Smokescreen (8 page)

And one of the men was Scalpucci.

What the devil?

Sam trotted back to the bushes, counting on the nearby party to cover any sound she might make. Gretchen Scalpucci. She had to be at this house. Scalpucci’s little spy had found her and called in Scalpucci, and that’s why Sam and Jeth had made it here before everything was over. Preoccupied, her ears filled with the thump of excessive party bass and her mind’s eye with the bare glimpse of bullying men and frightened women, she crouched behind the cover and dropped her
unseen
guise.

And Jeth’s voice blurted, “Holy freakin’ crap!”

There he knelt, right at the edge of the bushes, blending into the dark shadows so he’d simply looked like part of the foliage itself.

Sam closed her eyes, ducked her head, pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead.
No, no, NO. Not now. Not ever.
“Ah,” she said, finding no words to suit the situation, “Holy freakin’
fuck.
”

The shadows lined his anger, sharpening the angles of his face and hiding his eyes. “I hope,” he said tightly,
“you can find a way to convince me I was seeing things just now. That you didn’t actually just…appear.”

“I didn’t.” Earnest words, a little desperate…because the truth was even harder. She dropped down to her knees in the cold grass, desperately hunting some way to handle this moment—to get past it and back to work. Saving women. Saving the underground.

He stared at her, aghast even in shadow. “My God.” If anything, the anger built. “Those photos…you can
change.
You can
disappear.
” Then he scrubbed his hands across his face, roughly enough to make Sam wince. Then again, her whole being was set to
wince
just this moment. “No. I didn’t say that. Holy Batman redux, I did
not
say that.”

“I can’t disappear, though,” she said. Helpfully, she thought.

His head swung up to pin her with that shadowed gaze. “No,” he said. “No more lies. That’s all you do, isn’t it? Lie? Who you are,
what
you are?”

Sam stiffened.
Self-righteous
— But she didn’t even give herself time to finish the thought. “I
wasn’t
lying,” she informed him, reaching deeply into the acerbic tone that worked so well to cover hurt she wouldn’t even admit to herself. “I
don’t
disappear. Any camera can tell you as much. People just can’t see me. It’s in their heads, not my body.”

“Camera,” he repeated. He looked at the digital in her hands. “It doesn’t work for cameras. Whatever the hell you do, it doesn’t work for them. And I saw your images. The
real
you. You’re the one who’s been chasing me off—”

“It didn’t work,” Sam said dryly.

“Everything about you…is
any
of it true?”

She couldn’t keep the snap out of her voice. “Everything that matters.”

“And you really think you’re some sort of hero, using the ultimate lie to lead these women off into a life of their own deception? Don’t you think that’s the blind leading the blind?”

“I can see perfectly fine.” Sam glared at him, no longer sunk in the horror of being discovered, no longer thinking of the shivery feeling he’d sometimes given her. “I see a damned lot better than you. These women need help—that’s what this is about. Not about me. Not about you.”

He snorted. “Get real. If you ditched this charade and called the cops on Scalpucci
right now,
his wife would be safe.”

She snorted back, and then aimed below the belt. “Like your sister was
safe.
”

He flinched. Hard. “She could have come to me. She
should
have come to me.”

The night music filled the air around them, thumping its way through the conversation, filling in the gaps with angry noise. She took a breath. “Look, Jeth, I admire your faith in the system—”

He scoffed. “Naiveté, don’t you mean?”

Sam peered behind her, checking the driveway and the van and finding the house just as it had been. No telling what was happening on the inside. She reached past all her hurt and defensiveness, trying to see him just as clearly as he wanted to see her. “Maybe some of that,” she admitted, hunting honesty of a sort she didn’t often need to tap. “But I’m not sure it’s bad to look at life that way. It gives the rest of us something to aim for.”

Silence. Even the music, for that instant, was silent.
His voice was low and crystal clear against that backdrop, his face still hidden by shadows. “That’s not…I wasn’t expecting you to say that.”

“Look,” Sam told him, sitting back on her heels when she realized she’d somehow ended up leaning toward him, almost off balance in her need to convince him—to
reach
him. “I do what I need to. I do the things no one else can do, in a way no one else can do them. But I’m not the one who makes this underground either possible or necessary. And I did my best to keep you out of it.”

“You were trying to protect the underground.” His voice had grown subdued, almost hidden in the renewed music.

She inched closer on her knees, checking the house again, feeling the pressure from all sides. “That’s why I’m here. To protect them.” She was losing time she couldn’t afford…she should just walk away from Jeth and do what needed to be done.

But she needed him. She needed his help, and she needed the understanding of the one person who’d finally been so damned bulldoggedly persistent that he’d found her deeply hidden truths. “That’s why I’m here,” she repeated, and this close she could see his face, see the furl of his brow as he struggled to deal with what he’d witnessed and what she was. “But I never lied to you about what this night would bring for you.”

After a long moment, he nodded. “No,” he said. “You never did.”

She inched closer yet. No more time to waste. He had to
listen.
“I can’t talk about this. I’ve got to go back there.” She handed him the camera, the images queued up on the LCD display on the back. “Scalpucci is here. Not just his errand boys, but Scalpucci himself. I can’t think of anything that would bring him out in the open
like this—except for his wife. That would explain their delay in reaching this place—they had to pick up Scalpucci. And Gretchen’s got to be here, too.”

He looked up at her with the grimmest of expressions, his mouth thinned to a line in the shadow of his mustache and his eyes gone from a struggling frown to a new type of anguish. “She’s not the only one.” He turned the camera so she could see. “The woman in the middle…that’s my sister.”

Sam’s mouth dropped open. “No,” she said, unthinking words straight from her stunned brain to her mouth. “She can’t still be here. It’s been
days.
Unless—” No, she wasn’t going to say that out loud. She wasn’t.

Except he looked at her, and she knew that now of all times, the only thing keeping the thin twist of connection between them was the truth. So she took a deep breath and said, low enough so maybe he just wouldn’t hear it after all, “Unless she had to recover before she could travel.”

He heard her. His face tightened down and his breath came short and sharp and only after all that was he finally able to mutter, “Son of a
bitch.
” And then he looked up at her and said, “But you can help her. You can help them all. You can use your…your what, your superhero powers?—and get them out of there.”

She laughed, more than a little bitter. “There’s no superhero here. Just one very normal person with a few tricks up her sleeve.” A million different ways to be someone other than who she really was, at least as far as anyone could perceive. Just…not really. Not ever really.

“Then use those tricks,” he said, suddenly and unexpectedly fierce. “Everything I said…I was wrong. About all of it. Just use
them.
”

She nodded. Slowly. “I will,” she said. “But not because I think you believe what you just said. I don’t. But…it’s
what I do.
”

“Because you can.”

“Yes. Because I can.”

And he nodded, as much to himself as to her. “I’ll help. Whatever that takes. But first—”

She knew what was coming. What he needed to trust her. She lifted her chin, looking straight into his shadowed eyes. For a moment they hesitated, knee-to-knee, behind the bushes with the night air pounding around them and action looming close. The sparse streetlight fell on his eyes—not enough to see color, but enough to reveal expression.
Impatience. Expectation.

She took a deep breath and let her guise fall away. Not just like that, but only after a long moment of struggle—a moment in which she thought she might not be able to do it at all. To reveal herself—her
real
self—for the first time since childhood.

She might as well be naked.

She wanted to run. But she forced herself to stay right where she was, sitting on her heels on the cold ground, Jeth so close—closer than she’d thought somehow. Her heart beat the quick, flighty rhythm of a cornered wild thing and she wondered just how much of her feelings showed on her face.

Her real face.

“Ah,” Jeth said, and his hand came up to brush her cheek with the back of his knuckles. “There you are.” His hand wasn’t entirely steady as a fingertip followed the bridge of her nose and over one eyebrow. Sam leaned into his touch without thinking, and then blinked when she realized it.

“Here I am,” she said. Shaky. Naked and vulnerable and real. Looking back at the first man who’d ever seen through her, and finding him still riveted to her.
Don’t think about it. Don’t try to plan it. Just find the moment.

Now.
This
moment. This instant of clarity before the world rushed in and Sam I Am leaped into action and then Jeth walked away with his sister.

She took his whiskery nighttime face in her own hands and drew him close. He accepted the invitation without hesitation, kissing her with an assurance that was just as honest as the rest of him. More than just a simple kiss, no matter how sweet and thrilling.

Affirmation.

He pulled back slightly, his hands tightening at her waist for a final, deeper kiss. When he broke away it was to look her in the eye. “Just so you know.”

Sam shook her head, dazed and trying to pull herself back to the moment.
Hiding in the yard, Scalpucci’s men inside the house, women in danger, Sam on her own
—

No, not so much on her own.

She took a deep breath. “Look, I’ve got to…I can’t go in there like this. I’ve got to—”

“Hide,” he said, a familiar note of dryness in his voice—except this time she could hear the affection that went with it.

“Yes,” she agreed. “I’ve got to hide.”

There she was. The Sam he’d been looking for and she was about to go away.

Jethro wanted to go bang his head on the smooth bark of the nearby maple tree, or to fling himself back on the cold ground with an arm over his face, long enough to absorb the events of this strangest day of his life. Until
he could truly believe what he’d seen in these last few moments—and what he’d felt. Manly reactions all.

He found he still had his hands on Sam’s hips, those glorious curvy hips that seemed so unlikely on a woman so slender. He tightened his hold, knowing that Sam—
this
Sam—was about to go away. That her strong chin and wide jaw and fierce eyebrows would blend into the less noticeable public-faced Sam, leaving him only her sunlight-honey eyes.

So he took one last look, baffled by this sudden surge of feeling for a woman who not only deceived others freely—had deceived
him
—but who lived her whole life this way. Somehow. Fooling people but not cameras…she turned herself into a product of her own mind, and made others believe it.

Holy freakin’ superhero.

And that was the whole point, wasn’t it? Hadn’t he always wanted to believe in a superhero who could and would stand up for the way things should be? And here she was. She just happened to get the job done with a frighteningly effective mask of lies.

But she was
doing
it. She was helping women like his sister…doing what Jethro himself hadn’t been able to get done.

“Okay,” he said, drinking in one long, last look at her. Shaggy hair in need of a cut, copper undertones visible even in this light. A smattering of freckles to go with it. He held her gaze, and he nodded. And when he let his focus widen, she was back to what she’d been. Attractive but less remarkable. More conventional and less noticeable. Even the feel of her changed, the angle between waist and hip easing. She’d put on her disguise, and accomplished it so thoroughly that his mind believed it down to every sense.

She’d hidden her vulnerability just as neatly. When she looked at him her face was tough and her expression impenetrable…all business. “I think I can get in the back,” she told him. “They won’t see me, that’s for sure. But it could get noisy. I need some cover.”

And Jethro, never having called on himself to be devious, said blankly, “How?”

She grinned. “It’s not so hard. Come knocking at the door as a neighbor because you’ve seen their lights on, assume they’ve been kept up by the party, and rant and rave about young kids these days and how the police have been called.”

“Hey,” he said, uncertain. “I don’t think I’m old enough to rant and rave.”

She saw his doubt, grew sharp at the sight. “Still too noble to lie?”

“No!” Well, maybe. “I mean…I just don’t think I
can.
”

“Jeth,” she said, a little too patiently, “we’re running out of time. We might be too late already. We don’t know what’s going on in there. I can do this, but everyone in that house will be safer if I have your help.”

And she was right, too. “The van,” he blurted. “Maybe it’s got an alarm. I can set it off. Or if it doesn’t have an alarm, it must have a horn. Even if they don’t come out to check, it should give you cover.”

“Why, Jeth,” Sam said, and batted her eyelashes at him in the darkness. “How sly you can be when you put your mind to it.” And then, more seriously, “At least one of them will probably come out to check. Don’t hang around.” She dug into her pocket and pulled out a tiny gun, an automatic in a tailored holster; she held it out to him.