Legal Heirs - Box Set Edition: Books 5-8 (Surrendering Charlotte Chronicles) (36 page)

Night was falling and Finn was glad. He liked the cover of night, especially when he had extremely dirty work to do, and because a grown man’s tears were embarrassing in the daylight. Especially when the grown man was a killer by nature, a hardened assassin, and especially when the grown man was him. He was going to enjoy killing whoever was hurting Charlotte, using her. And after he was through, he wanted to die himself. So he stripped off his shirt and the body armor vest as the Humvee pulled over and parked down the street from the warehouse. When West asked him what the fuck he was doing, he just opened the door and hit the ground running. Whatever was going on inside the warehouse, it was clear to him that Charlotte was as good as dead. With no need for stealthy maneuvering or attacking by surprise, he went in through the main door, guns blazing.

“Fuck, let’s go. That crazy bastard!” West shouted, and he and Bly were close on Finn’s heels.

Finn kicked the door in, scanned the room, and put a bullet between the eyes of a man kneeling on the mattress with his pants around his knees. He had just raped and slit the throat of the woman who lay beneath him. All Finn could see of her was black hair and blood gushing over her face and body. He blanked that scene out of his mind in an instant, clicked into killer mode, and shot two more men. Bly and West cleanly took out the remaining two, and it was all over in mere seconds. Heavy-gauge weaponry was scattered around the fallen bodies, but the attack had indeed been a complete surprise. Gabrielle was dead with her eyes wide open, a silent scream forever on her lips. West knelt down and closed her eyelids, then he gave Finn and Bly the news: It wasn’t Charlotte. They both closed their own eyes in unison, then Finn’s flew open a second later.

“Grab that tarp and let’s wrap her body. We need to get out of here, Charlotte could still be alive,” Finn said. He began to shout every profanity he could think of until he heard one of the men on the floor moan. He was next to the wounded man in a flash, and he yanked him up by his shirt. “Where is she, the young woman, the pregnant woman, and the Ghost?” He asked in Spanish, and the man mumbled a few words before he died.

“They’re local cartel members, small time. The Ghost gave them the older woman a few hours ago. Charlotte was alive, he took her with him. Leave all the bodies,” Finn said, his cold glance levelled at the dead woman who had been the cause of the destruction. “We’re burning the place down, no clues left behind for the cartel.”

West and Bly had been wrapping Gabrielle’s body, and West stopped to see how that decision might affect Bly. As West suspected, Bly’s sole concern was to find Charlotte alive and well. Finn’s ex-SEAL buddy cautiously walked through the door, his rifle at the ready, and Bly calmly asked him if he could rig an improvised explosive device. Which he did, fashioning it from the tools of his trade that he kept in the Humvee. Then they were out of there, and driving away, as the blast from the warehouse shook the city of Juarez, and the flames climbed into the moonless sky.

*

“I need to have a look at that cut,” Charlotte said when she realized fresh blood was seeping through Christopher’s shirt. “Can we land somewhere? Let me get some peroxide and bandages. Where are we going, anyway? Are you still going to kill me?”

“No, I… was never going to hurt you. I knew that when I saw your face in Cabo. I took you because you needed protection from that woman, Gabrielle… That doesn’t matter right now. We’ll land in Junction, gas up the plane, and stay the night.”

“Junction, is that in Texas? Where are we going? If I’m going to live, I should let my husband know. I mean, that’s pretty big news. It will mean a lot to him, to say the least, and then there’s our father—we have news for him, too,” Charlotte said. She sat in the seat next to him as he flew the plane. She turned sideways and allowed herself to really look at his face. He really was incredibly beautiful, and she wondered if that was how the world saw her. She couldn’t imagine she was as attractive as he was. “Do you think we look alike? I don’t see it, other than our eyes, of course. I’ll admit you don’t see that color of blue very often. For a man you’re kind of… gorgeous. If I looked like you, I’d throw a party to celebrate!”

He looked at her and smiled, and she thought she might faint. She felt a rush of connection followed by a huge rush of gratitude. She was going to live, her baby would be born, and her ghost of a brother had come back from the dead and was sitting next to her. All those things swept over and through her, and as the adrenaline receded from her bloodstream she reached out and placed her hand over his. He started to jerk away from her, he was so unused to human connection. But instead, he curled his long fingers around her soft hand and stared down at it as if he had seen the face of God. She smiled as she leaned her head against the back of the seat and she slept soundly, with one hand on her belly and the other held securely by her brother.

*

The Sunset Motel in Junction, Texas wasn’t fancy, but it had two adjoining rooms and it was clean. A grizzled old cowboy gave them a ride from the tiny airport into town, and they stopped to eat at a Dairy Queen along the way.

“Oh my God, I have to have this!” Charlotte practically groaned as she unwrapped her bacon double cheeseburger and dipped several hot French fries in ketchup. “Please don’t watch me eat. This is like food porn. I’m pregnant and I’m starving, it’s not going to be pretty.”

Christopher smiled as he watched her eat, and when she stuffed the fries in her mouth and moaned, he couldn’t help but laugh.

“Oh, oh, oh, this is
so
good, this hits the spot. The baby is kicking like a mad, like the star forward for Manchester United. We are both ridiculously happy. And look at you,” she said, watching Christopher lift his second cheeseburger to his lips. “I guess all that muscle requires twice as much food, huh?”

“You know you’re bleedin’ don’t cha?” The old cowboy said. He sat with them while they ate. He was skinny as a rail, and he drank several cups of coffee and stepped outside to smoke more than once.

“My brother was in a little skirmish. We’ll need to stop at a drugstore if you don’t mind, before we settle into the motel,” Charlotte said, and Christopher could see that the tough old man was easily caught up in Charlotte’s mesmerizing presence.

There was some magical quality about her, Christopher had to admit. She’d captivated him the first moment her eyes met his in the mirror in Cabo, and even before that. He’d been tailing her for some time, watching her from afar, trying to decide what to do about her. When she and her husband crossed into Mexico, it had presented the perfect opportunity. Her husband was the best operative he’d ever gone up against—that was undeniable. Christopher had never faced a more formidable adversary. So it had taken time to arrange the abduction after Gabrielle Sommerfeld had contracted the job. Watching Charlotte through a scope was quite a bit different than seeing her in person. She drew him to her like the moon pulled the tides. When she had first said the words, “I’m your sister,” he wanted it to be true. His heart had flip-flopped in his chest, and for the first time that he could remember, he desperately wanted something. He wanted to believe her, and he wanted her words to be true.

“Not a problem,” the cowboy said. His voice was dry as the West Texas landscape. “We got a Rexall right downtown, but it ain’t called that no more. Now it’s got some fancy name and they closed the soda fountain years back. But this here Dairy Queen ain’t too bad, and I’m pretty much a fool for their milk shakes at breakfast time. Where you folks from, if ya don’t mind me askin’?”

“Mexico,” Christopher said flatly, and the old man squinted and stared out the plate-glass window and didn’t ask any more questions.

“This is deeper than I thought,” Charlotte said when they had settled into the motel rooms and Christopher peeled off his shirt. The blood had dried and the denim stuck to his skin. She saw him wince just a little as he tore the shirt away and tossed it aside. “Wow, not your first knife fight, evidently. Reminds me of Finn. He used to come home with these battle scars all the time.”

“Finn? That’s his name, your husband, the assassin?” he asked.

“Yes, that’s his name and let’s skip the job specifications, okay? I need to call him soon, like right now. Here, take a shower and wash those cuts with this Betadine solution. I’m going to call my husband and tell him what’s going on… He’s worried sick, as you can imagine… or maybe you can’t, I don’t know. Just wash away some of the germs, then I’ll patch you up and we’ll talk if you’re up to it. Where are we going, anyway? We’re not going in the right direction for California.”

“New Orleans. I live there. It’s just a couple of rooms over a bar in the French Quarter, but I thought you could stay with me for a few days, a week or two, maybe. It seems like you know who I am, and I don’t. I only know I’m called the Ghost.”

“I don’t know what to say to that. You live in New Orleans and you seriously don’t know who you are?”

“I’ve been told I grew up in an orphanage in southern Mexico, no family, no one, not even a name.”

“For fuck’s sake, Christopher! You speak perfect English and you can fly an airplane. Those are not exactly things you learn in a Mexican orphanage. Okay,” she said, waving him toward the bathroom and shaking her head in disbelief, “just go take a shower, then slip into these fabulous designer Walmart jeans. I’ll tell you about our father. You and I have different mothers. He was married to your mother, and my mother was… I don’t know, a diversion? By the way, why New Orleans?”

“I don’t know. I went there to do a job a few years ago and I liked it. It felt right,” he said, kicking off his boots and emptying the pockets of his cargo pants. He laid a handgun and a couple of switchblades on the dresser, and Charlotte rolled her eyes and shook her head again.

“You don’t know that you grew up in New Orleans?” she asked.

He looked so surprised that he simply stood there staring at her. She closed her eyes to try and picture what had happened to this man. Then she shooed him toward the shower again and picked up the phone to call Finn.

“My love,” she said, tears springing to her eyes as soon as she heard his voice. “I’m alive, I’m with my brother, he believes that I’m his sister, but he has no memory of who he is. I need a few days to get him settled into… our world. I’ll call and tell you when to meet up with us. Just trust me. I love you, Finnegan, all is well.”

The wound on Christopher’s chest was deeper than Charlotte had expected. He didn’t move an inch when she swabbed it with peroxide and then alcohol and said they should find a doctor, that it needed stitches. He shook his head and disappeared into the bathroom, then returned with the motel’s complimentary sewing kit and handed it to her.

“Uh, no, no thank you. You’re not a teddy bear that needs a bit of sewing up. I’ll just be skipping the part where the needle pierces the skin, if you don’t mind,” she said, fighting the urge to run to the bathroom and lose the cheeseburger she’d eaten.

He shrugged, went to the bathroom sink, unwrapped a plastic razor, and shaved around the edges of the cut. His body was incredible—that was all that went through Charlotte’s mind as she watched him. The muscles of his chest, stomach, arms, and shoulders were like finely sculpted marble. His skin was bronzed from the sun and he had the most beautiful tattoo arched across his upper chest. Charlotte had only ever loved Finn’s tattoos—she thought they were out of place on ordinary men. Finn was no ordinary man, not by a long shot, and neither was her brother. She loved his tattoo. As tall and menacing as his body and demeanor might seem, the tattoo was strangely elegant. It depicted a bluebird of happiness holding an unfurled banner in its beak, and written across the banner in bold script was the word “
Blessed
.”

“You were going to kill me,” she said quietly. He had literally sewn himself up, and the gash across his broad chest had an eerie Frankenstein quality. But the bleeding had stopped and she was applying an antibiotic cream and a gauze bandage.

“No, that was never my intent. I am a killer, no denying it, but I don’t kill the innocent. The woman, Gabrielle, contacted me and showed me a picture of you. I was intrigued. I felt a connection to you, but I thought it was… a different kind of attraction.” For all his unabashed masculinity, he blushed when he admitted that. “I agreed to take the job so that I could do some recon, watch and study you, keep her from hiring someone else to do the hit. I watched you for months, stringing Gabrielle along, telling her the time wasn’t right. After a few months it became obvious that you were pregnant, and Gabrielle wasn’t going to wait any longer. If I hadn’t taken you, Charlotte, she would have had you killed one way or another. I took you to save you. Then, when I looked in your eyes, it was like I fell in love. When you said I was your brother it shocked me—I needed to reevaluate the things I felt for you, but it didn’t take long to straighten itself out in my mind. When Gabrielle threatened you, I wanted to protect you. I knew what you and I shared was deeper than… romantic love. We were part of each other.”

“That’s the best I can do. I think you’re going to live,” Charlotte said as she finished bandaging his chest. She handed him a clean white t-shirt and after he pulled it over his head she reached up to kiss his cheek. “I’m Charlotte McCall Hale, your sister. You are Christopher Charles Tremont, the brother I am so happy to meet. Thank you for saving my life.”

*

“I’ll send an army to find her. Are you telling me you’re not concerned that she’s with a cold-blooded killer?” Bly asked Finn as they sat in the kitchen of Finn and Charlotte’s house, drinking whiskey.