Authors: Stephanie Tyler
Carl wasn’t that man. And until today, when Nick Devane’s voice had done more for her than any man’s hands over the years, she’d thought that she was waiting for the unattainable.
Until today, when she knew she was in trouble. She could still smell the leather scent on her hair, could feel Nick’s grip on her hand as he helped her out of the car, as if she had just taken it for a ride with permission.
In his eyes, she’d seen the familiar spark of someone who’d had his own brushes with the law.
She could picture them, a tangle of arms and legs in the car’s tiny backseat, wondered if she’d be the first woman back there and decided she didn’t want to think about that.
What if I don’t want to forget that I met you?
She pulled the blanket tighter against the cool spring air and wondered if she’d hit some sort of massive spring fever, if the restlessness overtaking her body was something she’d be unable to ignore for much longer.
There was only one thing that was going to take the edge off. And it wasn’t going to come from her own touch.
Meeting Nick was not supposed to be about this—it was supposed to be about getting information on Aaron, discovering the mystery surrounding his death and the money he’d left her. About leaving her past behind her and thinking only on her future.
A future that if it included Carl Van Patterson might never include her career as a journalist again.
“Kaylee, are you coming to bed?” Carl’s voice drifted out onto the small balcony. And she stared at the patch and thought about Nick instead of Aaron and wasn’t sure how to tell Carl that
no
, she was never going to bed with him again.
What if I don’t want to forget I met you?
Nick had been halfway into his car when he heard Kaylee call those words out to him, and the relentless energy coursing through his body had nearly won out.
The hotwire had been enough to make him forget the blackmail attempt momentarily, enough to have him nearly take her right on the hood of his car or anywhere else she’d wanted him.
And she
had
wanted him. Had believed he could pull some
fucking magic
on her body that no one else had ever been able to do.
For some reason, that made a difference to him. A big difference, and dammit, he didn’t want anything about any woman—especially this woman—to make a difference.
Just your ego talking, asshole
.
He’d waited until she began to walk back toward the diner’s parking lot after they’d left the park before he’d started to trail her. Just to make sure she got to her car safely, he’d told himself, but fuck it, he’d never been a Boy Scout and the tail was purely a physical pull.
She’d run her hand over the fender of his car as if soothing a beast and he’d wanted to be under that hand. And he knew in that instant what she was going to do, watched and waited as she’d torn wires from the lights on the
4?4
and lit his engine on fire like a pro.
She’d put the windows down, but hadn’t used the radio.
She’d put on his racing gloves.
She’d looked sexy as hell as she stripped them off and handed them to him on the way back to her car, a Mercedes sedan that did not fit her at all.
Like you know her so damned well
.
No, the problem was that he didn’t know her at all. It was going to stay that way.
Roaring down the highway, he felt like he had the night of his first mission. Both times were brushes with something that changed his life forever, in ways he didn’t fully comprehend.
It was so easy to get caught up in the memories, from childhood, from his years before becoming a SEAL, from the missions themselves—easy to get mentally screwed for hours or a day or however long he let them take up residence. Some days they rose up and caught him off guard, until he pushed them back down where they belonged.
Most nights, he didn’t let himself sleep. He didn’t expect this one to be any different.
He’d taken his jacket and shirt off on his way up the driveway to the house. The jeans came off the second he hit the door, and this wasn’t anything new or unexpected for him, something done without much thought—or any, no matter if the house was empty or full of company.
He was convinced that his disdain for clothing came from so much time spent in the hospital as a kid. As a patient, he’d never worn clothes. The doctors and nurses were always stripping you down, knocking you out, and you woke up dazed, balls free and surrounded.
These days, the only part of that he dealt with well was being balls free.
Now he deposited the discarded clothing in a heap on a chair in the maze of rooms he called home, part of the first floor of the house where he’d spent his teenage years. A house Dad had left to the three of them when he moved to L.A., left to him and Chris and Jake, so they’d always have a place to come home to, no matter what else happened.
He opened the windows and the sliding glass doors that overlooked the backyard and stood in the cool night air naked. If he’d been training or on a mission, that would’ve overrode the need to feel something on his skin, pleasurable or painful. His throat ached where the scar was and he rubbed it again and waited for the air to calm him.
There was a danger in remembering … but sometimes an even bigger one in forgetting.
———
W
hy don’t you just forget about taking these crazy bands on
was something Kenny Waldron was used to hearing—a question he never answered. Instead he would just smile a secret smile and think of his three sons, who were wilder than any band he’d ever managed. Then he would sign the papers his lawyer put in front of him, committing him to manage what usually turned out to be a band on the verge of self-destruction, one that had been dumped by several managers before him, one that no one but Kenny was crazy enough to take on.
There was crazy and then there was
crazy
, and Kenny had been used to all kinds from the time he’d been a young wild boy himself growing up in the bayous of Louisiana. Married to Maggie at seventeen, they’d had their son, Chris, nine months later and had taken him on the road with them as they began a career of managing bands that would make them famous.
By this time, Kenny was used to trouble, used to having his authority questioned. Used to things coming out all right in the end. Sometimes, it took his sons, and the bands, longer to figure that out.
“We could’ve had a bigger deal if we hadn’t listened to him,” he heard the lead singer of his latest project whisper now to the other members of the group from behind the half-closed door.
Kenny would speak to the kid later, privately, after the show was finished and the post-performance adrenaline had waned. When the kid was alone in his dressing room, after the fans—and the women—left, Kenny would remind the singer that this was all he had, right there.
All you have is your soul
.
He would tell the kid that it was never a good idea to make a deal with the devil.
Kenny had made a deal with the devil only once in his lifetime and considered it worth it to keep one of his three sons out of hell’s reach.
“We did the right thing,” his wife, Maggie, had told him firmly thirteen years earlier as Kenny steered the SUV down the thruway that led from New York to Virginia.
The three boys—Chris, Nick and Jake—had all been asleep in the backseat by that point, the trauma of the past days and weeks having taken its toll on each of them.
“I know we did.” He’d held her hand, the way he had for all the years they’d been together, with no way of knowing she’d be dead nine months later, the cancer spreading quickly and quietly in an effort to evade both of their second sights. “I wish we could do this legally. Adopt Jake and Nick.”
That wasn’t possible. Jake had recently lost his stepfather—an abusive man who’d nearly killed him—and going through the proper channels would’ve taken too long. Sad to say, the boy was never missed in the city, his disappearance had merely lightened an overworked social worker’s case file.
No, Jake would have a good home with them now. There was no guilt in what they’d done.
But things with Nick were far more complicated.
“They’re still ours,” she’d said. “The way it was meant to be. That’s all that matters now.”
That had been the truth. Although only Chris was their biological son, Kenny and Maggie had become involved in Nick’s and Jake’s lives quickly. They’d just moved to New York so Kenny could work with a new producer and record label he’d been developing, and Chris had met the two boys who would soon become his brothers on his very first day of school.
The Waldron family had been there all of two weeks when Jake’s stepfather had died. And things were horribly wrong for Nick too, so Kenny had to work fast to stop that boy from running away.
It had taken only a moment of concentration before Kenny’s gift of second sight led him to Nick, found him on the platform of the train station, ready to go and yet unable to actually leave.
Kenny had watched as Nick let three different trains go by before he’d gone to sit next to him on the wooden bench and silently handed him the papers he’d had a lawyer draw up earlier that same day.
They weren’t adoption papers, but they were the key to Nick’s emancipation in so many different ways.
“Is this what you want?” he’d asked. Even at fourteen, Nick had been devastatingly handsome, an heir to a throne and part of a family so cursed Kenny knew Nick would spend a lifetime trying to escape it if he’d stayed.
“It’s what I want.”
“There’s no going back.” Kenny’s stomach had lurched every time he thought of what kind of man, what kind of father could blithely agree to publicly declare his son missing, believed dead, in exchange for an inheritance.
“I don’t want to go back. I’m never going back,” Nick had ground out fiercely.
“Then sign. And you never have to,” Kenny had told him quietly, felt Nick’s green eyes pierce through his in a silent
thank you
, for the way out he’d have never been able to achieve on his own. At least not back then.
After Maggie’s death, Kenny had been as inconsolable as his sons, barely remembered the first years, when Chris went quiet and refused to acknowledge his own gift of second sight, when Jake pushed a paper at him and told him he was joining the military at fifteen. When Nick and Chris had tried to take themselves so far over the edge that there’d almost been no turning back for either of them.
He’d woken up when both of them were arrested for stealing cars on the same night—what had started as a stupid hobby of hotwiring cars for joyrides had veered dangerously close to a way of life for the two boys on the verge of manhood.
His three boys had all survived in a way that made his heart swell with pride. And with that, he should be happy, content, not restless, the way he’d been all night long.
When he felt a chill shoot straight to his soul, he looked around the room until his gaze settled on the muted TV that had been turned to a twenty-four-hour news station.
He saw the devil’s face—contorted in fake grief—on the big screen set up in the green room of the massive concert hall, where his latest out-of-control band was currently performing.
The hair on the back of his neck stood on end and he said a silent prayer to both God and Maggie and hoped one of them was paying attention.
Senator Winfield’s wife, Deidre, died early yesterday morning at the family home in New York from complications of lungcancer. The Winfields chose to wait twenty-four hours before announcing Deidre’s death so they could have time to mourn in private. Services will be held this weekend in a private memorial. The Winfields have a long history of both public and political service and an even longer history of family tragedy, beginning with the untimely death of the senator’s brother, William “Billy” Winfield, and followed by the still unconfirmed death of his youngest son, Cutter Nicholas Winfield, at age fourteen…
“Cutter’s not coming home, is he?”
Walter Winfield looked away from the television reports to see his eldest son standing in the doorway of his office. Eric, still looking very much like the star quarterback hedging for a tackle or routing out a kick path, leaned against the doorjamb. With his body poised in a forward motion of hunger, hair hanging over his forehead in a decidedly noncorporate length, he looked every inch the man Walter’s brother had been.
Walter’s throat still tightened when he thought of Billy, killed in combat one month before Cutter was born.
“He can’t,” Walter said finally. “He knows that.”
Eric hesitated for a beat, and then muttered that his day had already been ruined. He walked farther into the office, not bothering to shut the door behind him the way he would during normal business hours. It was close to midnight, and they were the only two on the floor—and most likely in the entire building, save for a cleaning staff. “You still haven’t been able to get inside the will, have you?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Do you think there’s going to be a problem?”
“I don’t. But if there is, I’ll take care of it, Eric.” Walter pushed back in his chair and sighed, feeling the weight of the world on his sixty-year-old shoulders and hating it.
He glanced at the note he’d prepared, one that would be picked up shortly and hand-delivered to Cutter by morning. Simple and to the point, the way he’d always taught his children to be. The way Deidre could never have acted, even later on when talking got too hard for her. And then he ripped it in half and threw it into the fireplace.
Nick, as the man was known today, would hate him for the message, but his youngest had always found a reason to despise his father. Running away, first at twelve and again, for good, at fourteen, had proven the point.
He would only have come home for his mother. Only if and when she’d called, and she never had.
The Winfields were all about public face and private pain. This would prove to be no exception.