Jack gave me the rest of the week off. I showed up for the early morning meeting, and he sent me right back out the door.

“I’ve arranged for a couple of operatives to come out from Memphis to help supplement things until we can get around to hiring more people. So go. Take some time off. You’ve earned it.”

I didn’t know what to do with myself, but Rachel had a few ideas.

I was currently following her through a mall in Tucson.

“I can’t believe you’ve never had a hot dog!”

“I grew up Kosher. Most hot dogs have pork in them.”

“Not these.” She gestured with the hot dog she was currently enjoying. “You don’t know what you’re missing out on!”

“You enjoy it.” I moved up behind her and kissed the back of her neck. “I just like watching you have so much fun.”

She stopped and turned right in the middle of the corridor, forcing other shoppers to walk around us. “Do you always spoil women you’ve only just met like this?” She held up the few shopping bags she was carrying along with that hot dog.

“Not always.”

“But sometimes?”

“You want me to tell you you’re my first?”

“That would be nice, yes.”

I chuckled even as she moved closer against me, her lips grazing my throat. “You’re the first woman to kiss me after eating a hot dog. How’s that?”

She reached up and kissed me quite passionately, her tongue dancing in my mouth. I groaned and kissed her back, slipping my one free arm around her waist to pull her closer. The other arm was supporting two shopping bags that went along with the three she was holding. She wanted a new wardrobe, and the fact that we began our shopping trip at Victoria’s Secret sort of inspired me.

I was a man, after all.

When she pulled back, there was pleasure dancing in her eyes. “Maybe we should go find a hotel room. Finish our shopping later.”

“Or we could just go out to the car.”

She groaned softly. “I haven’t ever gotten naked in the backseat of a car.”

“Yeah? Me either.”

Her eyes brightened. “Another first. I like that.”

I turned her around, becoming aware that we were attracting attention. “We should go.”

But before we could make it to the exit, she spotted a blouse in a store window she wanted to check out. And that blouse led to a pair of jeans that she just had to try on. I found myself following her through the mall for hours, trying on ten times as many clothes as we ended up buying. To her credit, though, she did insist that I buy myself a new suit. I was always up for buying new suits.

Exhausted at the end of the day, we ended up at an Italian restaurant, sitting in a dark corner with a bottle of wine and a delicate angel hair pasta in a cream sauce. Rachel sat close to me, her hand resting on my thigh as we whispered to one another during the meal. And then we retired to a hotel room rented for the night.

“You live a luxurious life,” Rachel said as she climbed under the heavy down comforter that the high-end hotel had provided.

“I don’t normally live out of hotels.”

“It seems like you do.”

“My living arrangements in Ellaville are temporary. Jack will likely send me back to Memphis when he gets the office there up and running.”

“And where do you live in Memphis?”

“I was living in an apartment over this woman’s garage, but I let it go when I came to Arizona.”

“Then you’ll have to live in a hotel for a while there, too.”

I shrugged as I slipped out of my shirt. “Probably.”

“You live a luxurious life.”

I kicked off my shoes and began to unbutton my pants, aware of her watching me closely. “What about you? What happens when this is all over?”

Her face fell a little. “I don’t know. I go back to California, I suppose.”

“Do you have family there?”

She shrugged. “Not really. My dad’s stationed at the Presidio in Monterey. But I haven’t seen him in years.”

“Why not?”

She rolled over onto her side, dragging the pillow under her head. When she didn’t answer, I finished undressing and crawled under the covers beside her.

“What about your mom? Your siblings?”

“My mom died when I was five. I barely remember her. And I don’t have any siblings.”

I moved up behind her, pressed my body against her back. “It was always just you and your dad?”

“Pretty much. And he’s career military, so we were always traveling. He was always an officer, a major most of my childhood. He’s a general now, but then he was always trying to prove himself, always working hard to show his superiors that he could run a JAG corps by himself. And now he does. He got what he wanted.”

I kissed her shoulder. “It must have been a lonely childhood.”

“Left me open to a guy like Briggs.”

Her words were bitter. Accusatory.

“Is that what happened? He didn’t approve of Briggs?”

She rolled onto her back, her eyes snapping with anger. “Why are we dissecting my life? Why aren’t we talking about the fact that you’re clearly running from something? Or the fact that you were in Mossad, and you could probably kill my father with just a touch?”

My breath caught in my chest. I’d wanted someone to know the truth about me, but now that it was slipping out, the fear that was born the day I left my sister in the care of strangers came roaring back to life.

“What makes you think I was Mossad?”

“I’m not stupid, Moshe. You were raised Kosher? You speak Hebrew? You were in military intelligence? It doesn’t take much to figure it out.”

That was the first time she’d called me by my given name. It felt weird, hearing it in a voice that wasn’t Ariella’s. Wrong, somehow.

“Don’t do that,” I said, rolling over and sitting up. “The less you know about my past, the safer you’ll be.”

“Why? Because you killed those men who hurt your girl?”

“Because I’ve done a lot more than just kill those men.” I dragged my hands over the top of my head. “I’ve done things that would forever change your opinion of me if I told you about them.”

“I doubt that.” She sat up and ran her hand over my bare back. “You’re not the only one who’s done things you’re not proud of.”

“What did you do?”

She was quiet for a long minute. “I stole from my father. Thousands of dollars to help Briggs with one of his many get-rich-quick schemes. And I cheated poor old women out of money so that he could sell shares in a movie that didn’t exist.” She hesitated a moment. “I watched while he beat a man to death and didn’t do anything about it.”

I glanced back at her. “What?”

She nodded, her eyes darkened by the memory. “He was always trying to find ways to make money. Credit card schemes and phone schemes. He used one of those things you put over the credit card slot on an ATM and stole people’s numbers and PINs, using them to rob them blind. He sold fake magazines and producer rights to movies that didn’t exist, sold insurance policies that didn’t pay out, and he’d buy cars that had been totaled and sold them to people, claiming they were in perfect condition even though he knew they weren’t roadworthy. He did all these things, trying to raise money for himself so that he wouldn’t actually have to work. And he made me help him.”

“But murder?”

“It was the son of one of the elderly women Briggs stole from. The guy put it all together and threatened to go to the police. Briggs had some of his guys grab the guy, and he beat him until he passed out. Everyone thought the guy was just unconscious, but it turned out he’d had a brain bleed. He died.”

“What happened?”

“Briggs put him in his car and let it drive off the side of the road. Cops ruled it an accident even though they could see that he’d been beaten. They investigated for like a hot minute but quit because the coroner ruled it an accident.”

“Where did this happen?”

“Los Angeles.”

I turned and pulled her onto my lap. “We can use this. I have contacts in Los Angeles. I can have them check into it. Do you remember the guy’s name?”

“I’ll never forget it. Benson Clark.”

“We’re going to take him down, Rachel. I promise you.”

She touched the side of my face, her fingers lingering on my jaw. “I believe you.”

We moved together as we’d done before, our bodies finding one another with little need for guidance. We took our time, exhaustion no longer an issue. And when it was done, I watched sleep come over her, watched her face relax into something that was a different kind of beautiful, a sort of peace that was reassuring to my restless soul.

I slipped out of bed when I was sure she was sound asleep and pulled out my laptop, moving to the far side of the room so that I wouldn’t wake her. Benson Clark was a forty-two year old divorced father of two. He’d been found behind the wheel of his 1999 Ford Explorer at the bottom of a cliff off the Pacific Coast Highway. His body showed signs of a beating, but the coroner ruled his death an accident brought on by a blow to the steering wheel during the accident.

The family protested the coroner’s ruling, but there wasn’t anything that could be done without the coroner’s office changing the cause of death on his death certificate, and that would have taken a long battle that would have been too expensive for the family to engage in.

I sat back, my eyes moving over the articles I’d found, the wheels in my head spinning. If we could prove that Briggs Thomas was behind this man’s murder, we could put him in jail. And then he’d be someone else’s nightmare.

And he’d no longer be able to come anywhere near Rachel.

It was the perfect solution to our problems.

I made a call and put in motion what I hoped would be the end of this Guardian mess and the beginning of something bright in my future. It’d been a long time since I’d been optimistic about the future. But I was optimistic tonight.

I crawled back into bed beside Rachel, my hand slipping over her hip as I cradled her body against mine. She reached back and touched my leg before settling deep into the pillows. If every night could be like this…

 

 

We were in the shower the next morning when my phone rang. I untangled myself from Rachel as she protested—“Why can’t you just let it ring?”—and grabbed a towel as I rushed to answer before my voicemail picked up.

“We need testimony,” the voice on the other end announced in lieu of a greeting. “If you can get something down on paper, that would be fantastic. A visit to the area and live testimony in front of a court reporter would be better.”

The voice was Cameron Richmond, a prosecutor who worked for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office. I’d worked with him last year when an actress visiting the Memphis area had been followed by a stalker she’d been trying to evade for more than three months. The actress happened to have been working with Cameron to charge the guy, and my testimony finally put him away.

“I don’t know about a visit, but I’m sure she’d be willing to put something on paper.”

“And you’re sure her testimony is trustworthy? I won’t get burned if I start the paperwork on this thing?”

“You won’t get burned.”

“More than one witness would be helpful.”

“I’ll check into it. See what we can do.”

Rachel came out of the bathroom as I was disconnecting the call. “Who was that?”

“A friend.”

Her eyebrows rose. “Oh, are we still in that phase? The one where I’m not allowed to know what’s going on in your world?”

“Of course not.” I set the phone on the table and turned to her. “It was a prosecutor in Los Angeles. He’s going to help us put Briggs away.”

“For that murder? I told you, it was ruled an accident.”

“He thinks with your testimony, he can get the coroner’s office to change the cause of death.”

“My testimony? Patrick, I—”

“You can. I told you, I’ll protect you.”

“And what do I do when he shows up at your hotel while you’re at work? Do I hide in the bathroom and hope he’s too stupid to find me there?”

There was real panic in her eyes. I crossed to her, taking her by the shoulders. “You trust me, Rachel?” I studied her face for a long second. “Maybe it’s time for me to tell Jack about you.”

“Jack Stone?” Her eyes widened. “So he can accuse me of trying to steal information from you? So he can think that I’m still spying for Briggs? Patrick, he’ll force us apart.”

I shook my head. “You don’t know Jack. He trusts me.”

“He runs a security firm. He doesn’t trust anyone.”

I cradled her face in my hand. “He trusts me.”

We worked on her testimony on my laptop. I watched her type, giving her advice on how to make the details as clear as possible. I also had her make a list of the names of the other people who had been there that night. Cameron needed as much information as possible, and I thought he might be able to approach those people on his own, keep Rachel out of it as much as possible. She did it all without comment. In fact, she was quiet the rest of the morning.

I accessed Stone Security’s system to encrypt her testimony and send it to Cameron in a secure email. It never hurt to be cautious.

We dressed and had breakfast in one of those big, commercial pancake places, the waitress cracking jokes and flirting openly in a vain attempt to break up the tension. The drive back to Ellaville was just as silent, more than an hour of tension that made my shoulders ache.

I spotted a dark car parked across from the hotel as I drove around the block to the parking lot in the back. From the room, I could look down on the car’s roof, with a perfect view of him that meant he had a perfect view of us.

“Do you know that car?”

Rachel moved up beside me and glanced down, barely giving it a full look. “No.”

It bothered me, though. In the driver’s seat was a man with a stern, bored look on his face, the kind of expression almost anyone but a newbie would have on his face during a stakeout. And he had sat up a little straighter when he saw us pass by.

An amateur.

And clearly a Guardian.

“When are you next supposed to call Briggs?”

“Not until Wednesday.”

I looked down at the guy on the street. “Do you think he still believes you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you think he believed what you told him when you talked to him last?”

“Yes. Why wouldn’t he?”

I shrugged. There was something about Briggs posting a man on the hotel that bothered me. It suggested that the situation had changed, but I couldn’t imagine why.

Did Briggs somehow know that I’d contacted the authorities in Los Angeles? It was too soon for Cameron to have filed paperwork with the coroner’s office. The only way he could know would be if he had a bug on my phone.

That wasn’t possible, was it?

I told myself I was being paranoid. And that seemed to be underscored when the car suddenly came to life and drove away.

Just letting my imagination get away from me. Right?