Tears brimmed in her eyes. “I thought you loved me!”
The pain in her voice ripped a hole in his heart. “I do, baby. I love you so much it hurts to do this, but I have to
because
I love you. I have a responsibility to keep you safe. That’s why I have to do what’s right for you.”
“You can’t just send me off like this! How can you say you love me and do this to me?”
One of the men spoke up. “Ms. Peres, I’m Special Agent Williams. We have a material witness warrant from a federal judge allowing us to take you into protective custody. You need to come with us.”
“Jer, don’t let them do this, please. Don’t let them take me!”
He couldn’t look her in the eye, at the tears spilling down her cheeks. His gaze dropped to the floor. “You have to testify or he goes free. This isn’t a book or a movie where I can magically protect you and off the bad guy. I need to know you’re safe. I love you too much to risk your life again.”
She stood there, staring at him, until the female marshal stepped forward. “Ms. Peres, please—”
“No!” She jerked her arm out of the woman’s hand. “No! I won’t go! You can’t make me!” she screamed.
“Daph, please don’t fight them,” Jerald softly said. “Baby, please don’t make a scene. Alan doesn’t need to hear that.”
She sobbed. “I can’t even say good-bye to him?”
“Please go. Don’t make this harder than it has to be.”
She stared at him, unmistakable disbelief on her face. “How can you just stand there staring at the damn floor? Can’t you even look me in the eye? If you really loved me, you wouldn’t be doing this! You promised me! You and Alan, you’re all I’ve got!”
He forced his gaze to hers. “I do love you,” he whispered. “And believe me, this is the hardest fucking thing I’ve ever had to do in my life. If you think this is easy for me, then you don’t know me very well.” He pushed past the marshals and out the door. Behind him, he heard them talking to her, trying to calm her as she sobbed before the door closed and blocked the sound.
He stepped into the bathroom across the hall and locked himself in. A few minutes later, he heard them open the conference room door. He heard her still crying.
They led her down the hall in the opposite direction of Alan’s room, down a back stairwell. They would most likely take her out a back door to a waiting vehicle. He’d already handed all her things over to Special Agent Williams, who promised they’d keep her safe.
He wouldn’t let himself cry. Not now.
He washed his face and pulled himself together before returning to Alan’s room. Alan lay sleeping, his pain killers zonking him out again. Jerald sat in her chair next to his bed. It still felt a little warm from where she’d been sitting in it.
Yes, he was a chickenshit. He admitted it and felt glad Alan still slept, sparing him from having to tell him.
It would break Alan’s heart, but not any more than his own.
He hated betraying her like that. He didn’t have a choice. Not when it came to keeping them both safe. They attacked Alan trying to get to her. She could have been shot too, if he hadn’t shown up when he did.
If that pissed her off and she was too upset to see the truth, he could do anything to change her mind. Hopefully when she calmed down she would see he was right.
A nurse came in to check Alan’s vital signs. “Major Carter, I’m sorry, but visiting hours are over.”
He nodded. “I’m going.” He stood, then leaned in and kissed Alan’s forehead. “I’ll see you in the morning, buddy,” he whispered. “I love you.”
Alan never stirred.
The emptiness of home painfully seared his soul. At least he could curl up in their bed with his arms wrapped around his lovers’ pillows. With his face buried in them, inhaling Alan and Daphne’s scents, Jerald broke down and sobbed.
* * * *
Daphne felt numb. She stared out the window of the armored SUV as the landscape passed outside. She didn’t know where they were going.
She didn’t care.
She didn’t care about anything anymore. He’d sent her away. How could he tell her he loved her, and in the same fucking breath send her packing? They were all she had.
They were her family.
What about all their plans?
He promised.
She felt something brush her hand. The female agent, Lammond, pressed several tissues into Daphne’s palm.
Yes, she was still crying. Would she ever stop crying? She didn’t have a home, didn’t have her men.
Didn’t have anyone anymore. For all his talk, Jerald Carter was as full of bullshit as anyone else. She thought she’d seen a softer side of him, but the truth was, his heart of stone was the real man. Everything else was just an act.
They finally pulled up in front of a small motel. She didn’t say anything or ask questions when one of the male agents opened her door and offered her a hand out.
She stepped out without taking it.
She followed them into a suite. Two beds in the bedroom, a sleeper sofa in the living room. One of the men brought in her stuff for her.
Daphne walked to the bathroom, locked herself in, and cried.
* * * *
Alan stared out the window from where he lay in his hospital bed. He hadn’t said much since Jerald broke the news to him three days earlier, the morning after Daphne left.
Jerald didn’t lie to him. He couldn’t. It wouldn’t do any good. He owed him the truth.
He didn’t know how angry Alan felt, how much had sunk in through the haze of painkillers they kept him on.
Jerald wore civilian clothes and pulled the chair next to Alan’s bed. “I was thinking,” Jerald said, “about what you said a few weeks ago. About me retiring and us working together. I’ve got over twenty years in. I’m vested in the pension plan. Not a lot, at my age, but I could go get my captain’s license and do that, too.”
Alan didn’t answer. He made no indication he’d even heard Jerald.
Jerald waited a minute and tried again. “I can help you out until you’re better. Then I can go to Sea School and get my license.”
Nothing.
Desperation set in. He knew it’d been a huge risk, but he couldn’t lose both of them at the same time. Not like this. “Please,” he softly begged. “Talk to me.”
Alan didn’t look at him. “What do you want me to say, Jer?”
“Please don’t be mad at me!”
“I’m not mad at you.”
He hated feeling like this, and yet he knew he couldn’t lose this man. “I had to keep her safe. Do you want her to get killed?”
“You did the right thing.” Alan’s voice still bore the same soft, flat intonation.
He grabbed Alan’s hand. “I can’t lose you,” he whispered. “I love you.”
Alan finally looked at Jerald. He studied him for a long time with those big, brown eyes. “I love you too,” he said. “It’s just going to take a while for me to heal, that’s all.”
Jerald knew he didn’t mean his stomach.
“I’m sorry. I love her too, you know. I couldn’t protect you. How the hell can I protect her if I couldn’t even keep you safe?”
He’d sworn he wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t cry in front of him. But he did. He dropped his head to the bed and cried. “Jesus, Alan, I thought both of you’d been shot when I saw the blood on her. She was screaming, and I thought you were dead. I’ll never get the sound of her screaming out of my fucking brain!”
He felt Alan’s hand on the back of his head, tangling in his hair, stroking his scalp. “It’s okay,” he said. This time a little emotion crept into his voice. “I’m not going anywhere, tough guy.”
He raised his head and met Alan’s gaze. “It’s not like she won’t come back. Once the trial’s over, we’ll bring her home. I swear we will. Then it’ll be the three of us forever.”
Alan nodded. “Yeah.” He stared at Jerald for a while. “I need more out of you. I need you to blow up that fucking wall you keep around your emotions. I don’t mean I want you to go all girly on me, but I need to not have to sit there and wonder what you’re thinking all the time. I can’t get through this and try to fight you over that at the same time.”
Jerald nodded. “Whatever you want.”
Alan laid his palm against Jerald’s cheek. Jerald covered Alan’s hand with his. “How long do you think the trial will last?” Alan asked.
“I don’t know. Depends on whether or not Scorsini cops to a deal.”
“Worst case.”
“Could be six months or longer.”
At that, Alan’s eyes dimmed. “Okay.”
* * * *
Scorsini’s lawyer must have had a serious come-to-Jesus talk with his client, because Jerald and Alan weren’t harassed. At least, not threatened with violence.
On the other hand, the defense dragged Daphne’s reputation through the mud at every possible opportunity. The defense tried to portray her to the press first as a whorish gold-digger, then as a worthless tramp latching onto fame and fortune at the expense of the taxpaying public and his client.
The men could do nothing but sit back and try to ignore the ugly lies the defense team spread about her. Jerald ached for her, missed her like crazy, but couldn’t talk about her.
Alan mentioned her from time to time. When Jerald first brought him home from the hospital, Alan paused in the living room doorway and silently stared before continuing on in silence to the master bedroom.
Jerald knew what he thought. It didn’t feel the same without her.
Two months after the shooting, Alan was back behind the wheel running charters.
Jerald turned in his badge and his retirement benefit paperwork.
While taking his Sea School classes, Jerald also took over doing Alan’s paperwork for him for the business, and all the housework, freeing him up to spend time on his charters. Alan didn’t talk or smile as much as he used to. His spontaneous, playful spark wasn’t there like before. Jerald found himself trying to carry on one-sided conversations with him until Alan’s sad smile told him without words that he was only humoring Jerald by listening in the first place.
He also knew the sadness in Alan’s soul was the same plaguing his.
Daphne’s absence felt like the throbbing from a phantom limb. Nothing you did eased the pain.
He also didn’t tell Alan about the letters. He’d written her every week, starting that first week, to explain, to keep her posted on Alan’s recovery.
To apologize and tell her they loved her and missed her and looked forward to being with her again once the trial was over.
After the third month, when he drove to the U.S. Marshal’s office in Tampa to deliver the latest one to Special Agent Williams, who was in charge of the case, Williams had closed the office door behind Jerald and gently told him she wasn’t reading them and that she requested he please stop sending them.
With his face burning, he handed the last one to the agent anyway. “Then do whatever you want with that one,” he mumbled before blindly feeling for the door, hurrying to get out of the building and into his truck before he started crying.
He could understand her being pissed at him, fine, okay. But to take it out on Alan?
Didn’t she care how he was doing?
How could she
not
worry about Alan?
He didn’t expect the crushing sensation that hit him, ripping his breath from him. At first he thought maybe it was a heart attack until he started crying, sobbing, his head on his arms on the steering wheel, screaming his rage and pain until his throat hurt and his voice had gone hoarse and scratchy.
Once he calmed down, he could breathe again. The pain in his chest eased after several minutes.
Okay. Fine. She couldn’t understand this was for her own good? Whatever.
No way in hell would he allow Alan to be hurt if he could help it. Not even by her.
He started the truck and headed for home.
* * * *
Daphne stared at the TV. She didn’t really know what was on. Didn’t care. It simply provided noise to help her drown out her thoughts.
At shift change, they brought her dinner and her weekly supply of Sudoku magazines. She was getting good at them. They allowed her to keep her mind off everything else. To totally focus and not let her thoughts wander.
In the plastic grocery bag with the Sudoku magazines lay a white envelope with her name printed on the front in familiar writing.
Williams shrugged. “I told him yesterday when he came by to stop bringing them. He told me to do whatever I wanted with that one. I figured I might as well give it to you.”
She nodded and returned to the bedroom. She rarely spoke to the agents. Not because she wanted to be rude, but because speaking meant thinking, which usually led to crying.
She hated crying.
She stared at the envelope for a long time before opening her dresser drawer and laying it, unopened, on the stack of unopened envelopes already there. Each with her name neatly printed in Jerald’s block handwriting on the front. She couldn’t bear to read them, yet as angry and hurt as she still felt, she couldn’t bear to throw them away, either.