“Then what is it a matter of?” she demanded. “If you trusted me, you would have been straight with me from the very beginning,” she insisted.
He had to know that she wouldn’t have told anyone. That she would have taken his secret to the grave because she knew it could mean his life. Instead, he chose to keep her in the dark, to make her think the worst of him. He’d robbed her of the joy of sharing the stages of pregnancy with him, of life, of their combined love, growing within her.
“Do you have any idea how hard it is to know that?” she cried. “That I don’t mean enough to you for you to be straight with me? To have you let me into your life and let me know what’s really going on?”
He still didn’t know if she thought he’d gone back to drug dealing or if this was about something else. Had Sederholm somehow gotten to her? Told her something? No, that wouldn’t have been his way. The scum would have taken her hostage, not talked with her.
He didn’t want her thinking of him as a pusher, but what choice did he have? This was almost over and once it was, he was free to really plead his case. If she’d listen to him.
“I told you, it’s not a matter of trust. There’re other things at stake. Other people at stake.” Oh, the hell with it. He couldn’t bear the torment in her eyes. He took hold of her shoulders and cried, “I’m not a drug dealer, Eve.”
She pulled free and her anger was as fierce as ever. “I know that.”
He stared at her, completely stunned. “You know that?”
“Yes,” she fairly shouted. “And not because you told me, although I really, really found it hard to believe that you’d turned over a new leaf—”
He needed to have something answered. There could be really bad repercussions to this. “Then what is this about?”
“What’s this about?” she echoed incredulously. He had a hell of a nerve, pretending to be in the dark. “I’ll tell you what this is all about. It’s about you cutting me out of your life, out of everything that’s going on. It’s about you not telling me that you’re a government agent,” she shouted at him.
He stared at her in silence for a very long moment, replaying her words in his head. “You know?”
“Yes, I know,” she spat back.
“How did you find out?”
Eve lifted her chin stubbornly. So now he had questions and she had the answers. She was tempted to taunt him and ask how it felt. But she wasn’t certain if Josiah would have wanted his part in this revealed, and right now, she was feeling a great deal more loyal to the older man than she was to Adam.
“It doesn’t matter how I found out. The important thing is that I did—and you weren’t the one to tell me.”
If she knew that he wasn’t a drug dealer, why was she still shouting at him? It didn’t make sense. “You’re angry because I’m a government agent?”
Eve was stunned by his question. Did this man have cotton for brains? “I’m angry because you didn’t tell me you were a government agent. You let me think you were a drug dealer.”
“I couldn’t compromise the operation.”
She was far from placated by his answer. “But you could compromise me, what I thought of you? Do you know how many nights I spent agonizing over this? Over the fact that the father of my baby was a drug dealer? Doesn’t it bother you that you could have righted everything by telling me what you were?”
Yes, it bothered him. But his hands were tied. If she knew and one of the people he was dealing with found out, a lot of lives could be lost. He couldn’t take that chance.
“It wasn’t my call.”
He made it sound like some kind of a sporting event, not her life he was playing with. “Sorry, I didn’t know the game plan ahead of time.”
This wasn’t getting them anywhere. He pushed past the blame portion and worked with what was. “Okay, so you know. Why are you so angry at me? I’m one of the good guys.”
He might be that to others, but not to her. Not after what he’d done—or hadn’t done. “No,” she said very deliberately, “you are a liar. Can’t you see, it doesn’t matter if you’re a good guy or a reformed bad guy, a lie is a lie. That’s an absolute,” she insisted. “And you told not one lie but two, maybe three. For all I know there are even more.”
“I didn’t—” Adam started to protest, but she held her hand up to stop the flow of words.
“How do I know that?” she demanded. “How do I know that you’re not some triple agent? A bad guy pretending to be a good guy pretending to be a bad guy?”
She’d lost him for a moment. He tried to work his way backward. “Hold it—”
“No,” she declared, “I won’t hold it and I won’t hold you. Now please, just leave,” she implored, not knowing how much longer she could hold it together.
He wanted to give her some space, but he had a feeling if he walked out that door, it would be all over between them. “No, I won’t leave until you tell me that we can work this out.”
She shook her head, her hair bobbing about her face. “If I said that, then I would be lying just like you and I don’t lie. Maybe that’s stupid of me,” she sniffled, “but I don’t. Because I knew that a lie, any lie, compromises a relationship and casts doubts on it. You lied to me and now I don’t know when to believe you or if to believe you. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me,” she said, reiterating the familiar old adage. “I’m taking that to heart.”
It couldn’t end this way, not when he’d finally opened up his heart to someone. “Eve, please—”
But she wasn’t about to be talked out of it. “I need time to think, to sort things through. I can’t do it with you around.”
He pressed his lips together. “Would it help if I told you I loved you?”
She didn’t believe him. She wanted to, but she couldn’t. “It would—if I felt I could believe you. But you could just be saying that because it’s expedient right now.”
He opened his mouth to argue with her, to profess his feelings more strongly, but just then, his cell phone rang. One glance at the illuminated screen told him he was getting a text message from Sederholm.
Adam bit off a curse when he saw that the deal was going down now.
She could see the struggle that was going on within him in his eyes. She made it easy for him—and for herself.
“You’d better take that,” she told Adam. “It’s obviously going to be more important than me.”
He wanted to shout at her that nothing was more important to him than her, but he knew that the effort would be useless. He couldn’t get through to her, not tonight, not given the way she felt. He’d already seen that the more he pushed, the more she resisted. As much as he didn’t want to, he knew his only recourse was to pull back and let her calm down.
And then maybe, once this major drug drop came to pass, he could devote all his attention to sorting things out for her.
“I’m going,” he agreed. “But I’ll be back.” And that was a promise she could take to the bank, whether she believed him or not.
“Only if I want you to be,” she informed him just before she slammed the door, cutting him off from her.
She leaned her head against the door, feeling drained. Feeling awful. God, what an idiot she’d been. Adam had to have thought of her as the most gullible person who had ever walked the earth.
Her heart ached even as she cursed him for complicating her life like this. She remained like that for a long moment, too numb to move, too unhappy to try.
Finally forcing herself to move, Eve looked at her watch. It was still early. Early enough to go pick up Brooklyn and bring her home. The thought bolstered her somewhat. She needed something to divert her, to keep her from dwelling on this overwhelming, terrible pain she felt.
Dialing Josiah’s number on her cell phone, she grabbed her car keys and her purse.
He answered on the second ring. “Turner here.”
“Hi, Josiah. It’s Eve,” she told him, heading for the front door. �
�There’s been a change in plans. I’m coming over to pick up Brooklyn.”
“Is something wrong, Eve?”
She might have known that Josiah would pick up on that. Before she could answer, the doorbell rang.
Damn it, why couldn’t Adam just go away and leave her be? She didn’t want to see him again, not tonight. Not for a long time.
“No, nothing’s wrong,” she bit off a little waspishly as she yanked open the door. Her attention switched to Adam. “Look, I said I just—Oh!”
“Eve, are you all right?” Josiah demanded. But there was no answer.
The phone had gone dead.
This didn’t feel right.
The text message he’d received from Sederholm had summoned him to this location. The buy was supposed to go down within this warehouse he was standing in front of and there were no lights, no signs of life anywhere.
And, more telling, no sign of Sederholm’s flashy silver Lexus convertible, the $68,000 gift, Sederholm had haughtily informed him, from the student’s clueless parents for his twenty-first birthday last year.
It was a setup. It had to be.
But even as he drew out his weapon, slowly circling the perimeter of the abandoned warehouse that had once ironically housed a toy empire before it had gone bankrupt, Adam could see that something was off.
Gaining access through a side entrance that, by the looks of it, hadn’t been used for some time, he moved about the darkened area slowly and cautiously. Every one of his senses was focused on the shadows as adrenaline went into high gear through his veins.
But there was no sound of breathing, no sound of movement anywhere within the warehouse. Not so much as a mouse or a rat.
Adam carefully made his way over every inch of the warehouse, moving from one wall to the other. Finding a light switch on the far wall, he held his breath and then threw it on. It wasn’t powerful enough to illuminate the entire warehouse, but did highlight that he was alone.
Why would that cretin send him out on a wild goose chase?
And then it hit him. The scum had orchestrated exactly what he’d been afraid of. Sederholm had lured him away to get to Eve.
What other explanation was there?
He pulled out his cell phone to call her. But before he could, it rang in his hand. Fearing the worst, hoping for the best, he flipped it open and put it to his ear, still holding his weapon ready in his other hand.
“Hello?”
“Get back to her house!”
The voice barking the order had a slight accent. He’d only been in the man’s company twice, but he recognized the voice immediately.
“Turner, what do you know?” Adam demanded.
But he found himself talking to no one. The line had gone dead. Adam didn’t bother swallowing the curse that rose to his lips.
Shoving the cell phone back into his pocket, Adam quickly ran back to the rusted door that had been his point of entry into the warehouse.
Even as he flew to his vehicle, he couldn’t contain the icy chill that zigzagged down his spine. He hadn’t had a chance to ask Turner what this was all about, but even so, he knew.
Something was happening to Eve. And it was all his fault.
“Who the hell are you and what do you want?” Eve demanded with all the anger she could summon. The look in the young man’s flat eyes made her blood run cold.
Sederholm shoved her back with the flat of his hand, while aiming his gun at her with his other. “I’m your boyfriend’s playmate and I want to make sure that he doesn’t think he can cut me out of the payoff that’s coming.” He looked around quickly to assure himself that it was just the two of them. “You think I don’t know about him going behind my back, trying to make nice to my connection? My connection,” he shouted, hitting his chest twice for emphasis. “And you’re going to be my insurance policy.”
She stalled for time. She’d been on the phone with Josiah. He must have heard her open the door to this stranger. If nothing else, he would be sending his driver out to check on her to see if everything was all right, the way he had when there’d been that minor earthquake in the spring.
All she needed was a split second to throw off this cocky-looking peacock. He was hardly more than a kid and she was certain he was a pushover. If he wasn’t wielding a gun, she could have easily taken him, she thought, even if he had the advantage of height going for him. But her father had been thorough when she was about to go off to college and had insisted that she take lessons in self-defense. She just needed to separate this character from his weapon.
“Insurance policy against what?” she asked him, doing her best to sound interested as her mind raced around for a solution.
“I’ve been watching him. That bookstore owner seems to care a lot about you, sneaking off to see you when he should be working.” He laid the cold steel gun barrel against her cheek, stroking it. “I’m going to make sure he thinks I’m going to hurt every pretty little hair on your head if he decides to get ahead of himself. Only room for one second-in-command and that’s me.”
The sound of a window opening in the rear of the house had Sederholm jerking her closer to him and wrapping an arm around her throat.
Chapter 15
The crazed intruder dragged her to the side, so that there was a wall at his back. His arm pressed down so hard against her clavicle, Eve thought she would choke to death. She could only think of Brooklyn.
Who was going to raise her daughter? Who was going to be there for the little girl when she was growing up? When she needed a mother?
She couldn’t die. Her baby needed her.
Frantic, she thought of her dog, then remembered that the animal was sedated because she’d removed a benign tumor from her side. Why had she picked today of all days to do the procedure?
She had to do something! Clawing at her assailant’s hand rather than his arm, Eve grabbed one of his fingers and bent it back as far as she could.
Sederholm howled in pain. “You bitch!” he screamed, then tightened his stranglehold even more.
Her head began to spin as she grew more and more light-headed. Desperate, she dug her nails into him. Cursing her, the man finally loosened his hold enough for her to gasp in air.
“Come on out, Smythe!” he called out. “I know you’re here.” His eyes scanned wildly about, unsure which way his target would enter. “Figured it out, did you? That I sent you on a wild goose chase so I could get to your whore. You’re smarter than I thought. Too bad you’re not as smart as me,” he taunted. The almost maniacal smile disappeared as if it had never been there. “Get out here before I shoot her—because you know I will!”
Adam cursed silently.
He had to show himself. There was no other choice. Sederholm was insane enough to do just what he threatened: shoot Eve because he could.
Adam thought about coming out shooting, but he had no way of knowing exactly where Eve was in the room and he didn’t want to risk hitting her. More than likely, the cowardly Sederholm held her in front of him like a shield.
Still armed, Adam positioned his weapon, ready to fire, as he emerged from the rear of the house. He saw Sederholm swing around, keeping Eve in front of him, the fireplace to his back.
“Let her go, Sederholm,” he ordered, aiming his gun at the man’s head. “She isn’t part of this.”
Sederholm shifted so that his head was partially blocked by Eve’s. His voice dripped with cynicism and evil.
“Oh, on the contrary, Smythe. You care about her. That makes her a very big part of this—maybe the most important part of all.”
Adam looked into Eve’s eyes for a split second. Damn it, he should have never shown up on her doorstep. He should have ignored that e-mail that appeared on his computer and just concentrated on his job.
“I’m sorry,” he told her.
It was too late for that. And she didn’t blame him, anyway. But she needed assurance. “Just promise me you’ll take care of Brooklyn.”
“Brook
lyn?” Sederholm interjected.
“My daughter,” she responded when he jerked her hard, demanding an answer.
“Oh, right. The kid. How touching,” he mocked. “What makes you think Adam here’s going to be around to take care of anything?” He laid the muzzle of his gun against her temple and gazed at the man he believed was trying to take his place in the hierarchy. “Drop your gun, Smythe. Drop it or she’s dead.” He raised his eyebrows. “My finger feels a spasm coming on.”
Terror filled her. Adam was her only chance of surviving this. “Don’t do it, Adam,” she pleaded. “He’ll kill us both.”
“Maybe,” Sederholm commented. “Then again, maybe not. All depends on how I feel.” His eyes challenged Adam. “I might let the pretty lady live. But not you, though. How’s that for honesty?” he asked with a chilling grin. “Now put the damn gun down,” he demanded, “or I swear she’s dead.”
Adam believed him. Very slowly, he bent his knees, placing his gun down in front of him.
“Good boy,” Sederholm mocked. “Now kick it over here.”
“No, don’t do it, Adam,” Eve cried. “Please—”
“How do you put up with this?” Sederholm asked, nodding at his hostage, his tone light as if they were two friends kicking back and shooting the breeze. Because he wanted to shut her up, Sederholm moved his arm from around her neck and quickly covered her mouth with his hand. “Now, where were we? Oh, right, I was going to shoot y—”
A shriek interrupted his sentence. Eve had bitten down on the fleshy part of his hand. Sederholm reacted automatically and pushed her from him. “You bitch!” he screamed, aiming at her.
The second Eve distracted Sederholm, Adam dived for his weapon. On the ground, his gun in his hand, Adam swiveled around, about to fire up at the drug dealer when a shot rang out through the living-room window.
Sederholm, his eyes opened wide in shock, sank down to his knees. Blood oozed from the hole between his eyes as he fell facedown on the floor.
Scrambling to his feet, adrenaline pumping, Adam whirled around toward the shattered window, ready to fire. He hadn’t had time to call for any backup. This had to be Montoya, or one of the drug lord’s underlings, cleaning up what had obviously become a liability for the cartel.
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