by Paula Graves
Instead, she opened her eyes to cool darkness relieved by pale streaks of blue moonlight filtering through a nearby window. She was on a pillowy mattress, swaddled in soft sheets and a fluffy comforter.
And Jesse was there, in the dark, a comforting shadow sitting on the edge of her bed.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured, her voice raspy with sleep. Her mouth was dry, her throat aching for something to drink. “I woke you.”
He touched her hand, his fingers warm on her skin. “I wasn’t asleep yet. It’s only eleven. You were having a bad dream.”
She tried to remember what she’d been dreaming about. She could recall only a few strange snippets—the sensation of drowning, the escalating terror of feeling trapped and unable to move away from the danger. A flash of blood on a man’s face, of twisted limbs and bleeding grins—
She drove those images away, squelching a shudder. “I don’t remember what it was about.”
“Well, why don’t you try to get back to sleep, then? Maybe this time you’ll have sweet dreams.”
“I need to get something to drink first.”
“Stay here. I’ll get it for you.” He was up off the bed and out the door before she could protest. With a sigh, she pulled herself into a sitting position and turned on the lamp on the bedside table, driving the darkness to the corners of the room.
Jesse came back with a glass of ice water and a small plastic pitcher. He set them both on the bedside table. “If you get thirsty in the night, you won’t have to get up and wake yourself up.”
She smiled, touched by his thoughtfulness. He was really making it hard to put her schoolgirl fantasies about him behind her. “Thank you.”
“No problem.”
As he started to get up, she caught his hand. “Shouldn’t you be in bed? We could both use some sleep.”
He looked down at her, his eyes coffee-dark. “I was doing a little more research into Katrina Hilliard’s background.”
“Oh?” She let go of his hand and patted the edge of the bed next to her.
He accepted her invitation to sit. “I decided to do a search for her name and Jackson Melville’s together. And it turns out the Singer Foundation Board wasn’t their only connection. They both were at Princeton the same years, and I found an interview with Hilliard from ten years ago, before MacLear’s fall, where Hilliard was praising Melville for MacLear’s expansion into environmental recovery as part of the services they offered.”
She arched an eyebrow. “MacLear offered environmental-recovery services?”
“It was news to me, too. I called Rick to ask him about it. Apparently they offered manpower for things like oil-spill cleanups and other environmental disasters. But Rick thinks it might have been a cover for getting the SSU into some sensitive areas.”
“I would have figured Hilliard as someone deeply suspicious of mercenary outfits like MacLear. Based on her other known viewpoints.”
“A lot of ideological people look the other way when it comes to supporting their own pet projects.”
“You mean she would have turned a blind eye to what the SSU was doing as long as their actions supported her goals?”
“You don’t get to a position like chief of staff to the president without making a few compromises along the way,” Jesse said.
“Murder is a pretty big compromise.”
“The ends justify the means for some people.”
Evie shivered. “I can’t imagine thinking like that.”
“I know you can’t. I saw how you reacted to what happened to those men today.” Jesse brushed a piece of her hair away from her eyes.
Heat flooded the narrow space between them, and Evie’s body responded with a flush of intense sexual awareness. His fingers brushing against the skin of her forehead felt like a caress. His dark eyes locked with hers, desire burning in their depths.
He wanted her. She wanted him. What to do next seemed so simple and effortless.
Only it wasn’t. It might be effortless, but it could never be simple. Not when she was Rita’s sister and he was the man who’d broken her sister’s heart, even if, ultimately, the breakup had been no one’s fault.
He cleared his throat and stood up, snapping the exquisite tension between them. She leaned back against the headboard, feeling boneless.
“I made that call to Darcy, but he was a step ahead of us. He’d already been looking into the story about Morris Gamble’s affair and came up with Katrina Hilliard as the top prospect for the role of the other woman.”
“Really? How?”
“That’s the interesting part. He said his sources mentioned seeing Gamble meeting Hilliard around lunchtime outside a house in Congress Heights every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday for weeks. He checked the address—it belongs to Hilliard’s aunt, the one who works at St. Elizabeth’s.”
“Every Wednesday through Friday?”
He nodded.
“So what do we do next? Go stake out that neighborhood and try to catch them in the act?” She couldn’t help but sound doubtful. They’d already dodged bullets doing something a lot less dangerous than that.
“Actually, I don’t think there’s much else to find here in D.C.,” he said.
His statement caught her by surprise. “I thought you said the answers to our questions were here.”
“And they were. But they didn’t really solve our bigger problem, did they? The SSU is still coming after you.”
“Then what good did it do to come here?” She felt queasy at the thought that all they’d gone through over the past few days had been without a purpose. Two men had died because they’d come here. They might have been very bad guys, but had they deserved to die such horrible, bloody deaths? “Did we do it all for nothing?”
He leaned against the doorframe, his gaze thoughtful. “It wasn’t for nothing. We have a pretty good idea that at least two of the president’s most trusted advisers have thrown in with the Espera Group’s goals. And it’s good that we know about Katrina Hilliard’s links to Jackson Melville, even if we can’t prove she’s behind what the SSU has been doing.”
“If we can’t prove it, we can’t stop her.”
“We’re not through trying to prove it.” His voice was resolute. “It’s just time we take a different tack.”
“Like what?”
“There’s a reason the bad guys have been going to such lengths to find General Ross’s journal. Clearly they believe the journal contains the kind of evidence we’re looking for.”
Evie’s gut tightened as a terrible thought occurred to her. “Do you think that’s why Mrs. Ross was attacked? They were looking for the journal at her house?”
Jesse’s mouth tightened with anger. “Shannon said they tore up her house pretty badly. They were looking for something. It could have been the journal, I suppose.”
“But you haven’t exactly been shy about letting people know the journal’s in Cooper Security’s possession,” she pointed out. “Why would they be looking for it at Mrs. Ross’s house?”
“Maybe they’re looking for the code instead. Finding the journal doesn’t help at all if you don’t have all three portions of the code. They’ve been trying to go after you as a way to force your father to reveal his part of the code, and they kidnapped the whole Harlowe family for three weeks in hope of getting the general to give them his code key. They’re going after everything as ruthlessly as they can.”
And they could be very ruthless, Evie thought, remembering Alan Wilson’s blood staining the upholstery of his SUV. She couldn’t hold back a little shudder. “So what do we do now, if we’ve accomplished all we can here in D.C.?”
He pushed away from the doorframe, squaring his shoulders and meeting her questioning gaze with firm resolve.
“It’s time to go home,” he said.
Chapter Thirteen
Jesse and Evie drove across the state line between Virginia and Tennessee a little before five Thursday afternoon, after a late start that morning le
aving Annie Harlowe’s apartment in Arlington. Evie had wanted to make sure they gave the place a good cleaning before they left.
“I can arrange for someone to come clean after we leave,” Jesse had told her, amused by her nervous energy as she washed dishes, wiped down counters and scrubbed the tub.
“I want to do it myself. I know Annie personally, and if she ever gets a chance to get out of that safe house and back here to D.C., I want to be able to say I left her place in better condition than I found it.”
He’d caught her hands as she started to pull out a mop for the kitchen floor. “Evie, you’re just delaying the inevitable. We have to go back home today. It’s where the journal is.”
She’d put the mop back in the closet and pressed her cheek against his shoulder, melting into his embrace when he’d put his arms around her and pulled her close. “Have you heard anything new on Mrs. Ross’s condition?”
“I talked to Shannon early this morning before you woke up,” he’d told her, trying to keep his caress comforting instead of seductive. “No change so far, but the doctors tell her that it’s actually a good sign that her condition hasn’t deteriorated. Her chances of recovery improve every hour she doesn’t get any worse.”
He’d checked with Shannon again when they’d stopped outside Roanoke for lunch, and learned, to his relief, that Lydia Ross was starting to wake up. “The doctors can’t promise she won’t have some memory issues,” Shannon had cautioned, but she hadn’t been able to keep the excitement out of her voice. During the week she’d spent on Nightshade Island with Lydia Ross and her right-hand man, Gideon Stone, Shannon had become fast friends with the general’s widow. And she’d fallen head over heels in love with Stone, a former Marine who had made protecting Lydia Ross, whose son had died saving Gideon’s life, his personal mission.
Shannon and Lydia had stayed in touch after Lydia left the island and moved to Burkettville, a small farming town just north of Gossamer Ridge. She and Shannon visited back and forth often, because the drive between the two towns took only ten minutes.
The attack on Lydia had hit Shannon and Gideon hard, Jesse knew, well beyond her connection to the mystery Cooper Security was trying to solve. He was rather fond of the woman himself, admiring her combination of guts and grace. If he’d stayed in the Marine Corps, he’d have been smart to find such a woman as his wife.
His gaze wandered over to Evie, who was driving this leg of the trip. In a lot of ways, she reminded him of Lydia Ross, far more than Rita ever had. Rita was smart and resourceful, brilliantly beautiful and utterly charming. But she lacked her younger sister’s dogged determination, her scrappy confidence and her strength in the face of fear.
Evie’s charms were buried a little deeper than her sister’s. But now that he had begun to understand just what kind of woman she really was, behind the occasional prickly self-protection, he found himself thinking that she was the superior sister.
Unnerved by that realization, he dragged his thoughts back to more immediate concerns. “Pull off at the next exit,” he said.
She glanced his way. “What are we going to do?”
“Load our guns. We’re in reciprocity territory now.” Unlike Virginia, Tennessee would honor their concealed carry permits. And he’d already spent too long feeling naked and unprotected. He wasn’t the sort of man who shot first and asked questions later, but he had run into enough trouble over the years to know that he was safer armed than not.
They had to drive a long way before they came to the next exit, then another few miles before Jesse spotted a narrow country lane that looked secluded enough for their purposes. “Pull off there,” he said, pointing.
They dug their weapons from the trunk of the car and loaded them with fresh ammunition. Jesse chambered an extra round, and Evie followed suit. She lifted the hem of her shirt, giving him an all-too-brief look at her flat stomach as she slid her hip holster into place and tucked the compact Ruger she carried into the holder.
He dragged his gaze away and holstered his GLOCK, dropping the hem of his denim jacket over the bulge of his weapon. Overhead, the sky was leaden, moisture adding a bite to the mild October air. “I should have checked the weather reports before we left D.C.”
Evie looked up at the gunmetal-gray clouds above them. “I did. Supposed to be heavy rain this afternoon all across the area.” She dropped her gaze to meet his. “We’re still four and a half hours away from Maybridge. Are you sure we should try to get there tonight?”
Temptation licked at his belly. “We could find a motel somewhere around here.”
“Another no-tell motel?” she asked with a half grimace.
“I’d rather not sleep in a place you have to fumigate first,” he admitted. “But those are the kinds of places that will take cash, nobody asks too many questions and they keep their mouths shut when the law comes knocking.”
She released a soft breath. “You’re right.”
Thunder rumbled from the south. “Sounds like we’ll be heading straight into it.”
“Then we’d better get a move on.” Evie tossed him the keys. “You drive.”
He caught the keys and circled around to the driver’s side.
“Are you glad to be going home?” Evie asked a few miles later.
He glanced at her. She was gazing forward through the windshield, presenting him with her pretty profile. “I’ll be glad to have my family around,” he admitted.
“Safety in numbers?”
“Something like that.”
“Did we do the right thing? Going to D.C.?”
He wondered if she was still thinking about the two men who’d died in the street in Congress Heights. That morning, before leaving D.C., they’d bought a newspaper and learned that both men had succumbed to their injuries. “You don’t still blame yourself for what happened to those two men, do you?”
“No, but they’d still be alive if we’d never gone there.”
“They’d still be alive if they hadn’t chased us into traffic with guns,” Jesse told her flatly. “They chose their own path.”
She fell silent for the next few miles, stirring only when Jesse pulled off the interstate in Knoxville, heading southeast toward the airport. “Where are we going?”
“Best cheap motels are almost always near an airport,” he said.
“‘Best cheap motels’ being a relative term,” she murmured, stretching her arms and legs. The movement stretched her T-shirt tight across her small, firm breasts, reminding him that the luxury of staying in a place with two bedrooms was about to be over.
They found a small, slightly shabby motel just north of the airport. The Volunteer Inn offered little in the way of amenities—no pool, no internet, only the most basic of cable. But Jesse’s Bluetooth worked fine in their small, two-bed room, giving them internet access at least.
He set up the laptop while Evie examined the bedding with a critical eye. “You know bedbugs are on the rise, right?” she asked as she pulled one of the thin blankets away from the sheets beneath.
“Yeah, ask me about the camel spiders in Iraq,” he answered.
She slanted a look his way. “You never talk about Iraq. Or Afghanistan or Kaziristan—”
“Or the Sudan or Sanselmo or Colombia,” he added, keeping his voice light. “So?”
“Why not?”
“What is there to talk about? War is hell.”
“Rita said you kept things bottled up. All the time. She’d try to get you to share your feelings and experiences with her but you’d just clam up.”
He turned from the laptop to look at her. “Rita didn’t want to hear my experiences.”
“But—”
“No buts. I tried to tell her sometimes. But I could see what it did to her, hearing the kind of hell we all had to face in the battle zone. It hurt her. Scared her. Your father knew the same thing about her. He kept that part of his life away from your family, didn’t he?”
She dropped the blanket back in place and sa
t on the edge of the bed nearest to him, her hands folded almost primly on her lap. “Yes, he did. Remember how I told you I wanted to be a Marine? Well, after I announced my plans to him and Mom, he sat me down and shared a little about what he’d gone through in the first Gulf War and in Panama. It was pretty terrifying, hearing how close he came to dying so many times.”
“It’s why we don’t talk about it,” he said quietly.
“But I can take it.”
He leaned toward her, covering her hands with one of his own. “I know. You’re one of the strongest people I know.”
She turned one hand over, curling her fingers over his. “I’m not sure that’s true. Sometimes I feel as if I’m drowning and I can’t find the surface.”
He squeezed her hand. “Sometimes I feel the same way.”
She laughed softly. “No, you don’t. You always know what you want and how to get it. And then you go do it. No fuss, no muss.”
He laughed, as well. “Apparently I hide my neuroses well.”
One dark eyebrow lifted, and her blue eyes sparkled with curiosity. “What neuroses might those be?”
“Well,” he admitted, “I’m not fond of spiders.”
“Like camel spiders?”
“Exactly. And I’m obsessive about winning.”
She grinned. “I know. I’ve played poker with you. Really, taking a week’s allowance from a seventeen-year-old? Harsh, Cooper. Very harsh.”
“You knew what you were getting into. And if you’d won, you’d have gotten me as your personal slave for a month.”
“Oh, that would have been nice,” she said with a wistful smile.
“Yeah? What would you have ordered me to do?”
She pretended to give it some thought. “Change Tuffy’s litter box, for one thing.”
He grimaced. “What else?”
“Well, the reason I really made the bet was that my senior prom was coming up, and I didn’t have a date.” She shot him a sheepish half smile.
Her answer surprised him. “You’d have made me take you to your senior prom?”