“She told me I could do anything as long as I was invisible. That I could escape even the darkest moment, the hurtful things, if I just closed my eyes and pretended I wasn’t there.”
“My mommy told me I could go anywhere in the world if I was invisible.”
I smiled, watching Chase climb up into the chair beside David. He looked like David with his dark, curly hair and his strong jaw. But Chase had his mother’s blue eyes, a gorgeous combination that would make him a knockout someday. The girls had no idea what was about to hit them.
“This girl who taught me said I could go to the Eifel Tower.”
Chase smiled, a lovely dimple appearing in his cheek. “That’s what my mom said!”
“Well, your mommy must be one of the smartest people on the whole planet.”
Chase nodded without hesitation. “She is. She works on computers, and she can save people with just one touch of a button.”
“That is impressive.”
He nodded again. “My mom is pretty cool. She’s having a baby.”
“I heard. Are you hoping for a brother or a sister?”
“A brother so we can play superheroes together.”
“You do know there are girl superheroes, right?”
“Sure. But I like playing with boys.”
“Speaking of which,” David said, gesturing toward the kitchen door as it swung open, “Bailey’s here to take you to your playdate.”
I turned, watching a pretty blonde beginning to swell heavy with pregnancy walk into the room. David introduced me—not elaborating beyond my name—telling me she was the wife of one of his operatives.
“It’s nice to meet you, Pepper,” she said politely, offering me her hand.
“Must be interesting, being married to one of these guys.”
Her eyebrows rose slightly. “It’s a family,” she said simply, smiling almost shyly at David. Then she took Chase’s hand and walked out.
“Ex-military?”
“How can you tell?”
I shrugged. “The way she carries herself. The way she said family.”
“She was a naval officer.”
I nodded. “Would have guessed that or the Marines.”
David stood up, shoving the report he’d ordered on me inside a portfolio before gesturing toward the door. “I’ll take you up to Ricki. She should be awake by now.”
He grabbed a prepared plate of fruit and cheese out of the fridge before leading the way out of the room. We headed back up the stairs. The main workroom was busier than it had been before; several more of the employees had come in and settled around the room. A couple of guys—a tall Latino guy and a shorter, dark-haired man who was clearly into weight lifting—were standing by the desk occupied by a pretty, red-haired woman, who was dressed like me in jeans and a t-shirt. They were laughing at something, clearly relaxed with one another. Another man was calling to them from across the room where he was helping himself to pastries laid out on a long table off to one side of the room. There was a lot of camaraderie going on here, but the man I’d noticed earlier, the man who looked fully prepared to dress in his military uniform, was still sitting alone and staring at his computer screen. He seemed all alone in this room full of companionship. I almost felt sorry for him while, but at the same time, I felt this sort of kindred spirit with him. That’s how I felt too much of the time—all alone in a crowd.
David led the way upstairs and through the door that cut off his family’s private rooms from the rest of the second floor. There was a small living room here and four doors that opened in a sort of horseshoe off to the back of the living area. David led the way to one door at the very back that opened into a most impressive bedroom, filled with expensive, modern furniture, a state of the art entertainment center, and big, beautiful windows that looked down on the most impressive property that spread for what looked like miles behind the house.
Ricki was there, curled on her left side, pillows propped up all around her. Her dirty blond hair was shorter than I remembered it, but still long enough to spread out behind her against the white cover pillows, her skin a little paler than I recalled, but her blue eyes just as intense as ever. She studied me as I came into the room behind her husband, her eyes registering recognition a little sooner than I expected. I was only eight when she last saw me, after all. But she knew me. I saw the shock and surprise rush through those eyes. I’d hoped to see pleasure, love. Relief, even. But that wasn’t there.
She sat up, even as David rushed to her and took her shoulders, gently easing her back down.
“What’s going on?” she demanded.
“She arrived last night,” David said softly. “She wanted to see you.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“You were asleep. I wanted you to rest.”
“I rest all the time. You could have woken me.”
She focused on me then, her eyes moving slowly over the length of me.
“You’re grown.”
“That happens when seventeen years pass.”
She didn’t acknowledge me, not even a little nod. She just kept staring at me, her eyes avoiding mine for quite a few minutes. When she finally did look me in the eye, there was weariness in hers.
“Why are you here?”
“Ricki…,” David said softly. But I didn’t mind. It was a perfectly logical question.
“I needed a place to go. I heard about you, your marriage, your new company. And I just happened to be in the area—”
“In the area? You were in Illinois the last time I saw you.”
“Yes, well, people move around.”
She was quiet for a long moment, almost as if she was processing. She studied my face, curiosity finally overcoming all else.
“Where’s Mom? I heard that he…” She said the pronoun very slowly, dragging it out almost as if she was trying to wipe the taste of it away. “I heard he died.”
“He did. Cancer nine years ago.”
I could see her doing the math in her head. “You were sixteen?”
“Yes.”
“Was he sick long?”
“Couple of years. Drained our finances, but they took out this huge insurance policy that paid out well for Momma when it was all said and done. She’s still living off of it, I think. And she used some of it to help Terry pay off his student loans.”
“Terry’s a lawyer?”
“Yeah, in Manhattan.”
She nodded. “I saw him—his profile—on a website somewhere a couple of years ago.”
“He got married and has three rugrats.”
Ricki touched her own swollen belly. “Good.”
David was sitting on the edge of the bed with her. She took his hand and squeezed it lightly.
“Pepper’s going to help out around here, help you, do some paperwork, that sort of thing. Just until she can get back on her feet.”
Ricki arched an eyebrow, studying me again. “Why do you need to get back on your feet? What have you been up to?”
I shrugged. “Waitressing, a little secretarial work. I just haven’t really decided what it is I want to do with my life.”
Her eyes narrowed. She glanced at David.
“Would you give us a second, Pepper?”
A sense of dread slowly slipped down the length of my spine. I’d known she wouldn’t be thrilled to see me, but I didn’t expect her to just throw me out on my ass. But I could see that was exactly what she planned on saying to her husband. I stepped out in the hallway, but I didn’t close the door all the way and I stood close, listening to what they had to say.
This was my life they were discussing in there. I felt like I had a right to know what they were saying.
“You should never have let her through the front gates,” I heard her say to David. “She’s just like my mom, flitting from thing to thing, growing tired of what she has when it looks like something over the horizon is much better.”
“You don’t know that.”
�
�I do and I can see that you do, too. You had her checked out, right? You wouldn’t be you if you hadn’t.”
“Of course. But there’s nothing significantly bad about her past. She’s never been arrested, never committed more than a simple traffic violation. She just moves around a lot.”
“No. She chooses to move around because she can’t stay in one place and be responsible.”
“Ricki—”
“I grew up in that world, David, you didn’t. I know what example she had. I know what it was like there.”
“That’s why you should give her a chance. You pulled yourself out of that world and made a success of yourself. Who’s to say that she can’t do the same?”
“If she could, she wouldn’t have come running here. You have to know that she’s in trouble or else she wouldn’t have come here.”
Anger suddenly roiled in my chest. I shoved the door open without thinking about it, barely aware that it slammed against the wall behind it as I did. I marched up to that bed and glared down at my sister.
“I came here to see you! I came here to reconnect with my sister, with the one person who ever really cared about me when I was a kid. The only person I could count on, who, if you’ll recall, left in the middle of the night without so much as stopping to say goodbye! Seventeen years, Ricki! Don’t you think you owe me more than this? Than comparing me to our loser mother?”
David stood and moved between the two of us, taking my arms and backing me toward the door.
“You can’t do this,” he said, his voice a low warning. “She’s not supposed to—”
“Let her stay.”
We both turned in surprise.
She waved her hand in the air. “You’re right. We need help and she’s here. There’s no reason to send her away now.” She focused on me. “But you look for another job as soon as you can, look for another place to live. When this baby is born, I want you out of here and as far from my family as possible.”
I inclined my head slightly, hiding the emotion that I knew must be crossing my face like a ticker tape on the trade floor on Wall Street. I wanted to stay. I needed to stay. But to hear her say those things, to so clearly equate me with our mother…if I’d had anywhere else to go, I would have told her where she could shove it.
I took off the moment it seemed appropriate, rushing down the back stairs and into the garden out back, finding a little path and following it at a slow jog and then a full run. Ricki had no idea what she’d done by leaving the way she had. I looked up to her, depended on her to be a buffer between me and the violence that often went on in our home. My dad…he was not a prince of a man. His temper was just the beginning of the troubles he caused us. When Ricki was there, I knew he was bad, knew that he made my mom cry more than he should have, knew he made Ricki tense whenever he walked into the room. But when she was gone, it was as if a nuclear weapon went off in our house. He was drunk all the time, belligerent. My mom was covered in bruises and Terry was pulled into things. He was eighteen, able to escape ten months out of the year. But Mom…I never understood why he didn’t touch me. In a way, it was worse that way, having to witness these things but knowing that I would never have to experience his wrath. It gave me nightmares then, left me feeling as though my mom and brother resented me. It gave me nightmares still, left me feeling as though I never knew what might come next, what might be around the next corner.
I don’t know what I expected when I came here. I knew she wouldn’t welcome me with open arms, but I hadn’t expected that level of hostility. If anyone had a right to hostility, I think it was my right, not hers. After all, I was the one who was left behind.
I trusted her. Not anymore.
I ran hard, pushing myself in my ratty, old canvas shoes. Then I rounded a corner too sharply and my shoe tore, sending me sprawling across the hard-packed dirt into a row of rose bushes.
“Damn!” I cried, pain rushing through me as dozens of thorns bit into my skin.
“Hey! You okay?” a warm, rich voice asked.
“Do I look okay? Like I lounge around in the damn rose bushes every day!”
Hands reached under the bush to pull me out. The fingers were long and slender, the hands tanned, like they belonged to a man who spent a lot of time outside. I let him pull me out, but then I pushed him away as I climbed to my feet. My ankle instantly screamed in protest, my shoe hanging off it in tatters.
“Oh, hell,” I muttered, reaching down to tug the shoe off my foot.
He grabbed my arm as I started to tumble over.
“Did you hurt your ankle?”
I started to shake my head, but he scooped me up into his arms and carried me to a tiny house that was set just off the path. We went in through a back door in the kitchen. He set me on the edge of the counter, his hands moving down over my ankle.
“It’s not swollen,” he said, his fingers moving smoothly over my skin. I watched him and admired his fingers, remembering the thought I’d had when I last saw him.
If I was a different girl…
Maybe I was a different girl. People change. Maybe it was time for me to change.
He stepped away to wet a paper towel under the facet. He came back, pressing the wet towel to a scratch that was bleeding surprisingly profusely on my arm. Then he got another paper towel and began to wash the rest of the scratches—which were surprisingly few.
“You make a habit of rescuing stupid girls?”
He cracked a smile, his thin upper lip seeming to swell with the movement. “I just happened to be on my way home when I saw you fall.”
“Home? You live here?”
“I do.”
“I didn’t even know these little houses were back here.”
“One for each operative.”
“You’re an operative?”
“Don’t sound so surprised,” he said, lifting the first paper towel to see if my scratch was still bleeding.
“You were in the military?”
A dark cloud seemed to slip across his face. He focused on my eyes for a second, then inclined his head slightly. “Marines.”
Clearly that was a subject he didn’t want to talk about with me. I watched his hands move over my arm, swiping at the scratch with the edge of the towel before he pressed it on there again. I hissed a little, pretending it hurt more than it really did, pressing my hand to the back of his. He was standing close, his body heat radiating over me, reminding what it was like to be close to someone. It hadn’t been that long for me, but I certainly wished it had been. I wished I’d never met that son of a—
“Are you new here? One of the analysts?”
“No. I’m just visiting family.”
“Oh? David?”
“His wife. Ricki.”
He nodded. “I only met her once, briefly. She’s been on bed rest, I guess.”
“Yeah. The baby’s giving her fits, I guess.”
He focused on my ankle again, pulling back to lift my foot. He slipped my sock from my foot, pressing around my ankle. I groaned when he touched a tender spot just above my heel.
“I think you bruised it. Not a major injury, but it’ll be uncomfortable for a while.”
His eyes came back up to mine, and I touched his face. I don’t know why. I wasn’t looking for a hookup, and I knew a romantic tangle would only cause me more trouble, not less. But he was cute and I so wanted to be someone other than my mother’s daughter, my father’s invisible child. I wanted to be someone who would take chances rather than that girl who runs away every time life gets too hard to handle.
I ran my thumb over the little cleft in his chin, slipping it upward until I touched his bottom lip. He didn’t pull away, but he didn’t move into me either. He stood perfectly still, watching me as I studied him. I wanted to get lost in his amber eyes; I wanted to study those perfect eyelashes and those too pretty brows. And I wanted to taste those lips even though I knew absolutely nothing about this guy.
What was wrong with me? Was this really
who I wanted to be?
But then he did move. He leaned close and our lips brushed. His were so soft. Warm. I pressed into him, letting my lips part just slightly. He groaned softly, the tip of his tongue exploring the possibility of being welcomed inside. And he was…so welcomed.
I’d kissed quite a few frogs in my life. A few more than I could say I was proud to admit. If he was a frog, he was at the top of the list, a frog that might have been worth the effort.
I slid my hand along his jaw, feeling just a hint of five o’clock shadow rough against my palm. The hair at the nape of his neck was so short, but it was almost silky. And the longer tresses at the top hinted at a curl, sliding through my fingers in waves. I drew him closer, not quite sure I could believe that I was sitting here, kissing a guy I met less than ten minutes ago. This was definitely not me. But he was a wonderful kisser, the nibble of his teeth against my bottom teeth the most erotic thing I think I’d ever experienced. My lower belly was coming to life, aching in a deep, dull way that only one other person had ever caused—and even then it took more than a kiss for his touch to get my engines started.
He suddenly pulled back, going to the sink to wet another paper towel.
“Hey,” I said, as gently as I could. I didn’t want him to think I was upset. “Thanks for all of this.”
He nodded, not really looking at me. “Anytime.” He came back, lifting the drying towel from the deeper scratch and applying the new one. “This one doesn’t want to stop bleeding.”
“It will.”
He tossed away the other towels. “You want help getting up to the main house?”
“No, I’m good.”
I jumped off the counter, testing my ankle. It was sore, a sharp pain shooting up my calf with every step. But it bore my weight just fine.
“No more running for me for a while,” I said.
He glanced at me, something like a grin on those perfect lips. “Too bad. I was going to invite you to jog with me in the mornings.”
CHASING PEPPER (Gray Wolf Security, Texas Book 5) Page 3