Page 20

CHAPTER TWENTY

C allan focused on his surroundings.

A sheet and blanket over him.

A soft pillow beneath his head.

Far away, a door slammed. Voices carried, getting louder at first, then fading.

Nearby, it was quiet. A heater hummed, which explained his desire to throw off the covers.

He didn’t, though. Not yet.

Not until he remembered where he was.

Though he didn’t open his eyes, light shined against his lids. Sunshine? Lamplight?

Another sound, fainter. Breathing. And tapping on a keyboard.

He inhaled through his nose, picking up the subtle scents of jasmine and vanilla.

Which brought it all back.

The escape. The long drive to Portland. The hotel that had no adjoining rooms and no suites.

His irrational fear of being separated from Alyssa.

Her telling the clerk that they both needed two keys.

She’d taken one of his, he’d taken one of hers. He’d walked her to her door, and when she was inside, stumbled into his own room across the hall, head pounding, stomach roiling.

Now, though he hadn’t moved, Alyssa said, “You’re awake.”

His breathing must have changed. He didn’t think he snored, but then, he didn’t generally sleep in the presence of others, so how would he know?

He opened his eyes.

The curtains were closed, but sunlight glowed around the edges. In front of the windows, Alyssa sat at her laptop at a little square table. She wore jeans, a pale pink blouse, and a navy-blue cardigan. Her hair fell in natural waves over her shoulders. Despite everything they’d gone through the night before, she looked gorgeous.

He imagined he looked—and smelled—far worse.

She was squinting at him.

“There’s this thing we humans enjoy,” he said. “Some of us even think we’re entitled to it.” His voice was scratchy, but he pressed on. “It’s called privacy.”

He expected a smile, but her brows lowered. “I thought you might be dead.”

“Just sleeping, another thing we humans enjoy.”

She made a show of checking her phone screen. “Most humans don’t sleep for ten straight hours.”

He sat up too fast, the movement making him lightheaded, which he did his best to conceal as he reached for his phone.

He found it plugged into the charger, though he hadn’t done that the night before. He’d managed little besides peeling out of his clothes and brushing his teeth. He’d been pretty proud of himself for thinking to grab their toothbrushes and toothpaste from the bathroom the night before and shoving the items into his bag.

He was still melting—had to be seventy-five degrees in the room—but he couldn’t exactly throw off the covers, considering he wore nothing but boxers. “Why are you here?”

“You had a concussion. When you didn’t answer my knock, I got worried. My uncle told me to check on you, so?—”

“Your uncle?”

Her head tilted to one side. “I know I told you?—”

“Right, right.” He brushed her off. “Uncle Roger, the doctor. You called him?”

“Like I said, I was worried. He told me you were probably fine but it wouldn’t hurt to make sure, so I let myself in and checked your pulse.”

She’d checked his pulse, and he’d slept right through it?

Disconcerting didn’t begin to cover how that felt. “And you’re still here because…?”

“Because checkout was hours ago.” She snapped her laptop closed. “Who knew you’d sleep until two o’clock.”

Right.

Too much information before coffee.

She pushed to her feet. “I assume you’d like that privacy now. Why don’t I get us something to eat? Anything sound good?”

Now that she mentioned it, he was starving. “Anything, and a Coke. I need caffeine.”

“Would you rather have coffee? There’s a Dunkin’ Donuts?—”

“No. It’s a thousand degrees in this room.”

Her eyes narrowed. “It’s not warm.” She stepped closer and laid a palm on his forehead.

Her hand was cool, her touch soft and tender.

“You don’t feel feverish.” She slid her hand to his cheeks. “Do you have a headache? Are you?—?”

“I’m fine. It’s just these blankets.” He hadn’t meant to snap, but sheesh. He needed her out of his bedroom. He tempered his tone. “Sorry. I’m cranky when I’m hungry.”

And when I wake up to find uninvited guests in my bedroom. Even gorgeous ones who smell like springtime and make my stupid heart go haywire.

“Right.” She backed away. “If you’re sure, I’ll be back soon.” She snatched the car keys off the bureau and headed for the door. “I left a note for you earlier with the number to the cellphone Malcolm gave me. Call or text if you think of anything. Oh, and I grabbed you some clean clothes. I wasn’t sure what sizes you’d want, so I made my best guess.”

Sure enough, a sack rested next to where she’d found his keys.

She walked out, leaving him alone. And as much as he told himself he was glad for it, he already looked forward to her return.

* * *

While Alyssa was out, Callan showered and dressed in the clothes she’d bought him—joggers and a T-shirt. She’d even grabbed a package of boxers. Awkward that she was buying his underwear, though they fit well enough.

Considering Benson-the-thug had hit him pretty hard the night before, most of his injuries weren’t visible. His headache was better, thanks to the ibuprofen Alyssa had left on top of the sack. He had a slight bruise on his cheek, and his lip was swollen.

When he finished cleaning up, he texted Malcolm, who responded immediately.

Sit tight. We’re formulating a plan.

Shouldn’t Callan be a part of that? He and Alyssa were the ones who’d been at Ghazi’s house.

If it were up to Callan, Ghazi and his people would be taken into custody and treated like the terrorists they were.

But it wasn’t up to Callan.

He emailed Michael Wright, who knew more about Dariush Ghazi than anybody else in the Agency. Callan described the photograph he’d seen in the man’s room and asked if he had any idea who she was.

Probably didn’t matter, but more information was always better.

An hour later, Callan finished off the meal Alyssa had picked up from an upscale pub nearby.

He’d expected her to come in with fast-food bags, but she rarely did what was expected, not that he was complaining. He’d been wary when he’d first seen the topping, not ketchup or mustard but some kind of bacon chutney.

Bacon, anytime. But chutney?

It was beyond delicious.

She’d already finished her salad and sat on the chair opposite him at the square table, feet propped on the bed, glancing at the laptop resting on her thighs. Her brows lowered, and her lips dipped in a frown.

“Something wrong?”

“Brooklynn called.”

Sister number two. “You gave her your number?”

“No. When I didn’t answer, she texted. I get my texts on my laptop.” She looked up. “Don’t worry. I’ve already disconnected my cell phone. Even if they can get past my passcode, they can’t track me.”

“I wasn’t worried. You know what you’re doing.” He pointed with his chin to her computer. “Something wrong?”

Alyssa read the screen. “She wants to talk to me about Grams and Pop’s party and is wondering why I haven’t answered her calls. I told her I lost my phone. I figure I shouldn’t give her the number to the one Malcolm provided. I’ll just text and tell her I’m not going to make the party.”

“Don’t do that until we hear back from Malcolm.”

He had a bad feeling about what his boss might say, though he wasn’t ready to let Alyssa in on his worries yet.

“I need to let them know. They’re going to be mad, but it’ll be so much worse if I cancel at the last minute?—”

“Then you’ll explain at the time. For now, don’t say anything, please.” He nodded to the hotel phone. “Call your sister from that, if you want.”

“I’ll just text her.”

“She wants to talk to you. I can leave, if you want privacy.”

“That’s not it.”

His face must’ve displayed his surprise because she said, “If I wanted to talk to her, I would.”

Interesting. Callan didn’t reject his own sister’s calls unless he legitimately couldn’t talk, even though lately, Hannah mostly gave him a hard time about his life choices. Not that he didn’t deserve it. Bossy as his little sister could be, he’d never avoided her calls. “Why aren't you close with them?”

She snatched his trash and shoved it in the can, ignoring his question.

“Are you close to your parents?” he asked.

“Mom and I, yeah.”

He lifted his eyebrows, figuring his expression asked the question.

“I’ve always been a disappointment to my father. I don’t even want to think about what he’d say if he knew the trouble I’m in now.”

“It’s not your fault. You did your homework on Sanders. You couldn’t have?—”

“It’s fine.” She lifted a hand to silence him. “His opinion of me is well deserved.”

“What are you talking about? You’re smart. You’re successful. You’re”—he almost said beautiful but managed to shift in time to—“capable. If your father doesn’t see that, then he’s blind.”

Alyssa settled in the chair across from him again and grabbed her laptop. Focused on it.

He was about to try again when she sighed.

“Dad honors achievement. What have I achieved? All I ever wanted was to follow him into the CIA. I failed there.” Her eyes narrowed in a glare. “Thanks to you.”

“Me?” He sat back, surprised. “What did I do?”

“We both applied for the same job. Despite the fact that I’d been working for the NSA in intelligence for years, they gave it to you.”

“I didn’t know you were up for that job.” He shouldn’t be pleased he’d bested her, especially considering it’d been more important than class rank—she’d beat him by about a tenth of a percentage point—or the software development contest they’d both entered.

He’d won that one.

“I was qualified for it,” she said. “More qualified than you were.”

He laughed without amusement. “That’s quite an assumption.”

“Come on, Callan. I was already working in intelligence. You were off in the Army.”

“I worked for INSCOM. Army intelligence.”

“Oh.” She blinked, then tilted her head to the side. “Really?”

“For the last three years of my service. What did you think, that they just…liked me more?”

“I thought…I thought you got the job because of your military experience. And because you’re a man.”

“It never crossed your mind that I might actually be more qualified.”

She closed her laptop and tossed it onto the bed beside her. “I didn’t think about it that way. I didn’t realize you were… I should’ve gone into the service. I was going to, but Dad told me not to. He said I wouldn’t need military experience. And then when I failed to get the job, he just acted like…like he wasn’t surprised. Like he’d never believed for a minute I could do it.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t that.”

“Trust me. It was.”

“Does he act like that toward your sisters?”

Alyssa shrugged, gazing out the window. It was a rainy afternoon, typical for springtime in Maine.

Callan had turned on all the lights in the room to chase away the dreariness.

But darkness crossed Alyssa’s face, her lips tightening as if she’d pressed them closed to keep whatever bothered her inside.

He should let it go. It was none of his business. But his whole life was about keeping—and exposing—secrets.

“Tell me the story.”

“Who says there’s a story?”

He raised his eyebrows, not letting her off the hook.

She snatched her cardigan from the top of the bureau and slipped it on. Enough time passed that he was sure she wasn’t going to answer.

She settled on the bed across from him. “It was a long time ago. I shouldn’t even…” Her voice trailed, and again, he kept silent.

“When I was twelve, my parents had to go to some event on the opposite side of Portland, about an hour away from our house. I’d taken a babysitting class, and they’d left me home with my sisters a couple of times. But this night, they hired a sitter. I was mad. I knew I could handle it.”

Callan couldn’t imagine leaving Peri home alone, ever. There was a big difference between eight and twelve, but even so, the thought of all the things that could go wrong had his pulse racing.

“Mom was the overprotective one,” Alyssa said. “It was the only time Dad ever took my side. He told Mom I could handle it. ‘You’ve got to trust your kids if you ever want them to be trustworthy.’” Alyssa had affected a man’s voice. “I thought for sure Mom would relent, but she said they were going to be gone too long and were going too far to risk it.

“After they left, I decided to prove Mom wrong—and Dad right. I thought I’d make him proud.”

By her smirk, things hadn’t gone according to plan.

“That evening, while the babysitter played with my little sisters upstairs, I decided to cook dinner. Mom had gotten some take-and-bake pizzas. I preheated the oven, then slid the pizzas in and set the timer. Once they were cooking, I joined the game my sisters and the babysitter were playing, thinking about how surprised they’d be when the timer went off.”

“What happened?”

“Before, when my mother had gotten take-home pizzas, they’d come on their own baking trays. But these didn’t.”

“Oh, no.”

“Yeah. I put them in the oven on the cardboard, and the cardboard caught fire. It wouldn’t have been a huge deal if I’d been watching them. I would have noticed and gotten the fire put out. But we were upstairs. I was just picking up the scent of smoke when the alarm went off.

“I thought the oven contained most of the damage, but the babysitter insisted we call the fire department anyway. Which…it’s stupid in retrospect because obviously, I wasn’t going to be able to hide the damage, but I didn’t want my father to find out what I’d done. That was my biggest fear. Not the fact that I could’ve killed us all, but that I might get in trouble. That I might disappoint him.”

Callan wasn’t sure what to say, so he just nodded for her to continue.

“The fire department came. If I’d been in charge, the whole house would’ve burned down. Somehow, the fire had spread into the walls. We lost most of the kitchen, but it could’ve been so much worse.”

“Aw, I’m sorry.” He reached for her, but if she saw his hand outstretched, she pretended not to.

“I’ll never forget the disappointment on my father’s face that night. He could barely look at me.”

“I’m sure it just scared him.”

Alyssa met his eyes. “He called me a stupid, foolish little girl.”

Anger sent Callan’s heart pounding. “He said that? To your face?”

“He said it to my mother. I’m sure he didn’t mean for me to hear.”

“Your father sounds like a world-class jerk.”

“He’s not.” Alyssa’s lips slid into an almost-smile. “He was just angry and disappointed.”

“You were a kid.”

“I know that. He shouldn’t have said those things, even if he believed them. Dad was never great at the whole fatherhood thing.” Now that her story was over, she seemed to relax a little. “I think being a parent takes practice. It takes time, but Dad was always too busy, off on assignments or at work. I mean, we lived in Maine, but he worked in DC. He usually came home on weekends, but there were times when we’d go weeks without seeing him. Even after he retired from the Agency and went into the private sector, he was away as much as he was home. I don’t think he ever really learned how to be a father.”

Alyssa couldn’t know how her words wounded Callan.

Here he was, judging Gavin Wright for being a lousy parent while he himself had hardly spent any time with his own child.

Gavin had probably felt capable at work. He’d probably felt incompetent at home.

He’d probably told himself that his daughters didn’t need him. They had their mother, after all. But Alyssa had needed her father’s love and approval.

The difference was that, no matter what Peri did, Callan adored her. But if his little girl didn’t know that, what good would his love prove to be?

That was a question that required contemplation.

The answers would require him to change his life and dedicate himself to his daughter.

Alyssa was watching him as though trying to read his thoughts.

“I’m sorry about what I said last night during our fake argument.” He couldn’t remember his exact words. Something about how she was working for Charles to prove to her father she wasn’t a failure.

Maybe that wasn’t really what drove her, but he guessed she had to fight that motivation a lot.

Alyssa waved off his apology. “You couldn’t have known. And I shouldn’t care.” But she did.

“Your dad sounds like a hard man to please.”

She propped her hands on the bed behind her, leaning back on them. “He was. Still is.”

“Are you…?” He worked to figure out how to ask his question. “Does your father help you out, financially? Or are you cut off, or…?”

“He helps more than I want him to.”

“Meaning?”

“Like with my apartment. When I quit the NSA, he was furious, even suggesting that he’d helped me get the job—as if I couldn’t have done it without him. It was the first time in my adult life that I ever defied him, which is…pathetic, I know.”

“You’re an adult, Alyssa. The fact that your father issues orders and you feel like, in refusing to do them, you’re defying him? That tells me more about him than it tells me about you. You get to make your own decisions.”

“Yeah, well… The point is, I had a plan. My cousin Sam has a brilliant business mind, and he helped me draw it up and even loaned me the startup money. I decided to move to Boston instead of back to Shadow Cove in order to be close to potential clients. I rented an apartment and gave my two weeks’ notice, and then I told my father.

“After Dad quit railing about what a stupid decision I’d made, he told me the area where I planned to live wasn’t safe enough. He signed a lease and demanded I live in the Back Bay apartment instead.”

“He demanded it, and you did it?”

She dipped her head side to side. “Probably the wrong choice of words. He strongly suggested it, and I would have refused if he hadn’t gotten Mom on his side. She suggested I was being stubborn—which I was—and that my safety was more important than proving to my father I didn’t need his help. I relented for her sake.”

“He pays for it?” At her nod, Callan said, “It’s a nice building.”

“So much for it being safe, though.” Alyssa’s smile surprised him until he realized that the break-in proved her father wrong. She was enjoying that, anyway.

“So you’re not still trying to please him?”

She shrugged. “Don’t you want to please your parents?”

“My parents have always been encouraging. Growing up, I never felt like they were disappointed in me.”

She tilted her head to the side. “Do you feel like they are now?”

“What?” He played back what he’d said, how he’d said it. Growing up… “No. They’re…no.”

He was lying. He didn’t just guess his parents’ disapproval. He knew it. They kept waiting for him to take on the role he’d been thrust into. And he kept…not doing it.

Any excuse to stay away, stay where he knew what he was doing.

He should tell Alyssa about Peri. She’d shared her story with him, after all. But the last thing he wanted was for Alyssa to realize what a terrible father he was. What a terrible person.

He liked this woman, far more than he should. Far more than he’d even admitted to himself.

But this relationship couldn’t go beyond where it was right now. He and Alyssa needed to figure out what to do about Ghazi, and then Callan needed to focus on Peri.

He couldn’t let himself be distracted by the beautiful blondewho studied him as if she could see right through him.

His cell phone rang, and he was grateful for an excuse to end the conversation. Not that he wasn’t happy to know Alyssa’s secrets, but he wasn’t ready to share any of his own.