Operation Blind Date (9 page)

Chapter 13

T
here was no mistaking the delight in the woman’s face when she opened the door and saw Laney, Teague thought. Or her stark disappointment when she saw him.

She’d been hoping it would be Amber with Laney, he realized. He took no pleasure in being right; they were already worried.

Under normal conditions, Teague guessed it would be easy to see where Amber got her looks. He knew from Laney Amber’s mother was only a couple of years younger than her father’s sixty-two, but if she said she was less than fifty he wouldn’t really doubt it. Laney had said they’d moved for the weather, and the woman’s tan seemed to show they enjoyed it.

But now she didn’t look like a slim, fit, attractive middle-aged woman. She looked like what she was, a worried mother. Still, she didn’t seem distraught. Not yet anyway.

And, he quickly realized as she ushered them inside the small but immaculately maintained house, she’d made an assumption about him. Them, rather.

“Well, so you’ve finally brought us a young man to meet? About time, young lady.” Laney tried to speak but the woman seemed on a roll, and turned her attention on him. “Aren’t you the handsome one?”

“No, no,” Laney finally managed to get in. “It’s not...he’s not—”

“I may be getting old, girl, but my eyesight’s fine. He most certainly is.” She smiled widely at Teague, who suddenly couldn’t resist keeping his mouth shut, just to see where this would go. “You’ve quite the treasure here, you know. You take good care of her, or you’ll have us to answer to first, since we’re closer than her folks now.”

“I mean we’re not together,” Laney said. “Not like that.”

Did she sound regretful? Or was it his imagination? And if so, why the hell was he imagining that?

“Too bad,” Mrs. Logan said with an appreciative once-over that make Teague smile, just barely. “You might want to rethink that.”

“I might,” he said, even though the comment had clearly been meant for Laney. He wasn’t sure what had gotten into him. Something about the assumption they were together seemed to have set him off. “Teague Johnson, Mrs. Logan,” he said, holding out a hand. Saying it was a pleasure to meet her seemed wrong under the circumstances so he left it at that.

The woman shook his hand rather delicately, but she smiled, and in that smile he again saw the younger woman from one of the photos Laney had shown them. A bright, beautiful smile. Somehow it made things more ominous instead of better.

“Sorry,” Laney said, apparently in apology for her lack of manners in not introducing him. Had Mrs. Logan’s assumption flustered her that much? The inward satisfaction he felt at that thought was unsettling.

“That’s all right, dear, I embarrassed you. I didn’t mean to.”

“Mrs. L.,” Laney said, changing the subject by pointing out the obvious, “there’s a police car in your driveway.”

“Yes.” The troubled expression again furrowed her brow. “Lisa’s a neighbor. She stopped by to give us some advice about Amber.”

Teague could almost feel Laney’s pulse leap. “Have you spoken to her?”

“No.” The furrow deepened. “You haven’t yet, either?”

“No.”

Teague could tell Amber’s parents hadn’t progressed to where Laney was. She seemed concerned but not panicked, and hadn’t yet connected her daughter’s lack of contact to Laney’s appearance on her doorstep.

“That’s why we’re here,” Laney said. “Teague, I mean the people he works for, are helping me try to find her. Make sure she’s all right.”

That did it, Teague thought. Ratcheted up the worry several notches. “You think there’s something really wrong?”

“I’m just worried,” Laney said. “You know it isn’t like her to not talk to either of us for so long. I just want to be sure she’s okay, that she’s really off on some romantic getaway.”

“Romantic getaway?”

Laney sighed as the woman’s puzzled expression made it clear she had no idea what she was talking about.

“You’d better come into the den with Lisa and Jim,” the woman said.

It was a small room, with a couch, a couple of recliners that served as comfortable seating in front of the flat-screen on one wall. Not huge, but new-looking. Teague watched as Laney greeted the silver-haired man who rose quickly when he saw her, and decided Amber had had the luck of the draw on both sides. Jim Logan was a handsome man, in a distinguished sort of way.

The uniformed officer that went with the unit outside was young, blonde and lively-looking. She gave him a once-over much more thorough than Amber’s mother’s assessment, and he guessed like any cop, she was doing just that, assessing.

“Foxworth?” she said when it came up. “I’ve heard of them. Didn’t one of your guys take a bullet taking down that cop killer in Seattle?”

“My boss,” Teague said.

“He okay now?”

“Fine. He was lucky.”

She nodded. “You think there’s something serious going on?”

“We’re involved to ease Laney’s mind,” Teague said. “I’m hoping that means we find Amber is fine, and annoyed at us for interrupting her fling.”

“I’ve told the Logans how tough it is when the person’s an adult and theoretically still in contact, and there’s no evidence of foul play.”

Teague nodded. “That’s why we’re in.”

“Anything I can do from here?”

“Probably not, but it’s early yet.”

The woman nodded. She reached into a pocket and pulled out a business card. Lisa Valpraiso, Teague read.

“Call me if there is.” She turned back to her neighbors. “I’ve heard good things about these people. You’re in good hands.”

She excused herself and left. Teague let Laney explain what they knew, let her decide what to tell these people who were clearly like second parents to her. She told them most of it, including the odd texts.

“We don’t text, so I can’t say,” Amber’s father said. “We did get an odd email from her, though, a couple of weeks ago. We didn’t think that much about it at the time, but when we didn’t hear from her after that...”

“Do you still have it?” Teague asked.

“I’m sure,” he said, rather wryly. “Audra never deletes anything.”

“Jim, stop,” his wife said.

The exchange held the tone of being oft-discussed. Amber’s mother got up and went to a small desk in one corner where a laptop computer sat. It was already on; he guessed they’d already checked for anything new from their daughter. It took her only a moment to find the email in question, and before he had to ask she had printed it out.

“See, you never know when you might need something. If it had been up to you, it would be already gone.”

“And if it was up to you, we’d need another hard drive just for mail,” her husband answered.

Normalcy bias, Teague thought. Neither of them seemed as worried as Laney, because they couldn’t let themselves believe anything was truly wrong. They clung to the world as it had been; the normal world they knew, because to acknowledge the possibilities was unbearable.

He didn’t blame them. Understood it all too well. Too bad it always smacked right into the immovable wall of reality. He understood that, too.

He realized that somewhere along the line his own view had shifted. He’d begun this with the goal of proving Amber was just off on a jaunt with a new love, simply so that Laney would stop worrying. Now he realized he wasn’t just thinking about finding her, but finding her in time. There wasn’t a lot more evidence something was wrong than they’d had before, except for the plane ticket, and yet he’d somehow become convinced. As if Laney’s worry was infectious.

And maybe it was. To him, anyway.

Audra Logan handed the printed page to him. Laney leaned over to read it with him.

“See?” the woman asked. “It’s all choppy and full of those silly shortcuts I hate. CUL8R? Really?”

“She never used those in email to us,” Jim put in. “She knows we hate it.”

“Sent from her phone,” Laney said.

Teague nodded. He’d seen the line at the bottom indicating that.

“And I have no idea what she’s talking about there, our anniversary was six months ago,” Mrs. Logan said with a glance at Laney. “You know that, you came for that lovely party she threw for us.”

“Yes,” Laney said, softly.

She looked at him then, and he saw the fear back in her eyes. She was more convinced than ever that something was very wrong.

“May we have a copy of this?” Teague asked.

“Of course. Do you want me to forward the email to you as well?”

“Yes, please.” He reached for his wallet.

“You can just send it—” Laney caught the barely perceptible shake of his head, and stopped midsentence.

“—to this address,” Teague said, finishing her sentence smoothly as he held out a business card, as if that had been the intention the whole time.

Jim took the card and nodded. He studied it for a moment. “It doesn’t say on here what you do.”

“If it listed everything we do, it would be a business book, not a card,” Teague said.

“Lisa trusts them,” Audra said to her husband, who made a noncommittal sound, but sat down to forward the email.

Audra turned back to Laney. “You’re worried, aren’t you?”

It was finally getting through that Laney hadn’t come all this way just to say hello. “I got those odd messages like yours, too,” Laney said. “I just want to know what’s going on.”

“This isn’t like her.”

“No. That’s why I—we are trying to find her.”

Amber’s father stood up. “It’s sent,” he said, then held up the card. “But I’ll just hang on to this, if you don’t mind.”

Laney didn’t miss the slight undertone of suspicion in the man’s voice.

“It’s all right,” she began.

“Didn’t you say you flew here in a private plane? You can’t afford to be paying some fancy P.I.,” he said with very fatherly concern. Teague kept his expression even, although
fancy
was not a word he’d ever heard applied to himself.

“I’m not paying them. They do this for free.”

“Free?” The suspicion went from an undertone to a trumpet. The man glared at Teague.

“Now, Jim,” Audra began.

“It’s all right, Mrs. Logan,” Teague said. “He’s absolutely right. Nothing’s really free.”

Laney looked at him then. Was she wondering if she really was going to get a smacking huge bill at the end of this?

“We don’t take money from the clients we choose to help.”

“Choose?”

He nodded. He glanced at Laney, saw her expression, knew she was wondering if he was going to try to explain Cutter. He wasn’t. She’d told him on the flight here that Amber’s father had been an old-school engineer who had retired reluctantly when technology began to move in leaps rather than steps. Teague didn’t figure he’d be receptive to the idea of taking cues from a dog, no matter how uncannily clever he was.

“We have our own criteria. A process and a research team. As my boss says, it’s amazing how many people seem on the side of the angels until you do a little digging.”

“Well, Laney is definitely that,” Audra said firmly.

“Yes, sir,” Teague said, barely managing not to glance at her again.

“If you don’t take money, what do you take?” Jim asked, obviously still not quite convinced.

“What we do take is their knowledge, their connections, because we never know what might help us help someone else later on down the line.”

“A network,” Jim said, still looking a bit wary. “But what do you get out of it? You get paid, right?”

“I do. A decent but not exorbitant salary. And a tremendous, unusually high amount of job satisfaction.”

Jim studied him carefully. “Were you in the service?”

“Yes, sir. Marines.”

“Well, then. Why didn’t you say so? Thank you. A lot of fine men in the corps.”

“There are.”
The problem’s from the top down, not the ground up.

“I worked more with DOD than any one branch, but I have a lot of respect for the marines.”

Teague went still. “You worked with the Department of Defense?”

“My company did. Grimholt Guidance Systems.” He grimaced. “That was back when they were a lot simpler than they are now.”

Teague absorbed that. And wondered.

Could Amber’s father’s work have anything to do with this?

Now that, he thought, would make this a whole different bowl of dog food.

Chapter 14

L
aney knew Teague was thinking, thinking hard. Something about what Amber’s father had said had sparked this. When Audra insisted they join them for a home-cooked meal and bustled off to the kitchen, followed by her husband, she held him back with a hand on his arm.

“What?”

He didn’t try denying it, which she appreciated. She’d meant what she’d said when she’d told them she wanted the truth every step of the way.

“Just wondering.” He took out his smartphone and began to text something.

“What?”

“If her father’s work could have anything to do with this.”

Laney drew back, frowned. “But he’s been retired for nearly three years.”

“That’s what makes it unlikely. But it’s a blip I hadn’t expected, him working with the DOD.” He backed up and corrected or shortened something to fit, then sent the text.

“You’re not thinking this is some...espionage thing?” she said, stunned at the very thought.

“Not really. It doesn’t have that feel. But we don’t get the results we do by not covering all the bases.”

She couldn’t argue with that.

“If there’s anything to find, Tyler will find it. Or Liam, if he’s back.”

Laney was careful throughout the time at the table, not wanting them to worry any more about Amber than they already were, trying to make her visit seem more like just that, a friendly visit. Teague asked questions about Amber, but he somehow made them sound merely friendly, always relating them to Laney or even himself. He was good at this, she thought, when she wasn’t wondering if all—or any—of the stuff he was telling about himself was true, or just a way to get Amber’s parents talking. He even managed to get her father talking about Amber’s dislike of the water, and the childhood incident involving him and his small fishing skiff that had likely caused it.

She hid her restlessness, the need to get back and keep looking, knowing that would only make them realize how seriously she was taking this. Besides, it could still well be nothing. It was most likely it was nothing. She almost convinced herself by the time they were looking at a slice of Audra’s wonderful apple cake, a treat that had always been Laney’s favorite.

It was after the meal, when Teague mentioned leaving ahead of the expected weather, that the awkward part started.

“You can’t head back over the mountains now, it’s too late,” Audra said.

“We flew,” Laney reminded her.

“I know, and in a little plane. I’d be terrified. And it’s nearly dark now. You should stay. Use the guest room.”

Audra was focused on her, and for a moment Laney wondered if she’d forgotten all about Teague.

You might want to rethink that.

Her words at the front door came back to Laney. No, she hadn’t forgotten at all. She didn’t dare look at Teague, not when the very idea of sharing a room with him made her cheeks heat.

“Twin beds, dear. You’re both adults, you can manage.”

No. No, we can’t. I can’t,
Laney thought. She wanted to glance at Teague, but she had a suspicion his face wouldn’t betray a thing. Perhaps because there was nothing to betray. It was possible, in fact likely, that she was the only one fighting this sudden battle of awakened hormones or something.

Besides, for all she knew, he had a girlfriend. Just because he hadn’t mentioned it didn’t mean she didn’t exist. It wasn’t like he owed her any explanations of his current personal life. And she couldn’t imagine any woman who got a chance with a man like Teague not hanging on for dear life.

Jim, who had disappeared into the den for a few minutes, reappeared. “Too late,” he said. “Cascades are getting slammed. Thunderstorms headed this way.”

“Welcome to the end of summer in the northwest,” she muttered.

Teague pulled out his cell phone. She took the chance to look at him then, while he tapped a series of selections. His jaw seemed tight, and his forehead was furrowed as he looked at the screen.

The weather, she told herself. He was just worried about the weather. He wasn’t all chewed up inside at the idea of sharing a room with her. She was the only total fool in this operation.

A weather map appeared on the phone’s screen, half-covered with an ominously large swath of green, yellow and far too much of the darker colors that meant seriously heavy weather. At nearly the same moment the chime announcing a text message came through, and he quickly switched over to read it.

He let out a compressed breath then glanced up at her. “Quinn. He says stay. It’s twelve hours early and nasty. But fast-moving. Should be clear by morning.”

Morning. Wonderful.

“I’ll get you set up,” Audra said cheerfully, and headed off to the guest room.

Laney smothered a groan. At least, she thought she had, but Teague took her to one side.

“I’ll go crash at the airport. I can sleep aboard the plane.”

“That doesn’t sound comfortable.”

“It’s not that bad. I’ve done it before. The back row of seats recline.”

“With a storm coming? That’s silly when there’s a perfectly good bed available.”

The words were out before she realized the absurdity of it all. She’d been the one so uncomfortable with the very idea of sharing close quarters with him, and now she was practically demanding he do it? When clearly he wasn’t any happier than she’d been about it?

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to push. If you’re not comfortable sleeping in a strange place—”

His short laugh cut her off. “Honey, I’ve slept on my feet in Afghanistan. Doesn’t get much stranger than that.”

After the jolt of the unexpected endearment wore off, Laney just stared at him. Sometimes she simply forgot his history. He was generally so cheerful, so upbeat; it didn’t seem possible that he’d seen the dark things she knew he must have.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, this time less flustered, more heartfelt. “Do enough people thank you?”

He blinked, drew back.

“Thank me?”

“Like Amber’s dad did. For serving.”

He lowered his gaze. “Some do,” he said.

“More should. Including me. Thank you.”

She turned on her heel and followed Audra into the guest bedroom, leaving him to decide whether to stay or go without any pressure from her.

He stayed.

* * *

It was all about context, Teague thought.

He, for instance, was wearing a pair of sweats that had been in his go bag for the duration, and a T-shirt. He could have been going to the gym. Laney was wearing a pair of flannel lounge pants and a T-shirt of her own, which covered as much as her work scrubs had. Nothing in the least provocative.

Well, except for the fact that the T-shirt clung to curves that were more generous than he’d realized, and the pants rode a fraction of an inch lower than the hem of the shirt. And that she’d pulled her hair free of the ponytail, and it flowed down past her shoulders in long, silky waves that gleamed.

Between that sweep of hair, legs that seemed a mile long and that tiny, occasional flash of skin above the utilitarian blue plaid, he was where he’d sworn he wouldn’t be. Lying wide-awake in the dark, staring at the ceiling, as aware of Laney’s soft breathing as he would have been of an enemy patrol working in their quadrant. As aware as if his life depended on it.

Because Laney wasn’t in her scrubs, working. She was lying warm and inviting in a bed a bare three feet away, and no slinky nightwear, no revealing lingerie could make him any more aware of that fact.

Even with the buffeting wind and rain, he would have been smarter to have headed back to the plane.

But then, it would have been smarter to have just walked out of her shop and let it all be.

He had the grace to laugh inwardly at that one. The dog had been so determined there had been no ignoring him. Not that Cutter was a dog you could ever ignore, but when he set that quirky canine mind on something, he was an immovable force.

And a good partner. He’d have made a hell of a war dog.

Laney’s quiet words about being thanked enough echoed in his head. He wondered if she had any idea how much they meant. How much such words from random civilians meant to anyone who served.

He thought she just might. She was perceptive, sensitive, and smart.

You miss it.

She’d known that, even though he’d said nothing, and rarely let it show. And she’d let it stop there, hadn’t pried, hadn’t probed the sore spot. He was grateful to her for that, for being willing to let it drop. Typically many weren’t. Especially women, who seemed to have that digging, relentless need to know every personal thing immediately.

But Laney wasn’t typical.

And lying here next to that impassable three feet of floor between them, knowing she was so close and yet off-limits, was going to drive him crazy. Staying was the worst decision he’d made since...well, since he hadn’t walked out of her shop.

You’re both adults, you can manage,
Amber’s mother had said.

He wasn’t feeling very adult right now. He was feeling more like a hormone-crazed teenager, or a deprived soldier who’d gone without for too long.

And if he kept thinking about this, about her, and how tempting she was, how much he wanted to bury his hands in that thick mane of hair and explore that tiny strip of skin that shouldn’t have been nearly as provocative as it was, he was going to lose it.

It took every bit of discipline he’d learned in the field, when you truly had to sleep when you could, coupled with the knowledge he had to fly in the morning, to clear his mind. He shoved his unruly thoughts into a cage and locked it, silently ordered his body to behave. He summoned up the old image, that picture that had gotten him through so many long nights, including the ones when he had purposefully slept on his feet, so that he wouldn’t go so deep he wouldn’t hear an enemy approach. It formed in his mind, that image of a peaceful, glassy lake reflecting a huge mountain, the most beautiful place he knew.

He fought off one last errant thought that he’d like to take Laney there.

Face it, you’d like to take her anywhere. In all senses of the word.

He slapped that all too true assessment into the cage with the rest. And finally, restlessly, slept.