Matt—The Callahan Brothers (Brazos Bend Book 2) (6 page)

Joyriding in a stolen car hadn’t seemed all that big of a deal at the time to a sixteen-year-old Torie. Truth be told, she’d committed a few worse crimes without being caught. Yet, it was that fateful theft that brought about her first separation from Helen and enrollment in the reform school that gave direction to her life.

At seventeen, Torie found photography. The rest was history—as printed in
Star
,
National Enquirer, People
, and dozens of other tabloids and gossip magazines.

Now history was repeating itself, so to speak, in that a man frighteningly similar to her father was offering Helen his respect while dissing her.
That
, Torie thought,
chapped her butt
.

“Why do you care, anyway?” she demanded after a long stretch of silence between them.

He shot her a “You’re crazy” look. “I guess because after all we went through today, I’d just as soon not get shot down for trying to land at a U.S. military facility without clearance.”

Oh. That must have been what all the radio talk was about. She hadn’t been paying attention while she was brooding. “Not that. My job. What possible difference does it make to you what I do for a living? Our worlds are a million miles apart.”

“Not always,” he grumbled.

Torie pounced on that like paparazzi on a scandal. “What do you mean? What happened? Have you and I met before?”

His jaw went hard and his gaze glittered with hostility. At first, Torie didn’t think he’d answer, but finally, he said, “No. It wasn’t you. It was one of your cohorts.”

She leaned away, studied him. He had a white-knuckle grip on the wheel. Ooh. This looked serious. Trepidation swelled inside her as she asked, “Did a photographer interrupt a mission? Maybe compromise an asset? Blow somebody’s cover?”

“Read a lot of spy thrillers, do you?”

“What happened, Callahan? I have a right to know.”

He snorted.

“I do. You asked me on a date if we survived and we survived.” The alarm in his gaze caused her stomach to take a bitter roll as she pressed on. “Now it’s obvious that date will never happen despite the fact the heat between us all but melted rock. You owe me an explanation, Callahan.”

“I saved your life. I don’t owe you squat.”

She lifted her chin. “You’ll damage my self-esteem if you walk away and leave me in the dark. I’m fragile.”

He snorted. “Fragile as granite. What you are, Victoria, is a piece of work.”

She folded her arms and stared at him. “What happened, Matt? Did paparazzi cause you grief sometime?”

“Grief? Hell. A camera-toting stalker sued me for attempted murder and damned near cost me my career. That’s not causing me grief. That’s assault.”

She put the clues together. “You beat up a photographer?”

“The sonofabitch intruded on a private moment between me and a lady and bared my ass to the world. He’s damned lucky he’s still breathing!”

Suspicion niggled at her brain. “Who was the lady?”

“It doesn’t matter. That’s all the explanation you’re going to get. Now be quiet. I need to concentrate. We’ll be landing in just a few minutes.”

Torie shut her mouth, but her mind kept running. She ran through the list of altercations she could recall between photographers and their subjects in the past few years. She had lots to choose from until she narrowed them down to a photographer, an American man who wasn’t on the paparazzi’s radar, and a female celebrity. Of those, she could recall only four.

And only one that involved a man’s naked butt.

The image was one she easily recalled. It’d been splashed all over the European tabloids two, maybe three years ago. It’d been a beach shot taken with a zoom lens. He’d lain atop the woman, nude, his body blocking everything but her face. The Italian movie star’s face was easily recognizable in the photograph, as was the ecstasy in her expression.

Three months after the photos were published, the photographer who’d taken them was dumped at the emergency room door of a Paris hospital with both index fingers broken. He blamed the actress’s lover, whose identity remained a mystery.

Torie had drooled over that picture for ... well ... ever since. It’s a wonder she hadn’t recognized his rear in the cenote. “You dated Sophia Martinelli?”

His hands jerked. The helicopter dipped. “How the hell—?” He broke off abruptly, set his jaw, and said through clenched teeth, “Not another word.”

She complied because the landing field was in sight and radio traffic between Callahan and the base intensified. As the giggles—of relief, amusement, she wasn’t sure which—rose within her, she tried to hold them back. She did.

But when the helicopter landed and he reached up to flip off switches, she could contain it no longer. Laughter burst from her mouth like water from a fountain jet.

Matt Callahan glared at her. She attempted to swallow her mirth. “I’m sorry. I just ... that picture ... I know it. It’s karma. I think today was meant to happen.”

“Get hold of yourself, Ms. Bradshaw.”

“It’s the sexiest piece of photography since the beach scene in
From Here to Eternity
. Helen bought a print and had it blown up into a poster for my birthday gift. I have it hanging in my workroom. Right next to the
Man with the Golden Gun
poster. You know the one. The one where Bond holds his gun like this?”

She lifted the gun from the console and held it up beside her face like in the movie advertisement. “It’s Double-Oh-Seven and Double-Oh-Yeah right beside each other on my wall. Karma, I tell you. Kismet.”

He let out a growl and reached for the gun at the same time Torie went to set it down.

She wasn’t certain how it happened. Bad luck. Bad karma. Truly awful kismet.

The gun fired. Blood splattered. Torie’s heart all but stopped.

Matt Callahan, savior and spy, stared down at the wound on his leg, his mouth gaping in shock. “Holy crap, you shot me!”

They were the last words he spoke to her before the medics arrived and carted him off.

***

Six months later, Torie returned to her California studio after an extended trip following the latest Hollywood couple on a do-gooders’ trip through India. She unlocked her front door, stepped inside, and immediately knew something was wrong. Someone had been in her studio. Within seconds, she discovered that she’d been robbed.

The thief left behind all of her valuable cameras and equipment. All that was missing was a poster from her wall.

Chapter Four

Eighteen months later

Ivars Ćurković
was dead. One week ago today, the effing sonofabitch died in his effing sleep in a five-effing-star hotel in effing Paris.

Matt had learned the news two days ago upon returning to Langley following a weeklong trip to Pakistan on a mission he almost couldn’t complete because his effing leg gave out halfway up an effing mountain.

People liked to say that life wasn’t fair, but that simply didn’t go far enough. Sometimes, life was a Chuck Norris kick in the balls.

Hearing that John’s killer had died such an easy death—one that Matt had absolutely no part in making happen—had been just that kick. Ever since the agency had pinned his brother’s death on Ćurković, he’d lived to take revenge on the warlord. He spent at least part of every day trying to track the bastard down. He’d made more trips into the rugged mountains of Eastern Europe and the hellholes of the subcontinent looking for his enemy than he could bear to remember. Most of the time, his efforts had proved fruitless, but on a handful of occasions, the trail had turned warm. Once he’d come within half an hour of catching the slippery killer. Still, he’d stayed hot on his trail with high expectations of finally running him to ground until he’d
 
done a father a favor and run afoul of That Damned Woman. He never came close to Ćurković
after that. Now he’d run out of chances.

Ivars Ćurković
was dead.

And Matt’s opportunity to assuage his guilt for his own part in his brother’s death had died with him.

So what did he do now? What purpose did he have in life? How was he going to live with himself from here on out?

They were questions he desperately needed answers for, and he’d come home hoping to find them. As he spied the carved wood sign that marked the turnoff to his land, his mouth lifted in a weary smile. Everything else in his life might have gone to hell, but at least this was good. He had a place to come to now. For the first time in a very long time, he had a home, a place where someone he cared about waited for him.

Even if that someone was a crusty old barnacle, a former sailor with a porcupine attitude and a priceless nose.

Matt slowed his F150 pickup and took a right onto the gravel road, seeking the peace that descended upon him whenever he made this particular turn. Sure enough, his muscles relaxed, and the invisible band around his chest loosened. This was one of the few places in the world where he could let down his guard. He appreciated that. A man would be a fool to do otherwise.

Rolling down the driver’s-side window, he breathed deeply of the fresh country air. He smelled wild onions and home, and a smile flirted with his lips.

It was springtime in Texas, and this northwest section of the Hill Country was alive with color. Green grass proved that the March showers had indeed arrived as needed. Yellow dandelions, purple asters, and pink prairie phlox dotted the rocky landscape and hugged the thick ankles of the grazing cattle on Scooter Harwell’s Rocking H ranch on the left side of the road. Matt’s land stretched off to the right.

Rolling, rocky hills protected the prettiest valley in Texas. The creek winding through his land had been named Black Eagle Creek by local Indians and fed into the Brazos River a short distance below the dam that formed Possum Kingdom Lake. Matt owned twenty-five hundred acres, but he leased the majority of it to area ranchers. His interest and that of his partner, Les Warfield, lay in the hundred acres he drove toward now—Four Brothers Vineyard and Winery.

He spied the trellises on the hillside first. When he’d left the vineyard back in January, the grapevines had been barren wood. Now he saw sprigs of color against the gray vines.

“April,” he murmured, thinking back to Les’s viticulture lessons. They’d had bud break in March and April. Buds would mature in June, and harvest in this part of Texas happened in August.

Matt didn’t know if he’d be here for harvest this year or not. Basically, that’s what he’d come home to figure out. Since he’d spent the last decade making life-and-death decisions in an instant, surely he could get a handle on his current problem in three friggin’ weeks. He just needed some downtime to gather his thoughts and make up his mind.

Knowing he’d find Les in the lab at this time of day, Matt drove past the old ranch house where Les had taken up residence to the new building. There, he switched off the engine and climbed down from the truck’s cab, pausing to stretch the stiff muscles of his left leg before shutting the door behind him. For a long moment, Matt stood beside his truck, taking stock of the scene around him. Above, puffy white clouds drifted in a brilliant blue sky. Yellow sheets drying on the clothesline behind the house flapped in the gentle breeze. Les’s tuxedo cat, Queenie, strolled nimbly along the wooden fence rail that stretched between the house and the Four Brothers tasting room, currently open only on weekends. If he looked just right, he could see the chimney of the lake house a half mile away where he stayed when he came to Texas. This was a good place, he thought. A dream of a place.

But in all honesty, it was Les’s dream, not his.

Twenty years Matt’s senior, the old sailor had taken Matt under his wing on his first tour of duty and the two men had bonded. In subsequent years in ports of call all over the world, they’d solidified their friendship over a common interest in fine wine. When Les retired five years ago, he’d approached Matt with the idea of founding a vineyard, and they’d formed a partnership utilizing Les’s talent and Matt’s treasure.

Matt had wavered about what he wanted from this hunk of land ever since he’d bought it. Originally, he’d purchased the Double R ranch as a way to stick it to his father. The owner of the Double R, Randolph Rawlings, had been Branch Callahan’s bitter rival, and Branch had coveted the ranch land for years. Rawlings sold his property to Matt with the proviso that Branch never set foot on it. Of course, now that Rawlings was cooling his heels in prison on a variety of charges, including the attempted murder of Matt’s sister-in-law, Maddie, Matt felt no need to honor that agreement.

Nevertheless, Matt wasn’t ready to let bygones be bygones and invite Branch to Four Brothers. His loyalty to Les was the most convenient reason for that decision. Les and Branch got along about as well as a couple of tomcats living in the same barn, and because of that, Matt didn’t need to analyze his own confused emotions where his father was concerned. He wouldn’t run across Branch Callahan at Four Brothers Vineyard and Winery. He could spend his mental energy on other concerns—like whether or not he wanted to leave his job and make this place his full-time home.

Sometimes he thought that was exactly what he wanted. Other times the notion made him feel trapped. Matt not only had to figure out what he’d do next in life; he had to figure out where he wanted to do it.