feel like my life suddenly has meaning again,” I tell him honestly.
He smiles softly at me. “That’s exactly how I feel,” he says quietly, leaning in to kiss me briefly. I feel my eyes close as he pulls away, only to snap open again at the sound of crunching. Matthew stole another piece of bacon.
“You are such a jerk,” I tell him through my laughter, shoving his shoulder.
“Maybe,” he says thoughtfully, then grins. “But you love me.”
I roll my eyes, but smile, and with the help of my two boys, we demolish the food on the tray, laughing and teasing one another. As they take away the tray, Matthew dispatches me to the shower and tells me we’re all going to check out the children’s museum. Apparently Claire wants to pack as much sightseeing into our last remaining two days in Cape Cod as possible; I think she hopes the kids will all be so wiped out by the time we leave that they’ll sleep through the entire drive home. One would think it would be smarter to fly with four small children in tow, but considering recent events, we were all reluctant to take Matthew up on his half-hearted offer for us to use his company’s brand-new jet. Honestly, if I never have to look at another airplane in my life, I would be content.
When I join my family downstairs, Claire looks up and immediately smirks, probably knowing exactly what Matthew and I were up to last night. Despite her claims that she and Danny could hear us in their bedroom, I know that’s not the case, but it doesn’t take much to realize why Matthew and I are in such great moods and it’s only partly because of our engagement.
Though it takes us nearly an hour to actually get everybody in the car—Abby threw a bit of a tantrum because she couldn’t find her favorite shoes; Gabe and Olly kept arguing over which one of them would sit where; Tyler had apparently been given sugar for breakfast and decided it would be fun to run away every time we tried to get him into the van—everyone is in good spirits and excited for the day. I’m not contributing much to the conversation, preferring to soak up everything around me knowing that the moment we go home, reality is going to slap us in the face. Despite everything, I know Matthew is having the time of his life and Claire has told me more than once that she couldn’t remember the last time he smiled as much as he has this week, but our troubles won’t have sorted themselves out while we’ve been on vacation. There’s still the matter of figuring out who betrayed Matthew’s trust and tried to kill him; finding the woman who held Tyler and me hostage on that boat; hunting down Frank Marone to find out what, if any, involvement he might have had in what happened.
Then there is a possible indictment for Matthew to face. The moment he realized there might be a problem with the plane he was supposed to board, the one that crashed, he disappeared. There have been accusations that he knew what was going to happen to the plane and he kept quiet, resulting in the deaths of several people. He’s trying to play down the possible repercussions for my sake, but I know he’s worried about it. And the thought that he could be charged with negligible homicide is terrifying for me. He could go to prison. He could lose everything he’s worked so hard to gain. I could lose him all over again.
I’m trying to focus on the good things that are in front of us. A wedding. Preparing for a baby. Getting to know Matthew again. Letting him get to know Tyler and me again. Having the family I always wanted with him and he with me. I feel him playing with my finger and look down to see him smiling boyishly at the ring he put there last night. It really is gorgeous. I loved my original engagement ring, but even I have to admit this blows it out of the water. White gold band with a large squarish diamond and surrounded on both sides with more tiny diamonds. I’m not an expert on diamonds, but if I had to guess I’d say it totals nearly five carats and is beyond anything I could have ever dreamed of, and I think I’m managing to fall even deeper in love with Matthew for his ability to choose something so incredible for me.
“It’s very heavy,” I tell him flatly, trying to keep my face straight.
He raises an eyebrow at me and smirks. “Right,” he says sardonically. “Next time I’ll get a bread bag twist tie.”
I can’t hold back my laugh. “Thought you said this would be the last time?”
“Indeed I did,” he agrees, kissing the back of my hand. “But I wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself with something so heavy on your finger.”
“Are you two done?”
We look up, startled, and find Claire turned aro
und in her seat glaring at us. Rolling our eyes at one another, we settle back in our seats, snickering every time we sneak a kiss behind Claire’s back.
––––-o––––-
The children’s museum turns out to be more fun than I thought it would be and I’m glad Claire managed to talk us into this outing when I would have much preferred sending everyone else out and spending some very quality time with my fiancée. Judging by the looks she’s sending me, Samantha would have preferred the same thing. I remind myself repeatedly this is supposed to be a family vacation and if I had wanted to spend several hours behind a locked door with Samantha, I probably should have waited to propose until we were home. But I waited as long as I could, much longer than I wanted to wait, and my only reason for doing so was to make sure she wants what I want.
I keep thinking about how close I had been to blowing the entire thing after the incident at the bar. I’d gone out to answer a call from one of my contacts in the FBI, Marcus West. Marcus basically became my babysitter during the couple months that I was supposed to be dead and has taken on this entire situation, handling all the gritty details I haven’t been able to work on myself. He had called to tell me Frank Marone had been sighted in Pennsylvania early that night. Several people are tailing him and following every movement he makes to find out what he’s been up to since the plane went down. The news immediately put me on edge, especially after I recalled just how closely Samantha had worked with that bastard, even if it was only for a week or two. If she hadn’t discovered a file in Frank’s desk containing information about her and Tyler, she’d probably still be working with him—or at least until I managed to return and beat the shit out of him for some of his surveillance techniques. Among other things I’ve found out, Frank had a camera aimed downwards at Samantha’s desk and I can only imagine the views he received from that footage and what he might have done with it.
So when I returned to the bar and found some asshole flirting with Samantha despite her body language that suggested his advances were less than unwelcome, I lost my temper. Maybe I was projecting my anger with Frank onto this guy, but I knew in that moment I could commit murder to defend my girlfriend and unborn child. There was every possibility he was merely an innocent drunk trying to pick up a girl at the bar—he wouldn’t be the first and I would be lying if I said I’d never done it myself—but I couldn’t take that chance. I probably would have been willing to let it go and laugh it off later if he’d kept his mouth shut and hadn’t insinuated things about my relationship with Samantha.
The look on Samantha’s face after I punched the guy then started kicking him as hard as I could barely registered in my mind as fear. It wasn’t until we were out on the sidewalk and I heard myself saying horrendous things to her that I realized what I was doing. My cheek is still stinging slightly from her slap and I spent the entire ride back to the beach house believing I’d fucked up enough that I might have lost her for good. When I found her in the bedroom crying, I never hated myself more than I did in that moment. We weren’t supposed to be at odds with one another; I was supposed to be preparing to propose to her, my nerves heightened to the maximum level.
I don’t know if the spa day and shopping trip I arranged for Claire and Samantha played a part in her forgiving me and agreeing to marry me—I’d had that planned from the beginning—but it probably hadn’t hurt. And the engagement itself… I’m still pretty damn proud of that. My first proposal was incredibly creative and up until the moment I watched it happen, I wasn’t sure it would work at all. This proposal was just as creative and less stressful than the fireworks, but up until the moment she said yes, I wasn’t sure she would. It just goes to show her love for me is unconditional when she probably should have dumped me on the sidewalk outside that bar.
This time around with Samantha seems to be a little more hard-going than before. Tempers have been resting very close to the surface and while I know there is no lack of love between us, there are moments when I wonder whether something has been broken in our relationship that we won’t be able to repair. I’m determined to keep her in my life. She belongs with me just as I belong with her. No other woman has ever sparked such jealousy from me. I’ve never punched a guy in a bar for hitting on a girlfriend. I wonder if there’s a subconscious part of me that doesn’t trust her. She left me once; who’s to say she won’t do it again?
Immediately hating myself, I look up and find Samantha looking at me, smiling. That smile is enough to convince me I’m an idiot for even thinking so horribly of her. The first time I saw that smile—the one that suggests there is nobody else in the world who could possibly measure up to the person receiving it—I made it my mission in life to see it as often as possible. I’ve never seen her direct that smile to anybody else; it’s for me and me alone. When she’s giving me that smile, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that she loves me and that our past will not repeat itself.
Giving her a smile of my own, I turn to watch Tyler running around with his cousins. There are multiple rooms in the museum and aside from the usual educational exhibits, there’s a castle setting, a pirate ship, and a giant tree house that Tyler seems to love. I file this information away for a later date. I’ve always wanted a tree house myself; maybe Tyler and I can build one next spring…
Around lunchtime, we manage to drag the kids from the museum down the street to a restaurant and discuss what to do next. Since today is our last here, Claire wants to make the most of it and spend it on the beach. Danny objects, since the sunburn he suffered our first day hasn’t healed yet. Samantha wants to check out some more of the sights—the lighthouses, a butterfly garden, and whatever else they can find. I’m perfectly content to just sit back and let them scheme. I’ve got what I want—Samantha and Tyler are having a great time and that’s what matters to me. Eventually we agree to visit a couple lighthouses, then head back to the house and grill out on the beach and end the night with a bonfire.
We settle the bill and I ignore Claire and Danny’s attempts to give me money, and head out to the car. While we’re loading the kids, I get a sense of being watched. As covertly as I can manage, I glance around us and it takes me a minute, but I find the source of the feeling. There is a black car several spots down and inside, an unfamiliar man is watching our every move. I try to play it off as paranoia, but the longer he watches, the more disconcerted I’m becoming. Having believed I could keep my family safe myself, I didn’t bring along any of my security team, much to their annoyance, but I suddenly wish I had.
“Matt? What’s wrong?”
I turn away from the car, only now realizing I’d begun walking towards it, and face Samantha’s concerned face. “Nothing,” I lie, forcing a smile. Glancing back, I see the car leaving the parking lot and quickly commit the license plate number to memory. “Just thought I saw something. Are we ready to go?”
––––-o––––-
Sitting around the beach bonfire, I have to keep reminding myself that I’m on vacation with my family and therefore need to seem engaged in the activity around me rather than preoccupied and brooding over the car in the restaurant parking lot. For all I know, the guy is completely harmless and poses no threat to my loved ones, and I’m overreacting due to everything that’s happened around me over the last several months. There’s still a niggling part of my mind, though, that tells me there is no overreaction and that danger has followed us to Cape Cod. I sent the license plate number to Leo, asking him to do a bit of research and see what this guy’s story is; so far I haven’t heard anything back, but considering he didn’t contact me within the first hour to tell me to evacuate everyone and get them home, I’m slightly comforted.
“You’re being very introverted today,” Danny comments as he sits beside me on my log while we watch the bonfire roaring. “Everything all right?”
As easy going as my brother-in-law can be, there’s a reason Claire loves him—he doesn’t miss a thing around him. He’s observant of his surroundings,
quietly calculating even the smallest details. Above all else, though, Danny is immensely protective of his family, just as I am with mine, and if he believes there’s some danger that might affect them, he’s going to find out what it is. “I’m probably reading too much into it,” I tell him quietly, glancing around to make sure Samantha is occupied playing with Tyler. “But when we left the restaurant after lunch, there was a car parked across from the van and the driver was following our every move. All things considered, I’m a little on edge.”
Danny sighs, nodding as he turns his thoughtful gaze to the bonfire. “There’s something you need to know, Matt,” he begins resignedly. “I didn’t want to bring it up until we got home, but the more I learn, the worse it seems.”
I glance at my brother-in-law, dread filling my body. “What is it?”
“Paul asked me to look into some things for him,” Danny begins slowly. “Things completely unrelated to you or anyone else in the family. But while I was going through the paperwork he dropped by my office, I found something that, even for him, seems a bit sketchy.” He’s got my full attention now. “Your dad sponsored a travel visa for a couple people—foreign engineers for some project he’s working on. One of them came from Russia.”
It takes a moment for his meaning to sink in, and when it does, I don’t need him to explain any further. “Which one was it?”
“Ivan Kuklov.”
I hardly need to think to attach a face to the name. He was the man who had a gun pressed to Samantha’s head and after she tried to defend herself with a well-placed elbow to his groin, he was the man who cracked her skull with the butt of that gun, then flung her into the wall of the boat. He was the bastard that very nearly killed her. And he was in the country because my father sponsored his visa. My initial reaction is to call my father and find out what the fuck he was doing allowing Russian mobsters come to work for him. But smart as he is, I can’t even bring myself to believe he would knowingly do something like that. He might not like Samantha, but he’s not one to hire kidnappers that attempt to kill my family. “Does my father know you found this out?” I ask Danny.
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