Page 7

Chapter Six

J enn hurried into the studio, shutting the door behind her. “ Any news?”

Angie and Kristen had convinced her to go to work at her internship in the Tampa Social Services department for a few hours, since there was nothing any of them could do but wait and worry.

The heads of the Sawyer family weren’t her biological grandparents, but she’d been calling them Grandpa and Grandma since she’d been a little girl.

Her mother’s and father’s parents had all died before Jenn had reached the age of three, so Chuck and Marie had happily filled that void in her life for all these years.

“ Not yet, sweetie,” Fancy answered from her perch on the couch.

“ Grab a drink and a plate from the kitchen and come have some pizza.” She gestured to two opened boxes sitting on the coffee table between the group of women.

From the looks of things though, nobody had been really hungry, except maybe Mara , who was stuffing plain, rotini pasta into her mouth, and JD who had his fist in his mouth.

After a pit stop in the kitchen, Jenn joined everyone gathered in the sitting area, taking a seat next to Harper and sliding a cheese slice onto her plate. “ What time are they supposed to land?”

“ Not until around 7:30 tonight, our time, which is 7:30 in the morning there. Figuring that out is the easy part—just don’t ask me what day it is over there—that always gets me all confused.

Plus a day? Minus a day? Unless I’m making reservations somewhere, it doesn’t make a bit of difference to me. ”

Jenn picked at her piece of pizza and glanced across the room to where Kristen was talking on the phone and she didn’t look happy. Her aunt slammed down the cordless receiver and strode toward them. Jenn’s eyes widened. “ What’s wrong? What did I miss?”

Flopping into one of the recliners, Kristen grabbed her laptop from a side table.

“ Someone plagiarized Hearts Ablaze ! I have to send Amazon proof that I hold the sole copyright to the book and other stuff. I don’t know why they can’t just look and see that I’ve had it published for years before this .

..” She furtively glanced at Mara . “... B - I - T - C - H came along. Shelby , can you use my desktop computer to take screen shots of both my book and the stolen version? I have to send them too—just the first few pages. I have to go through my files for the copyright and then write a Cease & Desist letter. Once I send them everything, and they see I’m telling the truth, they’ll remove the other listing. ”

Jenn was appalled anyone would do that, steal someone else’s hard work and pass it off as their own, but it wasn’t the first time she’d heard of it happening.

She just felt bad that this time it’d been done to someone she loved—and at the worst possible time.

With Marie missing, Kristen didn’t need this right now. “ Can I do anything to help?”

Kristen sighed, and her shoulders sagged. “ After you eat, would you mind trying to get JD down for a nap?”

“ Of course!” She loved the little boy she considered her nephew. His smile and dimples were the highlight of her day, every day.

“ Thanks , I really appreciate it.”

Twenty minutes later, Jenn had finished her lunch and JD was in a fresh diaper.

Since he was a little fussy, Jenn put him in his stroller and took him for a walk around the compound, hoping the motion would lull him to sleep.

Beau , of course, joined them. Ian’s dog took his protective watch seriously.

If JD was out and about, so was Beau , watching his six, as Jenn’s uncles would say.

As she rounded the corner of the apartment building, to take a stroll through Ian’s Oasis , the beautiful yard Angie had created for him, Jenn groaned and wished she could turn around, but it was too late.

Doug Henderson was heading her way and had already spotted her.

It would make her look like the immature woman he thought she was if she turned around and pretended she hadn’t seen him.

That was the last thing she wanted. Ever since the one and only kiss she’d shared with the man, who was over seven years her senior, she wanted him more than ever.

Unfortunately , he didn’t feel the same way, and she’d embarrassed herself in front of him.

Just the thought of how he’d turned her down after that amazing kiss made her blush.

It was hot enough, though, so she could blame it on the sun.

Pasting on an expression of indifference, she tried to act like the sight of him wasn’t breaking her heart. “ Something wrong, Doug ?”

He stopped in front of the stroller and gave the baby a quick smile.

“ Hey , kiddo.” His gaze then flittered to Jenn .

“ No , nothing’s wrong, at least not here.

I was heading over to the studio to check in with Kristen and Angie .

The Steel Corps team landed in the Philippines and met up with Carter and Jordyn . ”

T . Carter and his girlfriend, Jordyn Alvarez , were good friends of Jenn’s uncles.

While they were introduced to most people as the executives of an import/export company, Jenn knew that wasn’t true.

She didn’t know the extent of who they really were, but they were operatives for one of the US agencies.

She suspected the CIA or NSA but wasn’t certain.

All she did know was that if anyone at Trident needed them, the couple would be there in a heartbeat and vice versa.

Carter had even helped rescue Jenn and Angie when they’d been taken hostage a few years ago.

“ Do they know where Grandma Marie is yet?”

Doug hesitated, and that made her stomach drop. But then he said, “ I don’t have all the details, but they’ve been able to track the signal from her watch to a residential area. We think she and the nurse are okay for now. I wish I could tell you more but ...”

“ That’s okay. I’m used to it.” Her father had been on the same SEAL team as Ian , Devon , Brody , Jake , Marco , and Boomer .

Between the seven of them, they had a lot of secrets about their classified missions that they couldn’t tell anyone who didn’t “need to know.” She’d learned a long time ago she wouldn’t get the details of any of their tours or assignments.

Her parents had been killed because of one of those secrets during Jenn’s senior year in high school.

Since then, she’d been trying to deal with that fact as best she could.

“ Well , at least I can give Kristen some good news.” He held up a piece of paper. “ With a little help from Nathan , I was able to figure out who her plagiarist is.”

Jenn’s eyes went wide. “ Who ?”

“ Some twenty-three-year-old guy in Canada pretending to be a woman. He’s in a lot of author and reader groups on Facebook under his real name and has an author page under the fake one.”

“ Seriously ? How’d you find that out?”

He shrugged and gave her a sheepish smile. “ It was more Nathan’s doing than mine. I just did what he told me to do and searched what he said to search. How he can work more than one problem at a time is beyond me. The kid’s a genius and deserves every penny the bosses pay him.”

Jenn had no idea how much her uncles were paying Nathan , but it had obviously been enough to lure him into the private sector.

He was also a really nice guy, just a couple of years older than her.

When her e-reader had been giving her trouble recently, and Brody hadn’t been around, Nathan had quickly fixed it for her.

“ Will Kristen be able to sue him for any money he’s gotten from the stolen book?”

“ Yeah , but I’m not too sure it would be worth her time. Nathan had me use this tool that showed the rankings for the book since it’d been published, and at most, he only made about a hundred bucks or so. If he’d had a larger following, it might have been a different story.”

JD started to fuss, so Jenn pushed the stroller back and forth. “ So , he gets away with it?”

“ That’s up to her. I just checked, and all three of the guy’s books are down.

From what Kristen told me earlier, he’ll probably get his entire account shut down too.

My guess is he saw some scam post or something about how to publish books without writing them and make a lot of money.

I found a bunch of them while I was researching the guy.

There’s a scam for everything nowadays.”

“ Seems to be.” Jenn scrambled to think of something else to say, something that would keep Doug there, talking to her.

This was the first real conversation they’d had since the kiss they’d shared, and she didn’t want it to end.

God , she was a hopeless romantic whose object of her affection wanted to be nothing more than friends at the very most, and acquaintances that barely said hello to each other, at the very least.

In the uncomfortable silence that ensued, Doug glanced down at the stroller, then lowered his voice. “ He’s asleep.”

Leaning forward, Jenn peered under the shade canopy. Sure enough, JD was out like a light, and that gave her an idea. “ Great . I’ll walk back to the studio with you. It’s cooler in there for him.” Anything to spend a few more minutes with the man who owned her heart—too bad he didn’t want it.