Force of Nature (29 page)

“What are you afraid of?” Robin interrupted. “We’ve already crossed the point of no return. I want to wake up tomorrow with you in my arms.”

God. Jules wanted that, too.

The limo turned in to the hotel driveway and braked to a stop. Unlike at Robin’s fancier hotel, there were no bellhops at this hour to throw open the doors.

Which was just as well, because Robin had come across the limo to kiss him, and Jules was unable to do anything but kiss him back.

Except Max was in the hotel, waiting. Jules pulled away. “Go back to your hotel,” he told Robin again. “I’ll come to you.”

It was obvious that Robin hadn’t expected him to say that. “Really?”

“It might be late.”

“I don’t care.” Robin dug out his wallet, pulled out his key card, putting it in Jules’s jacket pocket.

“Don’t wait up for me.” Jules smoothed down a piece of Robin’s hair that was sticking straight up. He smiled at the protest he could see forming in Robin’s eyes. “Don’t worry. I’ll wake you when I get there.”

Robin nodded. And then kissed him again, hard and sweet. He opened the limo door. And got out. “Don’t freak. I’m coming in with you, but only because I have to use the men’s. Sean, I’ll be right back,” he called to the driver.

The hotel’s automatic doors slid open, and Jules followed Robin, who was running ahead into the lobby. But then Robin stopped and turned back, waiting for Jules to catch up. He was, without a doubt, the most beautiful man Jules had ever known, especially when he smiled the way he was smiling now.

“You know, I meant what I said before.” Robin put his hand over his heart. “I’m yours,” he told Jules. And then he turned and ran for the bathroom.

And okay, so maybe that meant it wasn’t
the
most romantic moment of Jules’s entire life, but it was pretty damn close.

Grinning like an idiot—because there was so much about this that just wasn’t going to work—Jules went into the hotel pub. It was dark in there, but he spotted Max right away, sitting at the bar.

“I hope you haven’t been waiting for too long, sir,” Jules said.

Max turned. “No, the flight just got into Tampa an hour ago.”

“Really.” What airline had flights landing after midnight? West-coast Florida was a roll-up-the-sidewalks-at-ten-thirty kind of place. “What’d you have, a lot of delays?”

“We hopped a military transport to MacDill.” It was only when he heard that familiar Western drawl that Jules realized that the man sitting next to Max was none other than his good friend Sam Starrett.

“Hey, hey, SpongeBob!” Jules laughed as Sam—a former Navy SEAL, hence the marine nickname—slid off the bar stool to give him a hug plus plenty of backslaps to prove that he still wasn’t gay. Some things never changed.

“New haircut?” Sam asked. “You’re looking good, Squidward.”

“Yeah, no…Thanks,” Jules said. “What is this, a surprise party? It’s not my birthday. I thought you and Lys were taking a vacation on Cape Cod after you got back from Europe.”

Sam and his wife, Alyssa, worked for one of the nation’s top personal security companies, Troubleshooters Incorporated—a civilian organization that was often contracted to task-force with the CIA or the FBI. There was enough work to keep them on the clock 24/7, and for a long time they’d done just that, jumping from one job to another, with no time off in between. Sam recently told Jules that he and Alyssa had made a pact to start taking more downtime.

Of course, maybe
that
was why Sam was in Florida. “Is Alyssa here, too?” Jules asked, looking around the bar. Had he missed seeing her, as well? But she wasn’t in sight. Robin was, though. He’d come out of the men’s room and was now at the other end of the bar, suspiciously eyeing Sam, who still had his hand on Jules’s shoulder. “Doesn’t your cousin live in Sarasota? Noah Something…Wait for it—it’s coming.” Jules squeezed his brain. “Gaines, right? Noah Gaines.”

Sam shook his head. “Do you remember the names of everyone you’ve ever met?”

“Only the hot ones.” Jules smiled back at him. “Are you here to see Noah?”

“I’m here to see you,” Sam told him, his smile fading to grim. “Lys is already in Spain. We got another lead on that missing suitcase nuke—it’s pretty high priority, considering Peggy’s message. I’m going to catch a flight over in a little while.”

A flight leaving after oh-dark-hundred, as SEALs and former SEALs were fond of calling the wee hours of the morning. What plane was Sam going to catch
in a little while
?

But that mystery was going to have to wait. “Peggy’s message?” Jules turned to Max expectantly.

“Her code included a date,” he told Jules, seeing Sam’s grimness, and raising it a million. He had bags under his eyes, and he looked as if he were wearing yesterday’s suit, and two years ago’s attitude—he was clenching and unclenching his jaw so tightly, his teeth were going to be nothing but shards and nubs if he kept that up. “June thirteenth. She also told us
Atlanta
and
T2
and three letters—
GBJ.
”

Gordie Burns Junior. So it wasn’t the father. It was the son.

T2 was Tango Two—the code name for al-Hasan.

And June 13 was going to arrive much too quickly. Was it the date of al-Hasan’s arrival, or the date he went to Atlanta?

“Sir, we’re going to catch this motherfucker, I guarantee it,” Jules told Max. “I know that’s not going to bring Peggy back, but…I really am sorry for your loss.”

Max glanced at Sam.

Sam—who had come all the way to Sarasota to see Jules, when he should have been in Spain with his ass-kicking wife…?

It didn’t compute. None of it did. A military transport to MacDill Air Force Base up in Tampa? To deliver, in person, information Max just as easily could have given Jules over the phone?

And, come to think of it, Max and Sam weren’t exactly buddies. The idea of them traveling anywhere, together, was bizarre.

“Who died?” Jules said, looking from Sam to Max and back.

Oh, Jesus. He was right. He could see it in Sam’s eyes. He was going to throw up. “Please tell me it’s not Alyssa or Gina or the baby.” Although, as soon as he said the words, he knew his friends were okay. Why would Sam and Max come all the way to give
him
news about
their
families?

“They’re fine,” Sam reassured him, his hand again on Jules’s shoulder. “Why don’t we go someplace more private?”

“Is it my mother?” Jules asked.

“Your mother’s fine, too.” Sam tried to move him toward the door.

But Jules shook him off. “Damn it, Starrett, don’t make this a guessing game. Just fucking tell me who died!”

“Ben Webster,” Max said.

Ben. Oh God…

“He was killed outside Baghdad by an IED,” Max told him.

Ben, who’d been serving in Iraq, whom Jules really should have thought of first, since he was stationed in one of the most dangerous places in the entire world.

Ben, whom Jules hadn’t thought of once today.

“Fuck.” Sam was pissed. “We did that so fucking badly.”

“Trust me, there’s no good way,” Max told him.

“Can we help you get upstairs, Jules?” Sam asked, his voice gentler. “Or get you a drink? Tell me what I can do to help you.”

“No.” Jules shook him off. “I’ve just…got to sit down for a sec.”

“Here.” There was a table nearby. Sam pulled out a seat, pushed him into it, and sat next to him, a solid, steady presence. “Get him a shot of Uncle Jack,” he ordered Max.

“IED?” Jules asked. It didn’t make sense. None of this made any sense at all. “He wasn’t flying?”

Max put three glasses and a bottle of whiskey on the table in front of them.

“I don’t want that,” Jules said. “I just want to know why wasn’t he flying?”

It was crazy. Dead was dead. Why should it matter so much to Jules that Ben hadn’t died while he was doing the one thing he truly loved? The one thing he was ready to give up, because he claimed to love Jules even more…

Oh, God. He was going to be sick.

“It was an IED,” Max told him as Sam filled the glasses anyway. “A roadside explosion.”

“What was he doing out on the road?” Jules asked. Ben had told him in many of his e-mails that he rarely left the Marine camp any way other than in his beloved helicopter.

“He’d just flown a mission,” Max tried to explain. “He’d caught enemy fire, and his chopper was damaged, but he brought it down safely, saving the lives of his crew. The problem was, he didn’t make it back to the airfield. HQ sent a vehicle to pick them up, get them back to camp. When the bomb went off…” Max shook his head. “They must’ve been right on top of it.” Misery was in his eyes. “They were all killed. Ben and all the men and women he’d saved, just hours earlier.”

Jules knew a thing or two about explosives. For a bomb to cause that kind of damage to an armored vehicle…But then he realized. “The transport wasn’t armored, was it?”

Max shook his head. “No.”

“What the
fuck
—”

“They were in a safe zone,” Sam chimed in, his voice dark. “Supposedly.”

God, what a senseless waste.

Sam pushed Jules’s glass closer to him.

“I really don’t want it,” Jules told his friend.

“Maybe it’ll help,” Sam said, but when Jules just looked at him, he chastised himself. “Yeah, that was stupid. I know nothing’s going to help. I’m just so sorry.”

“Thank you for coming,” Jules said. He looked at Max, too. “And for getting the details for me.”

“Lys would’ve been here, too,” Sam said, “if she could’ve. She was already in Spain—I had to talk her out of swimming the Atlantic to get to you.”

“When’s the service going to be?” Jules asked Max. “I know this isn’t a good time to tend to personal matters, and I understand that I won’t be able to go over there to…” He had to stop. Clear his throat. “Bring him home. But I would like to attend the service, if I can…”

He trailed off, because Sam was staring into his drink, and Max was looking down at the floor.

“You tell him,” Sam ordered Max, looking at Jules with an expression that was part heartfelt apology, part homicidal rage. “I’ll just fuck it up.”

The anger wasn’t aimed at Jules—it had to do with the additional bad news he was about to hear.

“Ben died two weeks ago,” Max told him quietly. “He’s already been interred—”

Two weeks…

“—at a military ceremony up in Arlington,” Max continued through the roaring in Jules’s ears. Ben had already been buried, and no one had called Jules to let him know, to let him attend.

But two
weeks…
?

“When?” Jules asked.

“The ceremony was Thursday,” Max said. “The casualty report didn’t cross my desk until today. Laronda noticed Ben’s name and brought it to my attention.” He was as angry about this as Sam was. “I couldn’t believe no one had contacted you.”

“No,” Jules said. “When—what day—was he killed?”

Max had some papers folded up and jammed into his inside jacket pocket. He tried to flatten them on the table as he searched for the information. He found it and read off both the date and the time.

Jules nodded.

“Ah, fuck,” Sam breathed, as usual way too perceptive for someone who wore cowboy boots and meant it. “What was it, the same day he sent you that e-mail?”

Yes, it was. And thanks to the Internet, by the time Jules had received that e-mail, Ben was already dead.

He’d never seen Jules’s reply—as brief as it had been.

Ben had taken a huge risk—and it was a career risk as well as an emotional one—by putting everything he was feeling into words, by labeling it love, and honoring and prioritizing that love above all of his other hopes and goals and dreams.

And then he’d gone to put in a hard day’s work for an organization that wouldn’t have wanted him had they known who he really was. And he’d died because the administration thought they could win a war on the cheap.

“What I don’t understand”—Sam was putting voice to his fury—“is why his parents didn’t get in touch with you.”

“He wasn’t out to them,” Jules said. “They didn’t know.”

“But he was an officer, he probably had a laptop—”

“He did,” Jules confirmed. Ben had told Jules that he’d kept their e-mails—they’d exchanged scores of them. And Ben had said he’d saved them all. If his parents had discovered the truth—and it was hard to imagine that they hadn’t—they’d made a choice to keep it hidden, at Jules’s expense. “But that’s how it goes when you live in the closet, when your entire life’s a lie. Some of the people you love—people who love you—don’t get to come to your funeral.” He stood up. “Excuse me. I have to go throw up now.”

He wasn’t going to make it up to his room, so he hurried for the men’s that was out in the lobby.

“Jules.” He was stopped by a hand on his arm by…

What was Robin still doing here? He’d never left, Jules realized. He’d stayed in the bar.

“I couldn’t help but overhear,” he told Jules now.

“Shit,” Jules swore, because here came Sam, making sure he wasn’t being accosted by some stranger.

“Everything okay?” Sam drawled, his sharp gaze missing nothing, including the hand Robin quickly reclaimed.

“This is my friend, Sam.” It was probably beyond absurd to exchange social niceties, considering he was moments from barfing on both of their shoes, but Jules didn’t quite know what else to do. Of course, once he’d introduced Sam, he realized he probably shouldn’t reveal Robin’s name in a hotel lobby, surrounded by curious onlookers, so it was even more awkward and strange.

And then there they were, two of the most important men in his life—the ones still living, that is—gazing at each other with mutual distrust in their ridiculously similar blue eyes.

Sam’s squint was particularly narrow. It was clear he recognized Robin, but just couldn’t place him. And God knows Robin had heard quite a bit about Sam from Jules.

Under other circumstances, it would’ve actually been funny—like a big, giant cosmic joke on Jules—because Robin and Sam had almost the exact same coloring and build. Sam was a little taller, but other than that, they could have been brothers.

“I just wanted to say that I’m sorry for your loss,” Robin told Jules, his face a mask. “I really am.”