Authors: Stephanie Tyler
“What’s that?”
“I don’t want to lose you when I’ve just found you.”
11
I
don’t want to lose you when I’ve just found you
.
Kaylee would fight to keep him—Nick was sure of it. Liked it, even, and a strange pride swelled inside him at the thought. “I can’t make any promises. Especially now. Not with all this shit coming down around our ears.”
“I understand. I just… wanted you to know where I stand.” She moved closer, went to touch his arm softly but he jerked back.
“You barely know me.”
“I know enough.”
She knew nothing. He planned on keeping it that way, no matter how hard his cock got. “I’ve got to talk to my brother. I’ll be back. Don’t answer your phone without me here.”
“I have to tell you about the call I made,” she said quickly. “I found us a guide through the DRC.”
He exhaled. Tried to stay calm. “Do you know this person? Can you trust him?”
“I didn’t say anything, just that it was a personal matter. She’s a photographer who lives in the area—she’s worked with colleagues of mine. She’s good.”
She
. Jesus, he was in real trouble here.
“She said to fly into Kisangani, said the coordinates were in Ubundu—”
“You gave her the coordinates?”
“I had to. Is that the right place?”
It was—he’d mapped it out quickly while he’d attempted to get in touch with Clutch. “Yes, that’s the right place.”
“Did your source come through?”
Clutch hadn’t. The man had fallen off the face of the earth. “No. And we don’t have time to wait on him. I’ll book the flight.”
He had friends he could call, could probably get use of a private plane in order to bypass security and allow him to bring weapons. Anything else would leave them too little time. They were pushing it as it was, according to Aaron’s forty-eight-hour timetable.
And so he left her in the kitchen before he did something even more stupid—not that
admitting
he couldn’t stop thinking about her wasn’t stupid enough—and went to find his brother.
Better to face Chris alone than to let Kaylee fall under his scrutiny.
There’d be plenty of time for that later, with an extra brother who wasn’t nearly as forgiving as Chris could be.
Chris sat behind the desk in what was once Dad’s office, legs propped up on its corner, waiting patiently. His iPod was on and his eyes were closed as he belted out a version of Nazareth’s “Hair of the Dog,” but they opened the second Nick walked into the room.
I just sense things
, Chris would say with a dismissive shrug when questioned. His gift, like Dad’s, was both amazing and unnerving, and Nick wasn’t particularly grateful for it, not when Chris’s eyes bore through him like a laser.
“Chris, before you start in on me—”
“Seriously, what the fuck? Like you need this now, with everything else going on?” Chris asked and then stopped. “Shit. You like her.”
Nick couldn’t put voice to it, just nodded. For a second, the two men sat there in silence and Nick prayed Chris wouldn’t push him on this.
But Chris, being Chris, didn’t say another word about it, knew how significant it was that Nick had admitted as much as he had. Instead, he asked, “Do you know that the FBI is asking questions about you? Any idea what the hell that’s about?”
Nick didn’t answer, just dumped out the contents of the envelope he’d gotten from Kaylee—everything Aaron had left her in the safe-deposit box—onto the desk between him and his brother.
“It’s amazing that a man’s entire life can boil down to this,” Nick murmured as he sifted through the contents. He pushed the patch aside and opened the folded legal-size paper that contained the list of men. It was ten sheets, meticulously written out and stapled together, and worn, as if Kaylee had read the reports Aaron had written out dozens of times.
He handed them to Chris and then turned his attention to the bankbook. He thumbed through it quickly, whistled when he saw the numbers involved.
Chris was moving Aaron’s dog tags between his fingers as he read, flipping them back and forth, the steady soft clink of the metal the only sound between them for several minutes.
When Chris finished the last page—the report that talked about Nick—he put down both the papers and the tags and began to rub the fingertips on his left hand together, an unconscious signal Nick knew all too well. “That’s why she came to you,” he said finally.
Chris knew about the mission and the patch—Nick had told both him and Jake about it and where to find the patch in case they needed to be the ones to hand it over to Kaylee.
“Aaron’s been … calling her. At least he could be. Shit, Chris, I heard one of the calls. Something’s going on, and it’s not good. I already committed to going with her to Africa,” Nick said, felt the heat of his brother’s unlikely anger shoot across the room.
Chris was typically slow to burn—it showed just how on edge he was, how much they all were because of the Winfield situation. “So you uncommit. You did what Aaron Smith asked of you, you met with her.”
“Someone wants her dead. Two men tried to take her out of her apartment tonight—they said they were FBI but I don’t think they were. I hope they weren’t anyway.”
“What the hell did you do? If she’s in danger, she needs to go to the police or someone higher up the food chain. You’re not going to fucking Africa with her—you don’t know what the hell you’re getting into.” Chris slammed a palm down on the table while Nick tried to remain unimpressed at his brother’s show of temper.
“Are you going to stop me? Because I’d really like to see that.”
“Fuck you, Nick. You know that jones for danger you’ve got is going to get you in some major trouble one of these days.”
Chris was right—Nick always had to hit it harder and faster, to up the bar. But that wasn’t what this was all about.
“Speaking of jones for danger, I seem to remember you sitting next to me in that jail cell. And this is my mountain,” he said tightly.
Dad’s favorite expression made Chris’s face soften, but only for a second. “You barely know this woman.”
“I know she’s not making up being in trouble.”
“I’m going with you for backup. I’ve got the time.
Shit.”
Chris rubbed his fingers together. “You’re going to have to give me the whole story.”
Nick did so, quickly and quietly. When he finished, Chris sighed, scrubbed his face with his palms. “Christ, Nick, if those men were FBI…” He trailed off, shook his head.
“You’re going to need to stay here, deal with the fallout.”
“You want me to run interference while you run off to Africa to figure all this out? Send you there with no backup?”
“I tried to get in touch with Clutch, but no dice. Kaylee’s got someone to help.”
Both his brothers—especially Chris—had shit a brick when they’d discovered he’d worked with Clutch off the books and off the radar last year.
Chris continued to stare at him. “When were you going to tell me that Walter came to visit you?”
“How the hell—” He sat back in his chair. “Dad,” they both said simultaneously.
And then Nick spoke the words out loud, the ones that had been echoing inside his mind since earlier that night. “He came looking for forgiveness. He told me… Fuck, he told me that I’m his son, not Billy’s.”
Chris shot forward on his elbows, nearly jumping across the desk. “Ah, shit, Nick.”
“Yeah.” He closed his eyes and then opened them to look into his brother’s.
“Do you think Kaylee suspects anything?” Chris asked him. “I recognize her pen name … She’s been writing about Cutter for a while now.”
Nick shrugged, like it didn’t matter, but Chris’s sentiments echoed his own worries. “None of those reporters are that good—you know that.”
“She’s major, all right? Big-time. Comes off as unassuming, Nick, but K. Darcy can take you down at the knees. She’s got a hell of a lot of clout in her industry. Has a reputation of not being afraid to take on anything.”
“Yeah, I have the same one in mine.”
Chris grew impatient, turned the laptop that had been facing him toward Nick, an article written by Kaylee on the screen. “She’s broken some big stories, unearthed corruption in the government and the military, opened her mouth when she was bribed—and threatened—to try to keep it shut. Took some big personal and professional risks. And that’s not including the times when she delved into people’s private lives too—do you remember this story she did?”
Nick scanned the piece and recalled reading it last year. Kaylee had been the first to break the news of a very married presidential candidate’s affair with a very married U.S. congresswoman, despite pleas from the candidate’s family.
The anger swelled inside of him again. What if she was lying to him? What if all of this was a ruse to get close to him? “She’s good, okay. But she’d have no reason to suspect me, and the angrier I get at her, the more suspicious she’s going to be, right? Besides, she’s here because of Aaron. That’s all.” He was well aware that he sounded like he was trying to convince himself.
Chris nodded slowly as he peered past Nick toward the kitchen. “Let’s keep it that way.”
“Yeah, you know me, spilling my guts to every woman I meet.”
His brother snorted.
“You heard from Jake?”
“No.”
Nick stared down at some faint scratches on the surface of the desk. If Jake was just in training in Coronado, they’d have heard from him by now. Another thing to worry about. “I don’t want to talk about Kaylee and her motives now.” Or ever, preferably.
Chris nodded, grabbed the bankbook. “How do you know the money’s still in the bank?”
“I don’t. But I’m betting that if I try to access it, the system will trigger.”
“If it hasn’t already. You’re not bringing this much cash with you. And look, if you transfer it—if you and Kaylee both have half the code, that could be your insurance policy if something bad goes down.”
Nick nodded. “Do what you have to do with it.”
Chris leaned forward on his elbows. “I got rid of the FBI agent for a while. If you haul ass, you can avoid her.”
“I need to get a flight.”
“I’ll take care of that. I’ve got a pilot who owes me a favor. A big one.”
“Thanks.” Nick stood and bypassed the kitchen for his room.
Before he began to pack, he rooted through his dresser for the old St. Jude medal inscribed with the initials
CNW-
—Cutter Nicholas Winfield—that he still kept, hidden away for safekeeping.
He held it in his palm, the cool metal leaving its brand thanks to his tightened fist.
He’d never been able to stand to wear the medal around his neck, and he didn’t believe in talismans or juju—bad for the teams to put your faith in an outside source. Still, beyond the clothing on his back, the medal was the only thing Nick took with him the night he’d left the Winfield estate for good.
Deidre had given it to him—her only gift, supposedly left next to his crib for his first birthday, although his first clear memory of the medal on the chain wasn’t until he was five and her visits had dropped off completely.
When he was old enough to know that St. Jude was often referred to as the patron saint of lost causes, Nick thought it an appropriate enough reminder of where he’d come from. Where he was headed.
And now Deidre Winfield was dead. He’d seen reports over the last few months that she was sick, knew she was dying, and still the ending he’d been anticipating hit him like a fresh wound.
After all this time, he hadn’t thought it would affect him. Why it did was more of a mystery than anything.
Within seconds, it had gone from the present day to ten years ago, twelve, even twenty-seven years earlier when it appeared that no one was happy to see him born, put him right back where he was before he’d walked away.
Nick shook off the memories. He shoved the medal into the drawer, back where it belonged, and rubbed his palm hard.
These days, he didn’t have to pretend to be someone else—in his mind, he already was, and he wasn’t about to get sucked back in. He could be ruthless about stripping things from his mind when he wanted to; today would be no exception.
Kaylee caught sight of Nick as she passed the open bedroom door, pausing without realizing it.
He was stripped bare to the waist. If he noticed her, he didn’t let on.
There were several guns spread on the king-size bed in front of him—she also saw the unmistakable glint of metal from knives and other assorted weaponry. He chose methodically, unfolded and refolded each blade and then strapped them to various places on his body—around his biceps, his thighs, as he wore only a pair of black boxer briefs. He strapped a pistol to one calf as well and then pulled on a pair of well-worn jeans, yanking on the leg to cover the weapon.
They must be taking a private plane to Africa—there was no way he’d get all that past security. And yet, despite the weaponry before her, she knew it wouldn’t be enough.
“I’ll have more firepower waiting for me,” he said, without looking up from the gun he was studying. “We leave in half an hour.”