Harlequin Special Edition November 2014 - Box Set 1 of 2: A Weaver Christmas Gift\The Soldier's Holiday Homecoming\Santa's Playbook (4 page)

“Oh, yeah?” She angled her head and batted her lashes comically. “You gonna put a ring on it and donate some genetic material?” She patted his cheek dismissively and walked away before she had to witness his response.

“Merilee,” she called as she headed toward the exit, “make sure Casey Clay doesn't skip out on his bill. Don't want anyone around here thinking they can get things for free.”

Casey watched Jane sail through the door, then glanced at Merilee, who was giving him a wry look.

“Think she had another bad date,” Merilee shared, moving down to his end of the bar.

Casey would bet on it. But he could play ignorant when he wanted. He twirled his fork in the spaghetti noodles. “What makes you say that?”

Merilee grinned. She was a little younger than Jane and lived over in Braden. Casey'd heard somewhere that she was engaged to a fireman. “If
you
had a good dinner date, would you be hanging around your workplace an hour after appetizers?” She poured herself a cup of coffee and shook her head. “Not me, my friend. How's that pasta?”

“Not as good as the meat loaf would have been.”

Merilee grinned. “Not one of Jerry's best dishes, that's for sure. Jane's been trying to get him to use her recipe, but he says the kitchen's his domain and unless she wants him to quit, to leave him to it.”

Casey figured the only reason Jane allowed Jerry any leeway at all was because she couldn't easily replace him. When it came to her business, like her personal life, she wanted to control every damn little detail.

He didn't begrudge her that particular right—he called plenty of his own shots, too—but it definitely made dealing with her a challenge. “You said
another
bad date.” He gave up on the watery spaghetti and bullet-hard meatballs and picked up the beer. It was just the way he liked. A little dark. A little toasty. And not too heavy on the hops. “She having a lot of 'em?”

Merilee obviously saw nothing odd in the question. There was a reason why gossip was Weaver's number-one sport. Everyone talked about everyone. “I know she's had a date every Thursday night for the past month with a different guy each time. Far as I can tell, none of them led to a second date. The rest of the time, she's here working.”

He did have to give Jane props for being a hard worker. She might bust his chops about getting called into Cee-Vid at all hours, but she wasn't much better.

It was a good thing they'd never tried moving their relationship out of the bedroom. Even if she'd never been struck with baby fever, it still would have been a recipe for disaster.

Knowing it didn't make the thought particularly welcome, though.

“You can take that away,” Casey told Merilee, nudging the still-full plate toward her.

“Want me to get you something else?”

He shook his head as he slid off the bar stool. He drained the last mouthful of beer and pulled some cash from his wallet that he dropped on the check. “Catch ya later, Merilee.”

She scooped up the money with a smile and turned to the register. He left the bar and headed toward his truck, parked in the lot that was situated between Colbys and the dance studio.

Even at that hour of the evening, there was still activity over there. Business was obviously going well for his cousin.

He drove out of the lot but was too restless to head home. He briefly considered dropping by his parents' place. Maggie and Daniel Clay still lived in the house where Casey had been born and raised. But he decided against it. He enjoyed his folks' company, but he wasn't in the mood for a dose of happy hearth and home. For the same reason, he didn't drop by J.D.'s place. His sister and her husband, Jake, were always welcoming, too. Jake's twin boys—preteen hellions that they were—would be chasing around while two-year-old Tucker did his level best to keep up with his big brothers.

He rubbed his fingers absently over the gnawing in his chest and drove without stopping right past his own house—a hundred-and-twenty-year-old farmhouse that he'd moved from the country into town and restored with his dad's help—all the way to Shop-World, which was on the other side of Weaver.

His excuse was he needed to pick up some groceries for his empty refrigerator. That Janie lived out by the big-box store was just a coincidence.

Her bright and shiny silver pickup was parked in front of her condo when he trolled past. She'd turned on her porch light. He looked up at the still-dark window on the second floor directly above the door. Her bedroom. He doubted she'd gone to bed. She was probably puttering around in her kitchen or the walled-in yard she had out back, where he'd always parked before when he'd come calling. It was rare for her to just sit and chill. She always seemed to need to be doing something.

He circled the block, giving up the pretense altogether that he cared about groceries when he passed Shop-World for the second time without a glance, and slowly drove past her condo again. The light had gone on in her bedroom window, and she was standing in front of the window looking out.

Dammit.

No way she'd fail to see his dusty black pickup truck creeping, two miles an hour, down her street when there was a big ol' streetlamp overhead. Speeding up would make him look even more stupid. Stopping altogether wasn't an option.

She wanted things he couldn't give her, he reminded himself.

Then she lifted her arms and closed the white plantation shutters, cutting herself off from view.

Another needless reminder. She wanted things, but not from him.

His jaw tight, he turned around and drove home.

Chapter Four

“A
rlo Bellamy.”

Jane turned her attention from the strawberry daiquiris she was mixing for a trio of young women she'd just carded to Hayley, who was sitting at the end of the bar. “What?”

Hayley tucked her hair behind her ear. She was nodding. “Arlo Bellamy. I don't know why I didn't think of him before. He's my neighbor. You should go out with him.”

Despite herself, Jane's gaze flicked toward the pool tables.

It was Saturday night and the Clay contingent was out in force. Casey was there, wielding his personal pool cue with his typical expertise. He had at least a dozen relatives with him. With a group that large, she would have assumed they were celebrating something special. But experience had already shown her that when it came to the Clay family, they didn't seem to need any special reason to socialize en masse.

“He's thirty-eight,” Hayley was saying. “He's the estate lawyer who has that office down on Second Street.”

Jane focused with an effort on her friend's voice rather than Casey. “The one who has that bronze horse statue out in front?”

Hayley nodded. “I think you'd have a lot in common.”

“Never met him.” She couldn't recall the lawyer ever stepping foot in Colbys.

“So? He's nice.”

“How do you know? Just because he's a lawyer?” She flipped on the blender and assembled three glasses in front of her. “Guy could be a stalker.” She thought of Casey driving past her house the other evening.

She'd been dangerously close to beckoning him to come inside.

And where would that have gotten her?

Certainly no closer to marriage and a baby.

“I doubt he's a stalker,” Hayley said drily. “He'd have chosen to live somewhere other than Weaver where he'd have a larger pool of pickings.”

Jane killed the blender and poured out the sweet drinks. Personally, she found the daiquiri concoctions sickening, but they never failed to appeal to a good portion of her patrons. She swirled whipped cream on top of the pink drinks and set them on a tray for her server to pick up, then started on the next order. She'd been tending bar for so many years that the motions were routine. Comfortable. “If he's so nice, why haven't you dated him?”

Hayley gave her a look. “Girlfriend,
you
are the one who says she's on the hunt for a husband. Not me.”

“Nor me,” Sam Dawson said as she stepped up to the bar and slid onto the stool that Hayley had been saving for her. “Sorry I'm late.”

Unconcerned, Hayley waved her hand toward Jane. “You've met Arlo,” she said to Sam. “Tell her he's a nice guy.”

“He's a nice guy,” Sam said obediently. Her dark blond hair was pulled into the usual knot at the back of her head. “No arrests since I've been here.”

Hayley grinned. “See, Jane? No arrests.”

Jane set a bottle of light beer in front of Sam and flipped off the bottle cap in the same motion before turning back to her order. “High praise, all right.” She wondered if Casey had ever been arrested.

Probably not. From all appearances, as a general rule the Clays seemed to be a highly upstanding lot.

“Arlo might not want to go out with me, then.” She pulled the bottle of Grey Goose down from the shelf behind her and poured it liberally over ice. “I have been.” She followed the vodka with a splash of freshly squeezed grapefruit juice and set the drink on another tray. For whatever reason, cocktails seemed to be the order of the evening among the crowd. Usually beer and margaritas were the heavy favorites but that night she was serving up everything from Manhattans to Slippery Nipples.

“No way.” Both Hayley and Sam looked agog.

She paused in front of them, long enough to pull another steaming rack of glasses out of the dishwasher. “That's how I met Gage in college. A couple dozen of us were protesting the unfair firing of a professor and we all got picked up.” She set the rack on the rubberized mat next to the small sink and moved down to the taps. “Eventually, the charges were dismissed.”

A burst of laughter came from the crowd of Clays surrounding the pool tables, drawing more eyes than just Jane's. Which was fortunate for her, because she had no witnesses to the way she managed to spill Guinness over her hand while she watched Casey's fine, fine behind as he leaned over for his shot. She shut off the tap and swiped her hand over her apron, then loaded up another tray. She had three cocktail waitresses on hand that night, and they were stretched to the max. Pulling someone over from the restaurant wasn't an option. Every table there was full, too, with a line of people stretching out the door, waiting.

A fine October night in Weaver. The weather was good, no snow yet, and people were out for a good time.

Rather than let the orders keep stacking up, she stepped out from behind the bar and delivered several herself and collected quite a few empties on her way back. Some young guy was trying to chat up Hayley and Sam, and her friends looked amused and happily occupied.

Everything was exactly as she'd planned when Gage had given her the money five years ago to buy Colbys, and she couldn't help smiling to herself as she went behind the glossy wood bar again and pulled up the next order.

One root beer. One designer microbrew that she ordered from Montana. The microbrew that she'd begun carrying only because it was Casey's favorite.

The combination was what Casey and his cousin Erik usually ordered and she figured now was no exception. She glanced over at the pool tables. Only this time, instead of seeing Casey's rear end, she saw him leaning against the wall, staring boldly back at her.

Heat shot through her, and she tore her gaze away from his. She pulled out an icy bottle of root beer along with a frosted mug, filled another with Casey's beer and stuck them on a tray before going back over to her girlfriends.

She had a plan and she was sticking to it.

“Give your neighbor my number,” she told Hayley. She had to raise her voice, because the jukebox was blaring, billiard balls were clacking, and the crowd gave off a general blur of chatter and laughter.

Hayley's eyebrows lifted. She glanced from Jane's face across the room toward the pool tables. Then she nodded.

Satisfied, Jane washed her sticky hands and reached for the next order.

She didn't allow herself any more glances toward the pool tables and the very unreachable Casey Clay.

* * *

Even though Casey saw Jane play server several times, she didn't play server to his party. And when he was called into work just before ten o'clock, he was glad for the excuse to escape. Glad, at least, until he got to his office and spent the next twelve hours studying satellite feeds and reports regarding three agents who'd gone missing in Central America.

By the next night, the situation had escalated even more, and the next thing he knew, he found himself sitting beside Tristan on a plane to Hollins-Winword's headquarters in Connecticut.

Four days later, he was watching two caskets being carried off a plane while rain poured down on their heads.

“This isn't your fault.” Tristan stood next to him on the tarmac, looking as grim as Casey had ever seen.

“Feels like it,” Casey returned flatly. “I was the last one in communication with them.”

“And their status was still clear,” Tristan pointed out.

“Was still my watch,” he said. It didn't matter that there'd been others on shift, as well. Casey was their commander. He was supposed to be the one who could find a gnat on a wall eight thousand miles away.

“At least we had something to recover. There was a time we wouldn't have even been able to retrieve their bodies.” Tristan's boss, Coleman Black, stood on the other side of Casey. Coleman was a hard-looking older man with gray hair and a face lined from sun and responsibility. The only time Casey had ever seen him really smile had been on the rare occasions he was around Casey's sister Angeline and her husband, Brody Paine. Casey's brother-in-law was Cole's son—a rarely acknowledged fact because of the inherent dangers that went along with that—and his visits were extremely rare; Casey could count them on one hand.

But in his role with Hollins-Winword, Casey had had many more encounters with the agency's head.

“Back when your uncle here was a young buck,” Cole was saying, “we wouldn't have been able to do a lot of the things we can now.” He shook his head as they watched the caskets being loaded into a waiting black hearse.

“Jefferson'd be the first to confirm that,” Tristan murmured.

Tristan's older brother Jefferson had been an HW field agent back in the day. During an especially tricky assignment, he'd landed in a third-world prison; ultimately, he'd escaped, but his partner hadn't. Even though Jefferson had returned to Weaver to become a horse breeder, had gotten married, had two grown kids and an ever-growing herd of grandchildren, the experience all those years ago still colored his life. When his son, Axel, had followed in his footsteps with the agency, he had
not
been particularly thrilled.

“We should've been able to do more,” Casey said now. Failure. Grief. Responsibility. It all weighed inside his gut like concrete blocks holding him below water. “Kept those caskets from ever being needed, and we damn sure should've found McGregor by now.” The third part of the missing trio was still a big fat unknown. They didn't know if Jason McGregor's body was lying in a ditch somewhere, tossed aside the same way Jon and Manny had been. They didn't know squat.

“It's not your fault,” Tristan said again. “You've got to have something to go on and we're flying blind.”

Cole made a sound Casey figured was meant to be agreement, though with the cagey old guy, it was hard to tell. He clapped Casey once on the shoulder before letting out a sigh and walking out from beneath the shelter of the airplane hangar into the rain toward the hearse.

“He's going along to meet the families,” Tristan said.

“Will he tell them the truth about how they died?”

His uncle's lips twisted and he shook his head. “If he follows his own protocol? No. But it never pays to anticipate Cole's actions too much. The man's a law unto himself.”

He turned and gave Casey a long look. Even though Casey was tall, his uncle still topped him by an inch. “I've been in your shoes, Case,” he reminded him. “I was never in the field either. Stayed safe, closed up in an office miles—usually countries—away from the action. But we're supposed to be the guardian angels, making sure those guys taking their chances out there in the field make it safely back home again. And I know only too well that it's not easy to handle when that doesn't happen.”

“I want to know what went wrong,” Casey muttered. “I want to find McGregor.”

“We will. We'll investigate.”

“I know. And I also know that not every investigation bears fruit.”

The hearse, with Cole inside, drove away. The private airfield where the plane had landed was once again empty.

“Take my advice.” Tristan nudged him back toward the black SUV in which they'd arrived. “Go back home. Put your arms around that pretty bartender of yours—”

Startled, Casey shot him a look. “
What
?”

“You're Hollins-Winword, kid,” Tristan drawled, looking vaguely amused. “Nephew of mine or not, you know what that means. There's nothing in your life that you're going to keep secret from us.” He climbed behind the wheel of the SUV himself, having dismissed the driver he'd been assigned even before they'd left HW's headquarters.

Casey got in the passenger seat and pinched the bridge of his nose, willing away the headache that was forming. “Secrets aside, she's anything but
mine.
”

“Most of us start out thinking that way.” His uncle drove out from beneath the hangar and headed in the opposite direction the hearse had taken. “Regardless, I'm telling you to focus on something good. Don't take the crap that happened here home to bed with you. When they went off grid, you did everything anyone could have done to find them. You can't control from a distance what those guys do once they're on an op. That buck doesn't stop at your door.” His hands tightened around the steering wheel and he sighed. “It stops with Cole. And he's been dealing with that reality since before you were a sparkle in your daddy's eye. McGregor is good in the field. If he's able to lift his head, we'll find him. Bring him back safely. But in the meantime, you've got to let go of the things you can't change or you're going to end up useless. Not just to the agency but to everyone who cares about you outside of the agency, as well.”

It was probably the longest speech he'd ever heard from his uncle. “Easier said than done.”

“I know.” Tristan waited a few beats. “Your bartender—”

“She's not—”

“
The
bartender, then,” Tristan fired back. “What's the problem there?”

Casey hadn't discussed this particular situation with anyone. Not Erik. Not even his own father. But Tris wasn't his father. He was his boss. His mentor. “She wants to get married.”

“Then put a ring on her finger already,” his uncle said as if the answer were obvious. “You've been sleeping with her for more than a year, for God's sake.”

Casey felt his neck get hot like some kid called on the carpet. He stared out at the Connecticut countryside. HW's compound—hidden in plain sight—was located inside a toilet-paper factory. “She doesn't want to marry
me.
She was plenty clear about it.”

His uncle waited a beat. “And you believed her?” He sounded as if he wanted to laugh and Casey looked over at him. “Son, you have a lot to learn about women.”

Casey grimaced. “It doesn't matter anyway. She only wants a husband so she can have a baby.”