Chapter 13

Chelsea pursed her bee-stung lips, and Dagan was sorely tempted to lean forward and take her up on the invitation she’d unwittingly sent him. But something was…off with her. So he remained where he was, satisfying himself with simply touching her, watching as her big, expressive eyes searched his face.

The longer she looked at him, the more he felt his chances of being with her slipping through his fingers. It reminded him of the mist that had crept over Lake Erie in the springtime. Or his brother’s sobriety in those early years. Here one minute, gone the next. Impossible to hold on to.

His heart beat sickly. Maybe he had been wrong to hope. Maybe there really was no way a woman like her could—

“I’m done playing the field,” she told him in a rush. That sounded fine by him. Just the idea of her with another man… Uh, no. Negative. No fuckin’ way. “I want a man who’s ready to take the next steps in life. Who’s ready for marriage. Who wants children.”

Marriage? Children? Seriously?

With Black Knights Inc. going civilian, he didn’t know where he’d be in a year, who he’d be in a year. He was no mechanic, so there’d be nothing for him to do for the shop. Not to mention there was Avan.

Always, there is Avan.

His mind was ripped back to the day of his father’s aneurysm. Dagan had been home on spring break from graduate school, and Avan was about to finish his freshman year at Ohio State University. They had all been in the kitchen, laughing over some ridiculous thing involving their batty neighbor who kept potbellied pigs. And then their father had suddenly stopped and sat down on the linoleum floor right beside the kitchen table.

Dagan remembered exchanging a look with Avan before squatting beside his father…

“Dad?” He squeezed his old man’s knee. “What’s up?”

His father looked up at him, and there was something funny going on with his eyes. “Head,” his father said, sounding breathless, blinking quickly. “Pop.”

Dagan didn’t know much about human biology, other than what he had learned in his science classes, but he knew something was definitely wrong with his dad. Fear became a poisonous flower that bloomed in his chest as he turned to Avan. “Call 911!” he yelled, then swung back to his father. “Dad, hang on, okay? We’ll have help coming soon.”

His father stared up at him, but there was a haze in his eyes, as if he couldn’t see clearly. The grip of his dad’s hand when he grabbed Dagan’s shoulder, however, was as strong as ever. “Take care…” His father shuddered. In pain? In fear? Dagan didn’t know. He was so helpless. So wretchedly helpless.

“Yes!” he heard his brother yelling into the phone. “That’s right! Come right away! I think my dad is having a stroke or a heart attack or—”

“Dagan.” His father’s hand squeezed tighter.

“Don’t try to talk, Dad. Just—”

“Your brother.” His father cut him off. “Take care of…” He shuddered again. “Your brother.”

“I will, Dad. I—”

“Promise.” The hand on his arm had become a vise.

“I swear it! But, Dad, you don’t have to—”

That’s all Dagan managed before his father’s eyes rolled back and he tumbled to his side, dead.

Dagan’s flashbacks didn’t always involve Afghanistan.

And that promise? The promise to take care of Avan? Well, he’d failed to keep it at first. He had been too busy in graduate school, then too busy being recruited by and going to work for the CIA. But the day he had received that call in Afghanistan that Avan was in the hospital recovering from an overdose was the day he had known he could no longer shirk his duty to his brother or sidestep his promise to his father.

He had put in for a transfer stateside and had gone about handing off his assets to other agents. Then had come the bombing and his ultimate ejection from the CIA.

With no job and very limited savings, Dagan hadn’t had the cash to book his brother into the ninety-day recovery program Avan had so desperately needed. So when Senator Aldus had approached Dagan about an off-the-books job to find missing files, Dagan had jumped at the chance to make some much-needed moolah. Little had he known that the senator was corruption incarnate, and the files Dagan had been hired to retrieve were proof of Aldus’s criminal endeavors. By the time he had found out, it was almost too late.

Luckily for him, that job for the senator had put him in the path of the Black Knights. They had seen something in him. Something beyond the dishonorable discharge from the Company. Something more than the man who’d been duped by one of his own government officials.

They had offered him a job, and it had paid for Avan’s rehab. Both that first time, and then again two years later when Avan fell off the wagon.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

But it wasn’t the past that was making Dagan’s heart beat too fast now. It was the future. Where would he go? What would he do? How would he continue to keep an eye on his little brother or make the money it would take to put Avan through rehab for a third time, should he need it?

Dagan knew the answers to none of that. Was terrified of all those unknowns, in fact. And here was Chelsea talking about marriage and children.

“For God’s sake, Chels.” Dagan ran a hand over his beard. “Don’t we get to have fun before we get serious?”

“That’s my point.” She speared him with a knowing look. “No. We don’t. Or at least I don’t. I know you, Z.” He really wished she’d go back to calling him Dagan. “I know you haven’t thought about what happens after we scratch our itch.” The fact that she’d hit the proverbial nail on the head made him shift uncomfortably. “Are you going to move to Washington to be with me? Are you going to leave Avan in Chicago to fend for himself?”

“I…” He shook his head, unable to go on. He could hear the mad rush of blood in the hollows of his ears.

Her expression softened, and she reached down to pat the hand he still had wrapped around her ankle. She might have the curves of an Amazon, but she had the bones of a bird, so small, so fragile. “I know,” she said. “Let’s agree to be friends, okay?”

The sickly beat of his heart had turned positively bilious. “Naked friends?” He forced a smile he knew didn’t come within spitting distance of his eyes.

She chuckled, but he noticed her smile didn’t reach her eyes either. “You’re a hard man to—”

That’s all she managed before the sound of feet pounding down the metal steps interrupted her. “You two better come back topside,” Emily said, standing on the second-to-last tread. “Looks like we could have trouble.”