Hide and Seek (3 page)

So much had happened during that time—and before—when the three of them had been recruited into Phoenix because of their unusual, shared ability.

Shit, in light of everything that had gone down in the time since, the odds were good that Duarte would never see either of his best friends again.

Worse than that, after the program they’d served had been betrayed, Duarte wasn’t certain he could trust any of his former teammates, including the two who had been like brothers to him.

And there was the distinct possibility that Kyle Becker was already dead. If that was true, and if Kyle had tried to warn his sister away from the danger following him, then she was likely in too deep already.

“Did you tell anyone about this text?”

She shook her head. “No. After I received it, I only took time enough to throw a few things in my bag, then I got in my car and left. I kept driving until I got here. I didn’t know if I should try to contact someone at the Pentagon, or go to the police, or—”

“No. Fuck, no.” His clipped response stopped her short. “You did the smartest thing, Lisa. For yourself and for Kyle.”

Duarte could see the tension in her face. It had deepened since they began talking. He was scaring her even more, something he didn’t mean to do.

He reached out and stroked his hand over her slender shoulder and arm. “We’ll sort it out, all right? Everything’s going to be fine.”

She didn’t look like she totally believed him, but she nodded.

This sure as hell wasn’t the way he’d envisioned his night playing out, but there was no going back. Like it or not, he couldn’t turn her away. Her brother had made him promise more than once to look after Lisa if Kyle wasn’t around to do it. While Duarte hadn’t really expected to be tested on that vow, he wasn’t about to back down from it—least of all when Lisa had crossed three states to reach him and was now standing in front of him, wet and trembling, desperation swimming in her eyes.

Her fear made him want to offer comfort, but that would be an even bigger mistake than before. If the timing had been bad that one night they’d shared, it was beyond bad now.

God knew it wouldn’t take much to light that fire all over again. Duarte noticed belatedly that he was still touching her, still caressing her arm and shoulder long after he should have let his hand fall away.

He pulled back, an abrupt move that didn’t escape her notice. He scowled. “Are you hungry?”

“Um... I don’t know. I guess so.” She blinked as if it took her a moment to process his question. “I haven’t eaten anything since lunch at the office.”

Duarte nodded as he stepped away from her. “I don’t have much. Some venison stew I took out of the freezer earlier, and a couple bottles of beer.”

“Sounds good,” she murmured. “Anything sounds good.”

He stared at her, his fingers still tingling from touching her. Other parts of him weren’t faring much better. He needed time to think. And she needed to get out of her wet clothes.

“The bathroom’s right there,” he said, pointing down the short hallway. “Go take a hot shower and warm up. If you don’t have any dry clothes in your pack, I can give you something to wear.”

“Okay.” She swallowed, then grabbed her backpack and the pair of towels.

Duarte didn’t move. He didn’t dare, not until he knew she was well out of reach.

She started to walk away from him, then paused. “John?”

“Yeah.”

“Thank you.”

He grunted. “Go warm up. The food will be ready when you get out.”

4

The shower had been just what her freezing limbs and frazzled nerves had needed.

It also helped melt away some of the awkward awareness that had begun to swirl within her under John’s lingering touch in the other room. He hadn’t meant anything by his tender caress, she was sure. His abrupt retraction of his hand and deepening scowl had been indication enough of that.

She’d been a sodden, nervous wreck and he was only doing what came natural to a man who made his living protecting others.

Lisa hated that she might need anyone’s protection, especially his. But whatever was going on with Kyle wasn’t something she was equipped to handle alone. And John’s reassurance that they would figure it all out was a life line she clung to even now.

After towel-drying her hair and dressing in the navy blue T-shirt and faded jeans from her backpack, Lisa stole a quick look at herself in the mirror and cringed. She might feel better after the shower, but her pale face and dark-shadowed eyes told a different story.

God, she looked ten years older than she actually was. The urge to dig her makeup bag out of her backpack was strong, though she doubted any amount of concealer or blush would fix the stressed-out, wan reflection staring back at her. And anyway, it wasn’t as if she didn’t have bigger concerns to deal with.

If it had been anyone else waiting in the other room, she wouldn’t have cared at all what she looked like. But the fact that it was John Duarte made her wish she could hide in the bathroom for the rest of the night.

She walked out and was immediately rewarded with the mouthwatering smells from the kitchen. To say nothing of the sight of John standing at the stove in dark denim and a worn lumberjack flannel shirt, stirring the pot of venison stew with one hand, his other wrapped loosely around a long-neck bottle of beer.

His big, six-foot-three frame swallowed up the space in the small cabin, and when he turned to look at her as she approached, his penetrating brown gaze seemed to suck all the air from the room, too.

“Better now?” His deep voice, with its smooth Southern drawl, drew her forward like a beacon of warmth. At her nod, he stretched for the handle on the fridge on the other side of him and took out a bottle of Coors for her. “Sit down and have a drink while I serve up the grub.”

Grub? Hardly. The venison stew smelled amazing. The spicy aroma invaded her senses and made her stomach growl in anticipation. She had no idea he knew how to cook. Then again, aside from John being her brother’s best friend and her most incredible one-night stand, there was a lot she probably didn’t know about him.

Even then, her knowledge was five years old and then some. This John Duarte seemed different in many ways. More emotionally isolated than before. Even more of a lone wolf, if that was possible.

Lisa took a sip from her bottle, but found the prospect of being waited on by him too much to bear. Instead of taking a seat at the table, she walked her beer over and set it down, then went back to help him serve the stew. “Let me take those,” she said as he pulled two earthenware bowls from a cabinet. “Silverware?”

“In that drawer on the left.” He gestured with his dark-bearded chin while he took the pot off the flame then grabbed a ladle from a utensil jar next to the range.

Lisa collected a couple of spoons and followed him. She watched as he scooped two generous servings into the bowls she’d placed on the table. His big hands were strong, steady. His long fingers were nicked here and there, callused from physical work. And yet, she couldn’t keep from remembering how tender they could be. How delicately he’d touched her bare skin that other night that she’d been in this cabin.

“Sit,” he said, glancing up at her and finding her staring. “Eat.”

At his grunted command, she dropped into the chair across from him and together they fell into a strange, oddly comfortable silence as they ate their stew and nursed their beers. Lisa took the opportunity to glance around the cabin, taking in the basic, masculine furnishings and decided lack of personal effects. No feminine touches anywhere either, something she’d also taken note of while she was in his shower.

John still lived alone on his mountain. For how long and why, she could only guess.

“Sorry I don’t have anything better to offer you to eat,” he murmured as she spooned up the last drop from her bowl. “I don’t make it down to town very often, and I live pretty rustic up here.”

“Are you kidding? This was delicious. Thank you.” And she’d been so hungry, there was no chance to feign a dainty appetite now. She tipped her longneck up to her mouth, then smirked as she swallowed the bland sip. “Your cooking is impressive, but your taste in beer has definitely degraded.”

There had been a time when she’d called her brother and his Marine buddies beer snobs. Nothing but small batch ales and browns, and obscure microbrews for the three musketeers when they were home on leave. Lisa had been the one who’d enjoyed her watery ultra-lights with their gleaming foil labels, and she’d caught plenty of flak from the guys because of it.

The corner of John’s mouth kicked up at her jab. “Not a lot of selection out here in the sticks. Besides, I like to keep things simple now. I keep my life uncomplicated.”

“Is that why there’s no Mrs. up here on the mountain with you?” His expression stilled at her blurt. “I’m sorry. That was rude, and it’s none of my business. You don’t have to answer—”

“There’s no Mrs.,” he said evenly. “And yeah, that’s by choice. Relationships are nothing but complicated. Wouldn’t you agree?”

He was right about that. Lisa nodded, all her past mistakes playing through her thoughts. And at the head of that parade was the mistake she made five years ago in this very cabin. It had been a mistake, but not one she’d ever been able to regret.

John’s gaze settled on her as she took a sudden interest in the loose edge of the label on her Coors. “What about you, Lisa?”

“Me?” She glanced up and collided with his intense stare. “What about me?”

“I heard you got married a few years back.”

“Four years ago.” It felt like a hundred had passed since then. Especially tonight, in this moment, discussing it with John Duarte over dinner in his cabin while her brother’s life might be hanging in the balance.

John grunted, the sensual line of his mouth pressed flat for a brief second. “Kyle mentioned it to me around that time. Some kind of doctor up there in Cincinnati?”

“Pediatric heart surgeon.” Lisa went back to picking at her bottle’s label. “Parker and I met when I organized a charity event for the hospital. We got married six weeks later at his parents’ estate.”

“Sounds fancy.” And John sounded thoroughly unimpressed.

“Yeah, it was. The divorce two months later was fancy, too. Lots of lawyers and engraved letterhead to sign. Lots of fancy legal agreements to ensure I didn’t profit off our brief farce of a marriage.”

“What happened?”

“He cheated on me.”

John bit off a low curse, his dark brow furrowing. “Idiot.”

Lisa shook her head. “In hindsight, I probably should’ve seen it coming. We were too different. From different worlds. I never should’ve married him.”

John studied her now. “So, why did you?”

“Good question. I was asking myself that very thing a month after walking down the aisle. That’s when my newlywed husband came home from a five-day seminar in Boston with another woman’s panties in his pocket. I guess he forgot to check his suits before he left them for me to send out to the dry cleaner. He didn’t even try to deny what he’d done. Maybe infidelity was acceptable in his world, but it sure as hell wasn’t in mine.”

Why had she married him? All she’d ever really wanted was to belong somewhere, to belong to someone. She wanted to feel she mattered, and that her life counted for something.

That was why she’d gotten involved in charity work. The need to feel that she was contributing to something important, while giving others less fortunate some of the care and benefits they needed.

She was still searching for that sense of purpose. That sense of belonging. Maybe she always would be.

Lisa lifted her shoulder in a shrug and went back to peeling the label off her beer. “I suppose if anyone was an idiot in my brief marriage, it was me. Like a fool, I bought into the whole knight-in-shining-armor, white-picket-fence, country-club illusion that I thought a man like Parker represented. None of it was real. You’d think I’d know not to believe in that kind of fairy tale, given how Kyle and I grew up, bouncing from one foster home to another as kids.”

John grunted as he set down his freshly drained bottle. “Doesn’t mean you don’t deserve the picket fence and the whole nine yards. Doesn’t mean you don’t deserve all that and more.”

He was trying to make her feel better, and his soft-spoken sympathy rubbed her like sandpaper. The last thing she meant to do was sit there whining about her pathetic childhood and equally messed up adult life, even though he already knew the basics, and from what she understood from her brother, John’s early life hadn’t been a bed of roses either.

She stripped off the last piece of curling foil label and crushed it into a tiny ball. “Well, I’ve given up looking for the fairy tale. Apparently, when it comes to men, I’m the queen of bad life choices, because the guys I date always turn out to be losers.”

As soon as the words left her mouth, she winced. Glancing up, she met John’s unflinching stare. “Don’t think I mean you...What I mean is, you and I never dated, so...”

One of his dark brows rose. “Technically, it
was
a date.”

“Okay, true,” she hedged. “But I’m not sure it counts, since you only did it as a favor to Kyle.”

John grunted. “Some favor. He’d have my balls—and rightly so—if he ever found out I let things get so far out of hand that night.”

He
had let things get out of hand? If that’s how he preferred to remember it, fine by her. What Lisa recalled was a far more even-handed slip from platonic stand-in wedding date to off-the-charts one-night stand.

The details of their time together five years ago swarmed her uninvited now. John showing up unexpectedly at her apartment a couple hours away from the base in his Marine dress blues, announcing he was there to pick her up after learning that her date had gotten sick the day before and cancelled. Handsome, heart-stopping John, with his regulation-trimmed dark hair, his face tanned from time on deployment in the desert, his strong, squared jaw clean-shaven, even near the tail end of his two-week liberty back home in the States.