Matt—The Callahan Brothers (Brazos Bend Book 2) (7 page)

“Three weeks, Callahan,” he muttered as he walked into the yeast-scented winery. He’d taken three weeks’ leave and given himself that deadline to make a decision. Surely by then he’d know whether he wanted to be part of this endeavor or if he should turn it all over to Les—lock, stock, and French oak barrels.

Les Warfield sat at his workbench in the lab, bent over a notebook, his long white hair pulled back in its customary ponytail, his lips pursed in a frown that accentuated the lines crisscrossing his leathery complexion. Looking up, he let out a disdainful sniff. “So, you’re back. I trust the world is safe from the forces of evil once again?”

“One hostage is free of the bastards who snatched her. Though with little help from me, I’m afraid.” Matt took a seat across from Les and eyed the half-dozen jars sitting on the table between them. He picked up one that was half filled with a red liquid. A small chip of wood sat in the bottom. “What’s this?”

“I’m testing different barrel woods. Put it down. Tell me about the operation.”

Aware that his partner had no patience for interference with his experiments, Matt returned the jar to its place. “She was a schoolteacher from Alabama doing mission work through her church. Nice lady. Scared to death. Cried big old silent tears from the moment we left the mountain camp where she’d been held until we delivered her to the embassy.”

“Unharmed?”

“No.” His tone was flat, his look hard. “A couple of them liked her red hair.”

Les waited a moment, then asked, “Are they dead?”

“No.” Matt expelled a long sigh. He grabbed a new cork from a bowl full of them and tossed it from one hand to the other. “Went against my grain to leave them alive, but our timeline was tight and we had trouble with the extraction.”

“What happened?”

“Me. I had no business being on the team, Les. I couldn’t keep up.”

“The leg.”

Matt nodded. “That and the fact I was damn near a decade older than everyone else on the team. Hell, even the schoolteacher scaled the cliff faster than me.” He dropped the cork back into the bowl and added, “I’ve been offered a desk job at Langley.”

Les winced. “Ouch.”

“Yeah.” Matt pushed to his feet and paced the path between the stainless steel fermentation tanks. “I thought I could come back from the gunshot. I thought I had. I thought my leg was stronger than ever. But I was a hindrance out there in the field, Les.”

“Bitter pill to swallow, I imagine.”

“It was humiliating. The bitter pill waited on my desk when I returned.” Matt then told Les the news about Ćurković.

Les laid down his pencil and leaned back in his chair. “Thank God.”

Matt’s jaw tightened. It wasn’t the reaction he’d been looking for.

“That obsession of yours wasn’t doing you a bit of good.”

“Now, look,” Matt began.

“No, you look.” Les shoved to his feet and punctuated his words by banging on the table in front of him. “Killing Ćurković
wasn’t going to bring your brother back, but it easily could have sent you to the grave along with him. You didn’t think straight in situations that involved him, Matthew. You let your emotions override your good sense and put yourself in danger. So I’m glad the villain is dead. I’m glad you had nothing to do with it. Maybe now you can put that whole mess behind you and move forward with your life.”

“Doing what?” Matt exploded, guilt churning inside him. Les didn’t know his part in John’s death. Nobody did. Nobody would understand. “Riding a desk at Langley?”

“Why not? You’re closer to forty than thirty. Field ops is a young man’s game. It was bound to happen sooner or later.”

“Yeah. Well.” Matt curled his lip. “It’d be later rather than sooner if not for That Damned Woman.”

Torie Bradshaw. Anger churned through Matt. The woman had wreaked havoc on his life. He’d endured three operations on his leg because of her. Spent months in grueling rehabilitation that failed to return him to one hundred percent despite his and his doctors’ best efforts. The injury had cost him two informers he’d spent more than a year cultivating and effectively set back Uncle Sam’s infiltration of a particularly nasty human-smuggling ring out of Turkey for months.

Worst of all, Torie Bradshaw cost him Ćurković. Matt had missed a golden opportunity when the S.O.B. showed himself in Vienna. At the time, Matt had been laid up with an infection following his second surgery.

And as if all that weren’t bad enough, to add insult to injury, she haunted his sleep. At least once a month he’d wake up hard as a railroad spike after dreaming about the witch. It was as if the picture of Torie Bradshaw and her string bikini was imprinted on his mind, and he could do nothing to erase it.

“Speaking of women,” Les said, interrupting Matt’s black thoughts, “another one of ‘‘em called here yesterday looking for you. I told her you’d be back today.”

“What! Why’d you do that?”

“Because I’m not your social secretary, that’s why. You’ve got to do something about this harem of yours, Matthew. They won’t leave me the hell alone. One of them drops by nearly every day hoping to catch you here. And the phone calls! The message machine filled up the first week after you left, so now they call and call and call until I give in and answer. I tried leaving it off the hook, but that just gives them more of an excuse to come out here.”

Matt dropped back into his chair. “Remind me to kick Luke’s ass next time I see him. This is my brother’s fault.”

“How’s that?”

“He got married. Made the women in town think it’s open season on Callahan brothers.”

“But you’re the only Callahan within a hundred miles of Brazos Bend.”

“That’s the problem.” Matt’s expression went glum.

“It’s been my problem and I’m tired of it,” Les fired back. “I expect you to deal with it while you’re here. Understand? Tell them you’re attached, celibate, gay. I don’t care. I just want them to leave me the hell alone.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Matt replied, grimacing. At least that would be one good thing about choosing a desk job over retirement to grow grapes. He wouldn’t have to worry about the Brazos Bend babe parade.

Wanting to get his mind off troublemaking women, he asked Les how the season was progressing in the vineyard. The two men spent the next twenty minutes discussing pump troubles, the flea beetles that showed up on the yellow sticky square at the end of an experimental row of Sangiovese, and the weather forecast for the rest of the week. Matt did more listening than discussing. He knew the wine market exceptionally well, but when it came to actually growing grapes and making magic in the winery, he had a lot to learn.

“What does a flea beetle look like?” he asked his partner.

Les shook his head in disgust. “I swear. How is it that you grew up in West Texas and you don’t know a leafhopper from a nematode?” Standing, he strolled for the door, saying, “Come with me, grasshopper, and I’ll teach you a bit about bugs.”

Outside the winery, Les motioned for Matt to climb into the driver’s seat of Les’s modified golf cart. Then he pointed toward the section of grapevines planted on the hillside. “Take us up there.”

The warning alarm on the golf cart beeped as Matt backed it in a half circle, turning around. He shifted into forward and headed for the vineyard. The golf cart traveled less than ten yards before a red and white MINI Cooper came speeding into the parking lot.

“Dammit!” Matt exclaimed, slamming on the brake, the cart sliding on the loose gravel.

The car’s driver braked, and gravel crunched as the MINI Cooper skidded to halt, dangerously close to the golf cart. Matt tried to see through the tinted windows into the car to identify the driver.

“One of the harem, I suppose?” Les asked, his voice laced with disgust as the car door opened.

“I don’t ...” A blonde climbed out of the car. “No!”

“You don’t know her?”

Matt couldn’t answer because he’d gone into shock. Adrenaline surged through him. He couldn’t believe his eyes.

“Matt?” Les asked.

She carried a pink-and-lime striped tote bag over her right shoulder and held a fluffy little designer dog in her left arm. She offered him a tentative smile. “Sorry. I didn’t see the golf cart.”

Matt ignored her and replied to his friend. “Oh, I know her, all right. She’s That Damned Woman.”

“Which ... oh, you’re kidding.” Les gaped in amazement. “She’s the Evil Twin?”

“Oh, for crying out loud,” she muttered.

“Yes.” Matt’s gaze met and held Torie’s as he continued to Les, “Victoria Bradshaw. The fluff-headed, picture-taking bimbo who put me in the hospital for months and cost me Ćurković. That’s her.”

Well within hearing distance, she sucked in a breath. “Fluff-headed bimbo?” she repeated. “Bimbo!”

Matt climbed out of the golf cart and turned toward the house. “Get rid of her, Les. There’s a rerun of a ball game on ESPN Classic I want to watch.”

“Excuse me?” she snapped.

“No, I won’t.”
 

She remained silent for five long seconds, then said, “That’s it. I’m done. I’m finished with being ignored. I’m through with being treated like—”

He looked back over his shoulder. “You deserve?”

“You jerk!” she shouted. “It was an accident. I made a mistake. I’m sorry. If I could go back and change it I would, but I can’t. You can castigate me more later, but now I need you to listen to me.”

“No.”

“Aargh!” She kicked a stone and sent it skidding across the ground. “Tell you what. Instead of Evil Twin, you can call me the Killer Twin, because that’s what I’ll be if you take one more step without listening to what I have to say.”

“Go away, Ms. Bradshaw.” He took two steps away.

Les called out a warning. “Matt!”

He turned in time to see her pull a gun from her bag. A nine-millimeter. A
pink
nine-millimeter.

Both men dived for cover. Matt heard the shot, followed immediately by the sound of breaking glass. He looked up. “She shot my truck. She shot out the headlight on my truck!”

“That’s right. I hit what I aim at now; I’ve been taking lessons. Turn your back on me again, Callahan, and I’ll take aim right at your pretty butt.”

***

Stress, frustration, and bone-deep, mind-numbing fear had led Torie to the edge of sanity. Matt Callahan pushed her right on over.

She shook with fury. Bimbo. Ooh. To think she’d wasted even a handful of brain cells in the past by fantasizing about this ... this ... Double-Oh-Jerkface. Her finger twitched on the trigger as she considered blowing his windshield to smithereens.

“Put the gun down, Victoria,” Callahan demanded with more arrogance in his voice than what a man pinned by gunfire behind a golf cart should risk.

“When I’m ready. I’m not ready yet.”

The older man with Matt piped up. “And what is it you need to get there, miss?”

“I need—” She broke off with a scornful laugh. “I need what apparently is the impossible. I need the police to listen to me. I need my father to pay attention to what I’m saying. It would have been nice if Mr. Superspy, here, could have found just a scintilla of compassion in that cold, arrogant heart of his and spared me a moment of his precious time. What I need, sir, is for every man on God’s green earth to disappear. Disintegrate. Vaporize. Maybe then poor Gigi finally would be safe!”

“Who’s Gigi?”

“This is Gigi.” She cuddled her dog closer. “He put her in the oven! She could have died. What if she’d fallen asleep in there? She sleeps deeply. I brought home chocolate chip cookie dough. I could have preheated the oven!”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Matt snapped.

“Now you want to know, hmm?” Blood coursed through Torie’s veins wild and hot. “Now you’re ready to listen? Because I shot your pretty truck? Well, let’s make sure you listen good.” She shot out his other headlight.

“Dammit, woman!” Matt shouted. “What’s the matter with you?”

“I’ll tell you what’s the matter. It’s nasty emails, hang-up calls, and ugly letters. It’s the sense of being followed every time I step out my front door. It’s finding pictures of me on my refrigerator door. It’s finding Gigi muzzled and in the oven!”

The sentence hung in the air for a long moment until the gray-haired man with Callahan said, “Now, that’s just wrong.”

Matt scowled and concluded, “You’re being stalked.”

“Yes!”

“So now you know what it feels like,” he observed, his lip curling with a sneer.

Torie let out a screech of frustration and eyed the truck again. The older man said, “Uh, Matt? You might want to motor back on the attitude.” Then he offered Torie a hesitant smile. “Ms., um ...”

Torie and Matt shouted simultaneously, “Bradshaw!”

“Ms. Bradshaw.” The man moved cautiously from behind the golf cart, his gaze flicking from her face to the gun, which remained aimed at the pickup. “My name is Les Warfield, and I own a stake of Four Brothers Vineyard. Obviously we have a problem here, and I’m happy to help solve it. It’d be helpful if you’d lower the firearm and give me a little more information.”

Torie kept the gun trained on the truck. “The problem, Mr. Warfield, is that I’m frightened and frustrated and at the end of my rope. No one believes me. Not the police, not my father. But I’m in trouble and I need help, and silly me, I thought your partner might provide it.”