think those men took him?” She was beginning to feel light-headed. “They wouldn’t hurt him, would they?”
He didn’t say anything, just squeezed her hand, the car flying over the road. It was getting late, so that traffic was beginning to thin, not much standing in their way.
She pulled away to wrap her arms around herself. “He isn’t my husband,” she said at last, dazed.
“Boyfriend? I guess he’s the father of your boys?”
She held Reid’s somber gaze when he glanced over. Bit her lip. Sooner or later… It wasn’t as if he wanted anything to do with them anyway. God, she’d been dreaming about this moment, wishing for this miracle for so long. And now that her most impossible dream had come true, nothing was as it should have been. It broke her heart.
She ignored the pain and filled her lungs. “No. You are,” she told him.
Chapter Three
He almost drove into oncoming traffic. Reid eased off the gas and straightened the steering wheel, trying to get his racing mind under control. “This would not be the best time to mess with me.”
She said nothing.
“How is that possible?” Don’t be an idiot, he thought as soon as the words were out of his mouth, just as she said the exact same thing out loud.
He swallowed back a snappy response. Okay, so, yes, they’d done the necessary deed. But still, a pregnancy wasn’t possible. But if he wasn’t the father, then who was? Why wasn’t he told that she was pregnant? He had asked for an update on her after he’d been evacuated from Hopeville. Someone had gone out, checked on her and reported back that she was fine.
Of course, her pregnancy might not have been showing at the time. The report had focused on the fact that her butcher shop had burned, too, but she’d received enough insurance money to rebuild. Not that he hadn’t felt guilty anyway.
He stole a look at her from the corner of his eye and decided to play along, figure out what her game was. “Which one?” She’d said Zak and Nate.
“Both. They’re twins.”
He gave a strangled cough as saliva went down the wrong way. He had to give it to her, when she did some thing, she really went to town with it. He loosened his hands on the steering wheel, which he’d been gripping so hard, his knuckles were beginning to ache.
“How did the fire start?” she asked.
And his muscles tightened again. “I can’t talk about that.”
Her voice deepened with anger. “I think you owe me an explanation.”
Words she stole right out of his mouth. He waited a couple of seconds while he arranged his thoughts. He could give her the generalities. She did deserve something. “I was watching someone I suspected was a member of a group we had an interest in.”
“We?”
He didn’t respond.
“Law enforcement? Some government agency?”
“Something along those lines. Anyway, there was a leak somewhere. They figured out who I was. They came after me.”
She was watching him, wide-eyed. “But then whose body was that in the ashes?”
Right. The body she had buried. An image rose in his mind—her standing by a headstone carved with his name. No reason he should feel bad about that—he’d just been doing his job—but he felt like a jerk anyway. “I took one of them out before they got to me.”
That revelation silenced her for only a second. “How did you get out?”
“I wasn’t as dead as they thought when they set the place on fire. I crawled off, called for help. The decision was made that it’d be best if I wasn’t officially resurrected.”
“You could have told me.” Her voice was full of accusation.
“I was under orders not to. And the less you knew the safer you were.” The safer I was.
If they’d spent any more time together, if he’d gone back… She would have become a complication. She would have made him vulnerable. He couldn’t afford that. No weaknesses were allowed in his line of work. Soft spots had a way of turning deadly. He’d had to cut her off before she could come to mean too much to him.
She took a few seconds to digest his words. “Who were you watching?” she asked after a while.
He considered how much he could tell her. He was skating dangerously close to lines he should not cross. “Remember the gun shop across the strip mall?”
“Jimmy Sparks? Weird guy with the shaved head and the red goatee?”
He nodded.
“He closed shop and moved to Nevada right after the fire.”
“Not exactly. He realized we were onto him and took off. Location unknown.” Along with his buddies. That whole operation had ended as a total bust, not one of his finest moments. It had taken two years of hard work to get this close again. And not a moment too soon. The cell was getting ready to pull off something major, after having practiced on single victims.
Reid hoped Jimmy would surface before it was all over. The two of them had a score to settle.
“Did he…kill anyone?” she asked, white-faced. “Why were you watching him?”
“He, um, made stuff.” That was as much information as he was willing to divulge for now.
But she was quick on the uptake. “Oh. With his resources…” Her violet eyes went wide. She shook her head, muttering, “The butcher, the baker and the bomb maker,” under her breath.
He couldn’t help a pained grin. “A nursery rhyme for the twenty-first century, huh?”
She shook her head, looking dazed. “In Hopeville? It doesn’t seem real.”
Welcome to my world, he thought, but didn’t say it. Truth was he didn’t want her in his world. He wanted her as far from his world as could be arranged. The second she was bundled up with her kids in a safe house somewhere, he was putting as much distance between them as possible.
Now she knew he was alive. She could stop going to the damn cemetery. She had closure, or whatever she thought she needed. Best thing for her was to forget him.
THE REST OF THE TWO-HOUR drive from New York to Hopeville was spent mostly in silence, questions asked now and then and sparingly answered, both of them just trying to deal.
Reid called in once they were on her street. “I’m here. We’re going in to get the kids. I want an invisible escort back to the highway, then I’m good. What did you find for me?” He memorized the address he was given. “Thanks.”
He pulled into the driveway. “Stay.” He got out, looked around, made two unmarked cop cars down
