Kansas City Christmas (16 page)

“Blake, we need to go,” his attorney advised.

But Blake was on a tear and he needed to spew. “What kind of poison did you put into your sister’s head? She used to be fun.”

“You mean she used to cater to your every whim. She’s healthy now. She stands on her own two feet. Jillian doesn’t need your money or any of the drugs you supplied her anymore.”

He pushed against her hand. “Sounds like slander to me, lady. I’m not that man anymore. I like Jillian. I bought tickets for us to take a vacation together.”

“She won’t go.”

“You won’t let her!”

The attorney tried one more time. “Blake, technically, you can’t go, either.”

“Shut up!”

All at once, Blake jerked back. Through a flurry of grunts and curses, she saw Edward behind him. Before Holly could do more than gasp, he had Blake shoved up against the wall, his neck pinned and his right arm trapped behind his back.

Edward put his mouth right up to Blake’s ear. “You stay away from Holly and her sister. Understand?”

“Who the hell—”

“Understand?”

After a sharp twist pushed his face into the wall, Blake nodded.

Holly breathed a little easier after the unexpected rescue. “Edward. I’m so glad I found you.”

But he wasn’t listening to her. She wasn’t quite sure
what
he was doing. Keeping Blake pinned with his body, Edward yanked up the ends of Blake’s coat and suit sleeves.

“What the hell are you doing?” Blake demanded.

Edward answered by grabbing him by the collar and turning him around. “You’re lucky you don’t have a tattoo on your wrist.”

“Why would I…?”

Edward’s youngest brother, Holden, startled her when he gently pulled Holly away from the confrontation. He pushed the elevator’s call button and the doors split open. “May I help?”

Edward nodded and pushed Blake toward his attorney. “Get him out of here.”

Holden grinned. “I’d love to escort them down to the parking lot.”

Blake straightened his clothes as he swung around. Holly instantly felt a grip on her arm and found herself standing behind the protective jut of Edward’s shoulder. “I am reporting you for police brutality,” said the angry younger man.

Edward opened the front of his coat. “Do you see a badge on me?”

With Holden walking toward them, the lawyer pulled Blake inside the elevator. “At this point I’d advise you to shut your mouth, get over yourself and come with me.”

Holden waved, a grown man delighted with the task given him. “See you later, bro. Doc.”

After the doors closed, Holly grinned. “That lawyer actually said something I agree with.”

“He should have intervened sooner.” The vise holding her wrist softened. As Edward turned to face her, he ran his hands up her arms to her shoulders, hunching forward ever so slightly to look her in the eye and study her face. “Are you all right? What about your head?” His warm hands moved to the sides of her neck and tenderly cupped her jaw. “You didn’t reinjure—”

“I’m okay.” Holly reached up and wound her fingers around his wrists, trying to reach the concern she saw in his deep gray eyes and ease it from his expression. “I promise you, I’m okay. His arrogance annoys the heck out of me, but he didn’t hurt me.”

He eyed her a moment longer, not quite believing her. “Good.” Then he leaned in and pressed a quick, hard kiss to her lips and pulled away before she could properly return the favor. “Now what are you doing here? I thought I told you to stay at home and rest.”

Holly pulled his hands from her face and laced their fingers together between them. “You said if I went somewhere that the patrolman had to come with me. He drove me to the lab and now he’s waiting downstairs with some friends of his.”

He tugged on her hands to pull her aside as the elevator doors opened and a trio of uniformed officers stepped out. “Do you have any idea how hard it is for me to do my job when I’m worried about you?”

Holly smiled at the hidden message she heard. He wouldn’t be so worried if he didn’t care about her. Maybe more than he even knew. But she’d called and deduced and tracked him here because she needed to talk business right now. Forcing him to admit that this was a real relationship growing between them would have to wait.

Letting go of his hands reluctantly, she reached into her purse and pulled out the copies she’d made of the lab reports. “I brought these to show Kevin Grove, but I want you to see them first.”

“What are they?”

“Proof that Irina Zorinsky Hansford is still alive and that I think I know how to bring her out of hiding.”

“No.” His gray eyes bored into hers. “I will not agree to anything that puts you in more danger.”

Holly pulled away entirely and crossed her arms in a defiant stance.
She
was the one still wearing the official credentials here. “I wasn’t asking for permission. You can either work with me or you can work against me. Now I have a feeling that we’d do much better as a team, but I’ll let that be your call.” She wanted to touch him, throttle him, beg him to understand that the answers to an eight-month long investigation were within their grasp. “We can crack this case, Edward. We can put your father’s killer away.”

His mouth thinned into a grim line. “Don’t do something crazy, Holly. I may not be able to protect you. I have a lead myself I want to pursue—”

“On your own? Can I come with you?”

“No. Absolutely not.” He raked his fingers through his hair, leaving a sexy disarray that her fingers itched to smooth back into place. “It’s personal. I need to do this on my own so it doesn’t come back to bite any of my brothers in the butt. Or you.”

“If it’s something that can get you into trouble, you should let me see what I—”

“No! I want you to go home, lock yourself in your apartment and be safe. Let me take care of this.”

Holly’s lips parted in shock at the vehemence of his argument. How damaged did a man have to be that he could only allow himself to see the world in one isolating, dangerous, forget-about-anyone-else’s-wishes-or-feelings kind of way?

“Edward, you can’t control who gets hurt and who doesn’t.” She gestured toward the sounds of the cops doing their work behind those cubicle walls. “Yes, this is dangerous work. And sometimes innocent people get hurt. But I’m trained to do my job. I’m trained to be smart and watch my back and get the bad guys, all at the same time. I’m going to do my job. With or without your help.”

“Taking on Z Group is suicide.”

“That’s what they used to say about taking on André Butler. And you defeated him.”

“No, Stick. I lost. I lost everything.” He smacked his hand against the elevator door and Holly jumped at the sudden outburst of his frustration and emotion. “Look at me. I’m not the man who took on Butler. I’m beat-up, I’m out of practice and my head’s not in the game the way it used to be. I thought you were dead when I saw you in that autopsy drawer with all that blood. When I saw Blake Rivers accosting you just now, I nearly lost it.”

“He wasn’t hurting me.”

“I know. And I still…overreacted.” Edward’s eyes were looking everywhere but at her. He was searching for words, searching for reason. “I can’t…” He swallowed hard, then determinedly looked her in the eye. “I can’t care about you if you’re going to intentionally put yourself in danger.”

“If we’re a team, it won’t be so dangerous. I watch your back. You watch mine. There’s no one I trust more than you to keep me safe.”

“That’d be your mistake.”

“Your wife and daughter didn’t die because of any mistake
you
made.”

“I put them in harm’s way. I made them targets. And now I’ve gotten you so involved in my father’s murder that I’ve made you a target.”

“Edward, please.” She curled her fingers into the front of his sweater, trying to reach the man inside. “It was a tragedy, yes, and you paid a huge price. But think of all the lives you saved by getting rid of Butler. Think of the lives we can save by exposing Irina Zorinsky and Z Group. It’s not just about us,” she pleaded with the man she couldn’t help loving, despite his harsh words. “Help me.”

“I’m sorry.” He pulled her fingers off him and retreated. “I just can’t do this. I can’t lose you, too.” The elevator doors opened and he walked inside. When he reached the back wall, he turned around and offered her one last bleak pronouncement. “You’re on your own. Good luck.”

The doors closed.

They closed around her heart, too.

“W
HAT ABOUT
G
RANDPA
, D
ADDY
? You promised.”

Edward sat in the living room of his stone cabin, isolated in the snowy countryside on the outskirts of Kansas City’s metropolitan area. Late-night television provided the only light in the entire house, but he wasn’t really watching. He slouched back against the black leather sofa, his booted feet propped up on the coffee table beside two cartons holding eleven bottles of ice-cold imported beer.

He twirled the twelfth bottle unopened in his right hand, savoring the chill of the icy condensation dripping over his fingers, barely able to hear his daughter’s voice.

A box that he’d pulled down from a closet shelf sat open on the coffee table. He’d tried to give some of the items away—but his mother and youngest brother had insisted he keep the contents that had once held meaning for him. Inside the box were painful reminders of his past. His badge. His gun. A wedding picture with Cara. A child’s rag doll ornament with button eyes that had been glued on crookedly. The ornament had been Melinda’s gift to him that last morning, just before he drove away to pick up her new bike. She’d given them a handmade present that she’d made at her school because she was too excited to wait until Christmas.

Tonight he’d gotten the cockeyed notion in his head that if he could look at those things that had once meant so much to him and not fall apart, then maybe he stood half a chance at making something happen with Holly. Maybe he could be a cop. Maybe he could feel like a real human being again.

Walking away from Holly this afternoon had been a selfish thing to do. The coward’s way out of getting hurt.

And tonight he hurt, anyway.

“Be brave, Daddy.”

“I’m trying, baby,” he whispered into the darkness. Trying and failing.

He’d already destroyed one family connection tonight. Before stopping to buy the beer, he’d paid a visit to William Caldwell. He’d asked the man flat-out how much he knew about Z Group’s current activities, how much he might still be an active part of them and if he knew that Irina Zorinsky Hansford was still alive.

Bill had gone pale. Poured himself a brandy before saying a word.

Yeah, there was something to tell. Either he’d just seen a ghost, or he’d been caught in the biggest lie of their lives.

“Alive? Irina is alive?”
Edward had seen better acting jobs from doped-up street punks trying to talk their way out of a possession charge.

All these months since his father’s murder—all these years that they’d spent together on camping and fishing trips, holiday get-togethers, graduations and other special events—Bill Caldwell had been lying.

He knew about Irina. Knew about Z Group.

Why give him clearance to search the labs at Caldwell Technologies? Not to point the finger at Blake Rivers, but to ease his own conscience.

Edward half hoped that Bill would say something about being blackmailed, about having no choice but to do an evil woman’s bidding—that he was a victim like the rest of them. Instead, he claimed to know nothing about his father’s murder or Holly’s attack or any other thing that Irina Zorinsky had been responsible for.

Oh, he told him plenty about the old days, when Z Group had been a government-sanctioned organization monitoring the flow of weapons and technology throughout eastern Europe before the fall of Communist regimes. He talked about the beautiful Irina—the double agent who had planned to hand over their names to their enemies—how they’d met secretly and taken a vote to eliminate her. He told him how Irina’s besotted husband, Leo Hansford, had volunteered for the mission to kill them both in a car accident.

“But Atticus’s fiancée, Brooke Hansford—Leo and Irina’s daughter—went to Sarajevo to move her parents’ remains back to the States. We told you that the DNA tests proved that the body buried in Irina’s grave wasn’t Irina. Didn’t you suspect anything then? Or are you the reason she’s still alive today?”

“She can’t be alive.”
It had taken another brandy for Bill to finally start sounding like the self-made billionaire he was. He’d accused Edward of lying, of manufacturing stories to trip him up like some common criminal. He was throwing out cruel guesses, trying to stir up a suspect because KCPD had been working eight months on this and still couldn’t make a case.
“Crawl back into your hole, Edward, and stop trying to be a hero. How could you accuse me of being a part of your father’s murder? I loved John like a brother. I love you and your brothers as if you were my own sons. I love your mother. Why would I agree to allow the people I love to be hurt?”

Feeling the lies like whip marks over his soul, Edward had stood up to make his exit.
“Think about this, Bill. If you know about Irina and you don’t do anything to stop her, then you might lose more of the people you love. Their lives would be on your head.

“And trust me, you don’t want to be in that place.”

When he walked away, it had almost been like losing his father all over again. He’d made the accusations his brothers hadn’t been able to make. He’d severed a bond that had been a part of his life from the day he was born. And someone else he loved had just been lost to him forever.

Now he was sitting alone, with late-night television shows droning on like crickets in the darkness, debating whether or not eight months of sobriety was worth the pain of caring about things.

It had to be better not to care about Holly, right?

Better not to want her with every cell in his body.

Better not to see her as the first light of something good to come into his life since losing Cara and Melinda?