RYDER: A Standalone Military Romance (Blake Security Book 1) (3 page)

“Since a month before Celia was born. She’ll be six months old next week.”

“So, seven months?” She nodded, and I went on to ask, “How long have you been in New Orleans?”

“It will be a year next month. I came here to take a job with a couple I met in Russia. They were looking for a nanny, and they arranged for me to obtain a visa and come back here with them. That job…didn’t work out. I met the Bransons through another nanny and they hired me to help get things ready before Celia came to live with them.”

I wondered if that statement was just her limited English talking, or if there was something I didn’t know about the baby’s biology. “I’m sorry, ‘before she came to live with them?’ You mean before she was born?”

Alicia once again looked anxious as she said, “Yes, she came to live with them as soon as she was released from the hospital, after she was born.”

“After she was born to Mrs. Branson, correct?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Alicia, I’m here to help. If I don’t have all the facts, I won’t be able to do that. I need you to be completely honest with me here.”

“I am.” She looked down at the floor when she said that.

“Alicia, please look at me.” She brought her pretty eyes back up to my face. She had tears in them. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

“No,” she said with a look of pure fear on her face. “I’m so stupid.”

“Don’t say that about yourself. You don’t seem the least bit stupid to me.”

“The Bransons are going to be furious with me. I can’t afford to lose my job. Please…”

“Alicia, is Celia not the Bransons’ biological child?”

“Please.”

“I only want to help. I promise I won’t say anything to the Bransons that will jeopardize your job, but I need to know the truth.”

“No, she’s not their biological child. They used a surrogate.” A stray tear rolled down her cheek, and I had to fight the compulsion to wipe it away and take her in his arms. I had to focus on what the hell was going on here. At no place in the file did it state that Celia was adopted. I’d seen her birth certificate, and it listed Matt and Julia as her parents. The police had thoroughly investigated them. Blake, who never missed anything, had investigated them as well. Why was there no mention whatsoever of the one person who would have the biggest motivation to snatch this child?

RYDER

              “No way, I checked these people out backwards and forwards. There is no way I missed that they used a surrogate.” Blake was actually offended that I was suggesting he’d missed something.

              “I don’t know why Alicia would say that if it wasn’t true.” She definitely acted as if she hadn’t wanted to tell me. If that was an act, she missed her calling.

              “If it were true, why would they want to hide it from the people that they’ve hired to help them? The surrogate would have a better motive to snatch that baby than anyone would. Shit. Who’s at the house right now?”

              “Leif is there. Matt Branson was supposed to call me when they got back from the gala, but I haven’t heard from him yet.” I saw Blake look at his watch.

              “It’s after nine already. I doubt that he’s going to call tonight. Are you leaving Leif there, or are you going back?”

              “I told him I’d relieve him at midnight. I have to go check on Granny.”

              “She’s not answering her phone again?”

I had bought her a cell phone so that I could call and talk to her. She’s nearly eighty years old, and I hate that she’s way out in the bayou all alone. She refuses to move into town. She calls New Orleans the “Devil’s Den.”

              “She won’t even turn it on. She gives me a headache.”

              Blake smiled. It’s not something he does often, but he has a soft spot for my Granny. “I can go relieve Leif if you want me to.”

              Any other job and I would have taken him up on the offer. Shamelessly, I couldn’t stop thinking about seeing Alicia again. “I think I can make it okay if I leave now,” I told him.

              “Okay, give me a call if you can’t. Also call me before you talk to these people about why they’d hire us to do a job and then withhold important information. I’m dying to hear their excuse for that one. I’d also like to know how they managed to cover it up so well that I didn’t even get a hint of it during my investigation.”

              “If I had to guess, I’d say money, a lot of money.”

              “Well, they might just have to use that money to pay for another bodyguard service, depending on whether or not I like their answer about why they lied to me.”

              In Blake’s world, everything was black and white. He didn't believe in gray areas, and to him, even an omission is a lie. Blake gives people one chance. If he catches them in a lie, they get one chance to explain themselves. If the explanation doesn’t include someone dying had they told the truth, he was finished with them. Purely for selfish reasons involving a hot nanny, I hoped the Bransons had a damned good reason for keeping that to themselves.

I pushed my chair back from his desk and stood up. “I’m going to take off and check on Granny. Are you going home?”

              “I might be here a while longer…”

              “Man, when was the last time you slept all night?”

              He gave me a hard look with his dark green eyes. They had dark gray circles underneath them. I’m one of the few people in the world that look doesn’t intimidate, much. “I sleep. Go see your grandmother and get to work.”

              “Alright, I’ll call you.” He was already back to doing whatever I’d interrupted when I came in, typing away at the computer keys, probably digging into someone’s deep, dark past. I wondered sometimes if Blake would ever tell me what it was that happened to him that snuffed out the light that used to burn so brightly inside of him. I still see flickers of it every now and then, but sometimes I worry that if he keeps carrying the weight of whatever it was solely on his shoulders it might eventually snuff out what’s left. Tonight was not the night to have that conversation though. Instead, I got in my car and took the thirty-minute drive out to Granny’s house.

Even if I didn’t know these Louisiana backroads like the lines on my own face, I’d know I was getting close to the swamp as soon as the humidity began to rise. I felt myself starting to sweat, but instead of turning up the air conditioner I put down the windows. Home was a place once I couldn’t wait to leave, and now it was the place that renewed my soul.

I can’t live without it for long, and I wondered why I ever wanted to leave it in the first place.

The land is low and wet, and the bugs are big and loud, and most importantly, the people who live there are content to be whom and what they are. You won’t find any fake in the bayou. My granny has lived in the same house in Terrebonne Parish her entire life. She grew up on the swamp, and she knew it better than anyone I’ve ever known. The house faced right out to it on the backside, and when I was a kid growing up, Granny and I used to catch and sell crawdads to the restaurants in the little town and the tourists.

The house was no more than a cabin up on blocks to keep the water from flooding us out back then. I was in the Middle East when Katrina hit, and it took me over two weeks to be able to get in touch with someone who could let me know that Granny was okay. The little house was wiped out, but by the time I got my furlough and made it home a month later, our neighbors had already rebuilt it. That’s another thing I loved about bayou country, the sense of community and belonging. We’re like one big family that speaks half-English and half-French with a bunch of sayings we made up thrown in there, too. Not much of it makes sense to an outsider, but we communicate with each other just fine.

The only regret I really have in my life is that my memories of my Pops were fading more and more with each passing year. From what I know, he was a hell of a man, and it was to my detriment that I didn’t get a chance to know him better. When Pops was just seventeen, he met a girl in N’awlins one night at a party. Granny said Pops told her that she was the most beautiful girl in the world, and he was gonna marry her someday. She was a little older than he was. She was also a city girl going to a university somewhere far from the bayou and just in New Orleans on spring break. Pops and the girl did some drinking and some dancing and nine months later when she showed up on Granny’s doorstep, they had to admit they’d gone a little further than that. She said she didn’t want the baby, and if Pops didn’t want him either, she was gonna leave him at the county hospital. Pops and Granny wouldn’t hear of that. The baby was their family, their blood. That baby was me, and when Pops died in a car accident at twenty-three years old and left behind a five-year-old boy, Granny stepped up, and if I say so myself, she did a great job.

In the dark, the swamp was all dark shadows and glowing eyes. In the light of day, the cypress trees would be filled with heron and other birds and the shallow, murky brown water with just about every fresh water fish, reptile, and amphibian known to man.

I turned off the main road and onto the bumpy dirt road that led along the bank of the swamp and out to Granny’s house. I bumped along for a couple of miles before the house came into view. As soon as my car topped the small dirt mound in front of it, I saw Granny’s head pop up from the porch. The porch swing behind her was still swaying as she hurried down to greet me. I’d only seen her two days ago, but every time I go away—even for an hour—Granny acts like we’re having a family reunion when I get back.

I put the car in park and turned it off as she bounced down toward me. Her dark hair now streaked with long strands of gray was piled up in a loose bun on top of her head and swayed back and forth as she moved. My Granny is tiny, and when you look at her and me together, it’s almost impossible to believe I have any of her genes running through me. But even if I found out now that I didn’t, I wouldn’t care. Granny is my heart, and she always will be. 

When she reached me, I smiled, and before I could say anything, she wrapped her arms around me. Her head only came up to my chest, and her arms were like spindles, but she was so strong from years of hard work that when she squeezed, I felt it.

After a few seconds, I held her back and looked into her dark eyes. “Granny, why don’t you answer your phone?”

She waved a wrinkled hand at me and said, “You know I don’t need none of them electronic contraptions. I tried to tell you before you went and spent all dat money on it.”

I chuckled. “It’s just so I can check on you when I don’t have the time to drive all the way out.”

“What you need to check on me for? Dis my home. I’m fine here.”

I laughed again and put my arm around her and led her back toward the house. “I know you are, but I just don’t like knowing you’re out here alone.”

“I spent seven years wit-out you, remember? Things were just fine. Even lived through dat hurricane.”

As we went up the steps, I kissed the top of her head. She always smelled like strawberries. Every time I get a whiff of strawberries, no matter where I am, I think of Granny. “I know, but I’m home now, and it’s my job to worry.”

She cackled out a laugh and let go of me as we went through the door. I had to duck to make it through. “Wat you want to eat?”

“I’m not hungry, Granny. I just came to…”

“I got some fresh boudin balls and some a dat dark gravy you love.”

“I’m okay Granny, I had supper. I can’t stay too…”

“You don’t want
boudin balls
? I got some pig from yesterday’s
cochon de lait
.”

A
cochon de lait
is a big Cajun party where they roast the slaughtered pigs all day while they drink and dance and play music. They are real proud of the fact that they find a way to use every piece of that pig, and I have to admit that it’s the best-damned pork in the world.

“Okay, Granny, I’ll have just a little…” I didn't know why I bothered trying. Feeding me was her life’s work, and she was not about to let me take that away.

“I get you sum of efferthing,” she said, already with a plate in one hand and a ladle in the other. A few minutes later a plate full of hot, spicy
boudin
balls and rich, dark gravy was set down in front of me. I knew that wouldn’t be it, and I wasn’t wrong. A giant-sized bowl of gumbo came next along with a heaping plate of the roasted pork and rice. I wasn’t the slightest bit hungry, but as soon as my taste buds got a whiff of it all, it disappeared into my big body like magic. The whole while Granny watched me eat, she smiled from ear to ear. Her enthusiasm might make you think I was a skinny, sickly thing if you couldn’t see me.

              “So tell Granny what’s new,
cher
.”

.               “
Cher
” is “dear” in French. It’s all she called me my whole life. Until I was almost ten, I thought it was my name.

              I was still shoveling in food as I said, “Ain’t nuthin’ much new, Granny. I’ve just been workin’ a lot. Blake, me, and the new boys have been keepin’ busy.” When I was home, I reverted back to the grammar I’d worked a lifetime to change. I tried speaking proper when I first got out of the Navy, but Granny told me I sounded like I was “puttin’ on airs,” and she would have none of it.

              “How dat Blake?”

              I shook my head and looked up at her. Sometimes it shocked me when I looked at her and just suddenly realized how fast she seemed to be aging lately. Her Cajun heritage had given her dark skin that stayed smooth long beyond its years, but lately it seems to be catching up with her. The only thing left to prove she was still a spry old thing was the light in her eyes that never went out.

“He ain’t doin’ so good, Granny. I can’t get him to talk to me about it though. I worry about him a lot.” They say twenty-four veterans commit suicide every twenty-four hours in the U.S. Sometimes I worried that was the direction Blake was headed in.

              “You send him out here ta see me. I’ll get ‘im ta talking.”

              I laughed, but I knew that if anyone could, it would be Granny. Convincing Blake to come out here and let her give it a shot would be the hard part. “I’ll see what I can do, Gran.”

I finally finished my food, and we went back out on the porch. I was so full I felt like I might need to be rolled down the steps to my car. As we sat there and listened to the melody of the crickets and frogs out on the swamp, I said, “Granny, wouldn’t it be nice if you were closer to me in town and you could come and see me any time you wanted?”

              “Nah,” she said with a mischievous grin. “I done seen you enough for all des years.”

I laughed, and she cackled. I loved the sound of it. I loved her. I know I’m over-protective and I drive her crazy, but I’m just not sure what I’d ever do without her. It hurt my heart to think about it.

              I finally got away in time to make it back to the mansion by midnight and relieve Leif. She’d sent me with a tub full of leftovers, and I gave half to Leif, who had no idea what most of it was but said he didn’t have a problem eating anything. The Bransons weren’t home yet, and Alicia, the baby, and all of the servants seemed to be down for the night. I took a seat in the sitting room, fired up my laptop, and started my own search on the Bransons and the hospital where little Celia was “born.” Like Blake, I doubted there was anything out there if he hadn’t found it, but until I could talk to them face-to-face, it was probably going to be a long boring night…or so I thought. That was until about three hours later when the perimeter alarm started screeching, and this time it wasn’t the baby making all of that noise.