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She made a face, relieved by the lightness of Luke’s tone. Better than the constant strain of the past hour. “I’ve gotten better. You might be surprised.”
He smiled at her. “You always found ways to surprise me, Abs.” His smile faded and he looked down at Stevie, who had rediscovered the hawk pendant and was twirling it around his sticky little fingers. “What do you say, Stevie? Wanna come stay with your uncle Luke for a few days?”
Abby struggled not to react to Luke’s words, but guilt burned in her chest like acid. She should have told him the truth three years ago, when she realized she was carrying his child inside her. At the time, with Luke in a war-torn country continents away, settling on the easy lie hadn’t seemed so wrong, especially given how abruptly and finally he’d left her bed—and life—after their night together.
But now that he was here in front of her, holding his son without even knowing it, she knew she’d been a coward. And Luke’s bad behavior at the time didn’t change the facts.
He had a son. He had a right to know.
When this was over, and everything had settled back down to normal, she’d tell him, she promised herself. She’d tell Luke he was Stevie’s father, and then they’d figure out how to go on with their separate lives from there.
“Okay,” she said finally. “For a couple of days.”
He gave a quick nod, as if to affirm she was doing the right thing. “Can I help you pack?”
“Just keep Stevie occupied,” she said, heading for the bedroom. Inside, she picked through the mess the intruders had left and found a few days’ worth of clothes for her and for Stevie, which she packed in an empty gym bag she found tossed against the wall under the window. She added toothbrushes, vitamins and a few other things Stevie would need into his diaper bag. His favorite book. The stuffed rabbit he didn’t like to sleep without. Blinking back tears, she headed out to the living room.
She found Stevie sitting quietly in the wooden rocking chair near the corner, watching Luke sweep up the broken crystal box. Luke looked up as Abby entered, a faint frown on his face. “Matt gave you this, didn’t he?”
She followed his gaze to the gold wildcat set into the cut crystal of the box’s top. “For our wedding.” Matt’s nickname had been Wildcat, and at the time he’d given her the box, she’d thought the gesture wildly romantic, as if he were giving himself to her symbolically.
She hadn’t realized that the box was almost all of himself he intended to give to her or any other woman. His first love was intrigue, and he’d have sacrificed anyone and anything for that beguiling temptress.
She took the piece of crystal from Luke’s hand. It was warm, but only from the heat of Luke’s fingers. She dropped it in the trash can by the kitchen nook and retrieved Stevie from the rocker, settling him on one hip. With the gym bag in her other hand, she looked back at Luke. “Let’s go.”
He caught up with her at the door, taking the bag from her hand. “He loved you, the best he knew how,” he murmured as he opened the apartment door for her.
She knew he was right. Matt had loved her in his own way. She’d loved him, as well. For all his faults, he’d been a hard man not to love.
It just hadn’t been enough.
THEY LEFT ABBY’S CAR at her apartment and took his Mustang, transferring Stevie’s car seat before they left. As Luke navigated through light traffic on the way back to University City, he found himself glancing in the rearview mirror now and then to check on the sleepy little boy, who’d fussed a bit when Abby had told him they were going on a trip.
“He’s past his bedtime,” Abby murmured. “He’ll probably be asleep by the time we get there.”
Luke looked at her. “You look pretty worn-out yourself.”
Her lips curved. “Gee, thanks.”
“I’ll call my supervisor tonight and tell him I’m working from home the rest of the week.” It was one of the perks of his job, directing his own schedule, for the most part. Now that the case in Rancho Santa Fe was over, he just had some paperwork to fill out and some loose ends to tie up, most of which he could do over the phone or by e-mail.
“What are you doing now?” she asked, stifling a yawn. “Jobwise, I mean.”
“Security work. Protective detail, investigations. That sort of thing.”
Her chuckle was low and warm, like cello music. He felt a rush of pure male heat flood his veins in response. “So, basically the same kind of work you did in the corps.”
“Basically,” he agreed, proud of how steady his voice emerged, despite the tremors going off low in his abdomen. He tried to concentrate on her question rather than his libido. “Compared to the corps, my job’s a day at the beach. Sometimes literally.” He grinned. “What about you? Where are you working these days?”
“I freelance with a couple of local school systems that don’t have full-time speech therapists. A few nonprofits that need temporary translation services. Some private tutoring.” She turned to look over her shoulder at Stevie. “I do some consulting work for Homeland Security, too. Linguistics stuff relating to wiretaps, that sort of thing. I’m looking to branch out, though. Bring in a little more money so we can afford a real house.”
MSI might be interested in her services, he thought. For a moment, his first thought was to mention her to Dave Malkin to see if he could find her some more freelance work.
But he quickly quashed the notion. The last thing Abby and her son needed was to have Luke in their lives, even hanging around the periphery.
He was dangerous to know.
“Luke, what if we don’t find what Matt took?” A tremble in Abby’s voice belied her calm expression. “What if these people are wrong and he didn’t take anything from them to begin with?”
“We’re going to sort it out, I promise.” He wasn’t yet sure how, but the one thing he knew, as surely as he knew his own name, was that he wasn’t going to let anyone hurt Abby or her son. He’d spent the past three years wishing he could have done things differently with Abby Chandler, and this was all the chance he could expect to make up for his mistakes.
He had no intention of letting her down this time.
He made the turn down his street and scanned the area, looking for anything that seemed out of place. He recognized all the vehicles parked within a block of his bungalow and didn’t see any strange people walking the streets. He lowered the car window as he made a pass down his street once without stopping. He could hear the muted sound of music coming from within a couple of the houses, and here and there dogs barking, but nothing seemed out of sorts.
“Didn’t we just pass your house?” Abby asked.
“Yeah. I wanted to drive around once, just to make sure everything’s calm.” He circled the block, moving neither too fast nor too slow, and kept his ears open. A block over, a beagle was baying frantically at something in the backyard of a small yellow stucco house located directly behind Luke’s own backyard.
Might be a squirrel or an opossum driving him nuts.
Or not.
Luke pulled up the short drive to his garage and reached across to press the door opener. The whir of the door’s machinery seemed deafening to his ears, though he knew from testing the security system that the sound of the garage door opening wasn’t nearly as audible in the house.
But if someone had managed to bypass his silent alarm and made it inside his house, would the faint noise of the garage door opening give them warning that he was on his way?
“Is something wrong?” Abby asked softly.
He met her worried gaze, not surprised that she was able to read his body language so well. She’d always seemed to know what he was thinking and feeling more clearly than he had known himself. “I’m cautious,” he admitted.
“Why don’t you have a security system?”
“I do,” he said with a smile. “It’s a silent one. You tripped it, by the way.”
“I’m an amateur. These people aren’t.”
He forced himself to smile. “So we’ll be cautious. You and Stevie stay here in the garage. I’ll lock the side door from the outside, so nobody should be able to get in. You’ll have the door opener if you need to get out, and I’ll leave the car key here with you.” He removed the Mustang’s ignition key from his key ring and handed it to her. “If you don’t hear anything from me in ten minutes, get out of here and go to the nearest police station. Tell them everything you know.”
He could tell from the look on her face that she had no intention of going to the police. But he wasn’t going to sit out here in the garage all night arguing a hypothetical.
“Once I make sure the house is safe, I’ll come back and get you.” He got out of the car and closed the driver’s door behind him, bending to look back in the open window. “We’re going to figure this all out, Abs. I promise.”
In her eyes he saw her desire to believe doing fierce battle with disillusionment. He wondered how much of that disillusionment was thanks to Matt’s lies and how much was a product of his own grave mistakes.
He slipped out of the garage and locked the door safely behind him, walking the flagstone path to the house with care, knowing that one slip onto the pebbles below would alert anyone lurking inside his darkened house of his approach.
He eyed the side-door lock to see if it had been tampered with. Everything looked just as he’d left it. But he wasn’t so egotistical as to believe there was no way an intruder could get past his security setup.
He closed his hand around the Glock at his belt and slipped it from the holster. Falling back on years of urban combat training, he entered the door fast and low, sweeping the kitchen for any signs of occupation.
It was empty.
He almost let his guard down at that point, listening to the familiar silence of the house. But he hadn’t spent a decade in the Marine Corps just to forget the hard lessons.
He scanned the kitchen once more, looking for any signs of something out of place. The lack of disorder only amped up his tension. Because somewhere in his gut, he sensed he wasn’t alone in the house.
Which meant whoever was waiting somewhere behind a door or around the corner was damned good at his job.
There were times to fight and times to regroup. Deciding which time was which was something he’d learned over almost ten years in uniform. Suicide missions were last-ditch options. Much smarter to beat a strategic retreat, then regroup and make a plan of attack from a more advantageous position.
Especially when you had a two-year-old boy and his mother waiting in the garage to be collateral damage.
He turned quietly and edged toward the back door. He almost made it there before he heard a metallic click a few feet behind him.
“Major Luke Cooper, United States Marine Corps. Retired.” The slick voice behind him ended with a soft clucking sound. “So young for a retiree. Battle fatigue?”
Luke started to turn around.
“I’d appreciate it if you lowered your gun,” the man behind him added in what Luke guessed, from what Abby had told him, must be a Boston Brahmin accent.
“If you think I’m going to put my weapon on the floor and go down without a fight, you don’t know much about the Marines,” Luke said, his voice calmer than the roiling sensation in his gut would have suggested.
“I don’t think either of us needs to use our weapons,” the other man said, his tone slightly amused. “In fact, I think we probably want the same thing, don’t we?”
Luke lowered his Glock to his side but didn’t holster it. He turned around to find the man Abby had described from her earlier encounter—tall, muscular, dressed in black from head to toe. The ski mask fit him snugly, hiding all but a circle of pale skin around his sharp blue eyes and two thin, hard lips. He held a nasty-looking Colt M1991 in his left hand.
“I suppose we want the same thing,” Luke agreed, “but I doubt we’ll agree on what to do with it.”
The thin lips curved into a humorless smile. “Well, I guess we’ll have to deal with that when the time comes. Meanwhile, Mrs. Chandler has told you what my employer wants.”
“Actually, she doesn’t seem very certain what it is we’re looking for,” Luke countered, wondering how many other people were hiding in his house. One more? Two? Three? He’d feel a lot more confident about what he needed to do next if he had some way of knowing what he was up against.
“Captain Chandler took something from my employer. He wants it back.”
“Something? That’s a little vague.”
“You’ll know it if you find it.”
“Also vague.” Luke cocked his head. “Your employer must not think very much of you if he couldn’t even tell you what you’re threatening women and children to find.”
The other man drew a swift breath through his nose, sucking the black knit up tighter against his face. His eyes flashed with hate, but when he spoke, it was in the same slightly bemused tone he’d used all along. “You served with Captain Chandler. You were close friends.”
“Look who knows how to use Google.”
The masked man smiled again. “You served side by side with the captain in Afghanistan four years ago, and again with him in Sanselmo shortly before he died.”
“What did you do, memorize my service jacket?” Luke asked, feigning boredom, although the intruder’s breadth of knowledge about his time in the Marines suggested he had some pretty well-connected sources, probably in the government.
Which meant they were up against an even tougher enemy than he’d anticipated.
The intruder’s smile grew ugly as he saw through Luke’s mask of indifference. “You see, I wasn’t bluffing when I told Mrs. Chandler she really had no choice but to help us find what we’re looking for.”
“She didn’t think you were.”
“We were wondering who she’d run to for help.” There was a hint of innuendo in the man’s tone that made Luke’s skin crawl. “You see, we knew she’d go to the person most likely to know what her husband had been hiding from her.”
“But you didn’t know who that was?”
“We do now.” The masked man chuckled. “Isn’t technology wonderful? A phone call, a text message, and in mere moments, almost everything you need to know is at your fingertips.”
“You should be in a commercial.” Luke made a show of looking around the spotless kitchen. “Should I feel insulted that you didn’t trash my place the way you did Abby’s?”
“You haven’t seen the rest of the house.”
Luke arched one eyebrow. “Say, did you find a dark green sock anywhere? I’ve been looking for it for weeks.”
The man’s smile faded. “Seven days, Major Cooper. Mrs. Chandler clearly believes you can help her find what we’re looking for. If you can, I suggest you do.”
“Or what? You’ll hurt a two-year-old?” Luke sneered. “What a fulfilling job you have.”
The masked man took a swift step forward. Luke’s gun hand twitched upward.
A second man in a black mask stepped around the corner into the kitchen and put a restraining hand on the other man’s arm. He murmured something Luke couldn’t quite make out.
The man with the Brahmin accent visibly took himself under control. “Seven days.”
“Got it. Now get out of my house.”
The second man—African-American, Luke noted, just as Abby had described—nodded toward the back of the house. He went around the corner and out of sight.
The other man stayed where he was, staring Luke down. Luke didn’t drop his gaze, more than happy to wait him out.
“Don’t let me down,” the man said. Then he turned as well, disappearing around the corner on silent feet.
Luke stayed where he was, knowing that trying to stop them was a fool’s game that wouldn’t end well. He tightened his grip on the Glock, waiting for the sound of a window opening in the back of the house.
It came, softer than he’d expected. They’d probably greased the window first to cut down on the creaks. He didn’t hear it close at all, but after a couple of minutes, he decided it was safe to check the rest of the house.
The man in the mask hadn’t been lying. Both bedrooms, both bathrooms and the living room had been trashed in a fast but thorough search. He suspected they’d searched the kitchen as well, though they’d clearly taken more care to hide their tracks there, apparently knowing from their earlier reconnaissance that he customarily entered through the side door. Easier to get the upper hand if they didn’t leave a calling card for him to discover the second he walked through the door.
He was surprised they hadn’t tried the garage.
Or had they?
Unease squirming in his belly, he raced to the garage, unlocked the door and let himself in. The place was just as he’d left it, no sign of a struggle or anything out of place. They’d probably checked here first, he realized, and, as they had with the kitchen, left it as they’d found it in order to cover their tracks.
Inside the car, Abby had shifted to the driver’s side, her pale face staring back at him through the Mustang’s open window.
