Brianne's Secret

by M. S. Parker

  “What the hell are you doing, Tess?”

  My hand tightened around the phone as my heart stuttered in my chest. Torn between anger and disbelief, I managed to choke out a single word. “Brianne?”

  “Yes, it’s me.” She actually had the gall to sound annoyed and impatient with me, as if I was the one causing all the problems we’d had the last few months. “And yes, I know you and Clay were looking for me. Yes, I put you on that plane. No, I’m not going to explain myself or tell you where I’ve been so just–”

  “Stop.” I didn’t yell, but she must’ve heard something in my tone because she did as I said. “You’re unbelievable, you know that? And not in a good way, Bri. I dropped everything to come down to Costa Rica and find you because Mom was worried. Then whatever the hell it is you’re involved in nearly got me killed, but do I get a thanks from you?”

  “Is that what you want?” she said with a barking laugh. “A thank you for rescuing me from the cartel? Fine. Thanks. Now can we talk about what it is you’re doing?”

  “No, we can’t. You fucking drugged me and put me on a plane against my will. That’s kidnapping, Brianne, and I’m pretty sure the army frowns on their people doing that to family members…or to FBI agents.”

  “Clay needs to hear this too.”

  I ground my teeth. “Hear what?”

  “That you both need to stop.”

  “What are you talking about?” I was beginning to feel that migraine I’d lied about.

  Brianne made an exasperated sound. “Let me spell it out for you. You’re in danger.”

  “I’m in danger.”

  “Why do you think I sent you home? I was trying to keep you safe.”

  Of course she was.

  Then I really heard what she’d said. She’d sent me away to keep me safe. Not Clay and me. Just me. Maybe it was just a slip of the tongue because she was talking to me. But maybe it’d been an intentional choice, trying to convey something she wouldn’t want anyone else to overhear. Anyone who might be in my hotel room with me.

  “Is it Congressman Kurth?” I asked. “Am I in danger from Clay and his father?”

  “What?” She sounded too surprised to be acting.

  I laid my cards on the table. “I had an informant tell me that the government was involved in what happened in Costa Rica, so I came with Clay to DC where I’ve been tracking his movements ever since I saw him with Secretary Ganesh. I heard Clay and Congressman Kurth talking about something Clay had done for his dad, something that would be dangerous if the press found out about it…something to do with money…”

  “I’m not going to debate things with you, Tess. Go back to New York and find another story. Go back to the life you had before all this happened.”

  She hung up before I could say anything else. I looked at the phone for a moment, tempted to call her back just so I could hang up on her. Then I heard a noise behind me and rolled over.

  I was going to be sick.

  Eighteen

  Clay

  It was all a lie. Every look and touch, every kiss. She’d been using me. Using me to find information for her article. Using me for my connections just like other people had done my whole life.

  I was going to be sick.

  “You heard.” She at least didn’t insult me by making it a question or denying what she’d said.

  I nodded, not trusting myself to say anything. I’d come back here because Mother had told me that Tess left in a hurry, complaining of a migraine. Between the car accident and the drugs Brianne had given us, I’d been worried about Tess’s health. She was stronger than she appeared, but she also wasn’t very good at taking care of herself if she had something else on her mind.

  Humiliation washed over me as I realized the entire time I’d been thinking and worrying about her, she’d been trying to get to my father through me.

  “I suppose turnabout’s fair play,” she said as she got off the bed. “I overheard something that changed the way I looked at people in my life. Now, you overheard something that changed the way you look at me.”

  How the fuck was she standing there, next to the bed we’d shared for the past couple days, acting like any of this was okay?

  My temper flared, and I came farther into the room. “Eavesdropping and assuming half of a conversation fits into whatever story you’ve already made up is shit journalism. I thought better of you, Tess.”

  “Me?” She crossed over to me and poked me in the chest. “You’re the one having secret meetings with your father, talking about money.”

  I raised an eyebrow at the accusation. “I don’t know what part of that conversation you heard, but I do know that it’s not all of it because if you’d actually heard it all, you would have known what it was really about. Just because you weren’t invited into the conversation doesn’t mean we were up to something nefarious.”

  She crossed her arms and glared at me, like I was the bad guy in this.

  “My father heard about the ransom drop,” I explained, the words coming out of me like razors. “How he knew about it, I don’t know. He knows a lot of people in a lot of places. But that’s not the point. What you heard was my father and I discussing his concerns about where I’d gotten the money to pay the ransom. He wanted to make sure I hadn’t done anything stupid to get it, something that could hurt his squeaky-clean reputation. Then when he found out that I’d gotten it from Rylan, he wanted an introduction. A campaign donor without an angle is a big deal to people like my father.”

  Tess had a shit poker face, and now, I watched as she processed everything I told her. I waited because I wanted to see the moment when she realized she’d made a complete ass of herself. Again.

  I didn’t know why I bothered.

  “Clay, I’m sor–”

  I waved a hand at her. “I don’t care.”

  I left before she could say anything else, barely taking the time to grab my bag of clothes. I didn’t care. Not anymore. I was done. Done with all of this. I’d tell Ray that I was going back to Denver. I needed to put a few more states between Tess and me.

  As I walked out into the cold February night with only my bag and my phone, I needed to talk to someone. Not Ray. I needed a friend, not a work partner. For a few weeks, I’d thought I’d had two of my closest friends back, but now I knew it had been a lie, just like everything else.

  I tapped a contact name and hoped enough time had passed that the awkwardness would be gone between us.

  “Clay? Are you okay?” The concern in Rona’s voice told me that I’d made the right call.

  “I’m okay,” I said before spitting out the truth a moment later, “No, I’m actually not.”

  The story came pouring out of me, all of it. I didn’t give graphic details, but I told her everything else. I hadn’t realized how much I’d truly needed to talk through everything until I finished.

  We shared a minute of silence, and then Rona spoke. “Wow.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It sounds to me like you really like this woman.”

  I sighed. I’d forgotten how well she knew me. “I do.”

  “But you’re going to walk away without letting her explain what she was thinking?” There wasn’t any accusation in her voice, just a matter-of-fact question.

  “She lied to me. She did the same thing to me that she thought I did to her.”

  “Think about it, Clay,” Rona said. “This woman drops everything to fly to a foreign country for a sister she believed betrayed her. Before she can even start looking, she finds herself face-to-face with someone she never thought she’d see again.”

  “I know what happened, Rona. I was there,” I reminded her.

  “Then you understand that she hasn’t really had a minute to think in this whole thing. She’s not a soldier like her sister or an FBI agent like you. She’s a journalist who’d never been in a situation like that before.”

  Dammit, she had a point.

  “Talk to her,” Rona said. “You�
�ll regret it if you walk away without giving her a chance.”

  It took me a few seconds to answer. “I don’t know if I can do that.”

  “Then you might find yourself living a life you don’t want.” She paused, and her voice softened. “And you won’t have anyone to blame for it but yourself.”

  Nineteen

  Tess

  I couldn’t blame anyone but myself for how things ended up. Clay had gotten the raw end of this deal as much as he had sixteen years ago with Brianne lying about him. This time, it wasn’t her fault though, and I didn’t even have her excuse of trying to protect someone. I hadn’t been trying to protect anyone when I’d snooped on his phone, or when I’d purposefully inserted myself in his life so I could put myself into a position to talk to people I wouldn’t otherwise have access to. No, there hadn’t been anything noble on my part, despite the fact that I actually did want him. I’d wanted a story more, and no matter how many people that story might help, it didn’t excuse what I’d done to him.

  Two days had passed, and I hadn’t heard from him or seen him. I hadn’t expected him to reach out, and I wasn’t going to attempt contact myself. I hoped he’d go back to Denver. Not because I didn’t want to see him anymore, but because I wanted him to have his life back. He deserved to have someone in his life who wouldn’t do shit like this to him. The Gardener women needed to stop dragging Clay down.

  None of that made me hurt any less, but I wasn’t going to try to stop the pain. After what I’d done, I deserved to feel every moment of it. The only objective I had now was to find Brianne so I could go home and have an answer for my mom. I’d write about my experiences and hope my editor took that instead of the exposé I’d originally pitched. Brianne would probably be pissed since I fully intended to reveal who she was and what she did for a living, but she hadn’t given me any reason not to include it.

  I pasted on a charming smile as I approached the customer service desk. I’d been trying for two days to track down the number Brianne had called from but hadn’t had any luck. Any calls I’d made to the cell company had been routed and re-routed until I didn’t know if the people I was talking to were robots or real.

  Today, I was trying something new and probably crazy.

  “Hi.” I leaned against the counter and hoped I could pull off a flirty co-ed. “I was wondering if you could help me.”

  The guy who turned around was easily seven or eight years younger than me, with ears sticking out from under a mop of bright orange hair. His dark eyes widened, and his Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed.

  “What can I do for you?” His voice cracked as color flooded his cheeks.

  “I have this ex, Riley, and he keeps calling me and harassing me.”

  “That’s awful.”

  I nodded in agreement and batted my eyes, feeling like a complete idiot as I did it. “I’m afraid all the time that he’s just going to show up at my place.”

  “I’m not sure what I can do?” The last word lilted up like a question.

  “You see, it’s easy to ignore his calls, and every time I change my number or block his, he finds a way around it. His sister told me that he moved to Tennessee, but I don’t know if she’s telling the truth. If I knew where he was, I’d feel a whole lot safer.”

  The kid’s eyes lit up. “Does he have a Find My Phone app?”

  I shook my head. “No, but isn’t there another way for you to find out where someone makes a call from?”

  He scratched the back of his head. “In theory. Do you happen to know the carrier?”

  I wrote down the phone number and slid it across the counter. I let his fingers brush against mine when he took it. I didn’t know if the store’s computer would be able to do anything, but I was pretty much out of ideas that didn’t involve me going to the offices of every major cell phone company in America in the hopes I could talk my way into Brianne’s account. Since that had about a dozen different ways it could go wrong, and a whole lot of additional variables I couldn’t control, going into a general phone store in the hopes that someone could do something seemed like as good a chance to take as any.

  Despite my determination, I wasn’t very hopeful about finding Brianne. My sister had made it clear that she’d go to pretty much any length to stay away from me, and everything I’d seen in Costa Rica made me suspicious of exactly how she’d learned to go to those lengths.

  “I did a reverse number search,” the clerk said. “It comes up as a landline in Duluth.”

  I frowned. Bri wasn’t in Duluth. Aside from the fact that there would be no reason for her to go there, she wouldn’t have wasted the time and effort to send Clay and me away from San Jose if she was just going back to the States herself. It would’ve been a whole lot easier for her to come back to the US with us, then simply go her own way when we all left from LAX. There wouldn’t have been a need for her to leave or to drug Clay and me. Hell, I probably wouldn’t have even noticed if she’d fallen off the grid at that point. Not for weeks or months, anyway.

  The clerk cleared his throat, his eyes darting around as if he expected to be caught doing something he shouldn’t. “I don’t really advertise this, but I’m a bit of a hacker.”

  “Really?” I didn’t have to pretend to put some excitement into my voice. I’d known a couple of people at the paper who had hacker contacts, but those sorts of informants were closely guarded, and it would’ve taken a lot of time and effort to get ahold of one of them.

  “I’m not like Pentagon-hacking worthy,” he said with a pleased blush. “But I think I can crack into a phone company. I can’t do it here, but I get off in ten minutes. You can come back to my place while I do it.”

  “I can’t,” I said, glancing at my watch. “I have another appointment to keep, but I can give you my phone number for you to call when you find something.”

  I might have been waiting for my new friend to illegally obtain entry into some private files before I could continue my search for Brianne, but there was another angle I’d been pursuing as well. A link to Brianne, albeit a more indirect one.

  I hadn’t needed a computer hack to find this information, but it had required a lot of string-pulling.

  It’s said that everyone in the world is connected to everyone else by six degrees of separation. Will Smith was in a movie with that title, and a couple of bored college kids had turned it into a game called the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. However anyone wanted to spin it, the conclusion remained the same. Finding a path from me to someone else was simply a matter of finding the right set of connections.

  Connections such as calling in a favor to Lanie that got me an introduction to an ex of hers who worked for a DC-based tabloid. A call from him took me to a lobbyist. Two cups of coffee later, I had the name of one of the White House groundskeepers who was married to the assistant to the Secretary of the Interior. A “Happy Birthday” call from a popular daytime TV actor I’d interviewed a year or so back was all it took to get me the information I wanted. Namely, a home address for one Sofie Harmon.

  Nearly three hours of cutting back and forth across DC making deals and promising favors, but it was worth it. Clay might’ve had Sofie’s number in his phone, but by the time I’d started looking for her, that number had been disconnected. I’d contacted the army but only gotten the runaround. I assumed that had been what had prompted Brianne’s warning, but it could’ve been anything.

  None of that mattered now. I had someone working on getting information from Brianne’s phone number, and I was in a cab, on my way to the house of one Sofie Harmon, army major and sister-in-law to Secretary Ganesh.

  Things were finally starting to go my way.

  Twenty

  Clay

  Ray had left for Denver on a seven thirty flight this morning, and his parting words had been a warning to mind my own business. I’d promised him I’d follow him home early Sunday morning – the first flight I’d been able to get – and neither one of us had acknowledged that I had
n’t said anything about his warning.

  I’d spent the last two days trying to figure out how to best handle things and trying to forget how angry I was at Tess…every single minute. Clearly, I’d tried and failed since I was currently gripping the wheel hard enough to turn my knuckles white. I needed to do something to find some closure. It was the only way I’d be able to go back to my life in Denver.

  The thing was, the only way I could find closure was if I knew Tess was out of danger, and to do that, I had to find Brianne. It didn’t matter how pissed I was at Tess, I wanted her safe. I’d made some discreet inquiries, but no one knew anything. Before Ray had left, I’d asked him to reach out to Secretary Ganesh and get me an address for Sofie Harmon.

  Now I was on my way to Sofie’s house, hoping that Brianne had reached out to her girlfriend in the last couple days. The house wasn’t large, but it was big enough for a family to live comfortably. It was the sort of place a person could be proud to own. A place where I would’ve been proud to raise a family. I supposed it was still possible that I’d have one someday, but after the way things had gone with the last two women I’d dated, I wasn’t holding my breath.

  Then again, it wasn’t like Tess and I had actually dated. We’d fucked and argued, and sometimes, we actually slept in the same bed, but we hadn’t dated, not really…

  Dammit! I was thinking about Tess again. It seemed like every time I thought I was moving past her, there she was. I didn’t understand how I’d been able to get over Rona so quickly when I’d been with her for months but being with Tess for less than two months had me in knots.

  Except, I had to acknowledge that I hadn’t been with Tess for just that short of a period of time. She’d been a part of me for my whole life, even when we’d been apart, the thought of her had always been there, though often unacknowledged.