CHAPTER TEN
Isaac watched Lilli read the headline of the article about her and waited for her reaction.
He’d had some time to process the information he had. He’d been shocked at first, then a good deal more suspicious. As he thought about it, though, he couldn’t see the threat. What he’d learned of Lilli over the past several days didn’t jive with some military intrigue focused on his club or his town. What had happened between them the night before had only strengthened that understanding. So now he was simply impressed.
Bart, genius geek that he was, had managed to find a crack along the sides of that wall. He still couldn’t get through it, so Isaac had no idea what the fuck Lilli was doing in Signal Bend, but he had this, and so he had her name. Bart was working on getting more of her history, but Isaac was hoping that he would now hear it from Lilli herself.
She turned and said, “How long have you had this?”
Understanding why it was an important question, he answered, “Yesterday. After I left your place. That call I got? Was Bart.”
“What else do you know?”
“For now, that’s it. Bart found that article. He’ll be looking for more, of course, but not till tomorrow. I’m hoping he won’t need to bother. Will he?”
For a full minute or more, Lilli just stared at him. He could almost see the gears turning; he just didn’t know where they were headed. Finally, she cleared her throat shifted sideways in her chair. “You have plans today? That phone going to go off and interrupt us?”
“No plans. Shit shuts down on Sundays, for the most part. That phone rings, it’s an emergency. My other phone rings, I’ll ignore it. We talkin’?”
Her expression was flat and stony. This was not the woman squealing over kid cereal fifteen minutes ago. “We’re talking. First thing I’m saying, before I give you anything, is my guy is better than your guy. I know more about you than you know about me. You want to hurt me, I take you and your club down, too.”
His stomach coiled into a knot instantly. Christ. Had he misread her that badly? Had he put his club at risk for a good fuck? He leaned forward, his forearms on the table, and snarled, “You here to hurt me and mine?”
She shook her head. “No, Isaac. I knew nothing about your club until a couple of days ago. When you threatened me that morning, I got myself some security. That’s all it is. I’m not here for you, and I have no wish to hurt you. I’m protecting myself.”
“But your guy knows what you know.” Fuck. Fuck. He’d misplayed every turn.
“He does. He won’t hurt you, either.”
“So now I’m trusting someone I’ve never even seen?”
“Looks that way.”
Isaac shoved his chair back and stood up, nearly tipping it over. He stalked around the kitchen for a minute and then came back and leaned on the table, facing her. “If my club or my town gets hurt because—because of—this”—he gestured wildly between them—“I will rain unholy fire, I swear to God.”
“It’s called Mutually Assured Destruction. I can’t hurt you because you can hurt me, and vice versa. I’m going to tell you what’s behind the wall that Bart won’t breach—not for weeks, anyway. He’s really good, though, to have found this”—she pushed at the pages in front of her—“I could get him a contract if he wanted it.”
Isaac snorted. “He’s a convicted felon, Sport. Government won’t want him.”
“You’d be surprised who the government wants for certain kinds of jobs. All the hackers I know have records. But that’s beside the point. I know about the meth. I know your contacts. I have interesting details that you think you protected. I don’t care about any of it, unless you’re coming for me. It’s not why I’m here.” She crossed her leg over her knee. “So the question is, are you coming for me?”
She had completely blindsided him. He’d been prepared—or he told himself he was, anyway—for her to be working against the club somehow. He’d hoped—and expected, truthfully—that she had no interest in the club at all. It seemed he’d been right, until he’d made her feel threatened. Fuck. Now, she was primly telling him that she could fuck him, his club, and his town hard whenever she felt like it. And he had nothing on her but an apparently glorious military record. He slammed his fist into the table. “FUCK!”
Very calmly, she said, “Isaac, sit. I don’t want to hurt you. If we’re being straight, then let’s be straight. I will tell you some things, but it cannot—cannot—leave this house. And there are some things I just can’t tell you. In fact, I can’t tell you a lot that has to do with the reason I’m here under an assumed name.”
He sat. “What the fuck? That’s what I need to know.”
“I’m not in the Army any longer. Now I do very highly classified contract work. My identity is concealed because there aren’t many who do what I do. It’s also why we don’t work from DC. We’re spread out in out-of-the-way places. I’m out of bounds to tell you that much. I won’t tell you what it is I do.”
“Why is the wall so obvious?”
“So that they know as soon as someone starts looking. Well-concealed security has a blind spot; it takes time to see that anyone’s poking around. A hacker who hits a wall like this, though, is known right away. Bart is tagged, I’m sure. No matter how good he is, if he probed hard enough to come up with that article, then they know he’s looking. He needs to wipe his slate and start fresh. You should probably use that only-for-emergencies phone and tell him that now, in case he’s putting in some off-the-clock time. The biggest threat I posed to you before I did my own digging was you digging into me.”
Isaac nodded, stood and pulled his burner out. Fuck, fuck, fuck. He was so angry his hands were shaking. But who was he angry at? Her? He felt betrayed, but had she betrayed him? How? No—he was angry at himself. He’d been sloppy. And he was in deep with this woman. He’d spent most of the hours after her nightmare watching her sleep, fucking guarding her, feeling protective and—and—FUCK.
Bart answered, clearly from a deep sleep. Good; he hadn’t been working. “Yeah.”
“Stay off the Lilli thing, Bart. Do NOT fuck with it again. She says she’s sure you’re tagged. Do you know what that means?” Because Isaac didn’t, not really.
“Fuck. Yeah. I’m on it.” He sounded fully awake now.
Isaac ended the call and came back to the table. “Is this talk gonna have any satisfaction for me, or are you just going to keep ruining my fucking day?” Jesus, he needed to punch something.
“You know my name is Lilli Accardo. You know I was an officer and a pilot in the Army. I’m not from Texas. I’m from California. The rest of it is just normal stuff that people share in the process of getting to know each other. It’s protected because it’s identifying, nothing more. So if you still want to get to know me, then we should maybe spend the day doing that. Both of us. But I’m still Lilli Carson in this town. Anyone who doesn’t know differently right now should never know differently. I assume your club knows how to keep quiet.”
He nodded. But there was too much missing. The moves weren’t clear. “You haven’t told me shit I didn’t know. Why here? Why Signal Bend? Nothing you’ve told me should have put you in need of protection from us. You have something else to hide, something that can hurt you.”
Again, she simply looked at him, thinking. Then: “If I tell you the rest, it stays between you and me. Only you and me. The risk I take to tell you is huge.”
No, it wasn’t. She’d seen to that. “That’s why you got intel on us, right? So there wouldn’t be that risk? You seem pretty fucking safe.” She was like a completely different person. Not the prickly, bantering woman he’d met, not the wild bedmate, not the free and delightful drunk. Not the kid eating cookie cereal. This version was calculating and eerily calm.
“I’m here to kill someone.”
Stunned, he sat there with his mouth open, unable to think what to say. Finally, words happened. “Are you telling me you’re a government assassin?”
But she shook her head. “No, this is a personal project. Someone who hurt me and mine very badly in Afghanistan and got away with it. I consider it an assassination, as do the people helping me. But legally speaking, I plan to murder him.” She smiled. “And now you can hurt me, too.”
Oh, shit. Isaac’s mind raced, trying to fit this new information into his understanding of her. And now he had a whole new set of problems related to Lilli. “Who? Someone in Signal Bend? In my town?”
“No, but someone fairly close. I wouldn’t move into the same small town as my target. There’s some modest distance between us.”
He tried to think. He knew everybody in town and virtually everybody in a radius ten miles or more around the town. Who’d been in Afghanistan? He could think of a few people, but no one he’d peg for doing something that would warrant that kind of retaliation. He took a calming breath. Stepping back from this a little, he ordered his thoughts. His club and his town were safe from her. He believed that. She had nothing to fear from him, so he had nothing to fear from her. And if what this guy did was as bad as all that, then he’d help her take the fucker down. “You gotta tell me who he is, baby, and what he did.”
But she shook her head. “No, Isaac. You need to stay out of it. Knowing any more than what I’ve told you puts you at risk if I go down. And that puts your club and town at risk.”
“And if I want to help?”
“The people with the most vested interest are involved. There’s a plan in place, and we’re working it.” She leaned forward. “Is that enough to trust me?”
She was sitting at his table, wearing his t-shirt, her beautiful hair long and loose, lying over her shoulder. He was falling in love with her; he’d understood that last night, watching her sleep. He wondered if the dream she had—the nightmare—had to do with this guy she was after. If someone had hurt her, Isaac wanted him dead.
He trusted her. From what he could tell, she played it straight or said why she wasn’t. And he wanted her. He wanted to be able to trust her, and he wanted her to trust him. “Yeah. I trust you. I get any of that back?”
“I trust you, Isaac. I wouldn’t have told you any of this if I didn’t. I’d have just used what I know and gotten you out of my way.”
“Jesus, Lilli. That’s cold.”
“No. It’s smart. Getting involved with you is not. But here I am.”
Isaac got up from his chair and went to squat next to hers. They had an opportunity to turn this conversation, this day, this thing between them around. He put his hands on her thigh. “Are you involved with me, Sport?”
She slid her hand under his, and he folded his fingers around it. “Yeah. Way too deep.” She leaned down and kissed him.
With a sigh, Isaac laid his forehead on her leg. “What are we gonna do about that?”
She laughed. “Why don’t you show me around your house?”
“Good idea.” He stood and held out his hand.
~oOo~
He showed her around the house, told her that his family had lived in it for generations. He was the first to live in it alone, in fact. The family farm had been large, but all of the arable land had been sold off, and now only the homestead, on seven acres, was left. His grandfather had been the last to work any farmland; Isaac’s father had been the last to sell it.
Lilli made several comments about the beauty of the wood pieces throughout the house, and he was glad to hear it. He was looking forward to taking her outside. But first, she wanted to look at the wall of photos. That gallery had grown for generations. Isaac was the only one not to have added a single photo. He’d changed the frames but had not added any new pictures.
He pointed out grandparents and great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and people so far removed generationally they could rightly be called ancestors. She pointed to pictures from his life, and he identified his parents and his sister. “That’s my mom. She died when I was twelve.”
“She was beautiful.”
“Yeah, she was. She hanged herself.”
Lilli turned fast, her eyes wide. He never talked about his mother—hell, his family—at all. There were patches who only knew what happened through rumor and gossip. She put her hand on his arm, and he muscled away the urge to shake her off.
“Isaac, I’m sorry.” He shook his head, ready to move on, but she moved to stand in front of him. “Isaac. My mother cut her wrists and bled out in her bathtub. I found her. I was ten.”
He looked down at her with a start. “God.” Something came over him in a jolt that he could not possibly define, and he grabbed her face and kissed her, fervently, his tongue probing deeply into her mouth. He felt her hands clutching his shirt as she kissed him back. When he pulled away, he searched her face for some kind of clue that she thought making out over their mothers’ suicides was inappropriate, but she simply looked well-kissed. Still, he muttered, “Sorry.”
“Don’t be. I get it.” She traced the length of the scar on his face.
He closed his eyes at the tender contact. “Never known anybody who does before. Nobody gets it.”
“I know. Why’d she do it?”
He shook his head again, hating to go to that place. Then he shrugged. “My father was a mean bastard. Best answer I got. She didn’t leave a note. Yours?”
“No note from her, either. I don’t know much. My dad did a purge after she died. But from what I remember, and what I know now, I think she was bipolar. My most vivid memory of her is her body in the bathtub, and sitting in there with it waiting for somebody to find me, but I also remember that she used to take me ‘adventuring,’”—Lilli made the air quotes around the word—“her word for it was avventurandosi, and we’d end up in these crazy places with her freaking out because she didn’t speak very good English, and I had to talk to strangers to try to get back home. I’m guessing that was mania. It wasn’t a great time.” She stopped and furrowed her brow. “Wow. I’ve literally never told that story to another human being, ever.”
Isaac felt the urge to kiss her again, but he tamped it down. “Jesus, Lilli. That’s intense.”
She laughed sadly. “Yeah. Just to get it out of the way, I’m an only child, and my dad died when I was 23. He was awesome.”
“Can I ask how old you are now?” He knew that was a question a lot of women hated.
She didn’t hesitate. “33. You?”
“39.”
She grinned. He loved her smile; her mouth was rosy and lovely, and her eyes lit up. “See, look at how much we’re learning. You said ‘was’ when you mentioned your dad. We both orphans?”
“Yeah. He died twelve years ago. Dropped his bike on an icy road and went under a truck. He was the MC president before me. He was Big Ike, and I was Little Ike until he died. That’s why I hate that fucking name.”
“Did you live here with him?”
“Not since I was 18. I stayed at the clubhouse. Moved back in here after he died.”
“What about your sister?”
“Martha. Don’t know. She’s four years older than me. She left in the dark one night not long after my mom died, and no one’s heard from her since. I get why she left. My old man was already turning his meanness on her. But she left me behind.”
“Did he . . .” She didn’t finish, but she didn’t need to.
Isaac shrugged. “Some. Not so unusual in these parts. Got better when I grew to be a lot bigger than him. Stopped, for the most part, when I started prospecting.” He shook off the melancholy gloom that was beginning to settle on his shoulders. “Anyway, that’s the past. You said your mom’s English wasn’t good?”
Lilli smiled. “So my past is still in the present, I see. My mom was born and raised in Italy. My dad was born there, too, but he came over really young. They met when he was stationed in Europe—he was in the Army, too. Special Forces.”
“He was a badass, then. I see where you get it.” That pleased her, and Isaac was glad of it. But she’d made him curious. “Lilli, what languages do you speak?”
The pleased smiled he’d brought out disappeared, and she looked guarded again, as she contemplated him. Then, she sighed, as if resigned to her fate. She counted them off on her fingers. “English, Italian, French, Spanish, German, Arabic, Farsi, and Hebrew.”
He laughed, loudly, and she looked at him like he was both crazy and rude. “Sorry. It’s just—I don’t get intimidated often, but that did it. How fucking smart are you?”
“Pretty fucking smart, but that’s beside the point. I was raised bilingual. It makes picking up new languages ridiculously easy. No need to be intimidated.” Now she wore a sly grin. “Not by that, anyway.”
Okay, now he needed to show her that there was something he could do, too. He took her hand. “Come with me. Get your boots on. I want to show you something.”
When she was appropriately shod, he led her out to the largest outbuilding and unlocked the door. She practically shrieked.
“Hah! You locked it!”
Laughing, he said, “Easy, there, Sport. This I lock. The house, I don’t.” He opened the door, and the strong aroma of wood shavings billowed out on the late morning breeze. It was his favorite smell. Well, second favorite now, supplanted by the natural scent of the woman standing with him. He let her go in first, and she stood just inside the doorway and gaped.
“Isaac, what?” She was taking in what he’d spent most of his life building up. Saws and planes and a massive lathe, chisels and files and rasps, stain and varnish and brushes and wood. A huge work table in the center of the room. All of it neatly organized. He thought this big room was beautiful. He could live in it.
“It’s my woodshop. The furniture and doodads in the house that you like—I made them.”
She turned her gaping face toward him and gaped some more. She went over to his row of shelving units, where he stored the pieces he intended to sell at art shows and craft fairs around the state. She picked up a burled vase that was part of a run he’d turned from some beautiful walnut he’d found near Kansas City. The turnings were his most artistic work.
“You made this?” He nodded, feeling suddenly self-conscious. She carefully set the vase down and ran her fingers lightly over the whole shelf of turnings. Then she went to his stock of carved pieces and spun to face him. She was holding a hummingbird at a lily, the bird no bigger than her palm. Her eyes were damp. “Jesus, Isaac. This is—it’s beautiful. I’m—in awe.”
The hummingbird was no big deal. He’d price it for twenty bucks, dicker down to fifteen, at a craft fair. He could carve a couple of those in an afternoon. There were a dozen on the shelf right now. But Lilli was carrying that one around with her as she looked at everything in the room. He went to her. “You want that?”
“What? Oh, I’m sorry—I didn’t mean—” She blushed. “My nonna loved hummingbirds.” She moved to take it back to the shelf, but he caught her arm and held her.
“Nonna?”
“Grandma. Italian.”
“Keep it.”
“No, Isaac. I’m sorry, you should sell it. It’s so beautiful.”
“Keep it. If you like it, you should keep it. It’s not a big deal to me. Look—there are a bunch on the same shelf you got that one.”
“But this one is the prettiest.” She smiled up at him, her eyes still shimmery. “Thank you.” He was blown away by how much this revelation had affected her.
Now she pushed her hand up his chest and hooked it around his neck, pulling him toward her. Before she kissed him, she whispered, “You astound me,” and brought his lips to hers.
Isaac was experiencing an acute case of emotional vertigo this morning. He still felt a little unsteady. But he was getting to know this woman, and he was letting her know him. Since the difficult discussion in the kitchen, there was a different atmosphere between them. They weren’t trying to figure each other out. They were relaxed, and he recognized that this was the first time they’d been relaxed together, at least when Lilli was sober.
He wrapped his arms around her waist and deepened their kiss, lifting her off her feet. She hooked her arm, that hand still holding the carved hummingbird, around his back. He set her on the worktable, then reached back and took the carving out of her hand, setting it on the table, off to the side.
He’d built the table to suit his size, so its surface was right at the level of his hips. With Lilli sitting in front of him, they were crotch to crotch. She moaned and looped her legs around him, crossing her ankles on his ass.
The feel of her tongue moving on his, the taste of her, the way he could feel the muscles and tendons in her thighs squeezing him—fuck, everything about this woman made him hard. When she whimpered sweetly and flexed on him, he tore his mouth away from hers with a gasp.
“I want to be inside your sweet pussy right the fuck now. Too sore?”
Her eyes hooded with lust, she smiled and pulled at his belt. “Not for that.”
Isaac growled and set about getting his woman naked.