Unchained (50 page)

“I arranged a consult with him to talk about having a vasectomy.”

She shot out of her chair and freaked the fuck out. “A vasectomy? Are you insane? Draegyn! My god. Daniel,” she choked out, suddenly horrified at the idea that her husband wasn’t all that down with fatherhood.

“Did you do it,” she yelled at the top of her lungs. “Did you go behind my back and have a vasectomy?”

“That’s where I was today, but I …”

She felt sick to her stomach. Gurgling started roiling in her belly.

“Shut up!” She started screaming to block out the horror unfolding in her head. “You son-of-a-bitch.”

“But honey,” he muttered forlornly. “You said you didn’t want any more babies. I just wanted to protect you from another horrible pregnancy.”

Thinking him cheating on her was the worst sort of betrayal imaginable, Tori wasn’t in any way prepared to deal with an even more horrible form of marital treachery. He’d chosen for her without any sort of discussion and gone behind her back. Who fucking did that shit?

Draegyn St. John. That was who.

“Get out,” she said after calming down. “I don’t care where you go, but you’re not sleeping in my bed ever again.”

And then she walked away, her head held high, and stomped up the stairs to what had until two minutes ago been their bedroom. Once inside, she slammed the door with such force, she swore the whole house shook. The tears came not long after.

H
E SHOT UP
in bed so fast his head spun when the low emergency beep on his phone got loud enough to rouse him from a dead sleep. Fumbling about on the nightstand until he found his phone, Alex struggled to clear his brain and focus on the alert.

“Fuck,” he muttered when he saw what it was. Shaking Meghan awake, he told her in quick, static sentences, “Get up. I need you. Something’s happened. We need to go to Lacey. Quick.”

“Is it Cam?” she asked in a worried whisper.

“I don’t know. Hurry, would you? We have to get moving.”

Minutes later, they were up, dressed, and driving at high speed in the dead of night, each of them white knuckling the ride down to the cabin.

Halfway there, he told her to call Lacey. Wake her up and have her meet them at the front door. She followed his instructions with a scared and shaking voice. A frightened Lacey met them at the door.

“Is Cameron all right?”

“Turn on CNN,” was all he said.

The three of them scurried into the kitchen where Meghan immediately put some water on to boil and then gathered with them in front of the small TV Lacey kept on a counter.

They watched in silent horror as the breaking news report unfolded. A massive explosion in a suburb of Paris had ominous overtones. Half a city block was destroyed, and a fire was raging out of control.

Alex feared that sort of thing the most. That one day, Justice would be involved in a terrorist incident. It was no coincidence that Cam was somewhere around Paris at a time when something bad happened.

Frantically working his phone, as the girls remained glued to the TV, he was afraid of what he might find out. For the longest time, there was nothing. Just silence—the sort of silence that didn’t feel right.

Right before dawn, the first casualty report came in. Four dead. A dozen, if not more, injured. Whatever inner strength Lacey had evaporated at that moment.

“No, no, no!” she cried. That was when he saw she was clutching her stomach.

A very bad feeling crept up his neck and detonated in his head. This couldn’t be happening.

All hell quickly broke loose. “I’m pregnant, Alex,” she cried as sobs tore through her. “Oh, my god. I’m pregnant!”

He held her while she sobbed out a story he could see from the expression on Meghan’s face was tearing her apart.

Learning that Cam and Lacey suffered quietly through a miscarriage earlier that spring made him feel awful. Why hadn’t anyone said anything? Because of the wedding. Because the people he cared about the most tried to shield him and Meghan from heartbreak so as not to spoil their special day.

Did Cam know she was pregnant?

No, she’d wailed miserably. She just did a test two weeks ago, and it was positive. Every test since then came up the same, confirming that she was indeed pregnant.

He didn’t know what to say. Or do.

Finally, Meghan took control. Coolly telling Lacey she had to calm down for her sake and for the baby’s too, she rubbed the distraught woman’s back as Lacey lay with her head in his wife’s lap.

The news didn’t get better as the sun came up. When the death toll rose, and he wasn’t getting any answers from his deep list of contacts, he didn’t know where else to turn or what to do, so he went to his phone list, found Drae’s number, and pressed call.

When he answered sounding like someone just ran over his dog, Alex ignored his instinct to play nice and started barking like a madman.

“Get up, you motherfucker. Something bad’s happened. I need you.”

“Where are you,” he asked.

“At Cam’s. Get your ass down here. And hurry.”

“Yes, sir,” Drae answered smartly. “Be there in ten.” And then the phone went dead.

Alex stood over Meghan and Lacey, his heart breaking for Cameron’s beloved Ponytail. His wife looked up at him, her normally vibrant green eyes shadowed with distress and fear. What was he supposed to say to her?

As he watched, all the color slowly drained from her face. She turned away from him, and he saw her bite a lip and swallow hard. She was imagining what was happening to the Camerons, happening to them.

No. He wasn’t having it. Not any of this. Cam being hurt or dead wasn’t possible. They were too close. Too bonded. Surely, he’d know if some terrible fate had befallen his friend and brother.

Drae came bursting in with a wild man look in his eyes. He’d heard the breaking news alert—that much he was sure of simply by the hard-ass expression on his face. The guy was in analytical mode. Maybe Drae could make some sense of this.

Without more than a hard glance at the women, he started asking questions. It was his way, and Alex was never so happy to witness the man’s calm shrewdness.

“Are we sure it’s Paris?”

“Yes,” he answered. “Figured it out last night. Was waiting on a detection ping but this came up first.”

Drae nodded and stood there, hands on his hips, eyes darting around the room.

“What’s that guy’s name at State? The one who hooked you up after that thing with the ambassador fell apart last year.”

Damn, he was good. Reaching for his phone, he murmured, “Right, right. Stan. Stan Morley. Do you think he’s close enough to the committee? It’s a long shot, man.”

“Long, short, or back channel. We’ll take any shot we can. Does he have an angle? What can Justice do for him?”

Hmph.
Alex knew damn well what the cost of calling in a favor would be. If this worked, he’d effectively be setting up a hostage swap. Information about Cam in exchange for Alex’s handling of the CIA boys’ dirty little mess. He bristled, not liking how it always came round again and again.

Balls.

“Go check the search program running on Cam’s computer. Give me the coordinates of the last three pings. Then reach out to your pals in the service. Isn’t there some classified mystical handshake those muscle guys in protective services do? Find out who the handler is. Let’s come at it from both sides and meet in the middle.”

“You got it, Major.”

Drae’s keen mind was firing on all cylinders, but he looked like warmed up horse piles. Alex assumed he and Tori’d had a rough night. Should he say something? Let his friend know he was aware of the couple’s difficulties? Hard decision to make. Saying nothing might be the easier way but Alex didn’t play that part in all of this.

“By the way, you didn’t do yourself any favors by not being here when we got home. Do you
need
more bullshit piling on?”

“You spoke to Victoria, didn’t you?”

“Uh, duh.”

“Now isn’t the time, Alex.”

His jaw clenched at Drae’s snotty tone. “Maybe not, dude, but we are going to talk.”

It felt like his friend was going to say something, but he cut off whatever it was and turned around to head to Cam’s study.

He’d think about the St. John drama later. Right now was all about finding Cameron and doing it quickly before the fierce inner fiber holding Lacey together completely unraveled.

“Jesus,” he muttered to himself. Moving to the far side of the open living room, he looked at the women on the sofa and felt his heart clutch with concern.

Two pregnancies in one day. Both oddly high risk. Stephanie because of age and Lacey because of a prior loss he could barely wrap his mind around coupled with the shock of Cam’s precarious and possibly deadly situation.

He sincerely hoped the hits did not keep coming.

Finn couldn’t believe his good luck. A sunrise run into Sedona to an equipment auction at a restaurant closing its doors had yielded fantastic results. In one fell swoop, he had nearly everything on his list of kitchen must-haves.

His adrenaline was cranking along at an annoyingly elevated rate that wouldn’t be helped by any more coffee, so he started keeping an eye out for a Mickey D’s. Scarfing down a couple of greasy hash browns and one of their disgusting egg sandwiches would be fuel enough until he got to Bendover.

He chuckled and gave the sunglasses slipping down his nose a little push back into place. Bendover. There had never been a more fitting name for a postage-stamp size town in the middle of the desert than that.

Where you from? Bendover.

Let’s meet for coffee. How about … Bendover?

Anyone headed to Bendover?

Shit. The guys at his station house in Boston would be all over that name with a never-ending tirade of snarky, highly inappropriate bend-over humor.

Somehow, the name was tailor-made for the life change he was already knee-deep in.

When everyone freaked out over what he was doing, his best answer should probably be a shrug and a muttered, “Bendover.”

It didn’t take long for a drive-through to appear, and after inhaling the scorching-hot hash browns and two breakfast sandwiches, he cracked open a small carton of ice-cold milk and downed that shit in one gulp.

Before getting back on the road, he opened a text message on his phone and shot off the good news to Barry.

Mission accomplished. Got us hooked up big time. Hope you like popcorn. LOL. Stopping at my place first and then I’ll meet you at Pete’s.

Pressing the phone into a rubbery do-hickey attached to the truck’s vents called a Spiderpodium, he redid his seat belt and pulled up next to a trashcan to get rid of the wrappers from his crap meal. Switching on a satellite station with country music, he pulled onto the highway and headed for the Villa.

His mind a jumble of thoughts, he tried to organize the thousand details he still had left to do, but one thing stood out in his mind. After tonight, when he and Barry signed on the dotted line, they’d be business partners and equal owners of the only bar in Bendover.

And as a result of that momentous life change, Whiskey Pete’s was about to get a full Hollywood makeover. Tearing out the grease pit masquerading as a kitchen and replacing it with something actually functional was numero uno on Finn’s to-do list.