ALEX WAS ENJOYING HIMSELF. HOW could he not? He hadn’t been speaking out his ass earlier when he said they all had good reason to be thankful.
Glancing at Cameron, he found the once brooding and miserable loner smiling from the inside out. He perched on an ottoman at Calder’s knees, a cigar clenched between his teeth as the two engaged in a Slapsies contest.
Each time Cam whacked Calder’s hand, he’d shout out, “Blow me,” and laugh. A far, far cry from the empty shelled man he’d been before Lacey turned up. And now look at him. Married. Happy. A father. Shit. If happily ever after ever needed a mascot, it should probably be the Camerons.
Ben, the old fucker, was clearly up to no good. Although Alex couldn’t hear what he was saying, he had the distinct impression he was talking about him as Gus and Brody listened to whatever he was driveling with captivated expressions. Occasionally, one or all of the three men would glance his way and laugh. Not that he hadn’t provided an ample reserve of stories to tell practically every time he and Meghan took the limo out for a drive. But, Jesus. Was nothing private around here?
Drae, who was in the chair by his side, was quietly watching, too. They’d come a long fucking way from their earliest escapades when the two first met. Alex wondered whether he was also thinking about how damn lucky they all were.
Cam sauntered over and joined them after Calder exclaimed that his hands were giving up. Alex found an odd contentment knowing that his uncle and the two men he considered his closest brothers were long-time friends.
First, it had just been he and Drae hanging out at Calder’s beach house whenever they had R&R. But over time, Cameron became part of their inner circle, and after that, it had been just the four of them. Giving them refuge from the suck of war meant his mentor-uncle knew where some of the skeletons were buried.
“Hey, dude,” Cam hooted at Drae. “Know what I just realized?”
“That you’re a cock gobbler?” came the irreverent, sarcastic reply.
Cam snorted. “Well, you’d be the one to know now, wouldn’t you?”
Alex almost choked on the brandy he’d been swallowing when Draegyn grabbed at his crotch and pinned Cam with a haughty look.
In all honesty, these were some the times he enjoyed the most—when Cam and Drae were sniping at each other as the insults flew right and left.
Turning to Alex with mischief in his expression, Cam waved his cigar at Drae. “The way I figure if Calder hooks up with Tori’s mom, that will make him his fucking father-in-law!”
This time Alex did choke and sit forward quickly while Drae thumped him on the back.
“Holy shit,” Drae muttered.
Cam blew a couple of smoke rings and then started howling with laughter. “Holy fuck!” he yelled. “And that will make you two sorry pieces of shit, like…what? Cousins?”
Calder had joined them and was standing there with a mock-horrified look on his face. “Slow the fuck down boys,” he jeered. “Marriage is for the young.”
“Oh, come on,” Brody interjected. Apparently everyone was going to offer an opinion and climb on this bandwagon. With a look of pure innocence, he taunted Calder some more. “Don’t try and tell us you haven’t thought about it.”
“Humph,” Calder grunted. “I think about a lot of things—none of which I’ll be sharing with you pussies.”
Gus and Ben were racked with laughter at the exchange. Alex eyed them both then went for the gold. “What the fuck are you giggling about, Gus? And when the hell are you going to ball up and take control of my housekeeper?”
Drae and Cam grinned and rumbled, “Oooooh, snap.”
“He’s making a point,” Brody drawled with a sneer.
“I think they’ve got ya, buddy,” Ben added with raised eyebrows.
Gus looked around at all of them and reddened. Finally, he fixed Alex with a steady stare and chuckled, “Control, you say? You want me to control that lady? You’ve met her, right?”
“Caveman style, dude,” Cam joked. “Just smack her on the ass, heft her over your shoulder, and get on with it!”
“Shut the fuck up,” Gus mumbled.
They all barked with laughter and refilled their snifters.
He saw Cam considering Brody with a long, inquisitive look before he bluntly asked, “What’s with you and the mad baby skills? You’ve never struck me as the diaper changing type.”
And then an unusual silence descended as the dog guru clammed up. What in the hell is that all about, Alex wondered. He caught Brody’s glancing his way a second before he took a heavy gulp of the brandy.
A bunch of things happened all at once. Drae, the cool-headed analyst, sat up straight and leaned with his forearms on his thighs—staring at Jensen’s unsmiling face. Calder leaned a hip against the enormous wood desk and said nothing, but his expression suggested he sensed a disturbance in the force.
Cam seemed to be considering the question he’d posed—searching for an easy explanation for the abrupt change in Brody’s mood. Gus and Ben looked a lot like jurors considering evidence.
“I’ve got a kid,” Brody muttered into the heavy silence.
Alex froze. What the fuck? Brody Jensen was a father? How in the fucking fuck did that little fact escape a background check?
The quiet grew deeper. There was an odd humming in Alex’s head—maybe from the brandy—and he swore, if it happened, he could have heard a pea drop.
As usual, despite the brandy, Drae got there first.
“Let me get this straight—you…Brody Jensen. You have a kid? That none of us know about?” Astonished best described Drae’s delivery.
“Back East?” Alex mumbled. “Is that why you travel? For a kid?”
As quickly as his sluggish mind could, Alex reviewed the Jensen file in his head. The guy was the real fucking deal. Ex-Navy SEAL. What Alex knew, and he knew everything that wasn’t buried in some deep cavern of secrecy, was that Brody enlisted right out of high school. Knew how to handle a rifle so the SEALs scooped him right up.
Ten years total in Naval Special Warfare—lots of it so confidential the security clearance needed to access the info was beyond imaginable. Alex was able to uncover the fact that Jensen had been part of an elite sniper team. He didn’t dig deeper than that. Didn’t need to. He was Special Forces, after all, and knew all too well what being on a sniper team meant.
He had about seven years in when the unlucky S.O.B. got shot. In the fucking head. He recovered, but that pretty much meant the end to handling a rifle for an assignment. Somehow, he ended up in the Canine Corps training and handling the spectacular frontline dogs that serve such an important role in the military.
At twenty-nine, he left the Navy. Less than a year later, he was referred to the agency by one of Alex’s D.O.D. contacts. After finding out that he was capable of designing and offering a first rate dog program for the agency, they hired him. That was three years ago.
Just the three of them—he, Drae, and Cam—knew anything at all about the intense loner. Mostly, he kept to himself making an exception for the inner core of Family Justice. They knew he was from back East, and that he’d considered San Diego home base while in the SEALs. He managed to get a teaching certification when he left the military and started out on the faculty of a community college.
But he had issues. They all did. He’d seen some shit and done his share of things…the kind of stuff that kept a man awake at night, and before too long he was spiraling downward. That was when he came to their attention. His deal with the agency was simple—from the end of May until sometime in December—he was in charge of the canines searched out and recruited for agency training. And he ran his little doggie kingdom with an iron hand.
They didn’t poke around in what he did when he wasn’t in Arizona. He’d been open with them at first, explaining that he found a way to continue his work at the college on a semester-by-semester basis. Whether he had a girlfriend, a wife, a kid, a family of any kind…well, it never came up. And clearly it should have.
He’d asked Brody a question that the man reluctantly answered. “No. Going East has nothing to do with her.”
“You have a daughter?” The shocked wheeze in Gus’s question got a brief glance from Alex. He knew how the man felt.
“Aright, aright, aright,” Drae cut in with a quarter of a brandy slur. “This’ll get us nowhere. Just let me ask the questions and the rest of you turd blossoms shut the hell up and let me think.”
SHIT, BRODY THOUGHT. MAYBE HE should have thought that through before he blurted it out.
Only thing was, he’d been trying to tell Alex for the last couple of weeks, but just hadn’t found the words. He was getting tired of the back and forth and thought some changes might be in order, so he’d started talking to the boss—testing out scenarios that might lead to staying in Arizona full-time.
That didn’t mean he knew what in the hell to do about his complicated life on the other side of the country. Truth was—he was stuck. Couldn’t move forward in any direction and certainly couldn’t go back. Not until he knew for sure about the kid.
Calder put a beefy hand on his shoulder and pushed him down into a chair. The men gathered round him. It felt like a fucking intervention. Or an interrogation. In either case, he was screwed.
Drae was running his thumb and forefinger up and down the sides of his mouth, thinking. A pensive look on his face. Brody knew that when it came to picking apart the cold, hard facts of any situation, St. John was the go-to guy. Man had a mind like a steel trap.
Gus and Ben were hovering in the rear while Calder sat on the arm of the sofa, arms crossed, waiting.
It was Cam and Alex who held his attention while Drae gathered his thoughts. Alex had settled into a rigid pose, his face blank, and Cam just sat there, his mouth open, staring.
Drae approached him like a courtroom prosecutor. “So…bottom line. You have a daughter, and she’s not back East so when you leave here—it’s not because you’re off playing part-time dad somewhere.”
Uh, sure. Fair enough. He nodded.
Then the questions rained down on him like a sudden gulley-washer.
“How old is she?”
Brody sighed and held up four, then five fingers.
“Where is she?”
“Dunno,” he grumbled.
“Why not?”
“It’s complicated.”
Drae snorted and shook his head in disbelief. “Oh really? You’ve met us before, right?” he bit out, pointing furiously between the three of them. “Complicated is our agency motto. I think it’s even in the fucking logo, so don’t waste time blowing sunshine up my skirt.”
“Sorry, sir,” Brody muttered. When he saw Drae stiffen, he realized that when a voice of authority barked at him, he immediately defaulted to military mode.
Drae softened his manner and asked, “Explain why you don’t know where your five-year-old daughter is.”
Fuck. If only an explanation were possible. Four years after the fact and Brody himself didn’t know the real explanation. Oh, he knew what he’d been told, but figuring what was truth and what were the lies in this situation was a problem.
He groaned, “Ugh,” and put his head in his hands as he leaned forward. Sitting back, he shook himself mentally and just went for it.
”Okay. So here it is. My girlfriend got pregnant. I managed to be stateside when the kid came. Had four months and then the SEALs sent me on a deployment. While I was away, she wrote to me, said the kid wasn’t mine and that she was leaving San Diego to go live with her new boyfriend. Some fuck-nut named Simon. Said she was sorry for being a cunt but that she had to follow her heart.”
Every man in the room groaned or hissed. Solidarity was a good thing.
“By the time I completed my service commitment and got home, she was long gone.”
“Was the child yours or not, Brody?” Alex asked.
“Yeah. She was mine. Never had a test or anything—didn’t know it was necessary but for real, man. The kid was like a fucking doppelgänger when you put our baby photos side by side.”
“Why would your girlfriend leave?”
God. Draegyn St. John could be such a prick. Brody knew that part of the story was the weak link in the chain. Fucker.
“Okay. First of all. No fucking judgment, alright? I was young, completely SEAL brainwashed—ready to eat it at any second. Wasn’t looking for happily ever after or the girl next door.”
Calder mumbled, “Oh, this is gonna be rich.”
“Tracey was an exotic dancer.” The admission filled in a hundred blanks and was deserving of the dead silence that descended.
Eventually, Drae coughed, smacked his hands together and rubbed them back and forth. “Alrighty then. Here’s what we have. Navy SEAL with an R&R hard-on and his exotic dancer, um, girlfriend, have a kid and play house for a couple of months. Your ass gets shipped out and next thing you know, Tracey, I fucking hate that name by the way,” Drae interjected, “sends you a poison pen fuck you, takes your kid, and hightails it to who knows the fuck where.”
“Why the hell didn’t you tell me this a couple of years ago, man?” Alex criticized with a deep frown. “I mean, fuck, Jensen. You do know that this is what the agency does, right? Locate people. Get to the bottom of things.”
“I know,” he apologized solemnly. “At first, I was just too fucked up in the head to even think about it and now, well…now. I just want to know the truth.”
Cam, who had stretched back in his seat, his legs out in front of him, ankles crossed looking like he was ready for a siesta, spoke up. “Tracking is my superpower. I’ll find her, dude. Make no mistake about that.”
After that, the seven men sat and talked quietly for a bit until Drae finally had enough.
“Think the ladies are finished whatever they’re doing? It’s late and Victoria is probably beat.”
Brody looked at him and saw nothing but an eager husband, yearning for some alone time with his new wife. It was the reminder they all needed that this wasn’t about his shit-tacular personal life and that a celebration was going on.