With Lily in one arm, he took Rachel’s hand with his free hand. “We have to talk.”
* * *
More than a little anxious, Rachel followed Grey into the front room. In her experience, the phrase we have to talk never boded well. She waited while he settled Lily on the floor, surrounded with toys and stuffed animals. The elephant with the floppy ears had been Rachel’s gift to the little girl, and she was ridiculously pleased to see that Lily chose it to clutch in her pudgy hands.
Rachel had arranged to take the two weeks of vacation she’d earned at S&J. She spent most of each day with Grey and Lily. They were glorious days, filled with little-girl giggles and Grey’s delight in having his daughter back. Picnics at the park, a trip to the zoo and a shopping trip to replenish Lily’s wardrobe were but a few of the highlights.
Did Grey want more time alone with his daughter? Had she butted in by spending so much time with father and daughter? Was that what Grey wanted to tell her? If so, she could handle it. It would hurt, but she’d understand.
Grey took a seat on the chair, leaving her to sit on the sofa. Alone.
“I care about you, Rachel. You know that.”
She nodded cautiously. Where was this going?
“You’ve been great during this past week, helping me with Lily, being patient while we got to know each other again. I owe you. I owe you more than I can say. I’ll never forget you.”
Okay. She definitely didn’t like the sound of that. “What are you trying to tell me, Grey?”
“I have Lily back. I have to focus on her. She needs me—full-time. I’ve arranged to use the last of my leave to finish off my deployment. I won’t have time for other...things.”
“Other things like me?” She said the words neutrally, as though she were only trying to ascertain their meaning.
His expression anguished, he nodded.
It felt as though a knife had plunged into her heart, but pride kept her head up and her voice steady. “I get it. I’m glad you have Lily back. She’s a beautiful little girl. And you’re right. She needs you.”
“Thank you for understanding. Thank you for everything. I can never repay you.”
The knife twisted a little deeper. Any more and she’d break down in tears. The last thing she wanted from Grey was gratitude. Please, don’t let me cry. Not here. Not now. There’d be time for tears later. Plenty of time.
She stood. “I’d better be going. You’re a great father, Grey. You and Lily will get to know each other and to feel comfortable with each other. You don’t need me to hold your hand. Not anymore.”
“Rachel...”
She paused, hoping, praying. “Yes?”
He stood, too, then closed the distance between them to frame her face in his hands. “Take care of yourself.”
“I will.” With those words, she walked to the door, her steps very precise, her head high, her back straight. Hold on. Don’t let him see that your heart is breaking. A few more steps, and she’d be outside. Another few steps, and she’d reach her car. She’d done harder things, hadn’t she, like pulling Grey through the forest on a makeshift litter? She’d survive this.
Finally, she was sitting behind the steering wheel, head bent as she forced the tears back. Not a good idea to cry while driving. With every bit of resolve she possessed, she made the drive home without incident.
There, she walked into her bedroom and let the tears have their way. She cried. For Maggie. For Grey and Lily. For herself. If she could, she’d have laughed at the irony that she’d finally found a man she loved with all of her heart and he didn’t want her.
It wasn’t the first time she’d been alone. Growing up as she had, being moved from one foster home to another, and then Jeremy’s desertion, should have prepared her for this, but none of that hurt nearly as much as Grey telling her that he didn’t need her, didn’t want her.
How could she have so misread him and his feelings for her? There’d been a time when she thought he loved her, but he’d never said the words aloud. He’d admitted to caring about her, but caring was a far cry from loving. Caring alone wouldn’t sustain a marriage.
Since when had she started thinking of love and marriage? Had it been when she and Grey had survived being shot at in the cabin? Or when he’d saved her from the IED? Maybe it had happened earlier, when they’d faced down two would-be killers in the forest.
When the tears were spent, she gave herself a shake, went into the bathroom, and splashed water on her face. “Enough.”
Tears wouldn’t change anything. They would only add to an already brewing headache.
She got up, showered away the effects of the crying jag and got busy cleaning the house. Nothing escaped her attention. By nighttime, floors gleamed, wood furniture glowed with a fresh coat of polish and bathroom fixtures were shiny enough that she could see her reflection in them.
The housework exhausted her, leaving her too weary to think about Grey. A blessing, she supposed. After another shower, she went to bed.
To her surprise, she slept deeply and awoke ready to get on with her life, even if that life was to be spent alone.
Work was the antidote to heartache, and she drove to S&J the following morning. “I need an assignment,” she told Shelley.
Shelley gave her a curious look. “I thought you were taking a couple of weeks off. You certainly earned it.”
Rachel did her best to assume a nonchalant air. “I need to work. I’ve taken too much time off as it is.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong.” She flushed at the curt words and attempted to soften them with a smile. “I just want to keep busy. Sitting around doing nothing doesn’t suit me.”
“Okay. But remember, you can come to me anytime. We’re friends. Right?”
Rachel managed a weak smile. “Right.”
From the look on Shelley’s face, Rachel hadn’t fooled her.
“Detective Lannigan called,” Shelley said. “He had some more information about Michaels he thought you’d want to know.”
At last. Something to think about besides Grey. “What about him?”
“When he was in law school, he was approached by a member of a crime family. Apparently, they saw something in him that they could use. Upon graduation, he was promised a fast track in his career. The family made good on it, and Michaels’s career soared. First as a prosecuting attorney, then as a defense attorney. He took his orders from the family, nothing too bad, fixing a trial here, bribing a witness there.
“Then he took over his family’s firm, a nice respectable law firm that had a sterling reputation not just in the South but all over the east coast. He didn’t put his name on it, preferring to keep a low profile. All the while, he continued doing the mob’s bidding. They were careful not to expose him by ordering him to do too many jobs. He was too valuable to risk. His contacts proved useful, and he became an even more prized asset.”
Rachel processed what Shelley had told her about Michaels. It made a terrible kind of sense, the high-society lawyer working for a crime family with no one being the wiser. Who would have ever suspected the blue-blooded lawyer of working for the mob?
“Under the family’s orders, he volunteered to represent certain criminals. Always pro bono. Everyone thought it was a way to rack up points with the judges. He was told to get his clients off with reduced sentences or to make the charges go away altogether. And sometimes he was told to let the client get the maximum sentence, the family’s way of punishing anyone who crossed them. That’s how he came to know those two thugs who tried to kill you.”
“Back in the woods, when I was questioning one of the men who came after us, he said that their boss was connected,” Rachel said. “Looks like he was telling the truth.”
“Michaels was as bad as any of the men he represented. Worse, in my opinion,” Shelley said in a h
ard voice. “We can’t prove it, but he probably hired the man on the roof that first day, the one who almost killed Grey. He was the go-to guy to arrange for contracts, so it made sense that he helped Roberta when she needed someone disposed of.”
“How did he and Roberta meet?”
“She and his family belonged to the same country club. It didn’t take long for her and Michaels to recognize what the other was and how they could use each other to their mutual benefit.”
“Did his family—his real family—know about any of this?”
Shelley shook her head. “Not according to Lannigan. They were devastated, first by his death, then by what’s come out about him. It turns out that the feds have had their eye on him for some time but could never prove anything against him. He was that smart.”
Rachel could only imagine the heartbreak Michaels’s parents must be experiencing. His had been a wasted life in every way.
“Lannigan also had news about Roberta. Seems that once she started talking, she couldn’t shut up. When Maggie discovered that she wasn’t Roberta’s biological child, she confronted Roberta and thereby signed her death warrant. Roberta was afraid that Maggie would take the trust and leave, so she started giving Maggie poison, a little every day. She bribed the family doctor to sign the death certificate listing the cause of death as heart failure, with no one the wiser.”
Another life destroyed, Rachel thought. She hadn’t known Maggie, but she mourned for her anew. And it brought her full circle back to Grey. She’d done her best to push thoughts of him from her mind and had failed spectacularly at it.
“I don’t have anything for you today,” Shelley said, “but I’ll have something tomorrow. Right up your alley.”
When Rachel returned home after taking care of some neglected chores, the sky was awash with pinks and corals and reds of the setting sun. She paid scant attention to the beauty, though. How could she appreciate nature’s paintbrush when her heart was breaking? Scratch that. It was already broken, shattered into little pieces that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put back together again.
At one time the words of the nursery rhyme would have caused her spirits to lift, but even they couldn’t nudge a smile from her. Not today. Perhaps not ever again.
She recalled that grueling time in the woods as she pulled Grey on the litter, when she’d questioned if she could keep going.
One foot in front of the other. It looked like she’d be putting that mantra to use again.
TWENTY
Shelley had taken Rachel at her word and put her to work.
When Shelley explained the nature of the assignment, Rachel decided her boss had given her hardship duty: providing security for the spoiled daughter of a foreign diplomat. It seemed the girl had given her last bodyguard, an ex-marine, the slip in the dressing room of an exclusive boutique and the father now wanted a woman to keep his daughter in line.
“Right up my alley, huh?” she said, repeating Shelley’s words back to her. “I’ll get you for this,” she promised her friend.
Shelley only laughed. “Think of it as a change of pace from your last job. The most hazardous thing you’ll have to face is shopping with a teenage girl. What could go wrong?”
Plenty, it turned out. Like almost losing Kaylie, said teenage girl, on one of Shelley’s predicted shopping trips. Like enduring a day at a spa with treatments that resembled some kind of medieval torture practices. Like spending a good portion of a night at an outdoor concert where the music was so loud Rachel was certain she’d suffered partial hearing loss.
Keeping track of her young charge was proving just as difficult as she’d feared. The sixteen-year-old girl had the energy of a new puppy and wanted to experience everything the city had to offer. Temper tantrums when she didn’t get her way were not uncommon. At one point Rachel was tempted to pull out a pair of flex-cuffs.
The temper tantrums turned Rachel’s thoughts to Lily. Was she, too, having the occasional tantrum of the one-year-old variety? How was Grey handling them? Had he regained his confidence in caring for his daughter?
When it came time to put Kaylie on the plane, Rachel felt she’d received a reprieve and vowed to never take on another babysitting job.
She returned to S&J, flopped down on the conference sofa with a dramatic sigh and gave Shelley her best pout. “Never again. Never again ask me to babysit, I beg of you.”
Shelley grinned. “Kaylie really took it out of you, huh?”
“And then some. I’d rather face terrorists armed with rocket launchers than keep track of one teenage girl. She did her best to give me the slip during one of those oh-so-fun shopping trips. At one point, I was ready to let her. How do parents of teenagers do it? How do any parents do it?”
“No promises about the babysitting gigs,” Shelley said. “As far as the parenting part, parents do it because they love their children more than anything on earth. Once you have children of your own, you’ll understand.”
Children of her own. The possibility didn’t seem likely. Her thoughts led her on yet another detour to Grey and Lily. How were they doing? Were they happy? Had they been able to put the kidnapping behind them? Stupid question. Of course they hadn’t. Grey would live with the terror of those days when Lily was missing for the rest of his life. And Lily, would she remember any of it?
“I haven’t heard you mention Grey Nighthorse lately,” Shelley said as though she’d read Rachel’s thoughts. “How are he and his little girl doing?”
“All right, I guess.” Rachel developed a sudden interest in the intricate weave of a throw pillow. “I haven’t seen much of them.”
“Oh?” There was a question in the single syllable. “I was thinking he’d be a good fit at S&J. We can always use another operative with his skills.”
Rachel barely kept from breaking down and bawling her eyes out. Again. “Maybe,” she said, striving for an offhand tone. “Though I think he’s pretty busy with Lily right now.”
“Just a thought,” Shelley said.
The casual words didn’t fool Rachel.
Knowing that Shelley was expecting a more enthusiastic response, Rachel agreed that Grey was a perfect fit for S&J, but what would she do if she had to face him every day at work? More important, could she do it?
* * *
Grey awoke with a foul headache and the lowering knowledge that he was a fool. Not just a fool, but a stupid fool who should have his head examined.
Why had he let Rachel go? Honesty forced him to admit that he hadn’t let her go—he’d practically pushed her out the door. He’d seen the devastation in her eyes and had done his best to harden his heart against it, all the while telling himself that he was doing it for her.
The truth was, he’d done it for himself. He was running scared. Facing the enemy in Afghanistan had been easy compared to facing his fears about entering into a relationship. He wasn’t accustomed to thinking of himself as a coward, but that was exactly what he was. Did he have the courage to go to Rachel and beg her to forgive him?
It had taken only a day without her to realize his mistake, a day filled with loneliness so acute that it nearly suffocated him. Even Lily’s sweet presence hadn’t been enough to make up for the fact that he’d sent Rachel away. Then another day to try to convince himself that he’d done the right thing, the noble thing, the only thing. A day after that to go back to his original premise that he was, indeed, a fool.
The question was, what did he do now?
Go find her and beg for her forgiveness? That was the smart thing. The only problem was that he didn’t know what her feelings for him were. He thought she cared for him, but love? And why would she have him after the way he’d treated her? She deserved to kick his teeth in. Then there was the question of whether she was willing to take on a ready-made family with another woman’s child.
The kind thing wo
uld be to let her alone. Let her go on with her life just as he would go on with his own. Though neither of them might be happy, at least he wouldn’t expose her to the selfishness that had led to the destruction of his first marriage.
With an impatient gesture for the swirl of his thoughts, he pushed back from the breakfast table. After feeding Lily a grape-jelly sandwich, her current favorite food, cleaning her up, and dressing her, he put her in her car seat and drove to S&J. He found Rachel in S&J’s parking lot, just getting out of her car. With her hair pulled back in a braid and her face bare of makeup, she was lovely, but there was a sadness to her eyes.
Lily in his arms, he made his way toward her. “Hi.” An inspired greeting if there ever was one.
“Hi back.”
Inspired greetings must be going around.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Coming to see you.”
“I thought you were busy,” she said with a nod in Lily’s direction.
Okay. He deserved that. “About what I said... I was...”
“You were what?”
“I was running scared.” There, he’d said it. “And I was trying to protect you.”
Rachel locked her car door and headed to the building. “From what?”
“Me.”
“That makes a lot of sense.” She reached the door and pulled out her keys. “Lily is looking good. Happy.” Her voice relaxed before turning hard again. “Unless you have something else to say, I’m busy.”
He took the keys from her, then led her to a bench nestled beneath a shade tree. After Rachel sat, he did the same. “Listen to me. Please. Then if you want me to go, I will.” Lily squirmed on his lap but soon settled when he gave her a rubber teething ring. “We’re getting in teeth,” he said with a wry smile. “I’m not exaggerating when I say we because we’ve been up every night with it.”
The softness in Rachel’s eyes as they rested on Lily gave him hope.
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