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“John.” She was tempted to just end the bullshit there. A blunt middle finger salute, a sharp turn right, and she’d be on her way toward the oak grove, ready to enjoy a peaceful morning’s walk. When was the last time she’d done something like that? When was the last time she’d been able to enjoy anything normal, stable?
The answer actually hit right away. It had been a little over a year ago. After the meeting in which Craig declared his intention about her appointment, she’d taken Luke home for the weekend, to Corpus Christi. Nobody but Norene, Luke, and the appropriate staff members knew, and she had a couple of days before her world blew up. She’d talked to Dad a lot, walking along the bay, skipping stones and throwing sticks for his two dogs.
After two days, she’d nearly lost her mind.
Even Dad had noticed. He’d chuckled heartily over Sunday morning coffee, muttering words laced with love—but right now, felt like some bloody cosmic curse.
You’re not wired for normal, Trace. Never have been, never will be.
And over the last week, for the first time in a long time, the man in front of her made that okay. Showed her that sometimes, many times, alternative wiring could be exactly what the world needed. She believed him too. Trusted him.
Right up to the instant she realized he’d been keeping shit from her.
So no, there wouldn’t be a middle finger for him. There’d be this. Her stare, full of her hurt and raging tears. Her words, full of the challenge she stabbed at the high-and-mighty Franzen in his beautiful, brooding throne.
“Look at me,” she dictated, moving to lock herself directly in front of him. “Look at me, dammit, and tell me why.” Her lungs burned, getting in the air to keep speaking, but she imposed mind over matter, forcing them to keep functioning. “Why did you know there was a crack in our cover, and not tell me—”
“Because I didn’t know.” He shoved off the pole so violently, she almost checked for the spear clearly skewering him through the back. “Because I didn’t know, Tracy. Not for sure, at least.”
She pivoted, narrowing her gaze. “What the hell does that mean?”
“I was only running on a hunch.” His hands lifted, dragging in tandem across his skull. “A really crazy one.”
“All right,” she said slowly. “A hunch you couldn’t share with me?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
His hands lowered. His whole frame became unnaturally still. He was, in really trite terms, like a glorious statue just added to the ambiance of the ranch. “Because if it was right,” he finally returned, voice filled with just as much stone, “you would have given it away…when you were talking to Sol.”
“Sol?” For a second, it felt as if the wind had stolen the word before it even got to him. That was the moment before she knew her gut had beaten it to the punch.
The really huge punch.
She slumped to the stoop, legs giving out, as the blow fully hit.
“Sol.” Vaguely, she felt her head shaking. Her mind fighting. “You—you think Sol gave us away?” But that same mind filled with a flashback of Franz seething into that burner phone, back in the garage. Ranting at Sol. Calling him an asshole. John wasn’t exactly a P’s and Q’s kind of guy, but that was beyond stretching the norms. It had snapped them.
Somewhere in the middle of the mini movie replay, Franz turned back to her. Gazed now, as if reliving that exact scene with her. “It was only an instinct,” he muttered. “But the more I turned details over and over, the more shit didn’t feel right—a feeling that got worse every time I got on the line with the guy.”
Tracy hugged both arms around her middle. She compelled herself to keep listening, no matter how huge the boulders got in her belly. The man had logged eleven years in Special Operations. That was over four thousand days of reading people purely on vocal cues and wonky-strange evidence. His “hunches” were better than most people’s hard facts. “Wh-what kind of a feeling?” she finally managed to stammer.
“Plain and simple?” John volleyed. “The feeling we were being played. Started back in Vegas, even before the explosion at the villa. What the hell was with his ‘huge technical glitch’ at the Vegas Convention Center? You want to tell me that army of trained audio technicians hadn’t backed up the sound settings for that presentation?”
“That…is odd.” She said it while a family of rabbits sought the shade beneath one of the helicopters. Had she been like one of those clueless creatures? Looking only at the grass, when larger things were happening right over her head?
“Well, that was only the beginning,” John persisted in a tight growl. “Didn’t come close to the alarms that went off when I talked to him after the blast.”
She focused a stare up at him. “I remember. He was baffling the hell out of you. At the time, I was still so rattled, I didn’t think…”
“And why did you think you had to?” He lowered to the step, sitting next to her. “You’ve always trusted him.”
Tracy said nothing, though that didn’t negate a reaction. She kept it to herself, choosing to contemplate how he gritted the word trust harder than the rest. Trust. To his warrior’s spirit, the word meant so much. To his Dominant’s soul, it meant everything. No matter what, he’d never taken the word lightly. Deciding to hide all this from her…it had been a shitty burden on him. A lie of omission, in order to honor the trust she’d given him.
“He was adamant that I not tell him where I took you—but as the days went on, I began to wonder if he didn’t already know.”
She clutched her stomach, now aching to the point of a hard throb, tighter. Dreaded blurting the one word on her lips. “Why?”
