The Reckoning (4 page)

“Believe me…I'm thinking…about it,” she panted out.

“Quit running,” he clarified, then leaned forward to reach the keypad where he could reduce the speed of the belt. “It's time for your cooldown.”

She frowned at him, though her feet slowed. “Don't need…a keeper,” she got out. “Used to be…fit. Very fit.”

“You'll be fit again.” He punched the pad a second time, reducing the speed even more. “Unless you give yourself a heart attack first. And I charge extra for CPR.”

She made a face at him, even as she sucked in a couple of long breaths. “You don't believe me… Used to be one tough woman.”

Her pace had slowed to a walk, and he let his gaze linger on her slim legs and their long stride. Toughness wasn't an antidote to evil and tragedy, he thought to himself, frowning. Ryan had been tough. Lily Fortune was tough. But they hadn't escaped the darkness the world could deal out. Jessica Chandler had been tough, too—the sweetest, toughest victim he'd ever tried to help—but in the end she'd been just that—a victim.

“Secret agent accountant.”

That brought his attention back to the present. “What did you say?”

Walking with her hands on her hips, she took another deep breath. “That's how I saw myself. Sure, I had degrees in the dry fields of finance and business, but when I was recruited as an agent for the Treasury Department, I saw myself as Linda Faraday, secret agent accountant.”

It made his lips quirk. “You
were
young, weren't you?” he murmured.

“Our new agent course included firearms as well as physical training. Not as intense as what you G-men go through, but I thought I could handle myself.”

Her fingers touched the keypad, and the treadmill's hum stopped. Linda stepped off the machine and grabbed the small towel hanging on its handrails. She blotted her face with it, her words coming out muffled. “Apparently it wasn't physical training that I needed, but emotional.”

She was talking about her affair, her affair with the subject of an investigation—Cameron Fortune. Sudden anger snapped inside Emmett, surprising him with its stinging lash. Ryan's brother had been twice her age and canny, no doubt.
The son of a bitch,
Emmett thought.
The son of a bitch took advantage of Linda and then irrevocably changed her life.

But Emmett kept his emotions off of his face and out of his voice. “He was a handsome and charming man, by all reports.”

She looked at him over the towel, strangling it between her hands. “That's supposed to make me feel better?” she asked, her voice bitter. “The person I thought I was wouldn't be swayed by good looks and charm.”

Though he was lousy at light banter, he tried to ease the tension of the moment. “Oh, good. Then maybe I have a chance with you.”

She didn't crack a smile. “As if I would know what to do if I had you. I was no good as Linda Faraday, secret agent accountant. Ricky doesn't think anything of me as a mother. I doubt I'm much of a woman, either.”

Despite those words, her flowery, female scent was in the air, tickling his nose, shaking awake the lust that he'd felt when he'd held her in his arms that morning. He couldn't stop himself from pushing back a damp tendril of her bright hair. “Give yourself time.”

“I
can't,
don't you see? I've lost so much time already. In another ten years, Ricky won't need a mother.”

What could he say to that? What could he do to help? Unfortunately for Linda, he wasn't the pep-talk type. His true expertise lay in looking at the dark side of life. “What's the alternative?” he asked.

She spun away. “Giving up.”

The two words froze him. Not because he didn't understand the impulse, but because he'd done it himself. After the Jessica Chandler case, so closely following his brother Chris's murder, he'd given up and run away to the cabin in the Sandias. If he had his way, he'd probably still be there. Still be half-drunk. Still be full of pain.

Now he was sober. And still full of pain.

Linda spun back. “But I
can't.
I won't. I have a responsibility to Ricky, an obligation to Nancy and Dean who never gave up on me. Do you see?”

“I do.” It was the truth. “Sometimes what keeps us going is not what we want, but what we owe to other people.”

She studied his face. “The promise you made to Ryan.”

“And to myself. To my parents. To the memory of my brother Christopher.”

Linda winced. “I'm sorry.” She touched a hand to her forehead, then laid her fingers on his arm. “The injury…I'm still working on not thinking everything revolves around me, me, me. I'm complaining, but you're in a bad place, too, and yet you're here, playing Mary Poppins to me.”

He raised his eyebrows. “As long as you don't ask me to fly you around with my umbrella.”

Her fingers tightened on him and her touch was once again warming his blood, that lust distracting him. “Seriously, Emmett. I know I'm not quite a whole person, let alone a sounding board, but I'm here if you want to talk.”

“I'm not much of a talker. I was always the lone wolf in the family.”

“You're in luck,” she said with a half smile. “I practiced my silence for many years.”

Then she showed him how good she was at it. She sat down on the edge of the treadmill's ramp, then patted the spot beside her. He surprised himself by obeying, seating himself next to her while the quiet grew around them.

She crossed her arms on top of her bent knees and rested her cheek there. He gazed at the back of her head while listening to the sounds of spring outside. Birds were trilling, peeping, cheeping. A branch, jostled by the warm wind, scratched against the glass of the window. Dogs barked in the distance.

A sense of the season settled over him. Springtime. Renewal. Hope.

Linda's eyes were closed and he wondered if she was asleep. Her lashes were dark brown and curled against the soft pink of her cheeks.

“You're still a woman, you know,” he murmured.

She wasn't asleep, at least not all the way. Her lashes rose and she sat up, slanting him a half-drowsy glance. “You think?”

“I know.” Their gazes held. Darker pink color tinged her fair skin. His hand reached out and he palmed her warm cheek. “Shall I prove it to you?”

She swallowed. “Not because you're obligated.”

He shook his head. “Not because I'm obligated.” But because he didn't like to see her sad. Because he thought he could take one worry off her mind. Oh, yeah, and then there was that lust. He'd known it would complicate things, but right now he didn't care.

Leaning close, he touched his lips to hers.

She jerked against his hand, as if he'd stung her, but he'd been gentle. He was gentle. So, so gentle.

For a moment, she kissed like a child might, her mouth pursed and stiff, but then she softened. Her lips parted, but he didn't pretend it was an intimate invitation. Instead, he let her warm up to the kiss, let her warm up to him, without doing any more than keeping his mouth pressed close to hers.

“You should breathe,” he whispered against her mouth. “You still need air.”

“Is that why I see stars?”

It made him smile, and he drew back to look at her.

She traced his lips with two fingers. “You don't do that often enough. Smile, I mean.”

“Keep kissing me and maybe I will.”

But she was shaking her head. “I have your number, you know. I'm getting smarter by the minute when it comes to you.”

“How's that?”

She straightened away from him. “You're sweet.”

He stared at her. “Sweet? You're kidding, right?”

“You're sweet.”

“I'm cynical. Cold. Distant. Determined. Ask anyone.”

Shaking her head, she rose to her feet. “I don't need to. I was feeling low and not very confident and you kissed me. That's sweet.”

“I didn't do it to be sweet!”

She had the wide blue eyes of a baby. “Then why did you?”

“Because…” It had nothing to do with sweetness. It was because he thought she was beautiful and sexy, which, if she wasn't so sweet herself, she'd see proof of in the tight fit of his now uncomfortable jeans.

“Told you.” With a little grin, she spun on one foot and sauntered out, her hips swishing with a sassy little twitch.

That womanly touch was almost worth being called sweet. Almost.

“Don't fool yourself,” he called after her. “I'm cynical. Cold. Distant. Determined. Just wait and I'll prove it to you.”

The bathroom door closing was her answer.

He was still smiling—smiling again!—when his cell phone rang. It sat on a low table he'd pushed to the side of the room, so he made a long reach for it.

“Jamison, here.”

“And here, too,” a voice said.

Emmett forgot about spring and sunshine. Darkness closed in on him again. He felt it, smelled it, sensed the sulfur whiff of evil in the air. Striding to the doorway of the exercise
room, he glanced down the hall to keep watch on the bathroom door. To make sure Linda was safe.

“Where the hell are you, Jason?”

“Do you think I called to tell you, little brother? Then you're stupider than I thought.”

Emmett gritted his teeth at his brother's taunting. In a perverse sense, Jason was entitled to his arrogance. The police had had him in custody once and then he'd escaped to kidnap Lily Fortune. Later, even with experienced men like Emmett in the mix, the FBI had lost him during the ransom exchange. And an agent had lost his life.

“We figured you'd be on your way to the South Pacific or South America with the ransom money by now,” Emmett said, calming his voice.

“You'd like me out of the country, wouldn't you?”

What Emmett would like was to find his brother and stop him once and for all. It was what he'd vowed to do. Cynical, cold, distant, determined. If Linda could look inside him right now, she'd have no doubt about the kind of man he was.

“I'd like to know why you called, Jason.”

“I read this morning's Red Rock newspaper.”

There was a clue. His brother was near enough to Red Rock to have easy access to the local paper. What it might have said, though, Emmett had no idea. Since he was in San Antonio now, he read the San Antonio paper. But Jason couldn't know what city he was in and Emmett certainly wasn't about to tell him. His brother was smart enough without providing him any aid. “I didn't get a chance to read it yet myself.”

“Didn't get a chance to read it,” Jason mocked, his voice rising. “You don't need to read it to know that Ryan Fortune left you a bundle of cash and stock options.”

Apparently some of the details of Ryan's will had been
leaked to the press. It might have irritated Emmett if it hadn't also brought Jason out of the woodwork. “Hey, it wasn't my choice, Jase. That was Ryan's doing.”

“Why should you get any of the Fortune money when it was me who worked so hard for it?”

Jason had thought himself entitled to the Fortune wealth since they were kids, and their grandfather, Farley Jamison, had been obsessed with the money as a means to fund his grandiose political aspirations. “But you have some of the Fortune money—Lily's ransom,” Emmett pointed out.

“I don't care about that,” Jason snapped.

Emmett frowned. “You don't care about the money?”

“Not as much as I care about taking
you
down, little brother. Keep looking over your shoulder, Emmett, because I'm coming after you. Then I'll have my reward. And my revenge.”

The call clicked off. Emmett remained standing, staring at the phone in his hand. Well, well, well. This put a new spin on things.

The man Emmett had promised himself to stop had just promised to stop
him.

Fine, he thought.

May the best man win.

E
mmett sat at the kitchen table the next morning, the last of a pot of coffee now a final swallow in the bottom of his mug. The dregs of black liquid were as dark as his mood after a sleepless night going over Jason's phone call.

I'm coming after you,
his brother had said.

As if Emmett were like the proverbial sitting duck, waiting for his brother to take him out.

He wasn't afraid of Jason. But there was no doubt the other man was wily and Emmett had others to think of besides himself. However, Jason didn't have a clue as to where Emmett was residing at the moment and would never think to look for him in the Armstrong's guest house. Jason didn't know that the older couple or Ricky and Linda even existed, so Emmett was reasonably sure they were safe from Jason's latest threat.

But damn, the truth was Emmett was just sitting around.

Taking care of this promise regarding Linda meant he
wasn't taking care of the problem that was Jason. It put the ball in his brother's court—
I'm coming after you
—and Emmett didn't like it. At all. He was used to controlling the action, not letting others control
him.

“G'morning.”

His gaze lifted in time to see a sleepy-eyed Linda enter the room. She was wearing a thick robe and terry-cloth slippers, had bedhead and a pillowcase crease across her left cheek.

He grunted, tightening his grip on his coffee mug as desire pinballed through his system. For some inconvenient reason, she gave him a bad case of the gimmes.

She squinched her eyes at him and pushed back a hank of her iron-straight, golden hair. “You
are
Emmett Jamison, yes?”

Was this another symptom of her brain injury? Had she forgotten him, or was she joking around? “The last I checked, that's me.”

She nodded. “Good. I thought so, but the way you greeted me set me off my stride for a second.”

“The way I greeted you?”

“That cheerful good morning grunt.”

“Oh.” She was joking around. “Sorry.”

Her hand waved. “No apology necessary. I'm not much of a morning person myself. It's just that after I came out of my…condition, I found myself often confused by new and unfamiliar faces. So I learned to gauge whether I was already acquainted with someone by the warmth of their response to me. Yours was a sort of stranger-type grunt.”

Funny, how she could make him half grin and feel guilty at the same time. Then more guilty when he saw that she was staring at the now-empty coffeepot. “Let me,” he said, starting to rise.

“No, no, no.” She waved him down again. “I can do this.
I can make coffee. We had a practice kitchen in rehab. Like kindergarten class, you know? We played house in order to relearn how to do simple tasks.”

He watched her trudge to the counter. She pulled close the bean grinder he'd left on the tiled surface and lifted off the clear plastic top to reveal plenty of freshly ground beans. Then she removed the basket from the coffeemaker. Inside was the used filter and a mess of wet grounds.

She stared at them. Then her gaze moved to the grinder. Back to the full basket.

Like yesterday in the grocery store, he could feel the confusion radiate off her slim body. Her spine became as straight as a steel rod, and her shoulders looked stiff. Something in the middle of his chest hurt.

He was almost out of his chair when she spoke, her voice tight. “Remind me again. What should I do?”

Breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding slid out of him in a silent whoosh. “Throw the old grounds and filter into the wastebasket under the sink,” he said, careful to keep his voice free of anything but information. “We put the fresh filters in that clear jar over there by the grinder.”

She crossed to the sink and he watched her reach for the wastebasket even as he pretended not to. He held his breath again and caught himself—barely—before telling her not to throw out the plastic basket along with the old filter and beans.

She caught herself—barely—before doing just that. Emmett let out a silent cheer as she rinsed the basket and then crossed back to the coffeemaker. “I knew that,” she said conversationally as she fitted in a clean filter. “That part about throwing away the used filter and grounds. But we'd only practiced with a clean coffeemaker in rehab and little things like that can stump me. I know there's something I should
do, and if it was on a multiple-choice test, I would recognize the answer. But sometimes I can't dredge up the information from wherever it's sleeping in my consciousness.”

His chest was hurting again and he said the first thing that came into his head. “I admire you for being able to ask for help. That can't be easy.”

“It isn't easy.” She finished preparing the coffee, then set the switch to On. “I don't want to need help. I don't want to admit I need help almost as much. But it's a fact of life until I get more practice.”

She moved to the oven and set the timer, then turned to meet his gaze. “Strategies. Props. That's how I get by. One of my strategies is to set a timer to remind myself to stay on task. Five minutes for coffee. When it goes off, I'll check the maker. Without the alarm I might sit here for a while and never remember what I'm waiting for. Unless I write it down in my notebook—another of my favorite props.”

Her matter-of-factness was just something else to admire. No whining, no play for pity. The counselors at her rehab facility had told him about Linda's strategies and props in order to prepare him for helping her out—and they'd also let him know that she was well on her way to needing them less and less—but they hadn't prepared him for how watching her use them would leave him feeling so…

There weren't words for it.

So, ignoring that ache in his chest, he grunted again and pulled a section of the San Antonio paper in front of him. He didn't look up until the kitchen alarm went off and she was back at the table after filling up his mug and then her own.

“Thank you,” he said.

“That's my line,” Linda replied. “I don't think I was that good at being grateful pre traumatic brain injury, but it seems to be another skill I'm slowly learning to acquire.”

“You don't—”

“I am, Emmett. Grateful and beholden. To the Armstrongs. To you. I don't know how I'll ever repay any of you.”

“Linda—”

“Don't tell me I'm wrong. My brain isn't that dead.”

“Wait a sec—”

“Oh, come on.”

“But—”

“Emmett, what could you possibly get out of this situation?”

“Lessons in how to edge a word into the conversation when sharing the breakfast table with a woman?”

Her velvety blue eyes rounded over the rim of her coffee mug. Then she laughed. “Okay. Apologies next.”

“Those are unnecessary, too.”

“Well, I'm certain you don't need practice facing women across a breakfast table.”

“What about across a kitchen table?” He leaned back in his chair to study her. “Outside of my mother, you might be my first, come to think of it.”

Her eyes registered surprise again. “No wife? No ex?”

“Never married.”

“Fiancée?”

He shook his head.

“No lovers?” she asked, her eyes rounding even more.

“Of course I've had lovers!” Maybe she was joking around again, but he discovered his ego couldn't take the chance.

“Ah.” That little smile playing around her mouth told him she had been joking after all. “But no long-term lovers. Nobody you wanted to share a bathroom or a breakfast with.”

“I'm a pretty solitary guy. Have been my whole life.”

She nodded. “How old are you?”

“Thirty-one.”

“Hah,” she said, that little smile reclaiming her pretty lips. She put one elbow on the table and leaned toward him. “I'm older than you. Maybe you
can
learn something from me.”

Such as how to control the lust that was rising in him like steam off the coffee in their mugs. The movement she'd made had opened a gap between the lapels of her nubby-textured robe. It exposed an expanse of pale skin and the fragile structure of her collarbone.

He'd always been a protector—it had been the lure of the FBI—and it was something he'd accepted about himself years ago. So Linda should be just another victim to him, just another one of those he was driven to keep safe. But he'd never felt this…pull toward anyone he'd rescued, or anyone he was charged with keeping secure. Not even Jessica Chandler and her family.

He was going to shut it down, right now, because it was unnecessary and distracting, and had nothing to do with the promises he'd made.

Take care of Linda and Ricky.

Put a stop to Jason.

The woman was still smiling at him from across the table. He could smell her, damn it, the same scent that drove him crazy in every room she'd been in. It was flowers and sunshine and a freshness that he would only bruise and darken with his big hands, foul moods and ugly family history.

Shoving back his chair, he stood.

She stood, too. “Emmett?” she asked, a frown between her brows.

See? He was already marking her, marring her, taking away her smiles.

He was better off alone. Ryan should have extracted the promise to care for Linda from someone else.

“Emmett?” Linda asked again.

He ran a hand over his hair. “My brother…” Tell her, he urged himself. Tell her that his vow to find his brother super-ceded everything. It was what he should do, because it would be safer for all of them. Leave this house and go on the hunt for Jason. Linda would find someone else, someone kinder, more lighthearted, less lustful, to help her make coffee and to shop for groceries and to ease the ache of not connecting with her child.

She put her hand on his arm. “Are you worrying about him? I heard you moving around last night. Is Jason the reason you couldn't sleep?”

Emmett stared down at the pale, slender fingers resting against the darker skin of his forearm. He'd hated the feeling that Jason was controlling him. But now… Now he was at Linda's mercy, too. There was no denying it.

He wanted to be the one for her. For right now, anyway. Until she was better prepared for her new life. Just until then.

He found himself covering her hand with his free one. He couldn't help himself. “I don't want to think of my brother at all,” he said, realizing that was true, as well. “I just want to kiss you.”

And without her permission, his head bent toward hers. Without her permission, he sank into another kiss.

And didn't mind the loss of control at all.

 

Holding a cheap disposable razor, Jason Jamison, aka Jason Wilkes, smiled at his reflection in the cracked mirror over the cracked bathroom sink in the crappy motel in a crappy small town not all that far from Red Rock. While he was accustomed to better surroundings, the knowledge that his little brother Emmett was certain to be shaking in his boots and stewing over Jason's whereabouts this morning was too damn good not to savor.

A loner and a loser, that was his brother Emmett. A sanctimonious do-gooder who had never possessed the true Jamison vision. His other brother, Christopher, hadn't, either. Jason had hated that Boy Scout Christopher since they were kids and mainly ignored the younger Emmett. But now that Chris was finally out of his hair—thanks to Jason's decisive, fatal action when St. Christopher had tried to talk him about of his plan of revenge against the Fortunes—asshole Emmett was now in his sights.

And Jason was a damn good shot.

Handling guns was one of the things he'd been taught by his grandfather, Farley Jamison.

The other was how the Fortune family had cheated Farley, and thus Jason himself, out of a powerful place in politics. Years before, Kingston Fortune, Farley's half brother, had refused to bankroll Farley's entrée into the Texas political scene. Jason's grandfather had never recovered from the disappointment and after his death, it had been up to Jason to avenge Farley's broken dreams by finding a way to topple Kingston's empire, which had been run by Ryan Fortune until his recent death.

Jason scraped the razor through the layer of shaving cream on his cheek. Though plastic surgery after an accident in his early twenties meant he no longer possessed the Jamison features, he didn't mind. His father and his brothers were weak men who didn't have the talent or ruthlessness to get what Jason had.

Two million dollars. A fake passport. Stolen credit cards. Everything a guy would need to get out of Texas and start a new life, knowing that he'd left a swathe of destruction in his wake. He'd scared the crap out of Ryan Fortune during the last few months of his life, even as the man was dying of a brain tumor, by kidnapping his beloved Lily.

That was what the old fool got for loving anyone better than himself.

Jason had never made that mistake. It was why it hadn't been so hard to kill his two-timing bitch of a girlfriend. Melissa had started it, anyway, striking out at him with her fists and her words. When she'd said he was going to end up as big a loser as his grandfather Farley, Jason had shut her up with his two hands around her skinny, trailer-trash throat. He was glad, damn glad, that she wasn't around to reap the benefits of his brilliance.

All the impediments to his future were out of the way now. He could ride off into the proverbial sunset with his saddlebags full of Fortune cash and have himself a hell of a good life.

As soon as he got rid of Emmett.

It wasn't part of his original plan, but then a brilliant man had to be flexible. And decisive.

Emmett annoyed him, so Emmett had to die. Jason wasn't leaving Texas until he'd taken care of that one last task.