Nightfire (4 page)

Her rebellion hadn’t lasted long, though.

“He broke my arm,” she said. “It had been operated on recently and it broke easily.” Cheap at the price, because he’d stopped dead in his tracks and stared at her, cradling her visibly broken arm.

Harry Bolt suddenly looked sick. Mike Keillor looked furious.

“My mother walked in and, without a word to my father, took me back to the hospital, told them I fell down, and left me there overnight. The next day, cast and all, I was on a flight to London, where I was enrolled in the Sacred Heart School for Young Girls, where I boarded for the next three years.”

Chloe smiled. She had no idea if her mother had checked up on the Sacred Heart, if there had been some kind of parents’ site giving ratings of schools for foreign girls, or whether her mother had simply thrown a dart at a page of choices. Whatever, she’d struck pure gold. The years at the Sacred Heart, under the stern and loving care of Sister Mary Michael who had become the mother of her heart, had been the happiest of her life, hands down. The nuns had been warm and welcoming, the other girls from all over the world had provided friendship, and she’d felt at home for the first time in her life.

“I stayed in England, went to university at University College London. When I graduated, I found a job back at the Sacred Heart, teaching English. I never saw my parents again. My mother and I emailed from time to time, and sometimes she talked about coming over to London, but she never did.”

She’d sent money, though. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, which Chloe had dutifully banked, spending as little of it as possible. She liked pretty clothes but she didn’t need a huge wardrobe. Her tastes were simple and the account grew and grew.

She glanced down at her wristwatch. She’d been talking for half an hour.

“I’m really sorry,” she said, looking up. “I know I’m taking up your time but I needed to say all of that, so you’d—you’d understand.”

Again, it was Michael Keillor—Mike—who spoke. “Oh, we understand all right,” he said grimly. He shot Harry a hard glance. “Don’t we?”

Harry Bolt shook his head. Not the
no
gesture, it was more like shaking himself awake.

Okay. So far, so good. Chloe’s hands started shaking again because . . . it was time. Her life was going to split in two. If this went well . . .

Don’t go there. Think of something else.

But somehow her usual trick of damping expectations wasn’t working. Hope had caught her heart in an unshakable iron grip. While recounting her past, she’d used the old distancing trick, talking about herself as if recounting the story of a remote acquaintance.

Now the story grew closer, more personal. Possibly with a terrifying ending. Possibly with a joyful one . . .

She leaned forward a little and so did the two men. Like a group of conspirators, hatching a subversive plot.

“As I said, I never saw my parents again and we communicated rarely. So . . . I had no idea that they’d died in a car crash. On the eighteenth of April of last year. It took my, um, my father’s lawyer almost a month to track me down. It was end of term at my school so I flew over to—to settle my parents’ affairs.”

The crumpled envelope on her lap felt like it was filled with bricks. Heavy, lumpy, cumbersome.

The closer she got to the heart of it, the harder it was to breathe. Something squeezed inside her chest. She watched Harry Bolt’s eyes, light golden brown, watching her.

“My father hadn’t left me anything in his will, which didn’t surprise me. However, my mother outlived him by three hours and she was his sole heir and I was her sole heir, so the entire estate came to me. Settling the estate was complicated, but I had lawyers and time and a place to stay—their house. Since I was there, I explored. It was a brand-new house. Yet again, one I’d never seen. I put it up for sale but you are probably aware of the fact that the real estate market is weak. I didn’t really care if it sold or not. I gave notice at my school because this was important. I spent all my time sifting through papers and books and objects, trying to get a handle on my parents, trying to get a handle on my past. I took my time because it seemed to me that it was an opportunity to find out things that had puzzled me all my life.”

She stopped and simply breathed. Her entire life arrowed toward this point and she, who thought out everything so carefully, who tried to anticipate all problems, had no idea what was coming next.

“There was a safe, a big one, like one of those safes in the movies. There was no way I could open it. But the lawyer told me I had a right to have it opened. He gave me the name of an expert. A man who’d done time as a safecracker and was now a ‘security consultant.’ A man you hired to crack into safes, legally.”

She smiled faintly at the memory. Luigi Zampilli, a short fireplug of a man with the hands of a neurosurgeon. Ten thousand dollars and the safe was open in five minutes.

The two men were staring at her. It was getting harder and harder to speak. She finished her tea to moisten her throat, wishing she could fast-forward to a quarter of an hour from now when she’d told it all and knew what the reaction was.

“Inside—inside the safe were several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of Treasury bonds, ten pounds of gold ingots, the title to a number of properties I had no idea they owned . . . and a black box full of documents.”

With a shaking hand, Chloe placed the manila envelope on Harry Bolt’s desk and stared at it. Her life in an envelope. She lifted her eyes to his, so like her own.

“I was adopted,” she said finally, swallowing heavily. “I had no idea, none. When I saw the adoption certificate I felt like someone had hit me on the side of the head.”

She’d been so shocked she simply sat in an armchair throughout a long day and night, sifting through her memories, letting them fall like the elements of a kaleidoscope into a new pattern, one that made more sense to her, where the old one had made no sense to her at all.

Adopted. She was adopted. By parents who hadn’t wanted her. That had emerged clearly from her “mother’s” diary.

“There was only the certificate of adoption, which was exclusively in my mother’s name. But as it turned out, the woman I thought was my mother was actually my aunt. I was my mother’s sister’s child. My, um, my biological mother had been a troubled girl, in and out of rehab, until she finally ran away from home in her late teens. It took me several days to piece this information together, mainly from a secret diary my mother—my aunt—had kept, and from newspaper articles about my real mother’s arrests. After my biological mother ran away, the trail went dead. So I hired a private detective. It took her almost six months to track down . . .” Chloe started trembling, looking at Harry and then Mike, then back to Harry.

Something was happening with Harry. He had barely spoken. His eyes were almost radioactively bright. The skin over his cheekbones was tight, deep furrows bracketed his mouth.

“Track down where I came from,” she ended in a whisper.

Emotion grabbed her throat. For a long moment, she couldn’t speak, could barely breathe. Could only stare at Harry.

No point mentioning the thousand false starts, disappointments, dead ends. Chloe’s birth mother had been erratic, mentally ill, with an unerring nose for violent, unstable men. Addicted to every substance going. The reports of the woman’s past made Chloe sick, but she kept digging. Because the truth was better than this . . . this nothing. This huge hole in the middle of her chest and of her life.

Her P.I., Amanda Box, was a young, savvy woman. A former cop who’d quit because her boss had harassed her. She’d sued, won, moved on. And understood Chloe instinctively. Amanda had worked tirelessly for Chloe. It was very possible that without Amanda’s ferocious tenacity, Chloe wouldn’t be here, about to . . .

She gulped.

She watched Harry carefully, heart in throat.

The thing was, she didn’t know Harry, didn’t know anything about him. Had no idea how he would react.

This could end so badly.

She felt as if she were holding her heart out to Harry, literally. A small, pumping muscle, quivering with hope, in her outstretched hands. Dripping blood.

He could slap her down, break that heart, in an instant.

However much Chloe sternly told herself not to hope, she couldn’t help herself. It must have been all over her face. It was imprinted in every cell of her body. Wild, outrageous hope that this would end well. Hope of a kind and intensity she’d never felt before.

She hadn’t hoped this hard for anything, not even when the doctors had told her she might never walk again.

“Did you?” Harry asked, thick ash brown eyebrows drawn over the bridge of his nose. His voice sounded hoarse. “Did you track down where you came from?”

Chloe nodded, eyes never leaving his. Trying to read something in his light brown eyes and failing.

“Yes. Um.” Her throat was dry, palms wet. “As I said, it took my investigator six months. The investigator followed my biological mother mainly through her troubles with the law. My—my mother went west, to San Diego, got married to another drug addict who walked out on her when she was pregnant with me. I was the second child. The first was a b-boy. When I was five, m-my mother’s boyfriend killed her, wounded my brother, hurt me. Badly. That was the—the ‘accident.’ ”

Chloe leaned forward, hands flat on the desk, so filled with nerves she could hardly sit still. Pressure was rising in her chest like steam. Slowly, so anxious she could barely feel her hands, she slid the envelope over to Harry Bolt. The room was utterly silent. The noise of the thick paper envelope crossing the desk sounded loud.

“It’s all in there. The P.I.’s report, the marriage certificate and the birth certificates of both me and my brother. The death certificates of my mother and her husband, my father. My mother’s husband’s name was Michael.” She swallowed heavily. “Michael Bolt. They ha-had two children.” Chloe was sweating, felt deep distress and this awful, singing hope. “Christine Bolt and—and Harry Bolt. I was born Christine Bolt.” She met the light brown eyes of the man she was now positive was her only living relative. Her throat tightened. It was almost painful speaking the words. “Harry . . . I think you’re my brother.”

Harry rose suddenly, face pale, jaw working.
“Crissy?”
he whispered, voice raw.

From somewhere deep inside her, a place she had no idea existed, lost but not forgotten, came the answer.
“Hawwy?”

Chloe burst into tears.

Chapter 4

H
oly. Shit.

Chloe was in Harry’s arms, crying so hard she was having trouble breathing. Harry was bent over her, holding her tightly, crying, too. Mike had never seen Harry cry, ever. Not even when he’d come back from Afghanistan almost dead from terrible wounds and it had hurt him to breathe.

“I can’t believe this.” Harry pulled away and held Crissy—Chloe—by the shoulders, tears streaming down his face. “Oh my God. Is it you? Is it really you?” He didn’t wait for an answer, just pulled her into another bear hug.

He didn’t need to ask. The resemblance was there, something almost tangible, which was why he’d been so frozen. Harry’s heart had been frantically sending him signals his head couldn’t accept.

They were brother and sister, all right. When you knew it, you couldn’t miss it. Male and female, yin and yang, but the same stock. It was amazing to Mike that they were clearly siblings and yet Chloe was so feminine and Harry was all male. But there it was—the same coloring, the same color eyes, even the cast of their faces was the same.

The Keillor kids had been like that. Three young brothers, clearly siblings, looking so much like their dad, but with a bit of their mom in there. A family, visibly bound by blood. His heart gave that familiar kick when he thought of them. He suppressed it, pushed it right back down again.

Harry and Chloe were making a lot of noise, words coming out so fast they were garbled, hard sobs, sharp laughter.

Sam stuck his head in, frowning, looking ten years older. Nicole had had a hard time expecting their first child, Merry, and she was having a hard time with the new one, too. Sam’s nights were as sleepless as hers.

“What’s all this racket—hey!” He gaped at Harry and Chloe, clutching each other, crying their hearts out and laughing, at the same time. It wasn’t every day he saw his brother Harry holding on to a woman and weeping.

Mike could almost see the gears moving in Sam’s head. Slowly. Sam was having problems processing the scene, unusual for a former SEAL. SEALs aren’t easily surprised and don’t usually have problems processing things. Sam must be really sleep-deprived.

Harry lifted his head, joy all over his wet face.

He grinned at Sam. “Sam, meet my sister, Crissy.” He looked down at her. “Or do you want us to call you Chloe, honey?”

Chloe glowed, like a little sun. “Chloe,” she said softly. “Please.”

Sam blinked, shook his head, as if the idea were too big for his brain to contain it. “Crissy? But, but isn’t she . . .”

Dead. He’d been about to say dead. Chloe turned fully toward Sam. Once that idea that Harry and Chloe were brother and sister was in your head, the truth was right there, on their faces. Unmistakable. The truth made flesh.

“Oh my God,” Sam breathed, eyes wide. Seeing it.

“Yeah.” Harry swiped at his face. “Yeah. Wait till I tell Ellen. And Grace!” He looked down at Chloe. “Honey, you have a niece. A beautiful little niece. Grace Christine. Named for you.”

Chloe’s face crumpled again, her shoulders shook. She buried her face in Harry’s now-wet shirt, sobbing quietly.

Sam walked in warily. Though he’d been married more than two years now, for him a weeping woman was still the equivalent of a block of C4 with the detonator in and the timer counting down. But before he reached them, Marisa rushed into the room.

A weeping woman. Marisa was hard-wired to react. She came in bristling, shooting filthy glances at Harry, Sam and Mike, men who’d dared make one of her women, one of the Lost Ones,
cry
. She put her arms around Chloe’s shoulders, glaring ferociously at the three men. Marisa weighed one-twenty dripping wet and was fifty years old. But none of them, highly trained former soldiers that they were, would dare take her on when she was in protective mode.

“What’s going on here? What did you men
do
to this poor girl—” she began furiously, getting right up into their faces.

“She’s my sister, Marisa,” Harry said at the same time. “Come back from the dead.”

Marisa’s face went utterly blank. They never talked about it, but everyone in the office knew Harry’s story. Knew that the loss of his little sister had been a tragic hole punched through his heart all his life.

“Mamma mia,”
she whispered, reverting back to the language of her childhood. She pulled away to look Chloe in the face, holding her by the shoulders. Eyes flicking from Chloe to Harry and back.
“Mamma mia
.
”

“Davvero,”
Chloe said unexpectedly, smiling, wiping away the tears that were streaming down her face.

Marisa whooped, kissed Chloe on the cheek and did a little jig. Mike stared. No one had ever seen cool, calm Marisa so excited, so joyful. “
Una sorella ritrovata!
A lost sister! Found! And she speaks Italian!”

“
Solo un poco,
very little.” Chloe smiled, wiped her eyes again. “I studied it only for a year.”

“Hey, what’s going on?” Two beautiful women stuck their heads in the room, looking puzzled. Nicole and Ellen. Ellen had probably been working with Nicole on her accounts. Besides singing for them, Ellen kept the books of Nicole’s translation agency and of RBK. Mike always thought that was a great twofer.

Ellen rushed over to her husband, seeing the tears running down his face. “Harry!” She sounded more shocked than worried. “What’s wrong, darling? Are you hurt?”

This last was said slowly, as an afterthought, because though he was crying, Harry clearly wasn’t hurt. He started laughing and wiped away some tears, though more fell.

Chloe turned to smile at the two women, hope and light in her golden eyes. Mike had never seen anything so luminous. It was as if she had a light source glowing inside her. Her smile was heartbreaking, the smile of someone who wasn’t used to happiness.

“Come here, honey,” Harry said to Ellen. He opened one arm, the other around Chloe. When Ellen was by his side, in his embrace, he kissed her cheek. Ellen and Nicole were no dummies. Both of them were looking at Chloe, then Harry, then back at Chloe. Understanding that something was up, but what?

“Honey,” Harry said to his wife, then gave a sort of laughing cough, as if whatever was in his chest was too big to express but had to come out. “I know you’re going to find this hard to believe, but this is . . . Crissy. My sister. Back from the dead. Only now she’s Chloe.” He threw his head back and laughed again.

Both Ellen and Nicole gasped.

Mike was barely paying attention to them, to Sam and Harry. He moved closer. He couldn’t help it. Chloe was light itself and he was helplessly drawn to it, to her. There was some kind of aura there, something he’d never seen in anyone else before, something that drew him in without any volition on his part. His legs moved without him willing it, his entire body moving toward the light, moving toward something it had never seen before and instantly recognized as something it craved.

Harry was holding Chloe and Ellen in his arms. Everyone was talking all at once, the noise level amazing. Marisa had drawn away from the group and was wiping her eyes, smiling. Sam bent down to her.

“Marisa.” With any other woman, Sam would have maybe laid a sympathetic hand on her shoulder. They were all affected, Marisa as much as anyone. But Marisa didn’t like being touched by a man. She still had scars from her husband’s touch.

She stood ramrod straight, was back to her prim and proper persona. She nodded her head soberly at Sam. “Mr. Reston.”

Sam looked at Harry, in a knot of happy women, Chloe, Ellen and Nicole, all of them talking loudly and happily, then met Mike’s eyes.

Sam had clearly made a decision. He turned to Marisa. “RBK closes for the next two days. Full pay for all employees. Cancel all appointments for today and tomorrow, with apologies. We open again on Monday.” When Sam looked at him, Mike nodded his approval.

Oh yeah. Finding the sister you thought long dead—yeah, that qualified for a holiday. And when that sister was Chloe Mason . . . hell yes. Celebrations were definitely in order.

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” Marisa’s voice was bland, but there was a rosy blush under her olive skin. She’d caught the Bolt happiness bug.

They all had.

“Well, then Wordsmith closes down, too,” Nicole said, smiling. Her translation agency was across the hallway from RBK. “I’ll subcontract out my own translations for the next couple of days. I can always check on things from home. This calls for a real celebration. And you, Ellen—” She looked sternly at Harry’s wife, a notorious workaholic. Sometimes you had to pry Ellen from the spreadsheets of Wordsmith and RBK with a crowbar. “No accounting. None. I don’t want you near a computer until Monday.”

Ellen laughed. “Absolutely! Are you kidding? Working when I have a sister to welcome to the family?” Ellen was hugging Chloe. “Oh man,” she said. She had that rosy blush, too. “Wait till you meet Grace, Chloe. Your niece. You’re going to love her. This is so great! Another aunt for her. Nicole can share aunt duty!”

“I love aunt duty.” Nicole bent down to kiss Chloe’s cheek. She was much taller than Chloe and Ellen, and moved a little awkwardly, her belly starting to get in her way. “But I’ll happily share. And I can’t wait for you to meet our daughter, Meredith. Merry.” Nicole smiled at her husband, then Harry. “This is so great. I have no words.”

Which for Nicole, a professional translator, whose stock in trade was words, was really something.

His brother’s wives were great. Mike knew both his brothers realized how blessed they were. Two beautiful women, particularly Nicole, who had a blinding kind of beauty, with that Snow White ivory and ebony thing going on. Though Ellen was a looker, too, and a world-class singer. Sam and Harry were lucky men because their wives were not only gorgeous and smart and talented, but also loving. They’d both created happy homes for his brothers, given them constant, unwavering love and beautiful children. Neither Sam nor Harry had ever had a happy home, and they lapped it up.

But neither of the women could hold a candle to Chloe. Mike couldn’t keep his eyes off her. He edged closer to see whether he could pick up on whatever it was that surrounded her. There was some kind of force field around Chloe, something he couldn’t in any way define or explain but that was as strong as a tractor beam.

Nicole had a cell phone to her ear, snapped it closed. She clapped her hands. “Okay, everyone, listen up! Manuela is going to start cooking lunch for us just as soon as she stops crying. So we can take this show down to Coronado Shores. Chloe, where are you staying?”

“With us,” Harry and Ellen said at the same time. “No question,” Harry added.

Chloe was looking overwhelmed with joy. Mike had been bowled over by her in the office lobby, this pale, anxious beauty. Now she was glowing with happiness, eyes gleaming with tears of joy, cheeks flushed. Absolutely irresistible.

“Oh!” Chloe covered her mouth with her hand. “I don’t mean to impose! I booked a room at the Del, you don’t need to put me up, for heaven’s sake. You have a small child and . . .” Her voice trailed off when she saw that Harry and Ellen weren’t even listening to her. Ellen absentmindedly gave her shoulders a squeeze while talking to Harry about beds and space, then turned to give Chloe another kiss on the cheek.

“This is so exciting! It’s the best Christmas ever!”

“No, really.” Chloe stepped back, just one tiny step, but it was the first step back anyone had taken. Her hands clasped in front of her and she pulled them apart. A sign of distress.

Harry glanced at Sam and at him and they drew closer, closer to him and to Chloe.

It was a look they’d shared all through their adolescence in a brutal foster home, a look they all understood instinctively, down to the bone. Harry wanted Sam and Mike to have his back. It was a call both Sam and Mike were incapable of resisting. They’d have Harry’s back no matter what. Mike would willingly take a bullet for him, and for Sam, too. He loved them.

He’d walk into the jaws of death for both of them.

Coming closer to Chloe, something he wanted desperately, was a no-brainer.

Harry took Chloe’s hands in his, carefully. Harry had big strong hands, they all did. They were all careful not to hurt women or kids with their hands.

A hot flush of grinding guilt shot through Mike at the memory of holding down the cokehead during the fuckathon last night. Hurting her. She was a whack job, true, but she didn’t deserve even one second of pain from him.

It was a memory that shamed him, made him feel unclean. Unworthy, of his brothers, of their wives. Of Chloe.

“Chloe,” Harry said gently, watching her face carefully, “you need to understand something really important. We’re all your family now. Sam and Mike and me, we’re like brothers. More than brothers. We’ll have all the time in the world for me to explain why, but for now—all you need to know is that they are your brothers, too. Together with Nicole and Ellen and Merry and Gracie. We’re all one family. Yours.”

Chloe burst into tears again. Mike could see that she couldn’t contain her emotions, which made sense. When she’d told her story, he could hear a longing for connection in her voice. Almost feel her yearning. He’d had his family until he was ten. He knew what it was like to yearn. She’d had it harder than he had because she’d never known family except for the first years, when Harry protected her. Years she couldn’t remember.