Oxblood (10 page)

“I'm not sure Ian knows how to be anyone's friend,” Claudia replied.

Claudia's statement made me sad. How tragic to do what Ian did and not have anyone to decompress with. I'd be lost without Tiffany to bitch to about my day—and I was just waiting tables.

“Ian is hardcore when it comes to having no family connections in this line of work,” she told me. “Gil was already embedded in the Cappola family when Ian found him. He was in deep, so Ian didn't have me run the standard background check because it wouldn't have mattered. And to find out that Gil lied about you? Well, that's got Ian fuming.”

“Is that why he's being so rude to me?”

“He likes you and he doesn't know how to deal with that.”

“He's not acting like it.” I rolled my eyes.

“All I know is that when Damon came back from the restaurant, he said he saw Ian smile.
Really
smile. We need those moments, Vic, but we don't get them. It's probably better that we don't. It's going to hurt when you leave.”

“I guess that makes sense. All of this . . . it's insane. I just spent the last two and a half days learning how to shoot a gun and play the mastermind version of I spy.” I pulled my hair down and ran my fingers across my scalp. My entire body ached, and I was on the verge of tears. So what if I could shoot a paper target from the safety of the shooting range? Or notice if a cup was upside down in a picture? What if, out there in the real world, where it really mattered, I wouldn't be able to defend myself or the team? The reality of the huge risk I was to the team hit me hard. But even more terrifying was the thought of Ian cutting me loose. I imagined being drugged and thrown in a plane and waking up in my apartment in Miami thousands of miles from Gil without any hope of ever seeing him again.

I looked around for Ian, hoping he might be ready to take me back to the hotel. I wanted a hot shower and a warm bed. I had no idea what time it was, but I planned on sleeping for as long as possible. He and Damon were huddled over a table, their eyes on a laptop, so I walked over to the maps hanging on the wall.

There were maps of Russia, the United States, France, Germany, and, of course, Italy. I stopped in front of the US map and stared at Florida, running my finger along the tiny spot where Miami would be. I hoped Tiffany was safe and that Mrs. Vasquez was keeping her well fed with black beans and rice. I said a little prayer that she would understand my email and not totally freak out.

I looked at the map of Italy.
Huh. It really is shaped like a boot
, I thought as I found all the major cities: Rome, Milan, Venice . . . It was funny to think that while others were looking at the map of Italy and romanticizing, I had been here rolling around in the dirt, shooting guns, and determining the best hiding places for weapons.

“Are you ready?” Ian said sharply, surprising me from behind.

“Yeah,” I replied as I looped my bag over my shoulder. I reached in to make sure Gil's journal was still there, wondering if Ian had felt the need to snoop while I had been training.

“Think maybe you can give me an idea about what our next move is in our Gil search?” I asked innocently.

“We're not
searching
for Gil,” he said as he began to walk away from me. I darted around to get in front of him.

“What do you mean we're not searching for Gil? That's the whole point of this!”

“No! That is
not
the whole point of
this
.” He raised his arms out to the side, indicating to the team and the resources at their disposal. “The
point
of this is to provide safety and security to the world! The
point
is to do things in the shadows that the rest of the world thinks only happen in James Bond movies. We have things to accomplish here. Things that we can't just abandon because your brother has gone AWOL!”

“I came here to look for my brother,” I told him through gritted teeth.

“Well, good luck putting up posters like he's a lost puppy. Don't come crying to me when you've blown his cover and you find out the mob tied cinder blocks to his ankles and dropped him in the ocean.”

“I asked you to help me find my brother. The next thing I know, you're bringing me here and training me like a dog. You let me believe we were going to go out there and find him!”

“Gil could literally be anywhere in the country, if he's even still
in
Italy. At this point in time, it looks like he did what he set out to do. He's not with the Cappola family anymore. They probably already moved him up the ranks with another crime family. He could have spent the last two weeks traipsing all over Italy with any number of people. We don't
go and find
Gil because we have no idea where he is. We do our job and hope to God we'll cross paths with him.”

I rubbed my eyes, too tired and angry to argue. I was about to tell Ian to take me back to the hotel when my eyes caught the map of Italy. I stared at it for a moment feeling something churning inside me. I stepped to the side and cocked my head to the left and that's when it clicked.

He could have spent the last two weeks traipsing all over Italy.

“Oh my God. That's it!” I said softly.

“What are you talking about?” Ian turned around and followed my eyes to the map of Italy. “What are you looking at?”

“Gil hasn't spent the last two weeks traipsing all over Italy. That's what he's been doing since he got here.” I pulled Gil's journal from my bag but didn't open it right away. “Claudia, can you pull up a map of Italy and a map of Florida?”

“Sure. Any kind in particular?” she asked as she began the task.

“Just make sure they both have all the cities on them,” I instructed.

“Are you going to tell me what you have in mind?” Ian asked.

“Just hold on,” I scolded. “I'm assuming you can do something cool like lay the map of Florida over the one of Italy,” I said to Claudia.

“Please. Your average sixth grader can do that,” she scoffed. Claudia did as I requested and Florida was a little smudge over Italy.

“Make Florida bigger.” She enlarged the map little by little until it almost perfectly lined up with Italy. “Okay. Stop there.” I examined the aligned maps more closely. “I know where Gil has been, and maybe even where he is now.”

“Explain,” Ian demanded.

Hesitantly, I held out the journal. “This is the out-of-character thing he did. It might not mean anything to you, but for him to let me look at his research, let alone send it to me . . . it's monumental.”

“So what's in it?” Ian stepped forward.

“It's a bizarre story filled with weird family trees and tales of trips we never took as kids. It didn't make any sense to me until now. I think he was trying to connect the dots covertly. See,” I said as I flipped a third of the way into the book, “here he talks about a trip to Tampa that we never took. But you can see that Tampa is Rome on the map.”

Ian stepped closer to the map to see what I was seeing. “Give me another location.”

I flipped through the journal again. “He talks about an uncle who lives in Tallahassee.”

“That's Genoa. Another.”

“The Keys.”

“Sicily.”

“That's just the beginning. He talks about people in our lives who are not actually relatives as uncles, aunts, and cousins,” I told Ian.

He turned around and had one arm crossed over his chest. He twisted his lip with his other hand before holding it out for the journal.

“May I see it?” Ian asked.

I set the journal carefully into his waiting palm.

He read a few pages and examined the family trees that had more people added to them as the journal went on.

“He's a genius.” Ian lifted his eyes from the journal and locked them on me.

“How is he a genius? This seems like he went to an awful lot of trouble,” I lamented.

“Because he knows you. For whatever reason, he couldn't get the information he's hidden in here directly to me. He sent it to you knowing you'd never sit still. He knew you'd come after him, and that I would find you. He also knew I would send you home, but clearly he underestimated you. It may seem convoluted, but it was the safest way to get whatever is in this journal to me.”

I smirked at Ian's comment and then half-smiled at the immense trust Gil had in me. I was happy that I hadn't let him down. I also had to admit that it felt pretty damn good unlocking a piece of the puzzle for Ian.

“What do you need us to do?” Damon asked.

“Gather everything we have on the families known for illegal import and export first,” he said matter-of-factly. “Adam, get my bag from the office,” he continued.

“And me?” I asked.

“I'm taking you back to the hotel, and we're going to tear this journal to shreds. Between the two of us, we're going to figure out what information Gil was collecting,” Ian said to me. He shoved his laptop into his backpack. “Ready?”

I felt like I had crossed over the threshold from trainee to official member of this team. This was it, the break I had been hoping for. My questions were about to be answered. As soon as we decoded the journal, we'd find Gil and our lives would get back to normal. But was normal what I wanted? And why did the thought of leaving Ian and his team make me sad?

Chapter 9

Ian closed the car door for me and I immediately leaned back on my headrest. I was just going to close my eyes for a minute. Before I knew it, the car door was opening again and Ian was reaching in to lift me up.

“I'm awake,” I yawned, as Ian's arms slipped under my knees.

“Oh . . . Right. Good,” he stammered, moving back. He held out his hand and helped me from the car. We walked in silence to the side entrance and directly to the elevators.

“What time is it? Or, maybe I should ask what day is it?” The elevator doors closed in front of us. I leaned against the back of the elevator and started to close my eyes again. Sleep was begging me to embrace it, and I began to teeter.

“Whoa there!” Ian chuckled as he caught me. “It's five o'clock on Friday afternoon. I'd ask if you're hungry, but it's clear that what you need is sleep.”

“I am hungry, but I need a shower, too.”

I could barely hold myself up, so Ian put his arm around my waist and all but carried me to my room. He felt just as strong as I remembered from our impromptu hug. I liked having him close. The way he took command of dangerous situations made me feel safe, and I couldn't deny it was pretty sexy, too.

“I'd be grateful if you
would
shower.” A hint of a smile flashed from the corner of his mouth. “And I could stand to close my eyes for a bit myself.”

Ian locked the door behind us and untucked his dress shirt.

“I'm sorry I was so hard on you.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “You did really well, Victoria. You should be proud of yourself.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

He nodded slowly.

“Claudia said you had her run a thorough background check on everyone on your team. Have you run one on me?”

“Yes.”

“What did you find out?”

“Things you already told me. Things you didn't.”

“Such as?”

Ian looked past me to the window and then back at me. “Such as . . . Gil isn't the only family you have left.”

That's what I had been waiting for. “So?”

“So I hoped you would tell me on your own.”

I sighed. “My mom's family is in New York. My parents were flying there for my grandmother's birthday—her seventieth—when the accident happened. My grandparents ran a restaurant that my great-grandfather started back in the early forties. My mom's brothers ran the kitchen, and her sisters did everything else. That was their life, and they expected it to be Mom's life, too. But a month after they got married, Dad got a promotion that moved them to Miami. They blamed Dad for separating them and were angry with Mom for choosing him over them. No one in the family had ever moved away from the Bronx. When I was a kid, we would go up occasionally to visit them, but they treated us differently. They didn't even play the doting grandparents card to try and sucker my parents into moving back or visiting more often. Our cousins got game systems, and we got holiday sweaters. Ugly ones. They were never really interested in us, so I wasn't surprised when they wouldn't take me in after Dad and Mom died. I spent a year in foster care until Gil could work out how he could take care of me himself.”

I untied my shoes and slipped them off. “Anyway, a few years later, my grandmother died and Gil and I went up to New York for the funeral. Gil said it was our duty since Mom couldn't be there. It took us two and a half days to drive because I refused to fly. When we arrived, they treated us like royalty. It was disgustingly fake. We knew they had heard on the news how the surviving family members had received settlements from the airline in excess of ‘seven figures.' I told Gil I never wanted to go back there again. He promised we wouldn't. It took a two-sentence conversation for us to decide that from then on it would be just me and him.”

I finally sat down on the couch, my whole body melting into the cushions. Ian sat next to me. His eyes were soft. These weren't the eyes of the sergeant who made me do the same drills over and over again. This was a man who had a story, perhaps one as devastating as mine.

“I'm sorry that you and Gil had to make that decision. Family should be there for one another, not treat one another like property.” Ian took my hand in his, and I knew I had to say what had been on my mind.

“We can be friends, Ian. We can do the whole badass spy thing
and
be friends.”

“I wish that were true, Victoria. But you can't have friends in this line of work.” Ian stood and propped himself against the wall.

“Why not? How can you put yourself in potentially fatal situations and not trust and protect one another?” I stood up, too, and immediately regretted it. My thighs were still burning from the combat stance Adam and Ian had made me repeat ten thousand times.

“We're colleagues, not friends. People stay by their friends' sides when they're dying. We can't do that. If anyone is too hurt to move, we have to leave him behind until we can go back safely. Sometimes, that's days later. You hope that the person has been able to find a way to survive in the meantime, but that's not always the case,” he explained. “Friendship is a luxury.”

“But eventually you go back. Even if it's just for the body.”

He nodded.

“Call it what you want, but that's friendship.”

Ian swallowed hard and looked away. “I'm going to call down for something to eat. Is there anything you're in the mood for?”

Claudia was right. It was clear that Ian struggled with the concept of friendship. When was the last time Ian had had a friend? Not a teammate or ally, but a true friend?

“I'd be super grateful for a burger—and a piece of cheesecake if they have it.” I bit my lip, only slightly embarrassed at how quickly I ordered the two things a girl is never supposed to order. But after what I had just endured, there was no way in hell I was ordering a salad and a glass of water.

“I'll see what I can do,” Ian smiled as he looked around the room.

“The menu is on the nightstand next to the phone in the bedroom,” I told him.

Ian took a step toward the bedroom and stopped. “May I?”

“Um . . . Yeah. Of course,” I replied.
Did he just ask permission to go into the bedroom?

Ian slipped into the bedroom, and I watched as he sat down on the side of the bed near the phone and looked over the menu. I left him there and walked into the extra bathroom.

I decided to take a shower after we ate in case room service was super fast. I had no plans of rushing through a wonderfully hot shower, not even for a burger and cheesecake. In the meantime, I had to wash my hands and my face. I felt so incredibly grubby. I took my shirt off so I could wash my neck, too. I knew it was impossible, but as I looked at myself in the mirror, I could have sworn the muscles in my arms were more defined. It was a strange sensation to feel as weak and fatigued as I did, and to feel strong, too. I liked it.

I shut the lid of the toilet and sat down, feeling a burning relief when I closed my eyes. Suddenly, there was a knock at the door and I jerked awake. Was the food already here? Had I actually fallen asleep sitting on the toilet?

“I've got it,” I called to Ian, throwing my shirt back on and heading out to the door. I turned the handle in anticipation of dinner, but was greeted by the last person I thought I'd see. “Oh my God. Chad?”

“Hey, baby!” Chad stood there with his arms open wide and a smile that could light up the room. I don't think I had ever seen him that happy.

“What . . . what are you doing here?” I was stunned.

“I came to see you!” Chad pushed his way past me and sauntered into the living room.

“How did you know where I was? Where to find me?”

“You said you weren't going to be at your place for a few days so I thought I'd do you a solid and clear your fridge of anything that might go bad. Mrs. Vasquez let me in. That's when I saw the contact info on the refrigerator door. When I asked her, Tiffany said you were meeting up with Gil. I found it odd that the college would pay for you to come out here. It only took a few more questions for Tiffany to spill the beans. You've been holding out on me, baby!”

Chad sat down on the couch and rested his ankle on his knee and spread his arms across the back of the couch.

“Okay. So you know how
I
got here. How did
you
get here?” I questioned as I crossed my arms.

A little of Chad's smugness dropped from his face. “I borrowed the money from Sam.”

“You did WHAT? How could you do that? Sam doesn't have that kind of money!” I shouted.

“But you do. I told him you'd pay him back,” he said as if it were obvious.

That was the last straw. It was one thing to take advantage of me but something entirely different when it came to Sam.

“Of course I'm going to pay him back, but—” I began.

“Darling? Is everything all right out there?”

I turned to see Ian emerge from the bedroom, his shirt undone. He stepped to my side and put his arm around my waist.

“Who the hell is this?” Chad demanded as he stood.

“I'm Ian,” he said, extending his hand. “I'm Victoria's, well, we haven't really defined that yet, have we, darling?” He looked at me with soft and loving eyes.

Chad's nostrils flared. “Who is this guy, Vic?”

“Ian is a friend of Gil's,” I said, thinking quickly. “We started emailing a while back and hit it off.”

“You've been cheating on me with some British dude you met online?”

“I wouldn't call it cheating. I mean, you're hardly ever around, and when you do show up, it's only because you want something. Did you even remember that my birthday was on Sunday?”

“I was . . . I was busy. I'd been working. I'm sorry I forgot. Happy birthday,” he said insincerely. “But that doesn't mean you should go hooking up with some guy you met online like a slut!”

Before I could respond, Ian had Chad's face pressed against the wall and his arm crooked and twisted behind his back.

“I'm going to give you one chance to apologize to Victoria. She is a beautiful and bright woman with more courage and strength than anyone I've ever known. If you were too foolish to recognize that when you had her, that's your loss.”

“I'm sorry! I'm sorry!” Chad winced, and Ian let him go.

I slid up to Ian and took his hand. I held it tightly and Ian squeezed it back, letting me know he was right here with me.

“So that's it? You're ditching two years with me for this guy you just met?” Chad challenged.

“Go home, Chad. And I mean, go
home
. Go back to your parents, and let them send you to med school. Become a doctor. Find a girl whose birthday you won't forget.”

Chad thought for a moment before he spoke. “I flew all the way here for this?”

“I didn't ask you to come here—and plus, we both know the real reason you're here.”

Ian cleared his throat and broke the silence. “I think you need to leave.”

“Don't you think that's up to Vic?” Chad narrowed his eyes at Ian. I stiffened my arm and held my grip on Ian's hand to keep him from charging forward.

“I think that Victoria has made it quite clear that she doesn't want you here.”

“Oh really?” Chad challenged. Ian started to say something, but I cut him off before he and Chad got any deeper into their pissing match.

“Would you like us to have someone take you back to the airport?” I asked bluntly.

Chad darted his gaze from Ian to me. His eyes widened, and I wondered how he could possibly be surprised at how this had all played out.

“No,” he said after a beat. “I got it.” Chad shook his head at me and then turned quickly. “Good-bye,
Victoria
.” I swallowed hard as I watched the door close behind him. I heard it click, then turned the top lock and bolted the door. I turned back to Ian, who was buttoning his shirt.

Ian sat next to me on the couch as we both stared at the opposite wall and considered what had just happened. I thought about what a grand gesture flying to Italy to see me would have been had my relationship with Chad been different. His bravado when Ian entered the room with his shirt undone might have carried weight if he'd ever been bothered by guys hitting on me in the past. I thought about how he called me a slut, something I'd never heard him say before. But then I thought about the lovely things Ian said about me. I knew it was just for show, but it felt good to hear them.

“Are you all right?” Ian asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?” Ian turned his body to face mine, and our eyes met. He looked concerned, worried about me.

Feeling the way I did around Ian was starting to bother me. I was there to find Gil, not a new crush. But the way Ian gave me his full attention when we were together made me realize I could say or do anything and it would be okay. When he came from the bedroom and slid his arm around my waist, his hand ever so subtly gripping my hip, my heart had begun to race and heat rose inside me. In my two years with Chad, I had never felt that way.

I nodded. “I will be. He just surprised me, is all. Thank you for all of that. I don't know that you needed to slam him against the wall, but thanks just the same.”

“He deserved to have more than his face smashed into the wall for what he called you.”

After Ian's apology for not having a coat to give me the night we met, his insistence in the car that women be treated well, and his response to Chad's derogatory comment, I couldn't hold my curiosity back any longer.

“What's the story, Ian? I know plenty of guys who treat women well, but you . . .you're passionate about it.”

“Why does there have to be a story? Why can't I just be a guy who firmly believes that every woman deserves to be treated well?”