Cherry Adair - T-flac 09 (24 page)

Caleb swallowed hard, and slapped the lid back on the nuts.

“Did that for the first three, four months she was knocked up. I love my sis, but man, she was damn lucky she didn’t give birth to an olive with white fluffy hair.” Rook chuckled at his lame joke, then reached over to punch Caleb in the arm. “But, hey! Congratulations. When this party’s over, let’s get shitfaced and celebrate.”

“I’m not telling you so we can smoke a cigar and have a bonding moment,” Caleb said. Then wished he hadn’t mentioned the word
cigar
as bile burned the back of his throat. Promising himself that this would be the very last one, he took another nut from the can and chewed furiously until the nausea subsided.

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Morning sickness—all freaking day and night sickness, if the truth be told. A sympathetic pregnancy?

Geez. What kind of f-ing cosmic joke was
that
?

He needed another nut.

He switched from “feelings” to business so that he wouldn’t have to think about it. “I’ll fill the others in as well—this is a heads-up that not only do we have an innocent civilian in a dangerously explosive situation, but that she’s carrying a child. And before you ask, you inquisitive little shit, no, her getting knocked up wasn’t intentional. Although it helped, you know, getting her to marry me so fast. She and Shaw had a serious falling-out.

“The only thing preventing me from feeling like a total asshole dirtbag is that I think it will make her happy to reconcile with her father.” Even as he said the words, Caleb’s gut told him they weren’t true.

She’d made no bones about how much she disliked her father. He’d spent the entire flight holding her in his arms while he convinced himself that what he was doing was just and right.

Shawhad to be stopped. Shaw’s
clients
had to be stopped. The only way to extract Shaw was to use his daughter as bait to gain entrée to the man’s stronghold. There was no other way.

He’d keep her safe, keep the baby safe. But it was a losing proposition. She’d probably hate him for forcing a reunion with her father. Probably, hell. Marriage or no marriage, there’d be no way back from this kind of deception. Which didn’t matter since they couldn’t have a traditional relationship anyway. If he stayed with her, according to the ancient family Curse, she’d die.

Sometimes life could really suck.

Caleb had put a protective spell on her in San Francisco. He’d strengthened it before they’d started the trip. But just because she had a protection spell in force didn’t mean that someone wanting to do her harm couldn’t attempt to do so.

No one could touch her physically because of the spell, but he didn’t want her terrified. And he sure as shit didn’t want anything upsetting little Bean.

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“She’ll be safe inside Shaw’s place,” he told Rook, told himself, knowing that was true. That last comment of Lark’s about amping up the protection spell niggled at the back of his brain, but he wasn’t quite sure why. He knew the spell was solid. Trust Lark to jerk his chain.

Shaw’s digs were a fortress, and she was his daughter. They didn’t have a shred of intel to indicate that he’d ever harmed Heather in the past, so it was a reasonable assumption that he didn’t pose a threat now.

Caleb had a quick flash of the scars on her shapely ass. Did her father suspect that his clients were after his daughter? Caleb suspected that more than one group was trying to nail her. To scare her? Or to prove to Shaw that they could get to him through his daughter? Another possibility was, he speculated, trying to kidnap her. To do what he’d done, flush out her father.

Whether Shaw knew that the bodyguards he’d sent away with his daughter were dead or not was immaterial. She’d been out in the cold,
on her own
for a year, while her father was safe and cozy and surrounded by more than two hundred armed men.

She was damn lucky Caleb had found her first. Yeah. Damn lucky.

They might have had a falling-out, but Caleb suspected that he’d witness a tearful reunion. It would be brief, but he could give her that much before he extracted Shaw and started grilling him like a cheese sandwich.

Before he left Heather with nothing but a prompt monthly child support check.

God damn it, he hated feeling like an asshole. Hell, not just feeling like one,
being
one. He’d left out
the
most important parts of Nairne’s Curse when he’d told it to her during the flight.

I gift you my powers in memory of me.He was a wizard, hard to explain and unnecessary information to one’s
temporary
wife. The mother of your child. To a woman who was going to inflict her own curses on him when she found out what he’d done.

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The joy of love no son shall ever see. When a Lifemate is chosen by the heart of a son, No protection can be given, again I have won.He was damned if he’d do anything that would remove that protection spell from her. Heather Shaw—Heather Edge—was safe from everyone but her husband.

He was
pretending
to be in love with her.
Pretending,
he reminded himself for the umpteenth time, as he absently ground up three large nuts at the same time—and doing a damn fine job of it too, he thought, rubbing the now-familiar aching void in his chest.

His pain will be deep, her death will be swift—

Not going to happen.

Inside his heart a terrible rift.Yeah. There was that little zinger.

Noneof it was going to happen. He was here to make sure it didn’t.

Not. Going. To. Happen. He’d live with his guilt. He’d take being an asshole. As long as Heather stayed safe, and with her, his son. It was a fair trade.

“I cast a powerful protective spell on Heather and my son, but I still want all eyes vigilant and ready for trouble until this is over,” Caleb told Rook. Barring his first mission, Caleb had never felt even a glimmer of fear before an op. He prided himself on his absolute focus when he was in the field. Or out of it, for that matter.

It had taken him half a plane trip—Jesus,
that
was a slow form of transportation—to recognize that for the past three months he’d felt edgy, out of sorts, and irritable as hell. Coupled with that shit were his strange, and sometimes bizarre, new eating habits. Not to mention this damned weird and annoying hollow sensation in his chest.

If he were a touchy-feely guy, which he sure as shit
wasn’t,
he’d say he was having a goddamned meltdown.

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Fear?

Before, during, or after an op? When he was a rookie, yeah. Since? No.

He loved his job. Thrived on it.

No. Obviously he’d picked up some freaking bug in the Saudi desert last month. That, coupled with some residual medical crap tied into spending so long in rehab for his leg, was why he felt like shit on a shingle half the time. And as if someone had whacked him in the chest with a two-by-four the other half of the time. Temporary.

Leg was fine.
He
was fine. Never better. Great. Excellent.

“What’re you gonna do?” Rook asked as the lights of Bari winked behind them. “Knock on the front door?”

“Yeah.” Caleb looked over his shoulder. Heather hadn’t moved in twenty minutes. She was still fast asleep. Moonlight streamed a cool white beam of light through the vehicle’s window, illuminating her profile.

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He’d considered and weighed the pros and cons of backspacing time to before they’d slept together.

Erase the past three months. But one: He wasn’t sure if he
could
TiVo Heather back before the baby was conceived. He had no idea how backspacing would affect either Heather or the baby. He’d never tried it with a pregnant woman, and he sure as shit didn’t plan on starting with Heather and Bean.

And two, and three, and fricking
four:
He wasn’t going to risk either mother or child or mission in an attempt to be chivalrous.

No. He was on a course. None of this had come about by accident, he reminded himself. He was doing his job. His duty.

Jesus. He was so screwed. “I want her to rest. Then we’re going to walk in there bold as brass to let Shaw wish us well.”

“And then?”

“Then I teleport them to our safe house. No fuss no muss.”

Rook shot him a glance. “You told her you’re a wizard?”

“Hell, I didn’t even tell her I was T-FLAC.”

“Man, I’d like to be a fly on the wall for
that
conversation.” Rook was still young enough that the trauma, the disbelief, the horror of full disclosure were nothing more than a vague thought. Each wizard had to decide if and when and to whom they would reveal themselves.

“Pull over,” he told the younger man absently. Caleb wasn’t sure telling Heather anything about himself would mitigate the hate she’d have for him when she realized how he’d used her. Whether a wizard divulged who and what he was was a matter of debate among the wizard council as well. He, Gabriel, and Duncan had discussed the pros and cons—briefly.

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The only time they deemed it necessary to tell someone that much info was if a long-term association was anticipated. Caleb could count the people who knew he was a wizard, other than T-FLAC/psi operatives and his immediate family, which included MacBain, on either hand.

It was on a need-to-know basis, and other than his fellow operatives, no one needed to know.

Rook pulled over onto the shoulder and turned off the car. “What are we doing?” The engine pinged and hummed for several minutes as it cooled down.

Caleb stared blindly at the moon-swathed road ahead. Jesus. Would
Bean
be a wizard?

Yes. Christ. Of course he would.

The knowledge hit him like a blunt force blow to the belly, and he shot out a hand to brace himself on the dash. He was going to
have
to tell Heather. About himself. And about their child. His son would be a wizard. Had he wanted to, he
couldn’t
disengage himself from the child. Which meant that, like his own father, Caleb had to have contact with Bean’s mother. There were things that only another wizard could teach him…

His brothers? Caleb thought a little desperately. Gabriel had practically raised himself
and
Caleb and Duncan…
He’d
make an excellent father…He would and could teach little Bean everything he’d need to know. Bean would certainly see a hell of a lot more of Gabriel, and perhaps Duncan, than all three of them combined had seen of their father.

His mother had taken them to Scotland to see Magnus, or he had come to Montana,
once
a year.

Alternating between the States and Scotland for sixteen fucking years. Jesus.

Of course the boys hadn’t spent a whole hell of a lot of quality time with their father, because their parents had spent most of that week upstairs in the master bedroom. His parents had been completely self-absorbed.
Obsessed.
Insane with love and lust. They couldn’t bear that they had to remain apart.

They spent their days whispering to each other on the phone. Living for that one week together.

His mother, who was always weak and melancholy, would get paler and paler, and more frail in that
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week they spent together. As if by being with her husband the very life was being sucked right out of her.

The three boys had grown up just fine without a mother tucking them in, or a father watching the Super Bowl with them.

It was amazing to Caleb that a man who was basically a stranger had been such an enormous presence in his children’s lives. It was their father who’d taught them swordplay. Their father who brought his manservant MacBain to Montana to keep an eye on them. Their father who had encouraged all three of them to try out for T-FLAC.

The counterterrorist organization was HQ’d not far from Edridge castle in Montana. Magnus had been aware of the T-FLAC/psi branch, and had offered up his sons when they’d been in their late teens.

It had been a perfect match.

Early discipline, rigorous training, and a love of their country had given Caleb and his brothers something to fight for. Something to believe in. Something, God damn it, to
love.

Fortunately they’d learned early not to expect anything back.

Annihilating tangos was an often thankless, unnoticed, and extremely violent job. Caleb’s smile was feral as he reached for another Brazil nut and crunched down. Man, he
loved
what he did.

And that was the point of this mental masturbation. He, Gabriel, and Duncan had turned out fine without the guidance of their father. Bean would do the same.