Las Vegas Sidewinders: Drake (Book 2) (20 page)

“Ten tiers?” Drake
asked, coming out with the last of her stuff. “Do they make cakes that big?”

“Why can’t
you
just get married and do all that?” Erin was asking her.

“‘Cause my mother is
going to ruin
my
wedding—I have to live vicariously through you.”

They laughed together,
wiping their faces and looking at each other for a long moment.

“I have to go,” Kate
said at last. “I want to be on the highway before 5:00.”

“Email me and check
Facebook. I’ll get on as soon as I can.”

“Pinky swear you’re
coming back.” Kate held out her pinky.

“Promise.” Erin wrapped
her pinky around Kate’s.

Kate hugged her best
friend tightly. “Don’t worry about the house. I’m going to be coming back and
forth for a while, until we know how long you’ll be gone. I’ll take care of
everything.”

“Thank you.”

Erin and Drake waved
until they couldn’t see Kate anymore and then made their way into the house. It
seemed quieter somehow.

“Hey, I have something
for you,” he said, pulling her into the kitchen. “I got these done while you
were at work.” He handed her a small pocket-sized photo album. Inside were all
the pictures he had of them together, ending with their wedding and the lunch
that followed.

“All the people I
love,” she whispered, looking up at him. “Thank you—this is wonderful. And
it’ll fit in my pocket.”

His arms closed around
her tightly. “So what time do we have to get up?”

“4:00, I guess. I need
to be on base by 6:00 and we’re supposed to leave soon after.”

“Okay.” He nodded. “Are
you hungry?”

“Not really.” She
looked at him. “What’s your plan for tomorrow?”

“I’ll get a cab to the
airport around 8:00.”

“Okay.” They stood for
a while without talking. Finally, she tugged his arm. “Come on.” She led him
upstairs into her room. She sat on the edge of the bed and patted the space
beside her.

He sat down and drew a
ragged breath. “I thought I could do this,” he whispered, his eyes growing
misty. “But this isn’t anything I’ve ever felt before. I’ve never been afraid
of anything, ever, and I’m fucking
terrified
right now.”

“It’s okay.” She
wrapped her arms around his neck. “This is like you getting on the ice every
night. Even though it’s just a game, you guys are big and strong, and you shoot
pucks a hundred miles an hour. Every once in a while, someone gets hurt, right?
But I sit there and root for you anyway because hockey is what you do. The
Marines is what I do. This mission is important and I have to do this because
it’s what I signed up for. You understand that, babe, don’t you?” Her eyes
searched his.

“Are you some kind of
special forces?” he asked quietly.

“No.” She hesitated.
“I’m just a Marine, but I work closely with the NSA. My security clearance is
really high. The stuff I’m dealing with comes down straight from the Secretary
of Defense—we’re a special unit; Shay hand-picked those of us who each had
specific skills for a reason. I recently found out they did an investigation of
the day our unit hit the IED, and some questions arose about it possibly being
a planned attack.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It might not have been
an accident.” She looked at him. “I didn’t know this until this week. Reports
from the CIA and military intelligence suggest that they knew we were coming.
They knew we were out there investigating what they were doing and set up the
IED to stop us. The area we were headed into wasn’t inhabited, yet after the
IED went off, we started taking fire. There were insurgents waiting for us.
Their plan was to take us out completely. The fact that Shay and I were alone
redistributed how we were travelling. Instead of three and three, it was four
and two. So only two of us were out of commission and there were three guys to
protect Liv while she got me into the other vehicle. Apparently, they weren’t
counting on that. There was also a little bit of luck involved. I inadvertently
sped up when I was telling Shay what Dickhead had done, so I put some extra
space between the two vehicles, which protected the other Hummer from the
explosion. If they had been right behind us, it might not have ended as well.
But what it boils down to is that
someone
wanted to eliminate our unit.”

“Wait, so now you’re
going back, with the same group of people, minus the one who didn’t make it?!”
He gaped at her.

“With a new commander
and a few other people that are already over there waiting for us. This is a
precision mission, Drake. This is war. Not like World War II or Vietnam, but we
work behind the scenes to keep it from escalating to that level.” She leaned
against him. “And this is
my
mission; it’s personal. Somebody out there
knew about our unit and wanted it taken out.”

“Who are they?”

“We don’t know yet,”
she admitted. “The CIA has been gathering intelligence, but I won’t know
anymore until I get there.”

“Will we be able to
talk?”

“I should be able to
contact you when I get settled, probably sometime on Sunday. You’ll be in
Buffalo Saturday night and then Ottawa on Sunday?”

“We’ll take the bus to
Ottawa on Sunday but we don’t play until Monday.”

“I’ll try to catch you
Sunday morning. If you don’t hear from me Sunday, I’ll find a sat
phone—satellite phone—on Monday, even if it’s just a few minutes. Okay?”

“And then?”

“I’ll let you know
then. I don’t know exactly when we’re going in.”

“Is there any
possibility I’ll hear about this on the news?”

She chuckled. “I guess
it’s possible. Depends on what we find.”

“Jesus, Erin. It sounds
like you’re going in blind.”

“We’re not. I just
can’t tell you the details. It’s safer for both of us if you don’t know.”

He said nothing for a
while and then sighed. “So how does this work? I’ve only been a military
husband for two days. I have no idea what I’m supposed to do, or who would
contact me if something happened…” His voice trailed off.

“I’ve done all the
paperwork, including my name change. There are protocols in place, and if you
need information, call Kate. She’s been my emergency contact since my dad got
sick, so she knows everything.”

“Okay.” He looked down
at his hands, focusing on the ring on his left hand.

“It looks good there,
doesn’t it?” She laid her left hand next to his and they stared at their rings.

“Better than I
thought,” he admitted.

“Do you have doubts
about this?” she asked.

“No.” He shook his
head. “I did the only thing I could think of to somehow protect you. I don’t
know how taking my name changes anything, but it feels like the right thing,
doesn’t it?”

“Absolutely.” She could
almost feel the pain in his voice, and it reminded her of how very different
this man was from Clay. Clay hadn’t even been home the night before she’d
deployed. He’d been out with clients and had mumbled a good-bye in the morning
before she’d left the house.

Slowly, she pulled off
her top. Then she tugged at his T-shirt until he lifted his arms so she could
take it off. She gently pushed him back onto the bed and brushed light kisses
along his rock-hard stomach. “This is what I’m going to think about when I’m
over there,” she whispered.

“Yeah?” He ran his
fingers through her hair. “How about this?” He pulled her on top of him and
found her lips with his.

“Tell me you love me,”
she whispered. “Show me you love me.”

“I love you,” he
breathed against her mouth. “And I plan on showing you all night long.

Lying on his bed in Las
Vegas on Tuesday night, Drake finally had a chance to go through the package
that had arrived from the private detective he’d hired to look into Clay’s
life. At first he was confused, trying to sort through everything at once.
Finally, he pulled out the cover letter and re-read it, focusing on the points
of interest that the investigator had highlighted.

Phone calls to
Afghanistan
.
He frowned, staring at the letter and then digging out the phone records they
had enclosed. Sure enough, there were calls to Afghanistan. A lot of them. The
numbers appeared to be cell phones or phones that were no longer in service.
Erin had left Afghanistan in August of 2010, yet Clay was still calling there.
Erin had been very specific that Drake could not contact her, and that she
would have to contact him. If that was the case, who the hell had Clay been
calling over there for more than three years now?

“Whatcha doin’?” Karl
wandered in, a bottle of beer in his hand.

“Listen to this,” Drake
told him what he’d just learned.

“What?” Karl frowned.
“How does that make sense? Who would he be calling over there? I mean, Erin has
been here, right?”

“She hasn’t been there
since August 2010. It’s February 2013. Who the hell has he been in contact with
for almost three years?”

“This can’t be right.”
Karl was now on the bed next to him digging through more records. “What was the
date of the IED explosion?”

“August 17
^th
.”

“Do you know what
time?”

“I think she said it
was afternoon, maybe 4:30 p.m. over there?”

“They’re what, 8 hours
ahead of the East Coast?”

“8 and a half hours,”
Drake corrected mildly. “Why? What do you see?”

“At 4:30 p.m. in
Afghanistan, it would have been 8:00 a.m. in Washington, D.C. There was a call
on August 17, 2011, at 7:45 a.m. to Afghanistan, and then another one at 9:00 a.m.
Then he received a call from that same number at 9:42.” Karl looked at Drake.
“He was in contact with someone in Afghanistan that was
not
Erin starting
about 15 minutes before the attack and then for a couple of hours after.”

Though Erin had warned
him not to, Drake told Karl everything. At some point, there had to be people
in his life he trusted, and Karl was one of them. He was sure Kate knew as much
as Erin could possibly tell her, so in essence it was the three of them holding
down the fort.

“Sonofabitch.” Drake
sat up. “Is Clay a fucking
traitor
?!”

“Who tried to have his
twin brother and his wife killed?!” Karl made a face. “I mean, aside from sounding
like a bad movie, how much money and power do you need to set something like
that up?”

“He has a lot of
money,” Drake said slowly. “And he comes from old New England money.”

“So this was personal,
not a terrorist attack?”

“That’s what I’m
thinking.” Drake got to his feet. “What the hell are we going to do? I can’t
even warn her!”

“We need to get Kate
out here,” Karl pulled his phone out of his pocket. “She can help us navigate
through the military stuff we don’t know.”

“And we need to tear
this report apart.” Drake started looking at the other items. Like Clay’s new
girlfriend. The pictures provided showed a dark-haired woman who actually
looked a lot like Erin from a distance, although up close her eyes were dark
and her nose a little big. She wasn’t that attractive, he thought, but more
exotic. Without makeup and a nice figure, she would be drab. Why would a guy
with Clay’s money and status date a woman who wasn’t beautiful? As much as it
was a cliché, guys like Clay didn’t date plain women.

Drake loved women, and
he’d had a lot of them, but that was one of the things he looked for; how a
woman who was all dolled up would look without makeup. It was one of his
talents and one that most of his friends and teammates would ask him for help
with when finding women in a bar. Though it was mostly a joke, in this woman’s
case, he thought her not in Clay’s league in the looks department. He hated to
think that way, but this was Clay they were talking about, not a regular guy.
This guy would want a beauty on his arm, and this woman didn’t fit the profile.

“Kate’s going to fly
out tomorrow—I think I scared her,” Karl murmured.

“Better that you didn’t
give her any details on the phone,” Drake answered. “Look at Clay’s girlfriend.
What do you see?” Her handed Karl a picture taken at a formal event somewhere.

Karl looked at it
carefully, trying to form a thoughtful opinion without sounding like an ass.
“She’s kind of…plain?” Karl frowned. “I mean, she’s okay, but not what I pictured
for a guy like him.”

“Exactly.” Drake pulled
out more. “Let’s look at his financials.” He hadn’t hired some corner store
private eye who would take pictures of a cheating spouse. He’d hired the same
major security and investigations firm that Dom had used to help Molly get
divorced last fall. They handled everything from personal bodyguard duties to
full background checks and financial information. It was costing him a fortune,
but he didn’t care; he would give every dime he had if he could protect Erin
from Clay.

His phone rang and he
absently picked it up. “Yeah?”

“Drake?” Erin’s voice
sounded so close he almost jumped.

“Hey, baby!” He sat up
straighter and shared a look with Karl. “Whatcha doin’?”

“I got up early, and
thought I’d call you while everything is quiet. It’s only 6:00 a.m. here so
most of the guys are eating breakfast or working out. I have a few minutes
alone.”

“How’s it going?”

“Everything has been
quiet since we got here.”

“Good.” He hesitated.
“Listen, we have a few things to talk about.”

“Uh-oh,” she laughed.
“That’s never good.”

“No. I need you to
listen to me.”

“Drake?”

He took a breath. He
hadn’t had time to plan what he was going to say but he knew he had to be
careful. “Do you remember what I said I was going to buy you to help you feel
safe again?”

“You mean the a—”

“I just asked if you
remember!” He cut her off abruptly, unwilling to say too much over a line he
had no way of knowing was secure or not.

Suddenly quiet, Erin’s
training kicked in. Although she had no idea what Drake was talking about, she
recognized his serious tone and the underlying fear. Something was wrong and he
wanted to tell her something but didn’t trust the security of the line.

“Yes, of course,” she
said slowly.

“Do you know what I’m
talking about?”

“I think so.” She
paused. “Is my house okay?”

“Yeah, it’s fine. The
other thing.”

The private
investigator he’d hired. She frowned and put her finger to her lips as Mark
joined her in the room. “Yeah, I remember.”

“I got it today.”

The report on Clay
. “Is it nice?” she
tried to keep her voice neutral as she crooked her finger at Mark, motioning
him to join her.

“It’s very
expensive
,”
he said, emphasizing the word. God, he hoped he knew her as well as he thought.

So he’d done a
thorough
check on Clay. “I know how you love to spend money on me,” she said lightly.

“I wish you were
here—I’ll give you my credit card if you come home.” He tried to keep his voice
from giving away how nervous he was. He had to find a way to work Clay into the
conversation, but all this cloak and dagger stuff was foreign to him.

“Does that mean I can’t
get my other surprise until I get home?”

“Nope. I’m holding it
hostage.” He suddenly had an idea. “By the way, I ran into a bunch of your
friends in Ottawa.”

“Who?”

“Some guy you went out
with after Homecoming—in college or something?—he works in the Middle East now.
Did you know that?”

Erin froze. She’d told
him the story behind her wedding dress, and how Shay’s not taking her to
Homecoming had led to her first official date with Clay. Did his strange
comment mean that Clay was working in the Middle East? She was confused, but
she instinctively knew Drake was being careful for a reason. “I haven’t talked
to him in ages,” she finally said. Mark was watching her face in confusion, but
remained at her side.

“I didn’t get into
specifics with him, but I guess he has ties to businesses there. He gave me his
card and said that if I ever get tired of hockey, he can use guys my size to
work
security
for him.”

Erin looked at Mark,
who was frowning. “Hey, you’re a famous hockey player! I didn’t marry some
bodyguard!” She tried to laugh but her mind was reeling.

“Like I’d leave
hockey!” he chuckled. “Just thought you’d find that amusing.”

“Yeah, ha ha.”

“So, uh, Kate is coming
out for a few days. Karl and I decided we didn’t like this bachelor stuff
anymore—we kind of need her help. Our place is a mess. She’s going to help us
organize all this new stuff we got.”

“She’s coming out this
week?”

“
Tomorrow
.” He
emphasized the word. “We
really
need her.”

Whatever they had found
out scared them enough to not want to talk to Kate about it on the phone
either, Erin realized. “I’ll try to call tomorrow, so I can talk to her too.”

“Be careful, honey,” he
said slowly. “August 17
^th
weighs heavy on my mind.”

“I know, babe.” She
didn’t know why he would use the date of the IED explosion but it definitely
meant something.

“I had a dream that it
was 4:42 p.m. over there and another IED blew up.”

Erin was truly baffled
now. The explosion had happened closer to 4 p.m. By 4:42, she’d been in the
helo on her way to Germany. “That’s silly,” she said finally. “You know I’m
fine.”

“I know.”

“I love you, Drake.”

“I love you too. Please
be careful. Don’t trust anyone outside your unit.”

She cocked her head and
stared at Mark. “I won’t, babe.”

“Talk soon, honey. I
really love you.”

“I really love you
too.” She hung up and looked at Mark. “What. The. Fuck.”

“What was he babbling
about?”

“He hired a private
investigation firm to find out everything they could about Clay.” She felt
slightly nauseous. “Who apparently has dealings in Afghanistan.”

“He’s the guy you went
out with after Homecoming?”

“Yeah. But only a few
people would get that reference—it has to do with my wedding dress—it’s not
important.” She started to pace. “What does 4:42 on August 17
^th
mean? By then we were on the way to Germany, or getting ready to go. At the
very least we were back on base by then.”

“So something in the
report happened on August 17
^th
at 4:42 p.m.”

“It has to be phone
records,” she said. “Otherwise, why would he mention that time? You think Clay
called someone in Afghanistan at 4:42 p.m.?”

“You can’t be serious.”
Mark was gaping at her.

“Is there anything you
didn’t tell me about Shay?” She demanded suddenly, her eyes narrowing. “It
could be important, Mark!”

“What do you mean?” He
was frowning again.

“Clay keeps accusing me
of leaving Shay behind—you guys didn’t leave him out there, did you?”

“Are you kidding me?!”
Mark looked furious. “
Of course not
. Ronnie picked him up and threw him
in the back of the Humvee. Yeah, we left half of his left leg out there—we were
under fire and didn’t have time to go searching for all the pieces that had
been blown up—but he was in the back of the Hummer and taken back to base. He was
cremated per his instructions and then buried in Arlington.”

“So why does Clay think
we left him behind?” She was still pacing. “And does he have the power and
connections to try to kill me and his brother in Afghanistan? Is it possible
this was personal and not related to Al Qaeda
at all?
”

“The intelligence has
been pretty clear: somebody knew we were coming. Whether it was a security
breach or personal, that’s what we’re here to figure out.”

“Mark.” She faced him
worriedly. “If Clay was behind that attack, that means he has access to
something, or
someone
, on this base. That’s the only way he knew exactly
where we were going to be, and when.”

Mark met her eyes. “But
if he wanted you and Shay dead, why is he so angry about you leaving Shay’s
body behind?”

“Unless…” Her voice
faltered. “Shay shouldn’t have led that patrol. He took it instead of Louie
because we needed to talk about the letter I’d gotten. Technically, I should
have been in that vehicle with
Louie
, and Shay should have been back on
base handling communications. But he switched with Louie so we could be alone
together.” She felt bile rising in her throat and she turned, rushing to the
bathroom.