Renegade Alpha (ALPHA 5) (26 page)

Callie had enjoyed the couple’s visit. She’d also kept and now lived at the house in Cornwall, the first real home she and her father had shared.

The small local church had been full to bursting at her father’s funeral a week later. Lots of people Peter had befriended in the village had been present, along with hundreds of the men he had trained during his years in the military.

With one noticeable exception.

Lijah.

Callie had searched the church for him that day, and again at the local village hall where she had invited the other mourners to join her for drinks and refreshment after the service.

All to no avail; Lijah wasn’t there.

Her disappointment had been tinged with anger. That he could have allowed his avoidance of her to induce a show of such a total lack of respect for the man he had claimed to have so much affection for.

The same avoidance of her company Lijah had shown from the moment they stepped aboard the jet flying them back to England the day after that encounter with Richard Stockton. Lijah had gone straight through to the cockpit to take the controls, and he hadn’t appeared again before Callie had been whisked away in the car waiting on the tarmac to drive her back to Cornwall.

Even so, Callie had been sure she would see him again at her father’s funeral.

His nonappearance at the service and afterward was the final slap in the face she had needed to tell her that she really had just been a part of a “mission with benefits” to Lijah, and this was his way of driving home that fact.

Her pride certainly hadn’t allowed her to ask Dair Grayson about him, or Kat Grayson either, despite the fact the two women had become firm friends during the Graysons’ stay in Cornwall. The couple’s baby daughter had been born just two weeks ago, and Callie had sent them a present and card to wish them all well. She had received an invitation to go and visit them in Venice, any time, in return. Maybe she would take them up on the offer in the spring.

With time, Callie had come to accept the advent of Lijah Smith into her life had been as brief and wondrous as a comet, shining brightly as it rushed across the sky for the blink of an eye before fading away into the darkness, never to be seen again in her lifetime.

And then she had gotten on with her life.

The fear that had held her paralyzed for so long had disappeared with the incarceration of Richard Stockton.

Lijah had been right to trust the senator, the older man having kept his word. There had been a press release just days after that confrontation at the Lincoln Memorial. In it, Senator Stockton had announced that his son, Richard, had suffered a serious mental breakdown, and now resided in a private nursing home “for the foreseeable future.” He had also announced his own retirement from politics, stating he “wished to spend more time with his family.”

That last part had been totally unexpected, but in retrospect, perhaps it was the only course for the senator to take? If the truth about his son ever came out, then Jacob Stockton’s political career would be over anyway, and he might just take the presidency with him. Far better to circumvent such an occurrence by retiring from public life.

The announcement had finally freed Callie to look around for something to do with the rest of her own life.

She still had no inclination to go back to London and take up her old career, so when she chanced to see the TO LET sign outside this shop in the local town one day, she had come up with the idea she could still sell art, even if she no longer wished to restore it. That life still held too many memories for her, and ones she would rather forget if she was to move on as she wanted.

Once she’d secured the lease, she’d spent an intense week and a half making it the Morgan Art Gallery. She’d had a workman knock the three small rooms into one, with the permission of the owner, followed by the painting and organizing the hanging of the artwork herself, before her grand opening three weeks ago. Again, that was a slight exaggeration. About twenty local people had turned up, and at the moment, she barely made enough to pay the rent and eat.

She accepted she was never going to get rich from running her little gallery, but she would happily settle for the calm she now felt inside herself in regard to her life. She missed her father so much, and knew that she always would. But she was also coming round to acceptance of his death, knew the past was over and couldn’t be changed. The future was totally unknown—

She turned with a frown as a knock sounded on the locked door. It was after five thirty, which was her closing time, but she wasn’t going to turn away a customer just because it was two minutes after closing time—

Oh God!

Callie had pulled the blind slightly aside to see if she knew the person outside, quickly dropping it back into place again to lean back against the door, legs trembling and her thoughts racing.

Lijah stood on the other side of this door.

The very last person Callie had ever expected to see again, after two months—eight weeks, four days, and six hours to be precise, but who was counting!—of neither sight nor sound of him.

She had taken in everything about him in that single glance. Large as life, still wearing that disreputable Stetson, stubble darkening his jaw, and he was wearing a black short-sleeved shirt, faded jeans, and those scuffed cowboy boots.

Her heart was beating a wild tattoo in her chest as she wondered what she should do. She could hardly leave Lijah standing out there on the pavement, at the same time as she didn’t want to reopen a wound that had barely begun to heal—

It hadn’t healed
at all
. Callie just refused to allow her unreturned love for Lijah to affect the life she was now trying to build for herself.

He’s standing outside
.

Another knock sounded on the door, accompanied by, “I know you’re in there, Callie.”

In just seconds, all the anger Callie had been suppressing for so many weeks bubbled up to the surface in a red haze that threatened to blind her.

He knows I’m in here!

Of course she was in here. This was her gallery. Her
life
. A life Lijah had walked out of two months ago without so much as a second glance.

Now he had just walked back into it as if he had a perfect right to do so. As if he hadn’t just disappeared off the face of the earth for all this time.

Callie spun sharply round to turn the lock and wrench the door open. “What the hell do you want?”

Not quite the greeting Lijah had been hoping for!

But as Callie looked achingly beautiful in a short fitted black skirt and red blouse, her hair loose about her shoulders, with that angry flush in her cheeks and the furious glitter in her eyes, he decided he would take it.

He hooked his thumbs into the pockets of his jeans as he gave a hard grin. “Hello to you too, Callie.”

“Hello?” she echoed incredulously. “
Hello?
” she repeated more forcefully. “After all this time, that’s all you have to say to me?”

No, it wasn’t all Lijah had to say to her, but until Callie calmed down, it was all he felt safe saying. “Well, you have to admit it’s slightly more polite than your own greeting to me.”

“I don’t have to admit anything to you, you—you—” She seemed completely at a loss for words.

He winced. “You seem a little…tense?”

She gave a disgusted snort. “You always were the master of the understatement!”

Lijah studied her through narrowed lids. Callie was thinner in the face than when he had last seen her, in the body too. She looked lean and fit, as if she had been working out. Or working hard. It must have taken a lot of hard work to get this gallery up and operational in so short a time.

He had spent a couple of days in Venice with Dair and Kat and their new baby daughter before coming here. Knew from Dair that Callie was doing okay, that she had opened up this gallery in the last month and was slowly putting her life back together.

That she was getting along just fine without him.

He gave a shrug. “Would you like to finish locking up here and go and grab a coffee together somewhere? Or something?” he added wryly as Callie gave another one of those scornful snorts.

She eyed him impatiently. “This is a small Cornish town, not London or New York, and the coffee shops all close at five thirty.”

“Fair enough.” He nodded. “You don’t have coffee at your house?” he added hopefully.

“Yes, I have coffee at my house—” Callie broke off the angry outburst to glare up at him. “What do you want, Lijah? It’s been two months—”

“Eight weeks, four days, six hours, and”—he glanced at his wrist watch—“seventeen minutes. But who’s counting?” He looked at her challengingly.

Callie froze at learning Lijah knew exactly to the minute how long it was since he had let her walk off that plane without so much as a good-bye. Even she didn’t have the time marked down that precisely.

Some of the tension left her shoulders. “Why are you here, Lijah?” She sighed. “Why now?”

“Because I couldn’t come before.”

“Why not?”

“We need that coffee and somewhere quiet to sit and talk, and then I’ll tell you exactly where I’ve been all this time.”

Callie was tempted, so tempted. Just seeing Lijah again, being with him, talking to him—arguing with him!—had brought all the love she felt for him flooding back into her heart.

But.

She’d come back from Washington determined to put her life back together, to honor the sacrifice her father had made and start living again, as he would have wished her to. She’d done it too, by opening the gallery and occasionally going out for lunch with people who had been friends of her father’s. She was also decorating parts of the house at the weekends. Letting Lijah back in now, if only briefly, would rip all that normality away from her, and Callie wasn’t sure she had the emotional strength to pick the pieces up and start all over again.

“I don’t think so.” She shook her head sadly.

“Look—”

“No,
you
look.” Callie straightened determinedly. “Look around you, and you’ll see for yourself I’ve put my life back together. I have the gallery now. Friends. You’re a painful reminder of the past, and a complication I don’t want or need.”

Lijah felt as if she’d just punched him in the gut, that pain radiating and blossoming outward until it consumed all of him. Callie couldn’t have been any blunter than that, could she? He was a complication. A painful reminder of the heartache of losing Michael and her father.

What had he expected?

That Callie would welcome him back with open arms.

He knew her better than that. When she’d come to Grayson security that first day, he had quickly come to realize she was the most stubborn and independent woman he had ever met. She had only become more so these past two months.

Lijah wasn’t proud of the fact that he had been running scared when he let her walk away after flying them both back from Washington. Oh, he had told himself he was prioritizing, that he had one last kidnapper to find and deal with. When the truth was he had been running away from Callie. From what she made him feel.

Well, he’d found his kidnapper, ensured Alejandro need never fear him again, and then he’d had weeks in which to sit and think about Callie. About the way the two of them had been together in Washington, despite the circumstances.

About what it meant to
miss
someone.

And, God, had he missed Callie.

She was the first thing he thought of when he woke up every morning, the last thing he thought of at night when his body was so hard and aching for her, he couldn’t sleep. He’d tried taking care of that problem himself a couple of times, but it just left him feeling more aching and hollow than ever. He didn’t have any interest in any other woman either, so that had been a nonstarter.

Two months of hell and one conversation with Dair and Kat Grayson later, Lijah had known exactly what he had to do.

And he was too fucking late.

Whatever Callie had been starting to feel for him in Washington was now gone. Maybe it had never really existed, but had just been, as he had suspected it might be, nothing more than a much-needed closeness to another human being in a world that was otherwise chaotic and falling apart.

“I appreciate your honesty.” He nodded abruptly. “I’m sorry I bothered you. I— Have a good life, Callie.” He gave a wry tip of his Stetson before turning and walking away.

Callie stood in the doorway of the gallery watching Lijah leave, knowing she would never see him again, that— “Why are you limping?” She ran the short distance separating them before grabbing hold of his arm and spinning him round to face her, her grip tightening as it took him a few seconds to regain his balance. “What’s wrong with your leg?” She looked down critically at the leg he favored when he walked.

“It’s nothing—”

“Don’t lie to me!” She glared in warning. “Don’t you dare lie to me, Lijah Smith!” she repeated fiercely. “I’ve taken more than enough bullshit from you, and I’m not taking any more.”

He looked taken aback at her vehemence. “I’ve never lied to you.”

“Except by omission. Several times.” Her jaw tightened. “Now tell me what’s wrong with your leg?”