Killing Time (One-Eyed Jacks) (16 page)

His hair was still wet. He’d shaved and the effect was stunning. He wore another one of the print shirts she’d bought mostly to tick him off, but partly because he looked so hot in the first one. She could smell him on the light summer breeze wafting across the terrace. Something citrus and spicy and 100 percent male; he must have helped himself to Jones’s aftershave.

He looked refreshed and vital and as gorgeous as the Primetime handle billed him to be.

Their eyes met and held for an explicably long moment before she looked away. Tipping up her wine, she attempted to act as though nothing out of the ordinary happened. But the exchange had rattled her.

The little rush, the undeniable shimmer of attraction was so unwise. If she could have ignored it she would have, but Mike Brown was a difficult man to ignore. So were these unexpected reactions she kept having to him.

Jones made a sound that could have been a laugh when he saw Brown. “For the love of God. Who puked a rain forest all over you?”

Brown walked over to inspect the salmon steaks. “You can thank her. Just my luck I finally get a personal shopper, and she misses the memo about cargo pants and black T-shirts.”

Jones turned back to his grill. “Well, I think you look real cute.”

“See what you’ve done?” When Mike turned to Eva, there was a smile in his eyes that prompted her to smile back before she could check it. “He’s disrespecting me now.”

“I never respected you in the first place,” Jones said with a grin that indicated he lied. “So you can’t hang that on her.”

“
Your
fault,” Brown insisted with a pointed look at Eva that she made a valiant attempt not to find endearing.

She could
not
go there.

She walked over to the waist-high wall of the terrace, let the coolness of a soft evening breeze wash over her, and listened without comment as the two friends talked, gave each other grief, and laughed softly—their way of keeping the tension of the current situation under control.

They’d been through the fire together. Their bond ran deep. Men like Jones and Brown didn’t give that kind of trust recklessly.

Reckless wasn’t something she could afford to be, either, but trust was mandatory. Someone wanted her dead and she had no choice but to trust both of these men with her life.

•   •   •

For her sake, Mike was glad they’d taken a little break. If a quick shower and quicker meal could be considered a break. All in all, it had been less than forty-five minutes since they’d invaded Gabe Jones’s very private sanctum. Gabe had gone to clean up, making himself scarce, leaving them alone in the home office with the computer.

Mike had pulled a chair up beside Eva, chomping at the bit as he waited for her to boot up Gabe’s PC and open the file on Operation Slam Dunk.

He wasn’t sure why he was so anxious. He already knew what was in it. Maybe it was the thought of seeing the lies in black and white all these years later. Or maybe it was that he’d spent the last eight years trying to forget it, and now he was about to lance open a wound that was still painful. Back when it had happened, he’d gone through it in sort of a fog. He’d been in mourning for his lost team, zoned out on the pain meds for his broken collarbone and the debridement of the burns on his leg—and in a state of shock that he had been fingered as the bad guy.

Gabe was right. He’d planned on being career Navy. He’d lived it, breathed it, loved it. And then suddenly the Navy no longer had any love for him. The entire U.S. military had wanted his head on a platter. It had been too much to absorb, to process, and most of all, to deal with.

So he hadn’t. He’d skated through the days, lying to himself, blindly reassuring himself that Brewster
would come through. That everything would be straightened out. He’d be released back to active duty, exonerated. A wronged man.

His head had been buried so deep in the proverbial sand that the court-martial proceedings had caught him completely off guard. And he’d folded in on himself, defeated, manipulated, too shocked to even be angry.

The anger had come later—self-destructive, angry years that he’d spent seeking restitution at the bottom of a bottle.

“Mike?”

Eva. He’d zoned out on her.

“Yeah. Sorry. What?”

“Where’d you go?”

To a very bad place.

He glanced into her concerned eyes, and it hit him how dark those eyes were. So brown they were almost black. And God, she smelled good. Like that rain forest Gabe had accused him of wearing.

And, whoa. She’d called him Mike.

She’d
never
called him Mike before. Always Brown. He’d understood; it established a line of demarcation.
We are not friends,
it said clearly.
We are merely working together by necessity.

But she’d just changed the game.

Like when he’d joined her and Gabe on the terrace after his shower. He’d thought then that he’d read more into her expression than was warranted. But no, he’d been right. She’d been glad to see him.
And then she’d looked away. Probably as surprised by her reaction as he’d been.

“Sorry,” he said. Not the time. Not the place, and sure as hell not the woman to be bonding with. Sure, he wanted to take her to bed. Any man with a pulse would want her.

But he was smart enough to know that an entanglement with Eva Salinas would come to no good end. So, no. Never. No way. This woman had complication, complication, and had he mentioned
complication
? written all over her.

“Is that it?” he asked with a no-nonsense nod toward the monitor and the document she’d opened up.

“Yeah. That’s the first one of several.”

She scooted her chair to the side so he could move in close and start reading.

It was all there. Spelled out nice and neat and military sharp. I’s dotted. T’s double crossed. Just the facts—and they were all wrong. All lies.

He hadn’t realized he’d started to sweat until he felt a trickle of perspiration inch down his temple.

“Looks like a cut-and-dried case against me,” he said, closing out the first document and opening another. “No wonder you wanted me dead.”

She sighed heavily. “I wasn’t going to kill you.”

“Well, no, not after my boyish charm won you over.”

Crap. He could not flirt with her.

“Yeah. The way you stumbled across the dance floor and gagged me with your pisco breath made my heart go pitty pat,” she flirted back.

Not good. Not good at all.

He could see in her eyes that she’d realized it a split second after he had. She quickly nipped it in the bud with a sober scowl.

We are totally on the same page here,
chica.

He cleared his throat, all business again, and leaned closer to the screen to put a little distance between them and that floral scent that made him crazy. Or maybe he was making himself crazy. He’d had plenty of practice in that area the past several years.

“I figured at the very least you were guilty of collusion with whoever had called the shots,” she said. “But I decided that until I could confront you face-to-face, I wasn’t taking any chances. That’s when I started digging past the file.”

He listened as he scrolled. Closed one document, opened another, not seeing anything he hadn’t known before.

“So who all did you bump about this?” he asked absently.

“It’s more like who
didn’t
I talk to.” She stared morosely at the screen over his shoulder. “So when doors started slamming shut in my face and I began to get the sense that I was being followed, I turned my focus in another direction. It didn’t make sense at that point that you were behind whoever was stonewalling or following me. You couldn’t have connections that reached that far.

“So the question was,” she continued, “who
did that leave? That’s when I started giving serious thought to a cover-up.”

“Maybe that’s what your mysterious benefactor wanted when he gave you the flash drive,” he speculated, opening the next file. “For you to investigate the possibility.”

“I wondered the same thing. But no matter how I spun it, I hated the idea. I’ve spent my entire career in service. To believe that you were innocent was to believe that my own government had conspired against you. But to what end? Why throw a decorated Navy pilot under the bus?”

“Lots of questions,” he agreed absently and clicked on another file. The first thing to open was a photograph.

His heart stopped dead before his mind fully engaged. Then he leaned in close, taking a really long look, making sure his eyes weren’t deceiving him.

“I have no idea why his photo was included along with the OSD files,” Eva said over Mike’s shoulder. “But in case it wasn’t by accident, I checked him out anyway. His name is Joseph Lawson.” She hit the print button and waited for the printer to spit out the photograph. “I didn’t find any connection to him and Afghanistan or you or Ramon.”

Only when she turned back to him did it register how deadly quiet he’d become. So quiet, she knew something big was going on.

She watched his face as she handed him Lawson’s photograph. “You know him, don’t you?”

Several seconds ticked by while he read all the information she’d compiled on Joseph Lawson.

He stood abruptly. “We need to share this with Gabe.” Shouldering around her, he headed out of the office.

•   •   •

They found Gabe on the terrace talking on his cell. The minute he saw the look on Mike’s face, he said,
“I’ve got to go, babe. Call you back later. Love you, too. Kiss Ali for me.” He ended the call. “What?”

Mike handed him Lawson’s picture without a word. Just as he hadn’t spoken another word to Eva after announcing that they needed to talk to Gabe.

Eva watched the exchange and shivered, sensing they were on the brink of a major breakthrough.

She breathed deep as Gabe studied the photograph. The July evening had cooled a little; that daylight was now a memory. Light from strategically placed sconces bathed the terrace in a soft glow. The fragrance of flowers spilling from a dozen planters scattered around the tile floor drifted on a soft breeze. But the soothing summer scents and colors did nothing to cut the tension that emanated from Mike in troubling waves.

She was worried about him. Which was crazy; he was a big boy. And while he wasn’t exactly her enemy, he wasn’t exactly her friend, either. Still, ever since he’d seen Lawson’s photograph, something had changed inside him. Something profound. Until that moment, she’d sensed he was only here because he’d felt he had no choice, not because he wanted answers.

There was no question that he was fully invested now.

Gabe’s expression was thoughtful as he squinted from the photo to Eva. “And?” Eva looked toward Mike for a clue.

“Tell him what you’ve got,” he said.

Eva turned back to Gabe. “That photo was included along with the OSD files. I didn’t understand
why—still don’t understand why—since it didn’t seem to have any connection, but I ran it through the CIA database anyway.”

Gabe smiled. “See, you are a spy.”

“Because I’m an attorney,” she reminded him, “it’s in my nature to investigate all angles of any situation. Anyway, I got a hit. His name is Joseph Lawson.”

Gabe glanced at Mike. “Should the name sound familiar?”

Mike looked grim. “It’s going to.”

“I pulled as much intel on Lawson as I could find,” Eva continued. “And when I butted up against security clearance restrictions, I leaned on some of my friends in-house.”

“Let me guess—it was about that time your sources dried up and you started to sense you were being followed,” Gabe said.

“Now that I think about it, you’re right. That’s exactly when the stonewalling started. But not before I found out about the organization Joseph Lawson founded.”

“UWD. United We Denounce,” Mike filled in the blank when Gabe’s brows furrowed. “A radical militia survivalist group that denounces all allegiance to the U.S. government.”

Mike drew a deep breath and dropped down on a chair, his hands clasped together between his knees like he was physically attempting to get a grip, Eva thought, watching him.

Gabe held up a finger. “I remember now. Saw Lawson’s name on a government watch list several
years ago. Has a big compound full of followers living somewhere in the mountains out west, right?”

Eva nodded. “UWD headquarters are in Idaho, at a commune on land Lawson’s parents left him when they died.”

“Perfect place to build a communal colony, isolate his followers from the outside world, and brainwash them,” Gabe said grimly and lifted a hand for Eva to continue.

“It’s estimated that between one hundred and one twenty-five UWD members and their families are in Idaho, but Lawson’s recently branched out. He’s started up smaller settlements in five or six states and over the past year the membership has multiplied like rabbits. UWD is now the fastest growing antigovernment group of the decade.”

“So what’s the background story on Lawson?” Gabe turned directly to Eva since Mike had grown quiet.

“Former Spec Ops. Gulf War veteran. Reports indicate he suffers from untreated PTSD with violent tendencies. Took to using his wife as a punching bag. Several years ago, when she finally filed a restraining order against him and left him, taking their only child with her, he turned radical zealot and started gathering disciples. His numbers are estimated to be pushing three hundred now.”