by Lisa Hughey
Bliss’s stomach dropped. Damn him.
“My responsibility is Maria.” She closed her mouth and breathed hard, trying to control the overwhelming urge to screech at him. How could he not understand? Maria was her charge. She’d already lost her once. But she was more than just a job. “I have to protect her at all costs.”
“Who are you?” Jack shot back. “You have to protect her, even at the expense of my brother and a woman I consider like a sister?”
The blood drained from her face. It was clear from this fight that neither one of them was the person they were thirteen years ago.
“I could ask you the same,” she attacked. He’d kept some pretty big things from her. They had practically been living together. Jack had spent most of his nights at her place. It had taken boxes to get all his stuff and clothes from her apartment before he left for the Navy.
Her face had gone from deathly pale to bright red at the memory of his reply to Jill. Her feelings of anger and betrayal simmered and boiled over. “We’ve met?” she snarled.
“What are you talking about?” Jack tried to play it off. But he knew.
“We’ve met. That was the sum total of your response when Jill introduced us?” Her voice stayed even, he would have thought she was calm, except for the sparks shooting from her golden eyes.
Jack was done. The last two days had pushed his patience to the limit and he wasn’t the most tactful guy to begin with.
“Yeah, well, what did you want me to say?” Yes, he’d kept things from her but she’d kept things from him as well. He was not the bad guy. So, he’d been trying to protect himself by indicating that their association was casual rather than the truth. “We used to fuck, but then she ripped out my heart?”
Peripherally Jack realized that Shane was standing in the doorway to the cockpit, frozen, clearly trying to be invisible, which was impossible for a six five, black man with a barrel chest and tree trunks for thighs. But Jack gave him points for trying.
Bliss just stared, the bow of her pink lips rounded in a startled O.
“I’ll just…take off.” Shane’s voice rumbled from behind Jack.
And this just turned into a bigger cluster, because Jack was pretty sure they couldn’t do this alone. If Bliss didn’t want him to contact his brother or Ava, then Jack needed to draft Shane into service.
And fuck but he didn’t know if he wanted to continue this conversation with Bliss or pretend he hadn’t just left his guts on the sleek, carpeted floor of the Bombardier.
“Sorry, bud.” Jack shook his head, his gaze still locked with Bliss’s tormented honey eyes. “I know you don’t usually do fieldwork but I may need to tap you to do some surveillance.”
Bliss’s eyebrows rose.
“He’s not on the official payroll. He’s an independent contractor,” Jack said before Bliss could object. “We have him on retainer, but he has other clients as well.”
Jack finally broke eye contact and turned to face Shane. “Are you available?”
“Yeah.” Shane’s voice rumbled deep in his chest. “You had me on call until Thursday, so I blocked out my schedule.”
Jack nodded. “Good. Let’s get the post flight paperwork out of the way.”
“Sure thing.”
Jack hesitated, his mouth tight with tension. “Can you grab our stuff and put it in the trunk of Shane’s car?”
“Yes,” was all she could manage right now.
Jack finished, “And then we can figure out where we’re going to stay tonight.”
Shane’s eyes widened. “You’re not going home?”
“Can’t, apparently.” Jack snarked. “We’re worried about some sort of big brother surveillance on me and mine.”
Bliss tightened her lips and grabbed her rolling suitcase stowed in the overhead storage above the second grouping of cream leather seats and burled wood tables.
“Okay,” Shane said slowly.
“You have enough clothes for the next few days?”
Shane smiled. “Yep.”
“What about a weapon?” Jack queried.
“You think I’ll need one?” Shane’s brows rose. They didn’t usually do any work requiring they be armed on U.S. soil. Stone Consulting jobs tended to be in foreign places where maybe the military had trouble operating. Not in the U.S.
“I’d like all of us to be armed.”
“Count me in.” Shane grinned. “Been awhile since I got to shoot someone.”
Jack turned a menacing glare on Shane, his thick black eyebrows lowered into a V above the blade of his nose. “You won’t speak of this. It’s an extremely sensitive situation.”
But it was very clear, he wasn’t really talking about the extra work.
Seven
Bliss waited in the backseat of Shane’s car, a sleek, red Dodge Charger. She couldn’t do anything to speed things along. Jack and Shane completed the final shutdown for the plane, threw away their garbage, and closed the private hangar door to secret away the plane.
Jack Stone’s private plane. Another trail that Fernandez could trace back to Jack. If Fernandez was monitoring Stone Consulting the plane and their landing was already on his damn radar. She wondered what would happen if they just confronted the jerk. It would certainly get her away from Jack as fast as possible.
But she couldn’t do that until she had Maria back in custody.
And she just needed to keep focusing on those details, focusing on how they were going to find Maria, because if she let herself think about the look on Jack’s face when he’d revealed how much she’d hurt him, she’d likely start crying. Stupid.
Until last night after her dream, she hadn’t cried since her divorce years ago.
But with one sentence that completely came out of left field, he’d reduced her to the emotional mess she’d been after he left.
Yes, she had broken up with him. But he was already leaving. And she still remembered his stoic face when he’d boxed up his stuff and left for good. She’d cried for days.
Weeks, really.
Once he was done with Basic training all the way in bumfuck Michigan, she’d scoured news reports for any word about soldiers who had fallen. She’d lit candles at the chapel on campus. She’d prayed every day for him to stay safe. Literally for years, she had kept his safety front and center in her mind. Even though she’d been the one to turn him away and she’d done it for her own sanity. She’d still made herself crazy worrying about him.
Bliss clasped her hands in a prayer position and pressed them between her knees.
So how the hell had she ended up here?
Jack and Shane opened their doors, startling Bliss out of her thoughts.
The car shook as they slammed their doors at the same time. She’d keep it completely business. Ignore, ignore, ignore all the personal undercurrents. “Is the plane registered to your company?”
“Yeah. We’re out of luck.”
Damn.
“But I think I managed to persuade the airport operations manager to ‘lose’ the landing paperwork for a few days. So hopefully, no one will know we returned until we’ve got Maria. There’s no way to stop the public record from my flight yesterday, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Assuming Fernandez is keeping track, he’ll think I’m out of town.”
“Great.” An unfamiliar buoyancy filled Bliss. Maybe something was finally going their way.
“Where to?” Shane asked.
Bliss hesitated. The sunlight was gone. “I’d really like to visit the house where she was held. But there are no lights around the house, and the basement electricity was from a generator, so visibility would be nonexistent. It’s very isolated.”
“First thing tomorrow morning then?” Jack didn’t turn around to look at her while he spoke. As a matter of fact he hadn’t looked her in the eyes since he’d dropped his bombshell. And she’d circled back to where she didn’t want to go.
Their plan was still in place, just postponed. And with Shane as an extra pair of eyes, they’d be
able to check out the house quickly in the morning.
“We need to spend the night at a place no one would think Jack Stone would frequent,” Bliss said softly. “And someplace where they won’t care that we’re checking in together.”
“Fine. So let’s find a place to bunk for the night.” Jack gestured to Shane and they were off.
***
Bliss fumbled with the key to the motel room. The aroma of eucalyptus, supposedly a calming scent, nearly overcame the stench of the open dumpster and the ammonia from a fresh urine trail. And this hotel was several steps up from the other places they’d considered. She’d absolutely put her foot down at the sleazy motel with the drug deals going on in the parking lot. Jack hadn’t argued and they’d kept looking.
While in the car, they’d turned on the radio and heard the local news. Connor Stone had been the top local story because he’d had a scuffle with Fernandez at his office and the police had been called. So she figured the pressure was on. That information only reinforced her insistence that they stay away from GHR and Stone Consulting. Hopefully, Jack wouldn’t try to call his brother again. But still.
They’d finally found this two bedroom suite relatively close to the rural area where Maria had been held and the night manager took cash. She’d eyed Jack speculatively after he requested a room that had access around the back, away from the road. But, she’d finally slapped the old-fashioned key in Jack’s hand with a shrug.
Inside the worn hotel suite, the musty scent of mildew from the semi-grungy bathroom lingered in the air. Jack opened the door of the battered, almond-colored refrigerator and shoved the bag of microwave breakfast sandwiches and clamshell of strawberries inside.
“Shane and I will bunk in that room.” Jack pointed to the room with two queen beds.
Bliss just gave Shane a long look. “You take the king bed.”
“You’re kidding?” Jack countered. “Really?”
No way was she giving him the opportunity to call his brother, or even worse, slip out. They were only about thirty miles from Monterey.
Well, this was nothing new. Jack was pissed at her. He was likely to stay that way for a while. And frankly she was still reeling from his blurted admission on the plane.
“I’m hitting the sack.” Shane smiled, a wide grin played over his face, a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. “I had a late night last night. What time is reveille?”
“Dawn is at seven a.m.” Jack kept his tone to a careful snarl. “Let’s be ready to go by six thirty. I want to get this over with.”
Bliss couldn’t agree more.
The tension between them rose as Shane shut the door to his room and they were alone. Trapped together for the nighttime hours. Which only increased her stress level.
Bliss was already wired. She should be dead on her feet after the last two days. The fact that they couldn’t check out the house until tomorrow really chafed. She fought the urge to pace in the tiny living area.
Worry for Maria competed with her feelings about Jack and the last twenty odd hours. It didn’t help she kept remembering his intense expressions. Jack’s devastated eyes when he’d confessed she’d broken his heart. Jack’s head thrown back in ecstasy last night. Jack’s stoic face when he’d left thirteen years ago.
It seemed impossible that he had been as destroyed as she had when they’d parted ways so long ago.
A seductive thought twined through her brain. The reason that she’d been afraid years ago was gone. Jack was no longer in the military. No longer putting his life on the line daily. But if she took a chance and it didn’t work, she couldn’t go through the pain of losing him again.
He pulled the file on Maria out of his duffel.
“You want to go over our plans one more time?” Jack clearly remembered her nearly OCD obsession with details. After her family was torn apart, and when she’d basically become her mother’s caregiver, Bliss had developed the need to make sure each and every detail was thought out precisely and nailed down.
It didn’t take a shrink to figure out that she needed to be in command of her life. Because when she’d been younger, everything had been out of her control. When they’d been together, Jack and been content to let her handle everything. He just went along with the flow.
But after working with him for the last twenty-four hours, she’d realized that he was actually almost as anal retentive as she was about controlling details. When had that happened? “I noticed you aren’t as laid back as you used to be.”
Jack hesitated. “The only time I was ever that relaxed was when I was with you.”
“Why?”
Bliss thought for a moment he wouldn’t answer. But then Jack said, “That’s what happens when you’re responsible for your family.”
She frowned. “What does that mean?”
Jack was still flipping through the file on Maria. “So you know Marshal Garrett?” Okay, clearly he was changing that subject.
“Not personally.” Bliss forced herself to sit. She propped her chin on her palm and rested her elbow on the arm of the faded sofa and studied Jack.
“How did he get Maria from Salinas to DC?”
“Sorry,” she said lazily, not sorry in the least. “Trade secret.”
Jack raised his brow. The action drew attention to the strip of missing hair. Bliss swallowed and lifted her hand toward his brow. “How’d that happen?”
“Classified,” he said abruptly and she dropped her hand back to her lap.
“Looks like we both have secrets,” Bliss shot back.
“Yeah. And it’s not the first time.” Jack cocked his head and studied her right back. “I guess I didn’t know you as well as I’d thought.”
“Ditto.” Bliss shoved back until she was sitting up, feet on the sofa, knees pressed against her chest as if she could protect her body against his animosity. The anger she’d suppressed earlier came flooding back. “Mr. SAE.”
“Don’t,” Jack said harshly. “SAE is my father. Not me.”
His tone was so adamant, Bliss was taken aback. “Well—”
“No. You want to give me a hard time fine. But do not bring up my father.”
“Fine. But why didn’t you share the information about your family when we lived together?” Bliss’s temper started to surface. “I knew you had issues with intimacy, but the fact that you’re heir to a billion dollar company should have come up at some time in the year that we were together.”
“You really want to go there?” Jack bit out and ignored her assumption that he was next in line for SAE. “What about the fact that you were clearly in some sort of witness protection program? You didn’t think that was relevant to share?”
That shut her up.
“I…I’m sorry,” she finally said.
“That’s it?” Jack threaded his fingers through his hair. “Seriously.”
“Not allowed to talk about it, Jack.” Bliss wrapped her arms around her calves and rested her cheek on top of her knees. Subconsciously she realized she was making herself as a small a target as possible. Hiding from view. The miniscule amount of InNOut she’d choked down for dinner wasn’t sitting well in her stomach. “Fine. Yes. I was in witness protection.”
“Was?” He picked up on that little clarification.
“Yeah.”
“So the threat is gone?”
“Not exactly.” Bliss tried to think about how to give him something without revealing too much.
“Then what exactly?”
“Well, after the initial threat was…eliminated.” Tony the Butcher had been killed by a rival mob family while walking out of his house to pick up the morning paper. “I wasn’t allowed to go back to my old identity, but they did decide to…transition me out.”
Which was a nice way of saying they didn’t want to monitor their family any more, at least not the half that included her and her mother. She guessed that had worked out great for her father and sister who were presumably still together somewhere on the West Coas
t. But for Bliss’s mother, that had been the straw that had pushed her over the edge from sad to clinically depressed.
“What about your family?” Jack was eyeing her as if he had figured out that something was really wrong with the scenario she was describing. The tension in her body was hard to miss.
“They had split us up to make us less of a target. My sister and my dad went to one coast and my mom and I went to another.”
He was thinking. She could practically see the synapses firing in his brain as he ticked through details at an accelerated pace. “But when we were together you told me your mom committed suicide.”
“She did.”
“So you’re telling me that they wouldn’t allow you to go live with the other half of your family?”
“I was eighteen. An adult.”
“Who’d been separated from her family for…how many years?” his mouth tightened.
“Four.”
“That’s utter bullshit.”
“Look, Jack. The marshal’s system is really designed for criminals who are testifying against their old bosses or associates. The Wit Sec system wasn’t set up for people, little kids, who saw things they shouldn’t.” Her sister had been the only witness to a mob slaying. At first, the authorities thought she’d be safe. But then the mob had blown up her family’s house. Luckily, her mom’s car had a dead battery at the grocery store and her dad had come to get them. Otherwise the whole family would have gone up in the blast.
“They still shouldn’t have left you twisting in the wind after your mom—”
“It was a long time ago. I’m over it.” Bliss really wanted off this topic now.
“Jesus, Bliss.” Jack straightened. “That’s why you used to say that you tried to live up to your name.”
Bliss shuddered. She’d been a whole hell of a lot more idealistic back then.
“You chose the name Bliss?”
“Um, yeah.” She remembered the moment clearly. She’d been sitting in a nondescript safe house somewhere in Indiana. She’d just said goodbye to her father and sister. At the time she hadn’t known that she was saying goodbye for the last time. The entire situation was supposed to be temporary.
So, being the idealistic, cheerful teen that she was she’d cut out inspirational slogans and taped them on her bedroom walls and vowed to be happy until it was all over.