Aine smiled and raced off to pluck her nephew from the crib. “Hello, sweet boy,” she said, lifting him into her arms. “Did you have a good nap?”
Sam was the most beautiful baby Aine had ever seen. He had his father’s jet black hair, and blue eyes like she and Ava had. At his last appointment, the doctor had told them that Sam was in the ninety-eighth percentile of both height and weight, which Tabon said was because her sister produced more milk than any mother in the history of the universe.
Ava had swatted at him when he said it after they got home, and pretended to pout. When Tabon had put his arms around her and nuzzled her sister’s neck, Aine walked out of the back door of the house to give them some privacy.
She didn’t begrudge Ava any happiness, but there were times she was envious. Tabon more than loved Ava; he worshiped her, and she felt the same way about him.
She’d foolishly thought for a while that she and Striker might have a similar relationship. How naive she’d been.
“Do you want to feed him, or should I grab a bottle from downstairs?” she asked. Ava pumped enough milk every day that Sam could probably get by with nothing but bottles for at least a week.
“Go ahead,” said Ava, distracted with packing.
“Hey,” she said to Tabon when he walked in and found her sitting on the sofa, feeding Sam.
“There’s my boy,” he said, walking over to run his finger down Sam’s cheek.
“Can I ask you something?” she said.
“Always.”
“Do you get tired of me being around all the time?”
Tabon sat on the coffee table in front of her, leaned forward, and put his elbows on his knees.
“What’s this all about?” he asked.
“Just that. I’m always here. Maybe you’d like to come home and not find your wife’s sister in your house.”
“You’re not here all the time, Aine. If anything, I worry that Avarie and I are always imposing on you. I doubt you signed up to be a full-time nanny when your sister had this big guy.”
Sam reached for his father, and Tabon took him in his arms.
“Ava said you’re leaving for California.”
Tabon looked at her but didn’t say anything right away.
“What?” she said when he continued to stare at her.
“I’m not sure what I’m supposed to say.”
“Oh.” Aine scooted forward on the sofa to stand, but Tabon put his hand on her arm.
“I know I just said that I feel like we’re always imposing on you, but I’m not sure your sister will want to go along if you don’t come too.”
“Won’t I be the imposition, though? I’ll go from being underfoot most of the time, to all of the time if I’m staying with you.”
Razor nipped at Sam’s hand when the baby put it near his mouth, and he giggled.
“There’s another solution.”
“What’s that?”
“You can stay in Gunner’s half of the duplex. He and Zary won’t be coming out between now and the first of the year, and maybe by then, either you’ll be sick of us and want to come back home, or we’ll all be back here.”
“Are you sure? It seems kind of big for just me.”
“Not an issue. You’ll have loads of privacy, and Ava will have you close. Your mom’s on a cruise, right?”
Aine nodded. “If you’re sure…”
“Positive.”
“I have one question, though.”
“Shoot.”
“Will Striker be there?”
“If by ‘there’ you mean at the house, maybe sometimes, but he definitely won’t be staying there. We haven’t figured out the logistics yet, but he’ll either be at the safe house in Harmony or down in Montecito, closer to Doc’s place.”
“Okay.”
“What happened with you two? If you don’t want to tell me, I’ll understand.”
“I think he got bored.”
Tabon raised his eyebrows. “Not a chance. Maybe he just got scared.”
“Of me? That’s hysterical.”
Razor shrugged. “I bet I’m more right than you are.”
5
One thing about being around Tabon and the rest of the K19 team that always astounded Aine was how many vehicles they had.
When she asked about driving her car down from Yachats, Tabon scoffed.
“There’s one in the garage you can use.”
“What about when you need it?”
“No, I meant in Gunner’s garage. Avarie and I both have cars in Cambria.”
“You do?”
Tabon nodded and went back to whatever he was doing.
“I don’t know how he’s getting there, but Tabon said that Striker—I mean Griffin—wouldn’t be on the plane today,” said Ava when they were getting ready to leave for the private airfield.
“It’s okay. You can call him Striker. I do now.” Aine had felt funny calling him by his code name when they were dating, but now that they weren’t, there was no reason she shouldn’t refer to him the same way everyone else did.
“Striker left last night,” said Tabon, walking past them with their bags.
Aine was equally relieved and disappointed. A part of her had hoped he’d be on the plane, even if he didn’t talk to her.
“What’s happening with Stuart?” asked Tabon when he came back inside after putting the bags in the car.
“I talked to him last night. He’s going to try to take a couple of days off to come down to visit. If that’s okay. I mean, he wouldn’t stay at the house or anything like that.”
Tabon put his hand on Aine’s shoulder. “You’re my sister-in-law not my daughter, and you’re twenty-three years old. You don’t need my permission to have guests. Even overnight ones. You have the run of that side of the duplex, sweetheart. The only thing I ask is that if you have loud parties, you invite your sister and me.”
“Right,” laughed Aine. “As if.”
“I don’t know,” said Ava. “Quinn’s back.”
Aine couldn’t wait to see one of her best friends. Quinn was the reason that Ava met Tabon, which led to Aine meeting Striker.
“Do you think it’ll be too hard for her, you know, with Sam?”
It had been over a year since they’d seen Quinn and her husband, Mercer. The last time they were in town had been for Ava and Tabon’s wedding. Quinn was pregnant at the time but had miscarried a couple of weeks after that. Since, she and Mercer had been traveling around the world.
“When I asked him if he’d take me to India, Mercer said he’ll take me everywhere,” Quinn had gushed shortly after she and Mercer started seeing each other.
He’d made good on his promise, and they’d spent the last year going everywhere from Europe to the Caribbean—even to places Aine had never heard of.
“I wish Tara and Penelope could come for Thanksgiving,” said Ava, looking sheepishly at her husband.
He shook his head and kissed her. “Then, invite them, Avarie. Aine was saying the duplex was too big for just her.”
“What do you think?” asked Ava.
Aine nodded and smiled. “We should definitely invite them. It’s been too long since the Tribe of Five was all in the same place at the same time.”
They’d all met in boarding school when they were seven years old—and had been best friends since. It was only after they all graduated from Barnard that they began living separate lives.
From the beginning, the thing they had in common was that each of them had terrible relationships with their parents.
When they were younger, they’d collectively decided Quinn had it the worst. After she arrived at boarding school, she and her mother saw each other so sporadically. At times it was like Quinn didn’t have any parents at all.
She didn’t find out who her dad was until she was twenty-one years old, and even then there had been some question as to whether Doc was her biological father. The night before her wedding to Mercer, Quinn and Doc opened the e
nvelope that confirmed he was.
While Quinn’s story had a happy ending, Ava and Aine’s didn’t. Shortly after the very same wedding, they found out their father, who had lived his life with them as Conor McNamara, was actually Makar Petrov, a black market arms dealer. Over the course of the next several months, he’d tried to kill her, Ava, and their half-sister, Zary, in order to get his hands on money he’d put in their names when they were born.
Aine shuddered. There was no reason to dredge up those memories again. The nightmare began with the man they’d once called “Daddy,” and still hadn’t ended even though he was dead.
Tara and Penelope had terrible relationships with their parents too, but nothing as dramatic as what she and her sister or Quinn had gone through. For them, it was the stereotypical scenario of their fathers turning in their “older wives” for newer models every couple of years while their mothers were angry and bitter about it.
Regardless of the situation, it was rare that any of them spent holidays with their families.
“I’ll send an email on our way to the airfield,” Aine told her sister.
Maybe if the Tribe of Five was back together again, they could help Aine get her head back on straight and get her mind off of Striker Ellis.
—:—
Striker sprung for a first-class ticket even though it was a quick flight from Portland to the Central Coast. He’d originally planned to leave last night, but decided to spend some time in the city instead. He spent three hours going from shops to restaurants to other shops, eating his way through downtown and buying gifts with no intended recipient. Each thing he’d picked out was because he thought Aine might like it—and he obviously couldn’t give any of the gifts to her.
It wasn’t as though he could give any of his purchases to someone in his family. In the first week of March, he’d received word that his last living relative had died.
His sister, Pam, had battled drugs and alcohol all her short life, until one day, her body had simply given out.
As for his parents, his mother had left home when Striker was in Kindergarten. He barely remembered her. Three years later, his father had skipped town and left him and his sister all alone. His mother’s only sibling, Dorothy, took him and Pam in. He was eight at the time, but his sister was fifteen and had no intention of living by their aunt’s strict rules.
Looking back on it, Dorothy hadn’t been that strict. The rules she made were reasonable. It was just that his parents hadn’t lived their own lives with any self-discipline that would provide stability for their kids.
When his aunt passed away, he was the only one at the cemetery on the day she was buried. He realized then that he was alone. For all intents and purposes, he had no family left—they’d all abandoned him.
A few weeks later, a woman claiming to be his mother had showed up at the CIA headquarters, high as a kite, demanding her share of whatever he’d inherited from Dorothy. When he informed her that there wasn’t any inheritance, she told him to expect to hear from her lawyer.
He did eventually hear from an attorney but not about any inheritance. Instead, the man had been attempting to collect past-due medical bills on behalf of Striker’s deceased mother. When he suggested the man look for her husband instead, he said that he did, and had found he had passed away a few months before her. That was how he found out both of his parents were dead. One phone call. From a lawyer looking for money.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the sheer bag that held the delicate pair of garnet earrings he purchased because they matched the bracelet he gave to Aine at Christmas, the one that had belonged to his Aunt Dorothy, and that Aine had tried to return to him when he broke things off with her.
It wasn’t the phone call from the lawyer looking for money for his mother’s medical bills that had made Striker end his relationship with Aine, though. It was what he learned from the one he received informing him of his sister’s death.
He closed his eyes against the memory of what had turned out to be one of the worst days of his life despite having done what he had to do.
Aine came into the kitchen, poured a cup of coffee, and joined him at the table.
“Is everything okay?” she asked, opening the door for him to act sooner than he’d planned to.
Striker shook his head. “It isn’t.”
When she reached across the table to put her hand on his, he pulled it away.
“Griffin?”
He scrubbed his face and took a deep breath. “This isn’t going to work out, Aine.”
“What do you mean?”
“You and me. We’ve run our course.”
He’d expected her look of confusion and maybe some tears, but so far, she wasn’t crying.
“I don’t understand.”
“We talked about the age difference between us in the past, and it’s more of an issue than I thought it would be.”
Her cheeks turned bright red. “I see.”
“We have very different lives. It isn’t only that I’m so much older than you are. I have a career, and I know what I want out of life. I thought I wanted a long-term relationship, but I’ve realized I don’t. I tried, and it isn’t what I thought it would be.”
There was little she could say in argument, and he’d planned it that way.
She rose from the table and walked toward the bedroom, but Striker didn’t follow. If he did, he might be tempted to take back everything he said and tell her the real reason he was ending things between them. He couldn’t do that, though. He could feel his heart splinter, but his pain didn’t matter. He couldn’t saddle someone like Aine with the baggage he’d be carrying with him his entire life.
She rolled her small suitcase into the kitchen and told him she’d called a car service to pick her up.
“I can give you a ride, Aine.”
“No, thank you. I’ll wait outside.”
“Aine—”
“Please, Griffin. You said what you needed to say. I’d rather not discuss it further.” She opened the door and walked out. Again, he didn’t follow.
Striker put the earrings back in his pocket, telling himself he needed to stop the foolishness of buying gifts for a woman who was no longer in his life, but knowing full well that the next time he saw something he thought she would like, he wouldn’t be able to resist.
As hard as it was to leave Yachats without seeing her one more time, it was for the best. He’d angered her when he made it obvious he thought about her, even paid attention to her life. She would never know the real extent to which he did.
“Were those earrings for your wife?” the older woman sitting in the seat next to him asked.
“Just a friend,” he answered.
“She’s a lucky woman.”
“She wouldn’t agree.”
The woman touched his arm with her hand. “Why wouldn’t she?”
Much to his surprise, Striker found himself telling the woman about Aine and their history.
“I did what I thought was best for her,” he admitted, “but I miss her every day.”
The woman studied him with her chin in her hand.
“I feel like there’s something you want to say.”
She raised and lowered her eyebrows with the deep breath she took, and then patted his hand. “You don’t need to hear my opinion to know what you need to do next.”
“If you’re going to say anything other than I should stay away from her, I disagree.”
“You can’t stay away from her, and you know it. Even when you aren’t with her physically, you carry her with you. You’re never without this woman, yet you’ve forced her to live her life without you.”
“It’s for the best.”
“No matter how many times you say it, you aren’t convincing yourself any more than you’re convincing me.”
“I don’t know…”
“Of course you do.”
“She’s seeing someone else now.”
The woman shrugged. “In
the words of a well-known Broadway actor and producer, ‘love is love is love is love.’ There’s no denying love, young man.” The woman shook her head. “For someone so obviously bright, you are quite dim when it comes to the female heart.”
Striker was intrigued. “I’ve told you far more about me than her. What leads you to think she loves me?”
“I’m a woman.”
Striker laughed a second time. “And?”
“Please don’t take this the wrong way, I am old enough to be your mother, as well as very happily married, but you’re very lovable.”
“If you knew me better, you wouldn’t say that.”
“Yes, I would, and so would your young lady. Ask her.”
“I doubt I’ll ever talk to her again.”
This time the woman laughed. “Of course you will. Very soon, in fact.”
“Are you psychic? Not that I believe in that sort of thing.”
“Intuitive.”
“She’s still in Oregon.”
The pilot announced their descent; the woman closed her eyes and rested her head against her seat.
Striker didn’t say anything more until after they landed and separated at the gate.
“Enjoy your stay,” he said, not knowing whether she was visiting or coming home.
“Follow your heart, young man,” she said before walking in the opposite direction.
Striker didn’t respond, but her words stuck with him the rest of the day. The cynic in him knew everything she’d said was nonsense, spoken from a woman who knew very little about the reality of the situation. There was another part of him that wished, even hoped, she was right.
6
“Striker is on his way here now,” said Tabon, looking at his phone.
“Oh,” responded Aine. “I guess that means I should leave.”
“I didn’t say that. I just said he’s on his way.”
“You don’t have to hide from him, Aine. You didn’t do anything wrong and neither did he. You broke up. That’s it. You’re both adults who can learn to be around each other.”
Striker (K19 Security Solutions Book 6) Page 4