Harlequin Special Edition November 2014 - Box Set 1 of 2: A Weaver Christmas Gift\The Soldier's Holiday Homecoming\Santa's Playbook (10 page)

“You're good for my ego, but going with you won't change anything.”

“Yeah, well, indulge me a little. All the other lawyers who'll be there will have dates. I don't look forward to being the odd man out. You might even have a little fun. It would be something different, at least.”

She exhaled and headed out of her office. She paused when she reached the swinging door that led to the bar. “I'm not sure it's a good idea, but okay.”

He nodded, obviously satisfied. “I'll pick you up about noon. Dress warm.” He pushed open the door for her to go through first.

Casey was standing next to the bar, bouncing his keys in the palm of his hand.

He looked terrible. As if he hadn't slept in days. His bloodshot gaze slid over Arlo, then her.

The last thing she expected was for Arlo to lean down and kiss her right on the lips, but that was what he did. Then he slid his mouth near her ear. “Keep your chin up,” he murmured.

Then he straightened and gave Casey an easy smile before striding across the bar and pushing through the exit.

“Not wasting any time, I see,” Casey said.

She curled her fingers until her nails dug into the palms of her hands and willed away whatever concern she felt over the fresh lines in his face and the tension pulsing out of his cells. “Just because I was stupid enough to sleep with you for the past year doesn't mean I'm a whore,” she managed tightly.

He sighed. “I'm sorry. That was uncalled for. Not once have I ever thought of you like that.”

She ignored him and went behind the bar, snatching up a bottle of vodka that hadn't been replaced on the shelf where it belonged. “You found your truck keys, obviously.” Her chest ached so badly it was hard to get out the words. “So just take them and go.”

“And if I made you feel like one—”

She closed her eyes, tightening her grip on the bottle. She didn't want to drop it, because her palm felt suddenly moist and slick. Nor did she want to heave it at his head.

Either was a distinct possibility.

“—then I deserve every crummy thing you've ever thought about me. And there aren't any apologies good enough.”

She carefully set the bottle on the shelf and turned to face him. “I didn't expect to see you. Steven from the plane said you'd be sending someone to get your truck.”

“I didn't expect to be here either.” He didn't move from where he stood at the end of the bar but had stopped jangling the keys in his hand.

Then why are you?

And why did she hurt so badly inside because he was?

She pushed the empty register drawer closed. “How did you get back from Denver?”

“Picked up another flight.”

“Cee-Vid has a bunch of planes at your disposal?”

“It wasn't Cee-Vid. But Tris does happen to have more than one.” He went silent for a moment. “I didn't come for the keys. I came to tell you I'm going to be out of town for a while. A couple weeks, maybe.”

“We've never kept up with each other's schedules before,” she said, managing a halfway even tone.

His lips tightened. “Maybe I thought you should know. So you wouldn't think my being gone had anything to do with—”

“Me?”

He pinched the bridge of his nose, then dropped his hand. “With last night.”

“Look, Casey.” She pressed her palms flat on the counter in front of her, feeling the textured rubbery mat dig into her skin. “We're not lovers anymore. I think we've proven we're not friends. So let's just stop pretending there's any reason why you need to inform me of anything, much less the fact you'll be out of town for a few weeks. It doesn't matter to me what you do. Or where you are.” Two bigger lies she'd never told in her life. “It was entertaining while it lasted, but it's over.” She made herself shrug even though her throat was in a vise, her voice turning thin. “No harm. No foul.”

“Maybe that crap flies with other people, but it doesn't with me. Not anymore. You want to stop pretending?” He suddenly moved toward her, leaning across the bar until their noses were only inches apart. “Stop pretending that we were just a convenient hookup whenever one of us had...an...itch.”

Her eyes burned. “What good would that do? It doesn't get me any closer to the things I want in life!”

“A baby.”

She threw up her hands, backing up until she felt the counter behind her against her spine. “Yes! A baby. I want a baby. I want a husband. And you think I didn't know that the second I said those words you'd be scoping out the closest exit? I knew, and it was exactly what happened!” Her choked voice rang out.

And it was perfectly audible for the small crowd that had formed in the archway between the grill and the bar, avid expressions on their faces.

Her shoulders fell. She lowered her hands to her sides. “Well,” she muttered thickly. “I guess we can forget about keeping things just between you and me.”

He barely gave their audience a glance. “I wasn't looking for an exit because I wanted to,” he said flatly.

“I don't even have a clue what that's supposed to mean. I don't have a clue what goes on inside your head. Inside your heart. The only thing I know for sure about you is that your work is always,
always
going to come first.”

“It means I can't give you what you want,” he said between his teeth.

“You mean you won't.”

“I mean I
can't
,” he repeated. Then he looked at the people watching them. Even Jerry, her cook, was there, his mouth open in shock.

Casey shook his head, his eyes a stormy gray. “I can't,” he said again.

Then he turned and walked out of the bar.

Chapter Ten

“S
o that's it.” Casey stared at a photo of the ramshackle hut situated across the narrow rutted road. The satellite image blazing across the wall in front of him was so clear he could have been standing within touching distance of the hut, rather than several thousand miles away, safe inside an air-conditioned vault deep within Hollins-Winword's Connecticut compound. “That's where Jon and Manny died.”

“That's it.” Tristan got up from where he'd been sitting beside Casey and moved past the computer consoles to stand next to the wall of screens. Currently, the screens were working in tandem to display this one huge image, and even his oversize uncle looked small in comparison as he walked over to stand just below the hut. He stared intently, as if he could see something that Casey and the others gathered together in the room couldn't.

For the past week, the six members of the investigation team had pored over every speck of data they had concerning the three agents' activities during the months leading up to when Jon and Manny had died in that Honduran hut.

There was no evidence their cover had been blown. To anyone who'd looked, they'd been three expats cranking out a meager existence alongside the locals in a small, nearly forgotten town. Their true task had been simply to gather intel on a drug lord who'd also been dipping his toes into human trafficking. Nasty stuff. HW had been feeding evidence to the authorities who were supposed to be able to do something about the situation.

There was no hint, no sign, no anything, that explained how, when or why they'd been found out. Nothing to explain the bullets that had struck down Jon and Manny.

It had taken Casey and the rest of their team four full days just to confirm that the two men hadn't died where their bodies had been discovered, some hundred miles north near San Pedro Sula.

Whoever had killed them had moved their bodies.

Which tended to dispel the theory that the men might have died through some coincidence unrelated to their true mission.

They'd spent the rest of the week trying to unearth the truth, and failing. And now the prevailing sense Casey got from the rest of his team members was that this particular mystery wasn't going to be solved. At least, not by them.

Not until they found McGregor. Either he'd killed his partners, which seemed unfathomable, or he was in so much danger he couldn't be found.

Casey didn't like agreeing with the team's assessment. But he didn't have any basis to argue either.

“Okay.” Tristan finally turned to face them. “Wrap it up.” He looked at the only female there. “Theresa, finish the report and have it to me in sixty. I want to be wheels up in sixty-five.”

“Yes, sir.” Theresa de Santos gathered her stack of materials and left the room, followed by the other team members.

They would be dispersing to various corners of the world. Only Casey and his uncle would head back to Weaver.

“This sucks,” Casey said bluntly the second they had the room to themselves.

“Yup.” His uncle agreed immediately. He stopped on the other side of the console and studied him. “Have you slept at all since we've been here?”

Not much. And not well. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Jane's face.

Or he heard the bone-jarring sound of seven rifles being shot off at once.

“I'm fine,” he said.

“You're not fine.” Tristan's face was hard. “Trust me, kid. You won't be the first Clay to ever get suspended from Hollins-Winword, but that's what's going to happen if you don't pull yourself together.”

“There's nothing wrong with my work.” His voice was flat. “Except for losing three agents on my freaking watch, I'm as good as you ever were.”

“Christ. You think I don't know that?” Tristan reached out and flicked his finger stingingly against Casey's temple. “What's wrong is in there. You're letting this eat at you from the inside, just like I warned against. You looked in a mirror lately? Maggie may be a bitty thing, but your mom'll string me up from my toes if she sees you looking like this. And I don't even want to think what your dad will do to me. You're my nephew, for God's sake. Bad enough we've already lived through Ryan's and Ax's experiences with the agency. Now it's your turn?”

He propped his hands on his hips and continued. “I swear to God, I'm never letting Cole pull anyone else I care about into this bloody business, no matter how good you are at what you do. Clean up. Take a shower, for cryin' out loud. Close the file on this. Not just here—” he flipped his hand against Casey's pile of notebooks and files, then jabbed him in the forehead even harder “—but here. Or I
will
suspend you.” Then he headed out of the room.

Casey knew it wasn't an empty threat.

What would he do if he didn't have Hollins-Winword? If all he really did was keep the systems for the public face of Cee-Vid running merrily along?

There was nothing else in his life.

Yeah, he had his sisters. His parents, Daniel and Maggie. He had nieces and nephews and cousins and extended family galore.

But he couldn't make a child of his own.

He'd had to accept that failure a decade ago when the girl he'd loved tossed him out like yesterday's trash after learning he'd never be able to put the babies she wanted in her belly.

He'd been only twenty-one.

He was long over Caitlyn now. He even recognized the fact that he'd escaped what would have been a disastrous marriage.

But nothing else had changed.

He was still sterile.

He couldn't be the man—the husband—that Jane needed.

Which left him with only Hollins-Winword.

What would he do if he lost that, too?

* * *

“Vivian,” Hayley said to the diminutive white-haired woman, “these are my friends, Jane Cohen and Samantha Dawson.”

Hayley's grandmother beamed at them, placed her narrow hand in Jane's and shook it with surprising firmness. Then she did the same with Sam. “At least some people have been welcoming me to Wyoming.”

Hayley made a face as she grabbed two unused folding chairs from the table next to theirs and brought them to the other side of the crowded banquet table where Jane and Sam were already sitting with a few others from Colbys. “Daddy and Uncle David will come around,” she told Vivian. “Just have patience.”

Vivian's lined face creased even more as she sat in one of the chairs. Her eyes were such a dark brown they were nearly black, but they sparkled with wry humor. “I'm eighty-six years old, dear. I don't necessarily have the luxury of patience.”

It was the day after Halloween and Jane was meeting up with her girlfriends at the high school gym for the town's Harvest Festival. Half the space was given over to carnival games for children. The other half was taken up by displays of baked goods and potluck dishes.

Looking around her with unabashed curiosity, Vivian patted her stylishly coiffed hair with a hand heavily weighted by diamonds. “It's taken me much too long to come to Wyoming. It's a great deal more civilized than I pictured.”

“But a long way from Pittsburgh,” Jane commented.

Vivian's eyebrows lifted. “Have you been there?”

She shook her head. “Never been farther east than Chicago.”

“Well, it was home,” Vivian said. “It's where my sons were all born.” Her lips thinned a little as her gaze scanned the people milling around the gym. “Though they all defected to head west.”

“Vivian,” Hayley's voice was soft. But it held a gentle warning.

Jane and Hayley hadn't had a chance to privately discuss anything that had occurred in the past several days. But from Hayley's tone, Jane was guessing that her friend and her grandmother had had a few discussions of their own.

Vivian exhaled and twisted the enormous ring on her wedding finger. “I know.” Her gaze took in Jane and Sam once more. “So does this Harvest Festival have such a thing as cocktails?”

“Afraid you'll have to wait until later,” Jane said wryly. “Strictly a nonalcoholic event. But there's punch, iced tea and a pretty good lemonade. And the food—” She gestured at the lines queuing up around the offerings. “You can see nobody's sitting around on their thumbs waiting.”

“Hayley, dear, get me a lemonade,” Vivian said in what Jane hoped was an unconsciously superior tone, and her friend dutifully set off. “My granddaughter tells me you're a police officer, Samantha? And, Jane, you own a bar and grill?”

Sam nodded. She was never much of a conversationalist in social situations.

“Sam's the only female deputy sheriff we've got here in Weaver,” Jane added.

“Really.” Vivian gave Sam an approving look. “Good for you, dear. In my day women usually only worked until they found themselves a husband.” She pressed her palm to the front of her pink nubby silk jacket. “Or in my case, husbands.”

“Not all at the same time,” Hayley interjected on a laugh as she set a plastic cup filled with lemonade on the table in front of her grandmother and sat down.

Vivian laughed, too. “Good heavens, no. I
tried
to leave the scandals in the family to others, though my first husband, Hayley's grandfather, seemed to want to thwart my effort at every turn. Four,” she said abruptly. “Four husbands. One after the other.” Her gaze drifted a little. “I buried them all, sadly. Punishment for my misdeeds, I'm sure.” She refocused her attention on Jane and Sam. “Are you girls single, like Hayley? No husbands yet?”

Jane buried her nose in her iced tea, leaving Sam to answer. Since Casey had left town, the thought of husbands had become alarmingly unappealing.

“By the time I was your age,” Vivian reminisced, “I had three sons already in elementary school.”

Jane glanced at Hayley. She'd heard her friend speak of only her dad and one uncle.

“Thatcher was the oldest,” Hayley provided. “Then Uncle David.”

“Then Hayley's father, Carter, was the youngest.” Vivian looked sad. “Thatcher died in a skiing accident when he was a young man. I thought he was destined to be a musician. The finest. My own father was a violin maker and Thatcher's father played beautifully—that's how we met. But all Thatcher wanted was adventure.” Then with an obvious effort, her expression perked up, and she picked up her plastic cup, which looked rather incongruous in her heavily ringed fingers. “To family,” she said, determinedly cheerful. “Ones lost and ones rediscovered.”

“To family,” they all murmured, and touched their cups together.

Jane hoped her face didn't show just how hollow the words made her feel.

Aside from Julia off in Montana, Jane had no family.

Considering the state of things with the only man she seemed to want, she feared she never would.

“So—” Vivian set her cup down and closed her hand around Hayley's “—tell me about Weaver.” The older woman's gaze roved around. She was clearly not ashamed of being caught people-watching. “Who's who and all of that?”

Jane was guessing Vivian's suit was Chanel. That, along with her flashing jewels, made her stick out like a sore thumb among the sea of people dressed in blue jeans, flannel shirts and cowboy hats. But if she liked gossip, she'd fit right in.

“That's the sheriff over there,” Hayley was saying, nodding toward the tall dark-haired man studying the selection of pies being judged for the bake-off. “Max Scalise.”

“Handsome,” Vivian murmured. “Married?”

“Yes,” Hayley drawled, “and too young for Husband Number Five anyway.”

Vivian chuckled. “I'm done with marriage, dear,” she assured them. “The years I got to have with Arthur, my last husband,” she said, looking at Sam and Jane, “were more perfect than any woman deserved. Particularly me. He was a good, good man. I'm not on a quest to try and replicate what can't be replicated.” She gave Hayley a look. “I do, however, want to right some old wrongs, an effort your father and uncle seem determined to thwart.”

“Give them time.”

From the corner of her eye, Jane saw Casey's parents, Maggie and Daniel, enter the gym. She sat forward, propping her elbows on the table. As far as she knew, Casey was still out of town, but that didn't stop her nerves from ratcheting up several notches. “How long were you and Arthur married, Mrs. Templeton?” She thought it strange that the woman had had three husbands after Hayley's grandfather but still used her first husband's name.

“Ten years. Just ten years.” She let go of Hayley's hand and fiddled with her rings. “The punishment of a foolish old woman. I could have had a lot longer with him if not for my own pride.” She leaned closer. “Arthur was a retired history teacher,” she confided, as if it were something secretive. “Not a professor, mind you. He taught children. In
public school
.”

Sam stirred. “There are worse things.”

“Of course there are, dear.” Vivian sat back again. “But old habits died hard. He came from a different class. I used to think things like that mattered. But Arthur changed all that.”

Jane realized she was watching the door for Casey and looked away. “How did the two of you meet?”

“Gardening. Arthur had a prize collection of roses.”

“So does my grandmother,” Hayley added. “She has a rose garden you wouldn't believe back in Pittsburgh. She's been showing me photographs.”

“Sawyer—that's Hayley's grandfather—he planted the roses himself,” Vivian said. “They're still beautiful all these years later.” Her gaze drifted past Jane and Sam again. “He was always a nurturing soul,” she murmured. “Who's
that
?”

Jane glanced over her shoulder and her stomach dropped away as her gaze collided with Casey's.

She'd thought he'd looked terrible the week before, but he looked even worse now.