Over the Line (16 page)

“I have no idea. I saw her take a check from my father…”

“Oh.” Harry said. “I heard about that routine. Cara told me that he wired her a hundred grand to leave you.”

Cara was another ex. “Fuck. But it does explain my pathetic love life. Jesus, I thought he only did that with Sadie’s boyfriends. God, if he weren’t my father, I’d kick the shit out of him.”

“I suspect if you look up all the girlfriends who’ve finished with you since you were eighteen you’ll find them in nice houses, with expensive educations and lovely cars. Maybe nicer than yours.”

“No one has a better car than mine. And hell.” He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. And from Harry, of all people. His father, controlling his love life. A red fury filled his head. “She took the check,” he ground out before collecting himself. He gave Harry a glance before scanning the crowd again for Beth.

“And yet she’s still here,” she said lightly. “Although you might want to hurry—it looks like William has set his sights on her.” She nodded over to the tables under the white tent.

William was pulling out a chair for her. James had to admit he looked pretty smart. The last time he’d seen William in a suit was when they’d both graduated from the private high school they’d attended. This suit looked even more expensive than that one had.

“Sadie told me he has a beach house in California,” she giggled. “He’s suddenly much more attractive, don’t you think?” Harry elbowed him in the gut.

“Right. Right. I’d better get going, then.” No way was he going to let him sweep Beth off her feet. William had done that more than once to him—sweet-talked a girl he was interested in. He was not going to stand by and let that happen again. Not with Beth. He strode over, Harry following in his wake.

“You better back off my girl, Wills,” he said, putting a possessive arm around Beth’s shoulders.

William grinned and held up his hands in submission. “You know I wouldn’t dare. Not after Anna-Lyn.”

James couldn’t help but laugh. He pulled out a seat and sat next to Beth, who was looking expectantly at him.

“Anna-Lyn was the neighborhood dreamgirl. I’d got her to go out with me one time…” he began.

“All I did was ask if she’d seen the new X-Men comic, honestly,” William said, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms.

“And before I knew it, they were snuggled up reading it together.” James took a mouthful of champagne.

William continued, to Beth and Harry’s rapt attention. “He totally called me out, and before I knew it, he’d wrestled me to the ground and was pummeling me.”

“I taught him how to do that,” Sadie announced as Simon pulled out a chair for her.

James lifted his glass and clinked it with Sadie’s. She really had taught him how to beat someone up. Suddenly he relaxed as he looked at the faces around the table. Sadie and Simon, William, Harry, and Beth. His Beth. He had to figure out a way to make that happen. The only person missing was… He looked around the grounds and smiled as he saw Maisie and another girl chasing a boy about the same age around the garden bathrooms.

He felt a hand on his leg. “So you’ve all known one another for years?” Beth said to the table.

Sadie answered. “Some of us. The rest, it just feels like we’ve known each other that long!”

A couple of people groaned, but she clarified. “Harry and I met at college, Simon and I met… recently”—she flashed an intimate smile at him—“William, James, and I have been friends since kindergarten. Harry and James used to date, of course.”

Beth smirked. “Yeah, I got that already.”

Everyone laughed.

“A long time ago,” Harry said firmly. “Much more importantly: Sadie. You’re looking really stressed. Is it about last night?”

Sadie and Simon looked at each other, with Simon looking particularly inscrutable. “Is everything okay?” James asked.

“We’ve just been thinking about blowing this joint,” Sadie said with the strain suddenly apparent in her voice. His stomach dropped.

“What do you mean?” he asked gently.

“I mean leaving today, going on our honeymoon a day early, and getting married somewhere else, quietly, just the two of us,” she said, reaching for Simon’s hand. “After last night, this just all seems too much.”

Tension flared in Simon’s jaw. “We just feel like being here has made us a target somehow. This… circus…”—he took a gulp of his beer—“seems to be the cause of last night’s attack. I’m just not comfortable putting her at risk again. And frankly, I feel we’re all sitting ducks in a shooting range. Not a feeling I’m easy with.”

It was probably the most James had ever heard him say at one time. He couldn’t argue with the man. Everything had been hinky since they’d arrived. Nothing had felt right until they’d all sat at this table. But if Sadie needed to escape, he’d do anything to help. “What do you want us to do?” he asked.

“We haven’t really thought about anything other than getting away from here. Canceling the wedding. From a distance.”

“Really?” William asked, leaning forward. “After all this?” He gestured around the grounds at the guests and the champagne fountain in the marquee, and the waiters bringing out hors d’oeuvres. “Your mom will kill you.” He looked around, grinning. “Probably literally.”

He wasn’t wrong, but James wanted to kick him nonetheless. William had never been great at picking up on social cues, but he’d always said that his obliviousness made him better in his virtual world of code.

“Look, you can’t go off on your own. We didn’t exactly cover ourselves in glory at the JibJab. You need to be safe. That’s the most important thing,” James said.

“She’s safe with me,” Simon said in what was probably a huge understatement.

“Yes. She is. But she can’t be in your sight 24/7. And we still don’t know what this is. What the threat is,” James said.

“It was professional,” Beth said, rubbing her arms where her bruises were. “And they knew where we were going to be.”

“It also wasn’t random,” Simon said. “I just don’t understand how they got away. Why they gave up so easily if they
were
after Sadie. I’ve got some people looking at traffic cams around the time it happened. They’ll call when they find something.”

“Wow. Who are you? A cop or something?” William said.

“Nah. Just have friends,” Simon said.

James jumped in to avoid any other stupid questions from William. “So do you want to sneak out? We can easily get Maisie to create a diversion.” He smiled.

“A diversion for what?” His mother appeared, stealthily, like a vampire.

“Nothing. It was a joke, Mother,” he said.

She narrowed her eyes at him like she’d done a thousand times when he was a kid. He jumped up and pulled out a seat for her.

“They were thinking about eloping tonight,” William said baldly. “We were trying to talk her out of it.”

A silence descended.
Fucking idiot.
Simon tensed in his chair, and Sadie’s eyes misted over.

“We were joking, though,” Beth said. There was a pause as his mother regarded her.

“No we weren’t. Not really, anyway,” Sadie admitted.

He half expected his mother to explode, but instead she slumped back in her seat and looked at the partygoers on the lawn and in the marquee. “It’s fine. If you want to go, you can go. I know this wasn’t to your taste. But with the new political appointments being made, we thought it would be a good idea to bring the key players here and we could, you know, take care of your father for once.”

Well played, Mom.

As soon as James had sat down with his friends he’d seemed at ease. Now every single person seemed to be on edge in sympathy with Sadie. What a nightmare for her. Beth half wanted to help spirit both of them away.

Sadie’s face fell as soon as her mother laid the guilt trip on her. “Of course, Mama,” she said almost pleadingly. “But maybe we can have the ceremony here, just with family. No other stress. And maybe early in the morning so we can get a head start on the honeymoon?”

Mrs. Walker rallied from her slump and perched on her seat, reminding Beth of a jackal. “That doesn’t sound too unreasonable. Rehearsal dinner as planned at Jamison’s in Georgetown, and then we’ll send word that due to security, the wedding is closed to family only. Then your father and I can still have the guests for dinner.” She cocked her head as if considering how it would play out. “Yes. That sounds like an acceptable compromise. Are we agreed?” Beth marveled at the manipulative woman.

The whole table turned to Sadie and Simon.

Simon looked incredibly uncomfortable under the scrutiny. Beth thought he must love Sadie with the power of a thousand suns to have agreed to the whole wedding circus to begin with. She wondered what James was thinking. Was he imagining his own wedding being like this? He’d been so inscrutable recently that she couldn’t begin to fathom his thoughts.

“I’m sure we can do that,” Simon replied to his mother-in-law-to-be.

A now-familiar tension twanged her stomach. She was at war with herself inside, and usually, the only people she liked being at war with were very definitely outside. It didn’t help that everyone was tense. Really tense. Even William seemed anxious, and he’d just dropped Sadie in it without even realizing what he’d done. She was beginning to see why James stayed away as much as he did.

She reached for her slightly warm champagne and was about to take a sip when sharp cracks sounded from the other side of the house. Simon and James stood up immediately. No one else seemed to pay much attention. Beth’s heart rate kicked up and her fight instinct kicked in—the army had beaten ninety percent of her flight instinct out of her.

“Wanna take a walk?” James said, holding his hand out to her.

She gave him a nearly imperceptible nod and said, “I could use the bathroom.”

His warm, dry hand encased hers as he helped her up. She tried to steady her breathing, although she couldn’t tell whether her erratic heart rate was because of James or due to the sinister-sounding bangs.

Simon kissed Sadie on the cheek and told her he’d be right back. Then he hesitated. His eyes met James’s.

“Stay with Sadie. We’ve got this,” James said.

Simon gave Beth a strange look, as if he was wondering what on earth
she
could do that would help. They walked away from the table then sped up, going toward where the sounds had seemed to originate and looking for telltale smoke or ejected shells. “What do you think it could be?” she asked as they walked faster. “It sounded more like a sidearm than anything else.”

She looked at all the people they passed and wondered if they would be victims of something awful, or if someone had excessively loud party crackers. It wasn’t close to being dark enough for fireworks, and she couldn’t help but think that the Walkers would have made a bigger deal of a display like that.

“Incoming!” a man shouted.

James ran toward the voice. Beth kicked off her shoes to keep up and sprinted after him. White heat pumped around her body and her legs took over. Running
toward
trouble was what made people who’d undergone military training different from most others.

James cleared the back of the property, where all the guests were, and ducked behind a large oak tree. She slid in behind him, watching to see if anyone was approaching from their rear.

No one.

Beth’s hand instinctively went to her side where her sidearm usually nestled, and she berated herself for not remembering she wasn’t actually in uniform.

The front of the house was all but deserted. A few cars belonging to the family’s closest friends were parked to one side. Where the driveway peeled off toward the road was similarly dead-looking.

Another crack sounded—this time coming from the part of the yard closest to the huge walls that acted as a security barrier. He turned to her, nodded in the direction of the noise.

Beth took another look around. Where the hell was Security? And who had shouted “incoming” like a mortar or a grenade was coming over the wall?

James stayed very still, and then his shoulders sagged a little as if all the tension had left his body. He turned and smiled.

She opened her mouth to question him, but he headed her off at the pass with a kiss. A hot, relieved kiss. A familiar heat washed over her slowly as his tongue stroked hers, almost languidly. Suddenly she felt like a teenager with her first boyfriend. All rampant need and hormones. She dragged her mouth from his.

“What was the noise?” She swallowed hard, trying to regain her equilibrium. She tried to peer around the tree to get a look.

“It’s the worst terrorist known to mankind, of course.” He took her hand and led her along a path beside the boundary wall. About thirty feet down the path was Maisie with two friends, throwing very large fire crackers at the wall.

The boy shouted “incoming!” again.

Beth shook her head and grinned. She wanted to join them so badly.

“Munch. What are you doing?”

“William gave me these. He said he found them in Pennsylvania. They’re called Pegasus Pipe Bombs.” She showed them one. It was indeed some kind of firecracker on steroids.

Beth laughed and looked behind her. “Can I try one? Do you have enough?”

Maisie held it out to her. “William bought us a hundred of them.”

James smiled. “I’m going to kill him. Or maybe I’ll just throw one in his bedroom when he’s sleeping.”

“I wouldn’t, not unless you want to change his sheets,” Beth said. She took a step back and launched one at the wall. It made a glorious noise, like a huge lightning strike. “I love the smell of gunpowder at lunchtime.”

James laughed and dragged her away from the kids.

As they drew closer to the house, Beth’s stomach rumbled in a very unladylike manner. “Urgh. I feel like I’m always hungry around you.”

“And I feel like I keep forgetting to feed you,” he replied.

“I’m going to duck into the bathroom and then maybe hit Gracie up for some sly food in the kitchen. I’ll catch up with you later.”

* * *

He should have gone with her, he thought. Ten minutes later she still hadn’t found her way back to him.

Instead, Harry found him. “Why did you bolt off like that?” she asked.

“Just checking on Maisie. She and her friends are playing with firecrackers on the front wall.” He slipped on his sunglasses so he could see her better. “Have they served any food yet?”

“They’re just about to, I think. About time, really. I swear half of your parents’ guests are a bit drunk already.”

“Maybe that was the idea. Mom did seem to want to grease the wheels of the politicians. What was decided about the wedding?”

Harry started walking slowly back toward the table, and James fell in beside her. “What you heard. Sadie agreed to the wedding being open only to family and her close friends, giving your mother the opportunity to host the dinner afterward. But without them. Simon was pretty firm that they’d be leaving at around midday tomorrow.”

“Can’t say I blame him. At all,” he said. “What about you, Harry? Found anyone to put up with your war-zone, globe-trotting, death-wish ways?”

He’d been convinced throughout their whole relationship that she’d had some messed-up desire to be with Danny, her dead husband, again. James hadn’t been able to live with her exploits, never knowing whether she would come back alive from them. Solo canoeing down the Amazon? Hiking the Australian outback? Walking across Africa? She’d done all that and more. She was afraid of absolutely nothing. Certainly not death.

“Let’s not do this here. You’re stressed out being here, and you’re taking it out on me. That’s not fair,” she said evenly.

He stopped and looked down at her. “You’re right. I’m sorry.” He wrapped his arms around her tiny frame and squeezed her tight, all the time wondering about Beth. Wondering if they had a future—wondering why she could definitely have his back in some situations and then take a check from his freaking father. He felt an uncontrollable urge to beat his head against a brick wall.

“Look. Go find Beth, and try to forget your crazy family for a while. You’re all safe here at the house, and you know, just have a bit of fun. You were a real catch. Still are. She’d be stupid if she didn’t see that. And she doesn’t seem stupid,” Harry said.

He wanted to confess his whole scheme to Harry, to ask her advice. Figure out why Beth didn’t trust herself, or anyone else, to stay in a relationship when she was away on deployment. But he couldn’t. He didn’t want to admit to Harry that he was still useless at relationships. Or even at starting one. This attempt already seemed to have imploded in a spectacular way.

He let Harry go and wandered the grounds, looking fruitlessly for Beth and chatting distractedly with his parents’ guests, all of whom seemed to have met her.

After an hour or so, he finally caught up with her. Guest after guest had come up to him to tell him how lucky he was to have found Beth, and ask when their wedding would be. He had no idea how to respond. He just wanted to find her, take her back to the pool house, and forget everything else. Weddings, checks, Sunday—everything.

He eventually found her in the kitchen, chatting in Spanish to the caterers. He watched her for a moment before making his presence known. She glowed, and the aproned people around her seemed happy: laughing at her, with her. She seemed at home. He wanted her to look like that when she was with him.

Her gaze eventually found his, and her smile dimmed a fraction. The tiniest amount, but that fraction splintered in his heart. He held out his hand. “We’re off the clock. We have a few free hours until we have to get ready for the rehearsal dinner.”

She slipped off the counter and took his hand. He couldn’t help but kiss it like he’d done in the elevator.

As they left the kitchen, she said, “You don’t have to do that, you know. Not when it’s just us.”

“What do you mean? Do you think when we’re in the pool house I’m kissing you for an audience?” He squinted at her, as if he was trying to understand her.

“I heard you tell Harry that you loved her.” She stared at the ground. “By the pool.”

“Jesus, don’t you start. I get Harry shoved down my throat enough by my mother. I love Harry, but just as an old acquaintance. We were never hot and heavy. I actually think I was just an experiment for her, to see if she could be with anyone after Danny. The answer to that was a resounding no.”

“Okay,” Beth said, but she only sounded about fifty percent convinced.

He said nothing, just held her hand tighter and towed her through the few remaining guests, back down to the pool house. He opened the glass door for her.

“Listen. Don’t mistake this”—he gestured toward the daybed and the bedroom—“for what we’re pretending to be out there. They are two completely separate things. I know things are complicated, and my family is bound to have done a number on you. But I am not my family. Don’t confuse the two.” He dragged her against him, kissing her as if he already had her permission. But he wasn’t asking.