Waiting for Him (3 page)

Taking hold of her chin, he turned her head until she was facing him, but her eyes remained downcast. “Kitten, look at me.” He waited a moment, but she still didn’t look up. “Kat, please, look at me.”

His heart almost broke when he saw the unshed tears in her eyes. Crap. She misunderstood him and now she was on the verge of crying. He did his best to embrace her despite the center console between them and kissed her on the top of her head. A shudder passed through her and he hugged her tighter. “Shhh, baby, you didn’t let me finish. Just because I never thought you and I would…you know, get together…doesn’t mean I’m not happy we did. I’ve been thinking about you and me ever since the prom when we danced those slow dances together. For the first time, I realized you’re more than my friend. You’re also a very beautiful woman who I suddenly found myself attracted to. I was just surprised you felt that way about me too.” He froze for a second. “You do feel that way, don’t you? I mean, it wasn’t just an experiment for you, right?”

She pulled away so she could look up at him again. “I’ve felt that way for a lot longer than you have. I was so happy when you asked me to the prom even though I knew it was only because you and Mary Jo Dwyer just broke up and everyone else was already paired up for the most part.”

He at least had the decency not to deny it. It
was
the reason why he’d asked her, but he wouldn’t have done it at all if he hadn’t thought they’d have a good time together. Which they had.

Taking a deep breath, she blurted out, “I didn’t want to stop tonight.”

Her face turned beet red as the implications of what she said sank into his brain. Was she telling him she would have given him her virginity tonight if the cop hadn’t interrupted them?
Holy shit!
What was he supposed to say to her? Any other girl, he would have been all over her without a second thought. He knew he could be a dog sometimes. He’d lost his own virginity two months before he turned fifteen. And like every other normal, red-blooded American male, he rarely said no when a girl offered him a roll in the sack or in the bed of his truck. But he needed
her
to be sure this was what she wanted and it wasn’t a spur of the moment thing because he was leaving. He couldn’t…wouldn’t do that to her. Kissing her had already changed the dynamics of their relationship, but having sex with her would put them in another orbit. And he knew it wouldn’t be just sex. With Katerina, it would be making love. “Baby, do you know what you’re saying?”

She nodded and then began to babble nervously. “I wanted you to be my first…you know. I still do. I mean, I know you’ve been having…you know, sex, for a long time now. I mean, everyone at school talks about who’s doing who, but I haven’t…you know…”

“You’re still a virgin.” He’d meant to say it as a question, not wanting her to know he’d overheard the conversation with her friends, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“I know it’s silly, but…”

He cupped her cheek with his hand. “It’s not silly, Kat. Not at all. But as much as I want to say yes to you…to us, I think it would be better if we waited until I finish basic training and find out where I’m being stationed. I don’t want to have one or two nights with you and then end up on a base on the opposite side of the country. It’s not fair to you.” He covered her mouth with his fingers when she tried to interrupt him. “But I’ll make you a deal, baby. If this is what you want…if you’re sure, then I’m willing to tell every woman I run into from here on out that I have someone special waiting for me back home and she’s the only one I want. Will you wait for me, Kitten? Will you be my girlfriend and wait until the time is right for us?”

“Yes, Benny, I will,” she whispered. “I promise. I’ll wait for you…forever.”

Alex was going to kill him.

* * *

Rick Michaelson stood between his wife and child at the cemetery and kept his hand on his grieving son’s shoulder. His boy was on the verge of entering the military and becoming a man, but in the blink of an eye, his life had been turned upside down. They watched as the funeral director’s crew unloaded scores of colorful arrangements from four matching hearses and placed them beside the caskets. The area around the grave sites was filling up with close to two hundred people who’d known one, two, or all members of the Maier family and come to pay their respects.

A somber priest made his way to the head of the graves in order to give the deceased their final blessing. Ivan and Sylvia would be buried side by side, just as their children, Alex and Katerina, would be in the plot next to them. The Sunday after Ben’s going-away party, the family had taken off on an hour-long afternoon drive to visit Ivan’s mother and sister, but they never arrived. A fiery crash on a lonely stretch of highway snuffed out the lives of four people, and left many others, like Ben, struggling to find a reason behind the terrible tragedy. Rick knew, although his son’s overwhelming grief would one day become bearable, the loss of his best friend, and the boy’s family, would forever change Ben’s life. He just hoped when his son emerged from his grief, he came out on the right side.

Present Day

Kate had known Benny was going to be shocked when he first saw her, but she hadn’t expected him to pass out. As far as he knew, she was dead and buried in a cemetery in Norfolk, Virginia, and not living and breathing at his place of business. His boss, Ian, had asked her to have a seat out here in the reception area, but she couldn’t sit. Instead, she was pacing back and forth, trying to keep her feet from running out the door and taking the rest of her body with them. Benny would’ve been better off if she’d never come looking for him, but it was too late to change her mind now. The last thing she ever wanted to do was to cause him any more pain, but her life was in danger and there was no one in the world she trusted more than him. It was sad he wasn’t going to be able to trust her in return. Not after what she’d put him through, even though none of it had been her fault. Her father was to blame for everything…her recently-deceased father. And for the first time in Kate’s life, she was all alone.

The sound of footsteps caused her pacing to cease and she turned to see Benny stalking toward her followed by his boss and the lab mix. The look on the man’s face, the man who’d once been the boy she’d fallen in love with, was now hard. Shock was giving away to anger and it was evident by the raging inferno in his beautiful amber eyes. Eyes which still haunted her dreams after all these years.

He stopped in front of her and crossed his arms. The Navy had taken his gangly teenage physique and made it broad, strong, and sinewy. She longed to have him pull her into his powerful arms and hold her while telling her everything would be okay. Instead, he glared at her from several feet away. “Do you want to explain how a woman I watched being buried twelve years ago, is standing in front of me? Because as far as I know, reincarnation is still a myth.”

“I-I’m sorry, Benny. I’m so sorry. But if we can go sit down, I’ll explain everything. I promise.”

Benny’s clenched jaw ticked at her use of his childhood nickname and again at her vow. The last time she promised him something, she’d said she would wait for him forever. As far as he knew, that hadn’t happened. When he didn’t say anything, Ian took a step around him and extended his open hand to her. “Ms. Zimmerman, please come back to the conference room and we’ll talk this out.”

A growl from deep in Benny’s throat escaped his mouth and he ignored the warning look Ian sent him. “Her name is Maier, Katerina Maier, and you’re damn right we’re going to talk.” While the two of them walked back to the room, she heard him take several deep breaths before turning around and following them.

Upon reentering the room they had moments ago vacated, Ian took the seat he’d earlier planned on giving Boomer. The meeting had taken a dramatic turn before it even began, and he needed to take control of the situation before it blew up in their faces. Boomer sat in the seat across from Kate with his arms crossed and glowered at her. Sighing, Ian rolled his chair back a few feet to a small refrigerator in the corner and grabbed three bottles of water and put them on the table. They were going to be here for a while. “Boom? Why don’t you tell me how you two know each other and we’ll go from there.”

Benny waited a moment before his harsh words came out, his eyes never leaving hers as if she would disappear again if they did. “Boss, this is Katerina Maier. She was my best friend’s sister. She’s also supposed to be six feet under along with her parents and brother in a cemetery in Norfolk, so I don’t have the slightest fucking idea what she’s doing here. They were
allegedly
killed in a car accident a week before I left for basic training. Tell me, Kat—are all four caskets empty or just yours?”

She winced at his accusatory tone. It also hadn’t escaped her notice when he referred to her only as his best friend’s sister and not his friend as well. She heard the pain under the anger in his voice, but knew he’d never admit to it. Her own voice came out a little louder than a whisper as she stared at the table top in front of her. “Mom and Alex are there. The accident was real, but it wasn’t an accident. We were forced off the road and rolled down a hill. My dad and I barely managed to get Alex out before the car exploded, but my mom had been killed on impact. Alex died in my arms a few minutes later. Dad and I went into hiding afterward.”

She hadn’t realized she was crying until Ian put a box of Kleenex in front of her and she grabbed two sheets. When a sympathetic warm nose poked her arm, she gave Beau a scratch behind his ear as his master spoke. “I get the feeling this is leading to Witness Protection.”

Kate nodded at the man’s gentle and understanding statement. “Yes. It’s exactly where it leads to.” Not being able to look at Benny, she instead turned her gaze to the man who didn’t currently hate her. “My dad is…was a CPA with some questionable clients at the time. Mom, Alex, and I had no idea some of the people he dealt with weren’t on the up-and-up, but he drew the line at certain…crimes, I guess you can say. He said the money was too good to pass up, especially when he’d been starting his own accounting business, but his conscience wouldn’t allow him let some things slide by. He tried to know as little as possible about who he was working for because he figured the less he knew the better off he would be. It worked for him for over ten years.”

“What happened?”

She drew in a trembling breath, reached for one of the water bottles and took a few sips to quench her sudden thirst. “He found out he was doing the books for a member of a Russian organized crime family. Dad wasn’t the only one. They used several accountants and gave each the books to only a few businesses, so if one turned on them, he didn’t have access to all the accounts. There was one man in particular Dad was dealing with. He owned a few bars in Norfolk, Newport News, and Virginia Beach among other businesses, both legal and illegal.”

Ian raised an eyebrow. “Do you know the man’s name?”

Nervously nibbling on her bottom lip, she nodded. “Mm-hm. Sergei Volkov.

“Are you fucking kidding me! Sergei ‘The Wolf’ Volkov?” Kate flinched at Benny’s sudden outburst as he jumped up and sent his chair flying back into the wall. He started pacing the room, ignoring Ian’s angry glare. “Even I knew that bastard should be avoided at all fucking costs and I was a fucking teenager!”

She looked at him with eyes that begged him to understand something she, herself, had never been able to. When her father tried to explain it to her in the days after the crash, she’d been in shock and nothing would sink into her brain and stay there. After the U.S. Marshals gave them new identities and they began their new lives in hiding, her father never wanted to talk about it again. He didn’t want to be reminded how his stupidity and greed had cost him his wife and son, in addition to the life he and his daughter had known. “Dad swore he didn’t know who Volkov was until it was too late and he was in too deep. So he did what he was paid to do and tried to stay out of trouble. But then he accidentally found out they were selling teenage girls into white slavery. The summer and spring breaks in Virginia, the Carolinas and Florida were the perfect times for them to kidnap a girl and make her disappear.

“Dad got a bunch of receipts and stuff he was supposed to add to the books and he found an envelope with a list of…God…he said it was like a shopping list with the type of girls they were looking for. Specific hair color and eyes, fair skin, a certain build, that sort of stuff.” She shook her head at the thought of any girl being taken because of what they looked like. “There were also a couple of photos of girls tied up. Dad recognized one of them from the newspaper. Her parents were rich and were making a lot of noise about her disappearance. He found out later most of the girls who’d been taken were the type no one would be surprised about if they took off on their own. Mostly they were teenage hookers or runaways. He said when he realized what he had in his hand, he thought about how he would feel if one of those girls had been me. So he called the phone number in the paper and the FBI came to talk to him. They wanted him to wear a wire and get them more information, but dad refused. He was too scared for our safety. He told them that if he started asking any questions, Volkov would immediately know something was wrong because my dad only talked about the accounting when he met with him or his right-hand man.”

“But they found out about the information he gave the feds, didn’t they?” Boomer gritted his teeth as he sat down again and grabbed one of the bottle waters.

She nodded. “Yes, right before the accident. Apparently the FBI thought my dad knew more than he was telling them, or he might lead them to Volkov. They were following us to my grandmother’s that day. It was her sixty-fifth birthday and we were going to take her and my aunt out to dinner to celebrate. The agents were using a tracking device, so they could stay further back, and weren’t close enough to stop a car that came out of nowhere and forced us off the road.”

A shudder went through her at the memory. “All I remember is everyone yelling and screaming as the car rolled over and over down the embankment, and then silence. Dad and I got our seatbelts off and crawled out of the car. It was upside down. We managed to get Alex out through the window with the help of the two agents who’d been following us. They saw the dust and smoke and realized what happened. After we got him out and far enough away from the car, they went to get my mom. I remember wondering why they came back without her, shaking their heads and then the car exploded. I tried to run back to get my mom, but they stopped me. I was screaming and hitting them, but they wouldn’t let me near it. I found out later she’d died instantly from a broken neck.

“A few minutes before the ambulance and police got there, Alex took his last breath.” She swallowed hard, trying to clear the thick lump in her throat, while wiping away the flood of tears rolling down her face. “I-I don’t remember much of what happened over the next few days. I guess I was numb. Dad and I ended up being moved from one safe-house to another until the FBI decided we could never return to Norfolk and put us in the Marshals’ Witness Protection Program. We changed identities and locations three times before we settled in Portland, Oregon. We’ve been Joe and Kate Zimmerman for the past eight years.”

At some point toward the end of telling her tragic story, Kate had closed her eyes, but her tears were still falling. Her voice had become little more than a hoarse whisper and she swallowed again, trying to regain her composure. Slowly she raised her lids and was relieved to see some sympathy in Ben’s hardened gaze. At least he knew she was telling the truth. “I wanted so badly to talk to you, to explain what happened, but they wouldn’t let me. When they came to give us new identities, I told them the only way I would agree to go was if our handler kept tabs on you and let me know how you were doing. He followed your career for me as best he could since a lot of it was classified. When I heard you were in the Naval Medical Center in Maryland with a bad leg injury, the only thing that kept me from flying to see you was my father had just been diagnosed with liver cancer. It wasn’t long before it spread and…”

Her words trailed off and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what had gone unspoken. She was surprised when Benny spoke in a gentle, sympathetic tone. “He’s gone, isn’t he?”

“Almost two months ago. The chemo and radiation did a number on him, but he lasted longer than the doctors expected.”

There was silence in the room for a few moments as what she’d been through over the past twelve years hung in the air. Finally, Ian cleared his throat and spoke. “You told our secretary you needed to hire us. Was it just a ruse to see Boomer or do you need our help? There’s obviously a lot more to your story we’re not aware of, but I would hope with your father’s death, it would be safe for you to come out of hiding.”

“I thought it would all be over after my father passed away,” she told them with a shake of her head. “But then I noticed I was being followed, and my condo was broken into and trashed.”

Benny had been looking down, but at her words his head jerked back up. “What? When the hell was this?”

Looking back and forth between the two men, she told them the details. “All last week, I was getting the feeling I was being watched. Then Friday afternoon, I got home from work and found my condo in shambles. The police said whoever it was had picked the lock. A few things, like my laptop, camera and jewelry were missing, so they assumed it was just a random burglary, but I didn’t think it was. Saturday, I tried to contact my handler at the Marshals, but was told he was killed in a car accident two days earlier. A new handler had taken over and wanted to meet with me, but with everything that happened, I wasn’t sure I could trust anyone there. So I grabbed a few clothes and money, and came to the one person I knew I could trust to help me.”

Anger returned to Benny’s face as his gaze flickered toward his boss. “Someone was looking for something.”

Ian nodded and rubbed his chin with his index finger. “But what? Why now and how did they find her after all these years?”

She cringed and whatever Benny had been about to say was lost as his eyes narrowed, focusing on her face. “How did they find you, Kat?”

“It was an accident.” She sighed, knowing she had to explain a few more things. “Dad couldn’t work as a CPA anymore when they changed our identity. In the beginning, we both worked odd jobs because we never knew when would have to change cities and names again. But after we settled down in Portland and two years went by without any trouble, our handler helped dad get his teaching license and he taught high school math. When he got sick, the teachers and students held fundraisers and stuff to help me pay for whatever his insurance didn’t cover. They were a big help to me. His students were always stopping by and visiting him.”