Bringing Benjy Home (Security Ops) (22 page)

After a moment, Jaida went back to her room and picked up the phone there. Trey had been checking daily with the lost-and-found office at Kids’ Kingdom, inquiring about her purse. After a brief conversation, she hung up the receiver with a sigh. Still no luck. There was no use in holding out any more hope. If it was going to be turned in, she had a feeling it would have been. She’d already canceled her credit cards and made arrangements to have replacements issued, but she called the credit companies anyway. There was no record that someone had tried to access her accounts. She then made a call to Arkansas, but as she’d half expected, there was no answer. When she hung up the phone, Trey appeared in the doorway.

“Who were you talking to?” he inquired.

“I was just trying to reach Granny, but there’s no answer at the cabin. I’m not surprised. She had been planning to visit her sister Nora and her husband. That’s probably where she’s at.”

“Have you checked today with the lost and found?”

She nodded. “No luck, I’m afraid.”

Trey frowned. “I’ll replace the money that was in your purse, of course.”

She immediately bristled at his words. “That won’t be necessary.”

“Yes, Jaida, it is.” His voice was firm. “You’ve already put yourself through enough. There’s no way we can repay you for finding Benjy, but I can make damn sure you don’t incur any personal expenses along the way.”

She stared at him, her chin squared. They hadn’t mentioned compensation since the day he’d been determined to pay her off and send her home. She’d told him then she wouldn’t take anything, and if he knew what was good for him, he wouldn’t bring the subject up now, either. Especially now, when this experience had become so much more than a missing-person case.

Especially now that she was in love with him.

She had to turn away then, afraid of what he’d see in her face. She knew what was in store for her. Trey was grateful for her help in finding Benjy. And in spite of her inexperience, he’d given every sign of a man satisfied by their lovemaking last night. But she didn’t try to fool herself into believing that it meant anything more special to him. Although he’d been concerned about her last night, and gentle once he’d learned she was a virgin, she didn’t dare allow herself to hope or something that didn’t have a cotton ball’s chance in a windstorm of coming true.

She thought she was prepared for what it would be like hack home in Arkansas alone and without him. No doubt it would be worse than she even expected. But she was determined to return to the valley with her pride. There would be no uncomfortable scenes when it was time for them to part. Despite his gratitude for Benjy, Trey owed her nothing. She wouldn’t be able to bear it if she suspected he felt otherwise. Gratitude wasn’t an emotion that would be enough from this man. Not nearly enough.

She’d rather return home shrouded in her tattered pride than make demands on him he couldn’t hope to meet. When the time came for them to part ways, she’d do it with nonchalant dignity if it killed her.

Lost in her morose thoughts, she was startled by his presence behind her. He took her shoulders in his hands, and she was jolted anew by those tiny pinpricks of electricity that accompanied his touch. She’d awakened this morning, a slight achiness the only thing to remind her that she would no longer feel like the only twenty-seven-year-old virgin in the country. She’d been unable to summon any regrets.

“Are you tired?” The words were spoken into her ear, low and sensual. He pushed her hair back over her shoulder and kissed her lobe.

She shook her head, then stopped to arch her neck under his wandering mouth. “No.”

“You didn’t get much sleep last night.” She didn’t need his words to remind her of the hours they’d spent exploring each other. By the time she’d fallen into an exhausted slumber, the sky had already begun to lighten.

“Neither did you,” she reminded him in a shaky voice. He made a sound of agreement, his mouth otherwise occupied. Her breathing grew unsteady.

Trey stiffened for a moment, then, cursing, straightened. Only then did she become aware of the ringing of his cell. He stepped away from her to answer it. She waited for a few minutes until he hung up, his expression remote.

“That was one of the FBI agents who has been tailing Penning. He was calling from Logan International Airport. Penning went there to pick up his parents, and they’re on their way to the Cape.”

“Will they be followed?”

He nodded. “The Feds are unwilling to give up, even now that Benjy’s been found. They’re still hoping to get something on Penning to put him away, which suits my purposes just fine. I doubt they’ll be allowed to spend much more time on the case, though. Benjy is safely home, and there’s nothing linking Penning to his kidnapping.”

“Now what?”

“Well, there’s no use hanging around here. Kasem is gone, and so is the chance to talk to her. I wouldn’t mind going back to Boston, though. I can’t help but hope the agents do find something they can hang on Penning, something that would put him away for a good, long while.” That would certainly solve a big problem of his. The evidence Lauren had stolen from Penning’s house the night she’d escaped him wasn’t enough to put him away. But if the FBI had other reasons to jail the man, Lauren and Benjy would be safe once again, to live a life finally free of fear.

He eyed Jaida. “How about it? Are you up for a trip back to Boston?”

An almost giddy sense of relief filled her at his words. There was no reason for her to accompany him; Benjy had been found and returned home. The only other possible interpretation of his invitation was that he wanted her with him, at least for a while longer.

“It’s been . . . let’s see—” Trey made a show of looking at his watch. “All of four hours since you last ate. You must be hungry.”

She shook her head. His face was easing into an expression that was all too easy to read, one that had her bones dissolving.

“No?” He stalked toward her. “I am,” he informed her. Reaching her, he caught her in a loose embrace and lowered his head. “In fact, I’m starved.”

She returned his kiss with lips that wanted to tremble. She was certain waiting wasn’t something he did gladly, but she felt as though she’d just been handed a reprieve. A few more hours, perhaps a couple of days, seemed very precious and much too short.

It was more than she’d dared hoped for.

Chapter 14

Trey and Jaida caught a flight back to Boston early the next morning and checked into a motel there. He put in a call to Colorado, and when he’d finished talking to Mac and Lauren had held out the phone to Jaida. Distance hadn’t been able to dim the emotion in Lauren’s voice. Any discomfort Jaida might have felt in light of Lauren’s repeated thanks was lost in the sheer joy of knowing she’d helped reunite Lauren and her son.

Trey rented a car and announced that they were going to the beach. But their first stop was the boutique in the hotel. It had been so easy to pretend they were a normal couple, one with some sort of relationship, some sort of future with each other. Trey had piled swimsuits that met with his approval into her arms, an act that was both arrogant and seductive. She’d been unrelenting in her own choices, putting back the ones that were too daring. But she’d reluctantly admitted that he had chosen well. The suit she’d eventually bought was one of his selections, blue again, a fairly modest two-piece.

She remembered reading once that most men’s favorite color was blue, and that certainly seemed to hold true with him, His own purchase had been made with far less care. The black trunks were plain, but she’d known that they would show off his hard, lean body to perfection, and she’d been right.

The only thing that marred her sheer happiness at spending a carefree day with him was noticing the careful way he kept sweeping the area with his gaze. While they drove to the motel, and again when they went to the beach, his eyes went frequently to the rearview mirror.

He was watching for anyone who might be following them.

The certainty put a chill in her blood. But she didn’t mention it until they’d found a small space on the crowded beach and sat down on the beach towels they’d purchased.

Rummaging around in her tote for some meganumber sunscreen, Jaida asked him nonchalantly, “So, who were you expecting to find in back of us on the trip here?”

Trey merely looked in her direction. She couldn’t see his eyes behind the dark-tinted glasses, but she knew if she could, they would be unreadable.

She squirted a dollop of lotion in her palm. “Is it the second kidnapper? Is that it? You think he’s hanging around to take his chances with us?”

He was silent so long she didn’t think he would answer. When he did, his voice was flat. “It’s possible. It’s hard to know what he would do next. He might have fled as far away as possible, knowing his partner had been arrested. He has no reason to believe she hasn’t given the police information on him. With a possible APB out on him, he’d be stupid not to go into hiding.”

“But you don’t think he did, do you?”

“There’s no way to tell. Since we don’t know the motivation for the kidnapping, we can’t guess at his next move. But,” he said, his voice hardening, “we’re his best bet for finding Benjy again, if that’s still what he wants to do. That’s why, when we do go home, we’ll have to be a little ingenious about not leaving a trail. I’m probably being paranoid,” he added, noting her ashen cheeks, “but I’m also not going to take any chances.”

Jaida made a production of applying more lotion to her leg. It wasn’t his plan that had had the blood rushing from her face; it was his casual mention of their parting.

When we do go home
. . . The words could have another interpretation, a much more cozy one—if she allowed herself to pretend that they would be leaving here together. But that scenario was as farfetched as the one about little green men taking over the earth. When they left, it would be separately, to their individual homes. And she wasn’t quite sure yet just how she was going to survive that.

“Here, let me,” he offered, taking the tube of sunscreen from her unsteady hand. He squirted some into his palm, then rubbed it with both hands to warm it. Then, with much more thoroughness than the act called for, he proceeded to apply it to her arms and then her stomach. He stopped to replenish the supply before focusing on her shoulders and chest. When he reached the tops of her breasts, where they curved above her swimsuit, he used utmost care. His hands left a lingering heat in the wake of their rhythmic circles.

“Have you spent much time at the ocean?”

His casual words, so at odds with his intimate touch, rendered her momentarily mute. His emerald eyes were lambent, and she responded helplessly to the heat in them.

“No . . . I . . . that is, I’ve been to the ocean before, of course. When I was a child.” He removed his hands then, finished with his task. Her skin immediately felt the loss of his touch.

“Did your grandmother take you?”

She giggled helplessly, unable to picture Granny in a bathing suit. “No, not Granny. Why, I only remember her leaving the valley once, and that was a long, long time ago.”

“What made her leave the valley then?”

He’d met with this careful silence before, and knew it meant he’d touched upon a memory that wasn’t pleasant for her. He wished he could retract his words. He didn’t want her troubled by anything right now, and certainly not by some ghost from her past better left buried. He of all people should know what it was like to fight to protect your privacy.

But eventually, despite her pensive frown and prolonged silence, she did answer. And her words were couched in her customary candor. “I’ve told you before that my mother never really wanted me with her, but there was one time, when I was eight, that I did go to live with her and her new husband. David was her third, I think. Or maybe her fourth.” She shook her head slightly. “It doesn’t matter. But unlike her other husbands, he professed to be delighted at the thought of a readymade family He insisted that I come to live with them in Memphis after the wedding. Marilee went along with the idea, but I doubt she was too thrilled about it.”

She stopped then, contemplating the ocean. The rhythmic wash and flow of the waves on the shore were soothing. The waves rushed in and wiped several feet of beach clean of marks, of flaws. Time was a little like that, she mused. The years had a similar way of easing painful memories, if not totally erasing them. “I was so excited to be going.” She smiled a little, thinking of the eight-year-old she’d been. “I was sad to be leaving Granny, but I was eager, too. So eager that I never told anyone that there was something about David that made me uncomfortable. Whenever he touched me . . .” She stopped and shook her head. She hadn’t had the words as a child, but he’d made her flesh crawl. She hadn’t understood then the meaning of the snippets of emotion she would pick up from his touch. “I soon learned to avoid him, but after I moved in with Marilee and him he made that impossible. It seemed as though he was constantly finding reasons to stroke my hair or my arm, to hug me a little too tight, a little too often.”

She glanced at Trey and his face was hard. “Granny is precognitive.” She made the remark as casually as she would tell her grandmother’s age. “I was an adult before I understood exactly why Granny left the valley that time. But I don’t doubt that she saw something so horrible, so frightening, in my future . . .” Her voice trailed off. All she remembered was her joy at seeing her grandmother so unexpectedly, her confusion at being sent to her room, at the raised voices downstairs. “A couple of hours later my things were packed and Granny and I were on our way to the bus station to buy a ticket back to Arkansas.” She added, almost as an afterthought, “My mother and David separated not long after that.”

Trey became aware of a pain in his jaw, and only then realized how tightly he was clenching it. It took conscious effort to release the tension there, and even more effort not to reach over and haul Jaida into his arms. “He didn’t hurt you?” The words were raw, torn from him.

Her gaze was on the tide again, and she shook her head. “I know now that he would have eventually. That was what Granny must have seen. It was the only thing that would have made her leave the valley.”

He brought her hand to his lips, where he pressed a quick kiss in her palm. “You owe your grandmother a lot.”

“I owe her . . . everything,” Jaida agreed softly. “She raised me, and took care of me, and never once made it seem like I was a burden. She is my family—all that’s ever mattered, anyway.”

“I’m glad you had her,” Trey murmured. With her hand still clasped in his, it wasn’t difficult to tell he was thinking of his own childhood, his and Lauren’s. He surprised her, and himself, by saying, “When Lauren was adopted by that couple, the only thing that made the pain of her loss better was to imagine this wonderful life she was having. I’d weave this fairy-tale existence for her, because I couldn’t deal with not knowing for sure if she was all right, if she was happy.”

“And was she happy?”

“I think so. She says she always felt there was something missing in her life when we were separated. I think she lived in fear of doing something that would disappoint her new parents so much that they would send her away. She doesn’t talk about them much, but I’m sure she misses them. She had to break contact with them when we made a new life for her, away from Penning. They were very much in favor of her marriage, and great admirers of her husband. They would have told him immediately if they knew where she was.” Resentment crept into his voice. “The one time she told her parents of Penning’s abuse, she was told to stop making her husband angry. She couldn’t turn to them for assistance when she wanted to leave. She had to rely on herself.”

“And you,” Jaida reminded him softly. “You were the one to help her escape him.”

“Yes. But Lauren had already been making plans of her own before I ever found her. She’d hidden some things away, the bloodstained clothing I told you about, hoping to be able to use it to buy her freedom. When she discovered she was pregnant, she knew she couldn’t wait much longer to leave him. That’s about the time I found her.”

“Does Penning know about you?”

He shook his head. “Lauren said she never mentioned me to him. And although her adoptive parents knew she had a brother when they decided to adopt her, I doubt they said anything to him about it, even if they still remember my existence.” He said the last words without rancor. The couple had been enchanted with four-year-old Lauren, but less so with him. He’d been wise beyond his years, with a chip on his shoulder and ice in his heart. He hadn’t wanted to be adopted, but given a choice it would have been better than being separated from Lauren. He hadn’t been given a choice.

A vision wafted across Jaida’s mind, settling over it like a filmy blanket. A vision of a small girl, screaming as she was led away, and several adults holding back a young boy who was fighting with unworldly strength to go to his sister. She could feel his shattering pain, and the bleakness that had permeated his existence for so long afterward.

She swallowed convulsively. “I think you needed her as much as she needed you. I’m so glad you found her.”

He knew then that she’d seen something, some scene transmitted through their touch, and immediately released her hand. He couldn’t get used to that ability of hers, didn’t want to get used to it. He’d spent too many years fortifying the walls around his feelings ever to be comfortable with a woman who could so easily circumvent them.

And yet . . . there was a bond between them he couldn’t deny. Their physical relationship had only strengthened it. He might have been able to convince himself that making love with her had been unavoidable and was a natural progression from their proximity and mystical connection. But finding she was a virgin had changed all that.

She hadn’t asked, hadn’t demanded anything from him, but he was still edgy. Edgy the way a man got when he knew he’d received more, far more, than he was comfortable returning. And rather than running in the opposite direction, he was greedily taking every moment with her he could get, while successfully putting off offering her anything in return.

It was late afternoon when Trey announced it was time to go and they made the trip back to the hotel. Jaida knew without being told that he wanted to get back to phone the agents watching Penning. The contacts were always there, hovering in the background, nebulous reminders that what she had with Trey was fleeting. The contented day they’d spent had been soothing in its ordinariness. But there was nothing ordinary about the circumstances that had brought them together, or the ones that were, for the moment, keeping them together.

Trey’s cell began ringing almost as soon as they entered his room, so Jaida took the opportunity to slip into her own room for a shower. After she’d finished and dressed again in shorts and a tank top she wandered back into the other room. He wasn’t on the phone. She heard the shower shut off and realized he was in the bathroom. Moments later the door opened and Trey sauntered out, drying his wet hair with an extra towel.

Jaida’s throat went dry. He was attired in nothing but a towel, which looked startlingly white wrapped carelessly around his hips. Each step he took made the knot on the towel seem a little more precarious. A stripe of hair angled upward above the covering, and his wedge of chest seemed even broader than usual above it.

“You were quick,” he said. He dropped the towel he had in his hand and slicked his hair back with careless fingers. She’d never seen him less than perfectly groomed, and she stared in fascination. Lack of clothing made him seem bigger, more dangerous. It was as if clothes were part of the camouflage he donned in his presentation to the world of an urbane, civilized man. Now, at moments like these, she was reminded of just how much of a facade that was. He moved with the lean grace of a jungle cat. The tensile strength alluded to in the play of muscle under sleek skin was compelling, and she tried in vain to look away.