Collateral Damage (19 page)

She nodded. “Guess that was part of why he flipped. Maybe the chaos was more than he could handle and something he always blamed me for. To him normal was being perfectly ordered at all times. He didn’t see the boys often after we separated.”

Jack bit back his anger and disgust for Bill and directed it toward himself as he saw his divorce from Jill in a new light. He understood parenting wasn’t for everyone, but once a kid was born, both parents had to step up to the plate. Instead of doing just that where his daughter was concerned, he’d let Jill cut him out of the game. What the hell? Why was he just seeing that now? They were back at the hotel before he knew it.

When they opened the door, the boys, still awake and going strong, raced up to him and Lauren, excitement shining in their eyes. They spoke to him at the same time, in a wild rush that he couldn’t decipher.

Angie looked done in. “I made the mistake of letting them up to have one pretermed race before going to sleep.”

Lauren frowned. “What’s that?”

“Don’t know.”

“We need a pretermed track, Mr. Jack.” Matt’s brow was creased with a serious frown.

“Please, sir,” Mitch added, eyes pleading as if his world hung on the answer.

Realization dawned. “They’re talking about a predetermined race track. So everyone has the same advantage.” Jack looked at Lauren. “I don’t mind. It’s up to you.”

“Just one race,” Lauren told the boys. “Then it’s bedtime.”

“Okay.” Jack rubbed his hands together with enthusiasm. “You two go sit in the chairs over there until I get my racing gear ready. I won’t be more than two minutes.” The boys nodded and dashed to the chairs, scrambling to sit down.

Angie laughed. “I’ve been trying to make that happen all night.”

“Watch NASCAR,” Jack said as he went through the adjoining door, to store his gun safely out of the reach of little hands. “The guys racing aren’t much different than the twins, and there’re all kinds of rules racers have to obey or get penalized for.”

Lauren laughed. “Smart man.”

Jack returned with some hastily gathered supplies. He told the twins about his Pinewood Derby racing days in Boy Scouts as he set about constructing an agreed upon route that employed just about every surface in the hotel room from a luggage rack to the bed pillows, excepting the table and chairs in which Lauren and Angie now huddled. He made a quick checkered flag, a red flag and a yellow flag out of paper and borrowed clothing, and set himself up as judge. The race was on. He had no doubt the twins could have run the Daytona 500 by foot and beat the drivers with the amount of energy they had. He and Livy used to have fun times like these and he realized he ached deep inside that they’d disappeared with the divorce.

The race was over too soon and there were no fights when he declared Mitch the winner. But he’d made a grave mistake. The boys were begging to join the Boy Scouts in the morning so they could make Pinewood Derby cars and race.

“When you start school in a few weeks,” Lauren told them. “Meanwhile you had better get a good night’s sleep or you’ll be too tired to win the races.”

“Pomise,” Mitch asked.

“Your solid oak,” Matt added.

“My solid oak.” Lauren smiled. “Now brush your teeth and hit the sack.”

The boys rushed to the bathroom and Jack laughed. “What’s solid oak mean?”

The warmth of love in Lauren’s eyes as she explained made her unbelievably beautiful and knocked him for a loop. “At first the boys mistook the words solid oak for solemn oath, but once they learned what it was supposed to be, they chose to stick with their own method of promise. Solemn oath doesn’t have any substance to it, whereas the big solid oak tree in the backyard means something really important.”

Jack nodded. He could remember just how huge promises were to him at six years old and it also made him remember who the most important man in his life was at the time. His father.

Matt and Mitch’s father would never walk through the door and speak to them again because Jack had killed him. An iron fist closed around Jack’s heart and squeezed hard. He hurt for them and for the part he’d played in Bill’s death.

Maybe he didn’t have the right to be here. Maybe it was wrong, and maybe it would only intensify the collateral damage of reveling the truth to Lauren later, but he was incapable of walking away from their emotional needs any more than he could have left them under gunfire in a battlefield—an apt description of life at times.

“I’ll say good night now.” Jack quickly left the room, shutting the adjoining door. All reasons aside, he shouldn’t be playing with Bill’s sons. Protect them yes, but build their hopes into thinking Jack was something more than the glorified killer he was? No. Nor should he be lusting after Bill’s widow.

With his insides all twisted in knots, he showered and mulled over his conversation with Lauren, getting his ducks in a row. He had to call Commander Weston before he hit the sack and he was not looking forward to the event.

Turning on his phone, he was surprised to see he had only one text from Weston.

Jack opened the message and stared at it a moment, stunned, simply because he expected to read an ass-chewing.
Call me. Mari is in trouble.
He hit the speed dial.

“About time you surfaced,” Weston said, his voice almost a whisper.

“What’s wrong with Mari?”

“Hold on. Let me step outside so I don’t wake her. She’s finally resting.”

“Outside where?” Jack demanded. “Damn it. What’s happened?”

Jack heard Weston’s description of the attack on Mari, about Neil’s car being stolen and his house shot to hell. “Please tell me they’ve nailed the bastard to a tree by his yellow balls.”

“Not yet.”

“Is she going to be all right? The baby?”

Weston’s tension-filled exhale grabbed Jack by the throat.

“Damn it, Roger. What are you not saying?”

“Physically, once she starts eating and gets into a prenatal care program, she should be fine. They’re going to keep her for a day or two in the hospital then she can go home. What happened today has traumatized her, but I think more than that has her jumping out of her skin every time the breeze moves. I know something traumatic happened to her in Afghanistan. Did Neil ever mention what to you?”

“I was there when he brought her in” Jack said. “It was the night our team had gone into find Ackbajeen?”

“Yeah.”

“Neil found her imprisoned in a windowless cell in the bowels of a fairly well-to-do compound-like house. Someone had left her to starve to death and she was literally at death’s door. I don’t know much more than that. Why?”

“I think she’s been—”

“What?”

“Never mind. What we do need to talk about is you getting your ass back here before I can’t cover it any more. What the hell do you think you are doing, DT?”

“The right thing. Do you know Bill Collins left Atlanta suddenly the very same day that the daughters of Ambassador James and Israel’s Prime Minister Shalev were kidnapped? Do you know that his body has gone missing from the Brazilian authorities today? Do you know that Lauren Collins and her six-year-old twin sons have a trained assassin after them? AWOL me if you have to, but I’m not abandoning her and her kids until this is over.”

Weston exhaled hard. “There’s no doubt then? Bill Collins is the man who hid in the armoire?”

“Facts are stacking up in my favor.”

“What does his wife know?”

“Make that his almost ex. Not much, but she can help me get into his life and piece together what in the hell Bill was up to and who’s was behind it. Bill worked for a tree-hugging company called BioLogics. Started two years ago and immediately went shady on his whereabouts and doings. So that company is a great starting point. I have to tell you that I just don’t buy it that that tiny radical group we took out in Lebanon pulled off the high profile kidnappings. Not without major connections and funding.”

“I’ll check on things from this end. Keep me posted then and would you keep in mind that
Posse Comitatus
is not dead. The lines have been a bit blurred lately but it’s still considered law, which means no military action on American soil is sanctioned. In other words this isn’t your egg to fry.”

“Too late,” Jack said. “But I’ll be careful. That reminds me. Whoever we are up against has resources out the whazoo and they’ve either stolen a cop car or have a cop moonlighting on the wrong side of the law.” He gave Weston the license plate numbers to check out as well as the names of Bill’s friends. “There has to be a connection to Lebanon somewhere.”

“Let’s hope. I’ve got an inside at the Agency I’ll try and tap before I bother my cousin Paul with this. Though if there is a connection everyone will be PO’d that I sat on it. Watch your back, DT.”

“Will do. Keep an eye on Mari and let me know when they nail the bastard who hurt her. I want to be there when he goes down for his crimes.”

“If he makes it that far. I’m hoping the cops shoot to kill,” Weston said. “I’m not letting Mari out of my sight.”

Jack disconnected. Over the years he’d heard Weston under pressure, in battle and going balls to the wall under gunfire, and never had he heard such deadly intent in his voice before. Jack set up the computer and hit the internet, putting BioLogics and Bill Collins under a microscope. From all articles and links, BioLogics was exactly what Lauren had said, a company dedicated to promoting green technology. Its ownership was obscured in a conglomeration of companies that he could find no head honcho on. Also, it was completely funded by charitable donations and listed as a non-profit. That sent his blood pressure steaming. How in the hell did crap like that go on and on?

After a frustrating hour, he went to bed, but took forever to fall asleep, visions of Lauren danced through his head. With her as a wife, a man had to be a total imbecile to have gone after anything else. The look of her, the feel of her, the total package from her vulnerable bottom lip to the fierce fire in her eyes when it came to protecting Matt and Mitch was more than amazing. He closed his eyes and saw her back in the shower with the water sluicing down her creamy neck and the way her shirt clung to the contours of her almost visible breasts. He hated to admit it, but more than his hand had itched to take a wet ride then, and the feeling had only grown. He so would have backed her to the wall in her almost-ex’s condo and wiped the SOB from her mind. There was something not quite sane about his need for her and it scared the hell out of him. She was in the other room and had never been in his room, yet he could smell her scent, a combination of lavender and warm honey. This time the gripping knot in his gut sent pulsing sensations southward, tightening his already aching groin. It was going to be a long, hard night.

He tried to knock himself back into line. Tried to put what she stirred in him on ice. His purpose here was to keep them safe and that package didn’t include his dick. Besides, any avenue he could take with Lauren once this was over was a dead end street that had Bill Collins’s gravestone carved all over it.

Chapter Twenty

0130 hours, August 6th

Unable to sleep, Lauren lay in the dark as the day ran through her mind over and over again. Weaving through it all was the puzzle of Jack. One minute he was the most relaxed man she’d ever met, then the next she’d catch a hint of ghosts and pain in his eyes and knew he had to be the most tortured man. The two didn’t mesh, but that was the truth of it and it made him more than just a sexy man, made him more than just a soldier. The puzzle somehow made him more real and more a part of her.

She heard a groan and sat up, her heart pounding as she listened carefully. Angie and the boys were still asleep. Hearing the groan again, she placed it as coming from Jack’s room. It sounded as if he were dreaming, and not pleasantly either. She got up and went to the adjoining door to listen. Hearing nothing more, she cracked the door open. Light from his computer screen showed him twisting and turning in bed as if he were wrestling an invisible enemy. His body was covered in sweat and his muscles were strained so taut that they silently screamed pain. Her heart twisted with the need to help him. Letting the door close behind her, she flipped on the light switch which triggered a lamp in the far corner, barely lighting the room. She crossed to the bed and tapped Jack on the shoulder.

“Jack—”

He exploded from the bed. She stumbled back and fell on her butt to stare up at him and the vibrant power electrifying his every move. She could likely just watch him…forever it seemed. He was so different from Bill, so roughly honed, a battle-experienced soldier, hardened by life, but yet so much more approachable. Or was it an element of tenderness she sensed in Jack that her husband never possessed.

“What is it?” He scanned the room and then held out a hand to help her up.

“You were having a nightmare.” She grabbed his hand. He pulled her up and something happened. There was a shift in the inches of air separating them. Every nerve she had stood up and said, “Hello, baby,” to the obvious flare of desire in his eyes when he looked at her. His need seemed to equal the desperation of her own. She opened her mouth, imagining his kiss, imagining his firm lips claiming hers. The fire in his green gaze blazed white hot. She blinked and then saw the scars on his chest, on his hip, on his leg. The badges of honor marred the perfection of his maleness and made her want to touch him even more.

What he had to have suffered hit her deep inside and tugged her closer to him, emotionally and physically, making him so much less than the stranger he should be. She wanted him, wanted to go back to that moment in the condo when he’d said,
I’d back you to that wall right there, or any place you wanted to go, and do everything in my power to wipe him from your mind.

She shivered as she stared at him. It was so easy for her to imagine his rock hard body driving her every want to completion, fulfilling her every fantasy. She pressed her hand to the warmth of his chest, reveling in his fresh spice and mint scent and leaned closer to him. Jack was so different from Bill; in look, in action, in beliefs, even in the way he interacted with Matt and Mitch. Jack had thrown all of himself into the race he’d set up for the boys. Whenever Bill had played with them, it seemed that he’d only given half-assed efforts to it minutes before bedtime after he’d checked his mail and read the paper.