The Innocent: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel

by Stevens, Taylor

  Munroe, still in Bradford’s arms and straining for a look around the corner, said, “Has she woken at all?”

  “Yes,” Bradford said. “Run the water. I’ll get you clean clothes.” He paused. “And if you don’t mind, I’ll tell you about it while you soak.”

  Chapter 37

  Munroe was smiling again, an ear-to-ear, shit-eating grin that Bradford could only return in kind. To see that smile, even with the damage that had been done to her face, made him damn near euphoric, and having her here, having her safe after so many tortured hours of the unknown, was such a giddy relief that it cloaked the anger that had fast followed the assurance that she was alive and okay.

  He wanted to kiss her, wanted to hold on to her, but then shake her and ask what the hell she had been thinking—yell out the frustration so that she’d understand the nauseating ache that had been with him all this time.

  But he didn’t.

  Wouldn’t.

  As she’d said, sometimes love was its own reward, and to struggle to turn it into more was to murder it slowly. No matter how badly he hated that she played so easily with risk and thought nothing of living on the blade of danger, he accepted this as the only way. He couldn’t protect her, wouldn’t attempt to change her, and if acceptance was the price required to stay within her orbit, he would pay it gladly.

  Bradford set Munroe’s legs on the bathroom floor, put her upright, and stepped out of her way. He waited just outside the door until the tub was full and she was in it, and then with a slight knock at the door brought in his only change of clothes and set them on the edge of the sink. But for these, which had been in the trunk of the car, everything else had been left in Buenos Aires.

  According to the plan, he and Munroe would have traveled to the charter together, and then, once she and Hannah were safely ensconced, he was to return to the hotel and clear it out.

  That was the plan.

  What he’d been left with was the need for improvisation: putting boot to Logan’s butt, rousing Heidi out of bed and getting her on her way, and then pulling in one last middle-of-the-night favor from his local connections. By his best estimate, the hotel room had been scrubbed clean right about when he was strapping Hannah into the seat of the Gulfstream that would carry them into Uruguay.

  Everything taken from the room was still in Buenos Aires, the clothing, equipment, data, money, and identification, all of it secured and waiting until ready for retrieval. They’d have to head back, probably sooner rather than later, if for nothing else than for their documents and to recover the data that Munroe had used as her bargaining chip with Gideon.

  After all of the buildup prior to Hannah’s extraction, and after the horror of having Munroe snatched from him, getting Hannah out of Buenos Aires had been a straightforward nonevent, executed flawlessly, the end result of meticulous preparation. The charter had been fueled and waiting, and although Bradford carried a valid passport for Hannah—something Charity would need to get the girl out of Uruguay—neither he nor Munroe had planned to travel documented, and arrangements had already been made to bypass official exit and entry.

  The girl had woken on the way to the airport, and although it had taken less than a minute to put her back under, that had been a painful minute. The kid was terrified. She’d gone to sleep in a bed, in familiar surroundings, and woken in a car with a strange man. Sedating her had been not only a necessary part of transporting her but also a favor. Once they’d reached Montevideo, he’d put a very slow drip into her to keep her hydrated and asleep and had kept her under ever since.

  But sooner or later they were going to have to wake her, and then what?

  Bathwater splashed against the other side of the shower curtain. There was joy in that simple sound, and then more of it in the ensuing silence while he waited to give Munroe information. She wasn’t ignoring him, she knew he was there and probably also knew that his patient waiting was really just a cover for a truth he’d never voice: He wanted to be near, didn’t want to let her out of his sight, not for a very, very long time. And although that was a wish that would never be granted, for now he had her cornered, and for the moment it was enough.

  Arms crossed, Bradford leaned into the wall opposite the tub, and after several more minutes, content to simply be, he finally spoke. “I know we did the right thing in taking Hannah from The Chosen,” he said. “But for all the time we’ve spent discussing the strategy of extraction, we haven’t talked much about what to do with her once we have her. The kid’s going to be traumatized, you know? One moment she’s asleep in her bed with someone she knows, the next minute she wakes up surrounded by people that she’s spent her whole life thinking were the Devil. Even if we wait until the last minute to wake her and give her directly to her mom, that’s not going to make it any better.”

  “How long was she awake?” Munroe said.

  “Not long, maybe a minute, but if you could have seen the look on her face, it was heartrending.”

  “I kind of figured that’s how it would go,” Munroe said. “Is Charity already in town?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon,” Bradford said. “But Logan’s been pushing nonstop to have me give Hannah to him. I had to turn off the phone.”

  “I can only imagine how difficult this is for him,” Munroe said. Logan had waited eight years for his daughter, and now that she was in custody, he couldn’t even come to hold her hand while her mother traveled down. But it was the way it had to be. Kidnapping and transporting a child across international borders was a serious crime. That they were doing so under the auspices of the child’s legal guardian was something of a gray area, and in order to fly under the radar of the law, they had to wait for Charity.

  “It can’t be helped,” Munroe said. “But maybe it’s for the best, because I need to talk to Hannah before she meets any of the others. I don’t know if it’ll go any better than it did for you, but I’m no longer a complete stranger, and I have something that she needs to hear.”

  Munroe let the water out of the tub, stood, and turned on the shower. From beyond the curtain her body was a vague silhouette, and Bradford watched with unabashed appreciation as she stretched her neck long and let the water beat against the back of it. Then, shutting off the water, she said, “We’ll bring Hannah out of it in the morning. That’ll give me several hours at least before her mom gets here.”

  Munroe reached her hand beyond the curtain, fingers wiggling expectantly, and Bradford grinned and handed her a hand towel. She laughed and tossed it back. “Give me,” she said, and he gave her a bath towel.

  “I got another bit of information out of New York this morning,” he said. “A decent-size update on the investigation that’s under way up there.”

  Munroe stepped from the shower, pink from the heat and towel wrapped around her. “Oh?” she said.

  “Yeah,” he replied, smiling, saying nothing more.

  She smacked the back of her hand to his biceps and, smirking, said, “I’m not going to beg you for the details, Miles, no matter how much you want me to.”

  “We’ll see,” he said, but his voice trailed and lowered, and had none of the bravado that he’d intended. In front of him, she stood warm and wet, and no matter how untoward it might appear, he couldn’t avert his eyes. To believe that he had lost her forever, only to have her gifted back, had altered any sense of propriety, and took from him all the reserve and control that thus far had kept him from pursuing her.

  He reached out, put a hand behind her neck, pulled her close, and kissed her.

  She could have pushed him away or gone cold, gone deadly, and he would have suffered the consequences willingly, if only to have that taste. But instead she put her hands to his face, let the towel drop, and kissed him back.

  He grabbed her to him, fingers and mouth hungry, wanting, and in full reciprocation her hands found their way underneath his shirt and began to pull it off.

  They had started in the bathroom and ended on the living room sofa. Munroe ha
d no idea of the time, only a vague notion of how much had passed, and that it was now dark outside. The suite was lit by ambient light from the windows and what little seeped from under the bathroom door.

  Bradford lay with his back flat to the couch, and she was beside him, on her side with her head on his chest, listening to the rhythm of his breathing. He’d drifted off to sleep, and although the idea of joining him in dreamland, joining him for longer, was tempting, she had work to do.

  As close as they were to handing off Hannah and finishing what they’d come down to accomplish, the assignment had loose ends. Munroe’s dilemma at the Haven Ranch hadn’t ended simply because circumstances had forced her to move away from it in the middle of the night. Elijah was far out of sight, but his treatment of Hannah wasn’t out of mind, nor was the convoluted way that everyone was connected, each relation turning in on another like an endless loop.

  Munroe slid over Bradford, making a halfhearted attempt not to wake him, though she gladdened when he did.

  “Where are you going?” he whispered.

  “I need to talk to Heidi,” she said. “And then I need to find Gideon and Logan. But first, I really need to eat.”

  Bradford was silent, and she knew the struggle. He didn’t want her to go without him, but neither could they leave Hannah unattended—even though she continued unconscious.

  Munroe stood, went to the bathroom, and retrieved the clothes that had never made it on her the first time. She slid into pants that, though a bit large, didn’t fall around her knees, and left the shirt hanging baggy over them.

  Bradford remained on the couch, eyes tracking her movements until she had fully dressed and her boots were back on, and then he stood. He walked to one TV desk, his naked physique a beautiful shape against the moonlight. He picked up the cell phone and tossed it to her.

  “It would make me feel a whole lot better about staying behind,” he said, “if you’d meet them at the restaurant downstairs.”

  She nodded. “I can do that,” she said, although they might, perhaps, suspect that Hannah was in the hotel, and Logan’s tenaciousness could become an issue. “Is the room in either of our names?” she asked.

  He shook his head and held up empty hands. “No identification or credit cards. I arranged it long before we ever flew, just had to know where to find the keycard.”

  Munroe smiled. This was one of the many things she liked about Bradford, that his mind worked so similarly to the way hers did, that he was able to plan and process in several directions at once, many moves in advance of where they stood.

  “This phone goes to Logan, right?”

  Bradford nodded.

  “How do I reach Heidi?”

  “She’s at the Balmoral Plaza,” he said, and Munroe left unspoken the dozen personal questions unspooling in her head.

  Getting the number for the hotel and then Heidi’s room was easy enough, and from there Munroe made two calls. The first was to Heidi, the second to Logan, and with each she arranged to gather at the hotel’s restaurant. But she gave Heidi a different time. Munroe wanted her there first, wanted her alone without the others, every second discussing details that she’d no desire to relay, a necessary evil that she would have avoided if she could.

  She’d run the scenarios backward, forward, and around again. She’d come to Argentina, accomplished what she’d set out to do, and these loose ends were extraneous—not her burden to bear. Yet in good conscience she couldn’t walk away. She’d seen, was aware, and to refuse to act, to turn her back completely and ignore what lay in plain sight, was to become a complicit part of it all in the same way that each person within The Chosen had become complicit.

  Munroe could see only one clear path toward extricating herself from a responsibility she’d never wanted, and this was part of it. Heidi had to know. And no child, no matter how adult, or how long estranged, would willingly bear the news that the father she loved and longed to reconnect with was potentially a child molester.

  Heidi’s own childhood experience would speak to the truth in what Munroe would say, and yet the human condition was so strong that it would force her into denial. She couldn’t accept it, wouldn’t want to, and the emotional conflict would over time become extreme. It would be far better if Heidi heard the news and confronted the initial round of disbelief with Munroe instead of hearing it later from Logan or Charity, when the truth eventually surfaced.

  And it would surface, of this Munroe was certain. Because even if Hannah didn’t tell her parents what had been going on, Munroe sure as hell would. Unlike the tarnished history of The Chosen and their older children, right here, right now, there were no expired statutes of limitations, no possibility of hiding and protecting the criminal, and if jurisdiction became an issue, Munroe would personally rendition Elijah back to the United States and dump his ass on the courthouse steps if that’s what it took. And maybe, just maybe, this time the legal system would work to protect those it was designed to protect, and save Munroe from being forced to take matters into her own hands.

  She left the hotel room, found a table at the restaurant, and ordered. She ate heartily, her body still craving true sustenance, and had nearly finished when Heidi arrived.

  Less than forty-eight hours had passed since they’d last met at the bar in San Telmo, and still it felt like a lifetime. As was Heidi’s way, she greeted Munroe with a hug and then, full of genuine concern, asked about the bruises.

  “I almost didn’t recognize you,” Heidi said. “Not with the clothes and your hair and your face like that.” She paused. “Just like you said it would be.” Without waiting for a response she handed Munroe a small plastic bag with a change of clothes. “They were the smallest things I have with me.”

  “I’m sure they’ll be fine,” Munroe said. “I just want her to have something available if she wants it, so she doesn’t have to face strangers in her pajamas.”

  Heidi nodded and looked around the restaurant. “Where are the guys?”

  “They’ll get here as soon as they can,” Munroe said, her answer the truth, if not completely.

  She invited Heidi to sit, and they exchanged small talk until Munroe, in as offhanded and casual a way as possible, segued into the events of the last week, a setup for what was to come, all of it necessary to take Heidi off her guard. She told first of what it had taken to get Hannah out of the country, and then how the Havens had been located and the methodology of gaining entrance once they’d known where Hannah was. All of this was new to Heidi, who sat wide-eyed, full of questions and tangible energy, which grew even more intense when Munroe spoke of Heidi’s siblings.

  “I expect that we’ll eventually hear from Morningstar,” Munroe said. “When she finally goes through the bag I left behind she’ll find a bit of documentation that she doesn’t believe exists, and there’s also a prepaid phone and my number.” Heidi’s expression, full of joy and expectation, was as Munroe had anticipated, but she followed this with the news she’d no desire to deliver. “The other thing is that sooner or later you’ll probably hear things about your dad.”

  Munroe paused, waited a beat, and continued. “I don’t want them to be a shock to you when you do.”

  “What kind of things?” Heidi asked. Munroe didn’t answer, and when the silence became tangible, Heidi appeared to grasp the unspoken allegations.

  “I’m not going to give you specifics,” Munroe said, “because I don’t have them. But you need to brace yourself for when they inevitably surface, okay?”

  Heidi nodded, and was still silent, still processing, when the boys arrived. They both stopped short when Munroe turned to face them, Gideon’s reaction far more cautious than Logan’s. In response Munroe said, “Yeah, but you already saw the other guys.”

  They sat, relaxed, and in order to allow Heidi time alone with her thoughts, Munroe repeated for Gideon and Logan most of what she’d already relayed. The boys, in turn, gave their version of events, and when playing catch-up was over and Munroe had
thanked them for coming after her, she turned to Logan and said, “You’ve heard from Charity, right?”

  He nodded. “I’ll be there to get her when her flight lands, and then we’ll head over to wherever you are.”

  “Miles will get you the information,” Munroe said. And then, “Look, Logan, I know that all of this waiting is incredibly difficult for you, but when Charity gets here, I think it’s best that she meets with Hannah alone first—before the rest of you, okay?”

  “It’ll just be me and Charity.”

  “You’re part of the ‘rest of you,’ ” Munroe said, and when Logan began to protest she shook her head. There was no point in having this discussion in front of Gideon or Heidi—there were things Logan wouldn’t want discussed—and as frustrating as it would be that he was being forced to wait yet again, when all was said and done, he’d understand and perhaps even thank her for it.

  Munroe turned to Gideon. “I need to talk to you,” she said.

  “Alone?”

  She shrugged. “It’s your call.”

  He stood, and leaving Logan and Heidi to their individual silences, Munroe and Gideon stepped outside the restaurant to the carpeted elevator foyer.

  “A deal’s a deal,” Munroe said. “Everything I told you I’d give you, I’ll give. The catch is that it’s all still in Buenos Aires. As soon as we get Charity and Hannah on their flight home, Miles and I are catching a charter back. You’re welcome to come along if you want, or I can deliver everything to you back in the States.”

  Gideon was silent, as if he was truly weighing the options.