Run To You (6 page)

He stared at her with cool gray eyes that knew better. “Friends?”

She could probably shake loose a friend or two who might want to get out of town for a few. The Texas panhandle wasn’t exactly a vacation destination, but it wasn’t an armpit. Of course, she’d never been in the panhandle and couldn’t say for sure. “No.” She looked into her glass and swirled her wine. But she
did
know one thing for sure, she’d never said she wanted to go to Lovett, Texas. Never said she wanted a long-lost sister reunion.

“Where in Texas are you planning to visit?” Naomi asked.

It was a normal question. One that anyone would naturally ask. “My father’s cattle ranch just outside of Lovett.” She looked up and frowned at the man half covered in shadow and eating his salmon and ceviche like it was his favorite meal. As if he hadn’t just been complaining about it. “At least I assume that’s where Sadie is living in Texas.”

He nodded his head as he ate but he didn’t look up.

For the first eighteen years of her life, men had tried to control her, never really caring what she wanted or how she felt. “What if I say no?”

He lifted his gaze, and his gray eyes locked with hers as he chewed. “Do you want to go back to your apartment?”

That wasn’t an option and he knew it.

“I’m sure Beau would never force you to go somewhere you didn’t want to go. Isn’t that right?”

“Right,” he answered, but he didn’t bother to sound very convincing. He looked down at his plate and stabbed an avocado.

Naomi raised a slim hand, and her fingers played with the collar of her yellow blouse. “I’ve never heard of Lovett.”

“It’s a little town in the panhandle about fifty miles north of Amarillo.” Stella took a big bite of shrimp salad and washed it down with a bigger swallow of wine.

“I was born and raised in a town no bigger than a speck on a map. Growing up, I hated it.” Naomi rose and returned with the bottle of wine. “Now looking back, some of my fondest memories are of Mama and Daddy dancing at the Grange and us kids packed up tight in the back of Daddy’s truck.” She poured out and added, “I love everything big cities have to offer, but small towns are a great place to grow up. Don’t you think?”

Naomi assumed Stella had lived in Lovett. That was a normal assumption, she supposed. “I was born and raised in Las Cruces, New Mexico. I’ve never been near Lovett.” She picked up her glass. She’d eaten very little that day and could feel the beginning of a nice warm glow. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” Naomi set the bottle on the table and looked from Stella to Beau, then back again. “Never?”

Stella didn’t usually talk about her personal life with people she didn’t know. Some of it was embarrassing, but no doubt Beau had plugged her name into some super-secret spy software that he’d bought along with his flashbang, and he already knew everything about her. The good, the bad, and the ugly. He’d probably seen her third grade report card and the balance on her Victoria’s Secret credit card. Beau would know if she was omitting, fudging, or outright lying. “Well, technically, I suppose I have been on the ranch,” she said as Naomi took her seat. “I was conceived there.” She reached for her glass and smiled. “Obviously, I was too young to remember the event. Thank God.” No one laughed at her little joke, but she thought she was pretty dang funny. She took a drink and looked over the rim into Naomi’s calm gaze. Curiosity lined her brow as she patiently waited for Stella to continue. “Sadie’s mama died when she was five, and my mother was her nanny.” Stella set the glass back on the table and decided just to share the short version. “To make a short story even shorter, my mother grew up really poor,” she said, repeating what she’d heard too many times to count. “From the time she was able, she worked at the Super 8 and El Sombrero. The only way out of her family’s house was to marry one of the neighborhood boys and have five children in as many years.” She gathered her hair at the back of her neck and pulled it over one shoulder. “She wanted something different and answered an ad placed by a nanny agency. Her first placement was on the JH Ranch, in the Texas panhandle.” She thought of the old photograph of her mother that Abuela had taken the day she’d left for Texas. In the faded photo she’d looked so young and pretty, and excitement sparkled in her eyes. “She worked at the ranch for three months when she discovered she was pregnant.” She still couldn’t picture her young mother and grouchy Clive Hollowell knocking boots. “When she told my father, he sent her back to New Mexico and paid her to stay there.”

Naomi sucked in a breath. “Your mother must have been devastated.”

“As my grandmother says,
Fue por lana y salio trasquilado
. She went looking for wool and came back shorn.” Good Lord. The wine was doing more than casting a warm glow if she was really quoting her grandmother. Abuela had a million sayings and wasn’t afraid to use them. A million annoying myths and legends and rules that she wasn’t afraid to share.

“Sometimes I don’t understand men.” Naomi was clearly appalled. “How could a father do something like that?”

Stella didn’t know which was worse. That her father had slept with the help, or that her mother had slept with her boss. That her father had slept with a girl thirty-five years younger than he, or that her mother had taken one look at Senor Hollowell and had seen a big house and lots of money. “I didn’t really know him. I only saw him about five times in my life.” While her mother had gone looking for wool, she hadn’t exactly been shorn. She didn’t get the big house, but she got a nicer house in a nicer Las Cruces neighborhood. She didn’t get Clive Hallowell’s millions, but she got enough money to support her and her family. Stella wouldn’t say her mother got pregnant on purpose, but she wouldn’t call it an accident, either.

“Is that it?” Naomi asked.

The last time she’d seen her father, she’d been eleven. She’d wanted desperately for him to like her, but he hadn’t. “He brought me porcelain horses once. I played with them until their legs broke off.” That sounded so pathetic that she might have blushed if not for the pinot. She wasn’t that little girl anymore who desperately wanted her father and sister to love her. She hadn’t been that girl for a long time.

“That’s sad.”

She shook her head. “No. I . . . ah . . . liked horses more than dolls.” Which was true. She glanced across the table at Beau, who seemed more interested in his plate than in her. Good. “My father might not have wanted to know me, but he made sure my mother had money to support me. I turned out okay. I wasn’t a bad kid.”

Beau looked up. His face was impassive but his gray eyes stared into her as if he could see into her brain and knew all her secrets. He’d said he knew her work history. Or had that been her arrest record?

“Well, except for the time I got in trouble for spray painting unicorns on the I–25 overpass,” she babbled before she could stop herself.

He raised a brow.

“It was funny,” she defended herself. “And a lot cuter than skulls and stupid gang symbols.” Too bad the police had not seen the humor of a cute little fantasy creature among the hardcore symbols. She’d been fourteen and had been given ten hours of community service. “On paper, my juvenile record might look like I was a troublemaker, but it was tame stuff compared to other kids.” She thought a moment, then confessed because she was sure Beau knew anyway, “Well, okay, except for shoplifting that padded bra from Kmart. That was bad. Real bad, but all the other girls in the seventh grade had boobs and I didn’t. The boys used to call me names like sunken chest.” She glanced at Naomi, who would surely understand. The other woman had her glass poised in front of her mouth, her eyes wide. “I just wanted to fit in and my mom wouldn’t give me money for a padded bra. But that’s the worst thing I ever did.” She returned her gaze to Beau. “Right?”

One of his brows rose up his tan forehead. “How would I know?”

She lifted a hand, then let it fall to the table. “Because you’re a spy.” Duh.

Naomi laughed. “Beau, did you tell Stella you’re CIA?”

“Of course not.” A familiar scowl creased the corners of his eyes. “We talked about this already. I told you that I’m not a spy.”

That was true. He’d said that, but he acted like one.

“He’s a Marine.”

A Marine. Of course he was. It all fit. The thick neck. The short hair. The hard ass. The— Wait! She’d just confessed to stealing a padded bra to a Marine. This time the pinot didn’t stop the blush creeping up her neck and warming her cheeks. Stella tipped up her glass and drained it.

“Beau joined the Marines.” Pride shone in Naomi’s brown eyes. “He’s a HOG.”

Stella choked a little in the back of her throat. He certainly ate a lot, but his table manners looked acceptable to her. Last night he’d kind of gobbled down his flan, but she wouldn’t call him a hog.

“My other son, Blake, followed their father into the Navy, but when the boys were little they used to play Batman and Robin.”

Beau removed his gaze from Stella’s and turned his attention to his mother. “We used to
fight
over who was Batman and who was Robin.”

“Yes.” Naomi sighed as if those were the days. “It got so bad, I had to buy one of you a Batman costume and the other Superman. They were just precious.”

“Then we fought over who was more hardcore. Batman or Superman.”

“The two of you still do.” Naomi frowned, and suddenly looked a lot like her son. “Just last Christmas the both of you almost ruined brunch with your nonsense.”

“Were you Superman?” Stella asked.

“Of course.”

Of course.

“Superman can fly and lift buildings,” he answered as if that made perfect sense. “Batman has to rely on gadgets.”

“Did you have a red cape?”

“Can’t be Superman without the cape.” He sat back in his chair.

“Tights?”

He shook his head. “It was called a jumpsuit.”

She couldn’t imagine him in tights any more than she could imagine him in nail polish. “Potato-potahto.”

“My boys were so cute when they were babies. Blond and snuggly,” Naomi continued down memory lane, Christmas brunch apparently forgotten.

Snuggly?
Baby boy was snuggly? Stella raised a hand and hid her smile.

Beau saw it anyway. His gaze narrowed but he didn’t look angry. “Are you laughing?”

She shook her head.

“I used to dress them in matching sailor suits.” Again Naomi sighed. “Remember Michelle Alverson?”

Without taking his gaze from Stella, Beau answered, “No.”

“Your prom date from Coronado High School. She’s a lawyer. Divorced with a young son.” Naomi paused before she added, “We’ve been chatting.”

Beau looked at his mother and reached for his glass. “She lives around here?”

“No. Chicago. We’re Facebook friends.”

“Facebook? Jesus.”

“Watch your language.”

“Are you back to picking out china patterns?”

“I’m never far from it, son. All the women I know my age have three or four grandchildren. All I need is one.” She held up a finger. “One. I’m not greedy.”

Chapter Six

A
thin white crescent hung over Tampa while the rest of the new moon hid in the Earth’s shadow, blending into the night sky.

It was the perfect moon. A sniper’s moon. A dark, brooding moon under which it was difficult to see or be seen. Unless a man was trained by the United States Marine Corps to stalk and lie in wait for an enemy determined to take out his fellow soldiers. Unless a man was trained to note his surroundings and pay attention to things that didn’t make sense and detect shapes that didn’t belong. And if all that training failed a man, a pair of government-issue night-vision goggles and a day/night scope did the trick.

“No. I can’t drive her to Texas. Reuniting long-lost sisters is above my pay grade.” Beau paced beside the pool as he spoke into his cell phone. An eight-mile-an-hour wind from the south pushed wavy ripples across the clear surface and brushed Beau’s bare chest and arms. Underwater lighting shone on the blue Neptune mosaic tiles and spread onto the concrete deck above. The light wavered across Beau’s bare feet as he moved between the spots of light and darkness.

“That’s why you’re not getting paid,” Blake responded.

“I have a job Sunday.” Never mind that it was more a business discussion with a buddy and not an actual job. Beau stopped by the steps to the Jacuzzi at one end and looked out at the points of light in the gulf. He’d stripped to a pair of blue swim trunks that hit him mid-thigh. “I have a business to run.”

“It’s
your
company,” Blake said, a slight edge to his voice. “You can take time off if you want.” Other people might not detect that edge, but Beau wasn’t other people. He’d been competing with his brother since the womb. It was the you-got-a-blue-ribbon-and-I-got-a-red-ribbon edge. It was the I-should-be-happy-for-you-but-I’m-not edge. The edge that crept into their voices when one did better than the other. When one of them was doing a little better in life than the other.

“Your point, sand sailor?” Today it was Beau doing better than Blake. Beau clutching the blue ribbon while Blake held red. Tomorrow things could change.

“You can send someone else, grunt.”

“I don’t want to send someone else.” For the past three years he’d worked his ass off. Mostly because he didn’t know a different way of doing things. He was a Junger. Jungers made overachievers look like slackers.

“Where is this job?”

“New Orleans.”

“Lovett is on the way.” Blake had obviously been drinking. Again.

“Last time I checked, Louisiana is south of the Texas Panhandle.”

“What we’ve got here is a fluid situation.” Since Blake had retired from the teams, he’d been drinking more than usual. There’d been a time when both brothers could drink all comers under the table. It was that whole competition thing. Beau wondered who Blake was competing against these days. “I’d come and get her, but I told Vince I’d stay here and help him out with some last-minute renovations.” In the background, Blake popped the top of an aluminum can. “How’s Mom?”

Beau let his brother change the subject for now and watched the lights of a sailboat as it slowly drifted past. “Too thin.” His mother had always been thin, but she seemed to be thinner than usual. He glanced at the veranda where his mom and Stella had polished off a bottle of wine before heading to bed and presumably passing out. Within the black curtain of a moonless night, the light from the back of the house bathed the stucco arches and columns in soft gold and lit the upstairs veranda in pale shadows. As he talked with his brother about their concerns for their mother’s weight, he glanced up at the guest room windows. Well, one of the guest rooms. The windows were dark and reflected the dim light from outside.

“Could be the stress of living with Dr. Mike.”

“Could be,” Beau agreed. He and his brother knew that when their mother felt stress, she didn’t eat. They’d lived with it just as they’d lived with their father’s cheating. “I’ll talk to Mike.” He needed to get off the phone and make a few more calls before he called it a night. But not before he fired his brother up. “Oh. One more thing.”

“Yeah?”

“Batman’s a pussy.”

“Bullshit! Batman is genius and a skilled veteran of ninjutsu. All Batman has to do is shove kryptonite up Superman’s ass and he’s fucking useless.”

Beau laughed as he pictured his brother jumping up in defense of his superhero. “Superman is faster than a speeding locomotive.”

“Batman has the Batmobile and Batpod. Both are rigged with grappling hooks and machine guns.”

“Superman is the man of steel.” Beau smiled in the darkness. “Means he’s rigged with a dick of steel. A big dick of steel trumps gadgets any day of the week.”

“What good does that do when he only bones Lois Lane?”

“Being a one-woman man isn’t a weakness.”

“It’s kryptonite, man. Kryptonite.”

Blake was being a drama queen, but even if monogamy was kryptonite, Beau wanted to give it a try. It had to be better than waking up with a parade of nameless women at the age of thirty-eight. Rather than argue, he got off the phone, then made a few calls. He left a message regarding the change he needed to his itinerary with his operations manager, Deborah, and chatted briefly with his second-in-command, Curt Hill. He’d incorporated Junger Security in Nevada because of the tax and privacy advantages. He had a physical business address in Las Vegas and owned a condo in Henderson, but his work took him all over the country. He was home so little, he didn’t really feel at home when he
was
there. Which in turn gave him little time for the social life he’d been meaning to get.

He tossed his phone on a padded deck chair and dived into the deep end of the pool. He might have joined the corps, but he’d spent most of his childhood swimming in anticipation of BUD/S.

He came up for a breath, then started the steady combat stroke his father had taught him. A combination of sidestroke, freestyle, and breaststroke. Pull. Pull. Twist. Breathe and glide. His body sliced through the water as he worked tension from his muscles. With each pull and twist and kick, he relaxed in the comfortable rhythm.

The cool water rushed over his face and body, and he thought of his business in New Orleans with retired gunnery sergeant and scout sniper instructor Kasper Pennington. After Kasper had retired from the corps, he’d returned to his home just outside New Orleans. Instead of sitting back and living off his retirement pay, he’d started his own construction company. He bought and flipped homes for profit, but due to Katrina and the poor economy, he’d expanded his business to include remodel and reconstruction. He employed a lot of former military men and women, whether for just a few months while they adjusted to civilian life before they moved on, or if they stuck around longer. Beau wasn’t sure what business discussion Kasper had in mind, but Beau never passed on a good investment opportunity. Could be Kasper wanted some names of guys who needed work. Whether they thought they did or not. His brother came to mind.

After several laps, his thoughts turned to the drive tomorrow. Originally, he’d planned to drive to New Orleans, meet with Kasper, then leave the rented Escalade at the airport and fly home to Nevada for a while.

At the deep end, he flip-turned and swam under water across the pool. His business had grown and he didn’t need to travel as much. He’d hired capable people in key positions and his life could settle down now. He could stay at home and start a new phase of his life. One that included a wife and kids. Not because his mother pressured him, but because it’s what he wanted.

He broke the surface and pulled oxygen deep into his lungs. He had a lot to think about between now and when he dumped a certain black-haired irritant in Texas. One thing he
didn’t
want to think about was Stella laughing it up with his mother. Pulling her hair over one bare shoulder as she and his mother got inebriated. Tanked while sharing a bottle of pinot. He didn’t want to think about her smile or the shape of her lips or the things the accidental touch of her arm did to his insides. He didn’t want to think of how she looked sitting across the table, the late sunlight tangled in her hair and bathing her smooth skin. He didn’t want to think about the curve of her neck or the shadow her chin made on her throat. He didn’t want to think of her breathy little moan or her blue eyes looking back at him as she rambled about unicorns and padded bras.

At the wall in the shallow end, he turned and headed back across. No, he didn’t want to think of blue eyes and breathy moans and padded bras, but he seemed to be having a harder time controlling his thoughts than usual. No matter the mind tricks he’d used in the past. Earlier, he’d sat at his mother’s table, converting wind velocity to minutes of angle in his brain while his body drowned in deep, dark lust. Lust that had finally cooled, not because of his mind-over-body tricks, but because of his mother’s talk of Facebook
friends
. He wondered how many of his other old girlfriends his mother had stalked.

He didn’t know how long he swam, lost in his thought and paying attention to his muscles rather than counting laps, when he noticed a white blur at the edge of the pool. He stopped in the middle of the deep end where the water reached the top of his shoulders and brushed his hands over his face. Light from within the pool shone up on Stella’s bare feet and legs. She wore white. A long shirt maybe. The full-value wind picked up the bottom and it fluttered against her thighs. Beau stared through the outlying shadows and into the umbra shades covering her face.

There were a lot of things he could have said. Could have asked. But the most important seemed to be “What are you wearing?”

She bent forward, and the white shirt slid down her thighs to her knees. “A nightshirt?” she said, her voice was disjointed and soft, like a caress clothed in black velvet. “Your mother lent it to me. She gave me the pants, too, but they’re way too long, and I don’t like to wear pajama pants to bed anyway.” She straightened. “I forgot to pack pajamas this morning.”

She hadn’t packed anything to sleep in. What would she wear tomorrow night? “Why aren’t you asleep?”

“Your splashing woke me up.”

“Sorry.” He ran his hands over his head. “I’m done. You can go back to bed.”

Instead, she knelt by the edge of the pool. “Your mother is a nice woman.” The light shone up the front of her shirt, shimmered on the waves, and touched her throat and chin and mouth.

“I know. Surprised?”

“A little.” The corners of her lips tilted up. “You’re a hard . . . ah . . . ah . . .”

“Ah what?”

“Marine.”

Nice save.

“What’s the plan for tomorrow?”

“I’m headed to New Orleans.” He moved a few steps closer so their raised voices wouldn’t wake his mother. “I’ve got business there.”

“Then what?”

“That depends on you. You can either get on a plane or I can take you to Lovett after New Orleans.”

She tilted her head in thought and the light brushed across her cheek. “Well, you’re kind of crabby, but I don’t want to fly to Texas.”

“I’m not crabby.” Even to his own ears he sounded crabby.

“I guess I’ll let you drive me to Lovett,” she said through a sigh as if she was doing
him
a favor. As if she had other choices when he got the feeling she clearly did not. “Do I get to meet your brother?”

“If he’s still there.” She did that thing with her hair. Pulled it to one side so that it looked very black against her white shirt. Her hair curled beneath her breast and did that thing deep in his groin that made him forget she was only twenty-eight.

“Are you the good twin or the evil twin?” She also did the thing with her mouth. Smiled like she thought she was funny.

“I’m the good one.” But at the moment, his thoughts headed south toward evil again. He spread his arms wide across the surface as if he was innocent and pushed waves against the edge.

“Or are you really the evil twin masquerading as the good twin?”

He and Blake had been fascinated with twin movies and had seen them all. Not that there were many. “Like
The Other
?”

She shook her head. “Like
South Park
. When Cartman had an evil twin who turned out to really be the good one.”

“Jesus.” A cartoon.

“Don’t tell me you’ve never seen
South Park
.”

“Maybe here and there.” While she’d been watching cartoons, he’d been watching high-value targets. He’d been sweating on rooftops in Iraq or freezing his balls off in the Afghanistan mountains, picking off terrorists and making the world a safer place. Sometimes making the mistake of thinking that he really was Superman. “I’ve been kind of busy.”

“Doing spy stuff?”

“Are we back to that?”

She grasped the edge of the pool and leaned forward to brush the surface water with the fingertips of her free hand. “Maybe you’re not a spy, but you know stuff about me.” She scooped water into her palm and let it run down her fingers and drip into the pool. “I wonder how much you know.”

“Not a lot,” he answered truthfully. “Other than you got busted for unicorn graffiti.” One drop, then two fell from her fingertips into the clear water. “And you shoplifted a padded bra.”

“I wish I hadn’t told you and Naomi that.” She leaned forward a little more and her fingers brushed the ripples in the water. Back and forth, barely skimming the top, teasing the surface.

A shudder tugged at Beau’s spine and worked its way to his shoulders, knotting his muscles as he held himself tight. “Yeah” was all he seemed capable of saying. Beau Junger, scout sniper, United States Marine, HOG, reduced to mindless lust.

“I wish you didn’t know things about me,” she continued, as her hair fell forward and light shimmered in the black strands. “While all I know about you is that you have a killer right hook, you’re kind of uptight, and you have a really nice mother. Oh, and you’re a Marine. Which isn’t a surprise, considering.”

He was glad she didn’t know things about him. Glad she didn’t know the things her smiles and hair and the sight of her fingers drifting across the water did to him. Glad she didn’t know that below the soft, wavering ripples, he was hard as a steel pipe.