Taking Flight (A Devereux Novel) (16 page)

Wow.

Derek stretched, his muscles
the special kind of sore that told him he’d engaged in rigorous physical
activity and then passed out so deeply that he didn’t move a single time over
the course of the night. Blood flooded back through his body, and it woke him a
little more.

He patted the bed around him
but Sara was nowhere to be found. The mattress beside him was still a little
warm.

That happened.

He couldn’t regret it. It
was what he needed, mind, body and soul. But he couldn’t be sure it was what
Sara wanted. Had he pushed her into it, used the danger they were in, her
desperate situation? Had he taken advantage of offering her the shelter of his
home to sleep with her?

Those were questions he
couldn’t answer yet, and he felt too good about life to worry about them. Yes,
there was a mysterious man out to kill him and everyone he cared about, but
that was no reason to feel guilty about experiencing joy.

His dresser had been
ransacked,
the drawers opened and previously folded clothes
left tangled and unkempt. A wry grin crossed his face as he located a pair of
slacks and a shirt.

As he left the room, he
looked over the railing on the balcony to see Gary had abandoned the recliner
below. When he got to the bottom of the big staircase and approached the
kitchen, he discovered the reason.

“You’ll have to come and
check it out,” his brother said. “You’d love the museum, and there are many
unsolved mysteries there you could dig into.”

“I may have to do that, once
I’ve wrapped up here,” Sara replied.

She was busy at his stove
where a heavenly mix of food sizzled in a frying pan. It looked as though she
had found the one pair of sweatpants he kept around, and she proved that one of
his shirts could look cute. Gary had pulled up a chair and sat with his cast
extended out in front of him, keeping her company as she expertly flipped the
food in the pan.

“Do I smell bacon?” Derek
asked. “I didn’t even know I had bacon.”

“You didn’t,” Gary said. “I
bought that a couple days ago. You don’t stock a fridge well, bro. I fixed
that.”

“Bacon, eggs, hash browns,
pancakes… I’ve got it all,” Sara said. “What would you like?”

He smiled as they met gazes.
Her hair was half-bound, with some of it trailing down the right side of her
face in lazy curls. He liked it.

“All the above? I must have
done something right to deserve all this!”

Sara just laughed, and Gary
looked back and forth between them, comprehension dawning on his face. Derek
expected a smartass comment, but to his surprise, Gary just smiled and made
himself busy with his orange juice.

“Okay, these eggs are done.
The rest of the food is keeping warm in the oven. Help yourself! I’ll wake
Beck. She had a rough go of it yesterday.” Sara bounded past Derek, sprightly
and full of energy. After passing him she tugged his arm to turn him around and
pulled his face down for a quick kiss. She tasted like oranges. “Good morning.”

“Good morning,” Derek
replied automatically as she skipped away with a laugh. He stared after her
until Gary’s laughter brought him back to the room. “Oh, shut it.” He took a
dishcloth and threw it at his brother.

“So, that happened last
night, I guess?” Gary asked. “Good for you. You two are a good match for each
other. Better than anyone else you’ve dated.”

A flood of delectable scents
burst forth from the oven as he opened the door. He took a piece of bacon and
snapped a bite off. The salty pork melted over his tongue, and his eyes closed
in bliss. He took the dishes out and heaped a selection of food onto a plate.

“Yeah, that happened.” He
passed the plate to Gary and then started on his own. “I hadn’t meant for it,
but I can’t be upset about it.”

“You didn’t want to sleep
with her? Why not? I thought you would have been all over that long before now.
At least, the Derek I used to know would have.” Gary gave him a long look.

“Things are more complicated
now. Considering all that’s happened… It isn’t wise to bring someone else into
the middle of everything. For heaven’s sake, Gary, their apartment was torn
apart! That must have been because of me, because of us. If she hadn’t been
seen with me so often, if she hadn’t seen the attack on me in the alley, then
maybe she wouldn’t have been targeted. Can I justify drawing her even closer?
What if she gets hurt?”

His brother speared a piece
of scrambled egg with a fork and munched on it. “Isn’t that her decision to
make? Besides, we don’t understand what’s going on, and you need something to
give you stability for now. Sara could be the key to that.”

Stability?
Derek had been tiring of the same old game he had played for what
seemed like forever. Sleeping with new women all the time, but never letting
them
close
enough to learn anything real about him.
The endless parties, socializing, and whole glamorous lifestyle had lost its
appeal.

The chatter of the two
girlfriends coming down the stairs filled the bottom of the house. It was nice
having other people around on a Sunday morning. He was used to utter silence
unless he put on music, but the house was big and it felt more natural to be
occupied like this.

“You might be onto something
there,” he said, watching as the girls appeared through the hallway.

“Good morning,” Becky said.
She was still bleary-eyed, and Derek wondered if anyone besides Gary on his
painkillers had gotten much sleep the night before. “This little monster
terrorized me and now insists on feeding me. I resisted, but she’s got way too
much sass in the morning.”

The dynamic between the two
had been terse the night before, but the atmosphere was much lighter if still
tender this morning. Derek was glad to see there didn’t appear to be any
obvious emotional trauma from the ordeal they’d suffered.

“What can I say?” Sara said.
“I’m in a good mood. It’s a gorgeous day with the sun shining and delicious
smells filling the air. It makes me feel like we can conquer anything. Even the
thought of flying doesn’t seem so awful right now.”

The other three traded a few
looks. That was a bold statement from someone paralyzed by the thought of
walking up more than a flight of stairs.

“What’s on the docket today,
chief?” Gary asked Derek. “I won’t be good for much more than sticking around
here with this leg. It might be a Netflix and reading type of day. Maybe I’ll
try to make it out on the patio and soak up the afternoon sun later. That’s one
advantage you have over Boston here—the excellent weather year-round.
Spending my winters visiting you might not be the worst idea.”

“I’ve got to get one more
practice flight in, at least,” Derek said. “The race is… oh, shit, the race is
tomorrow! I’ve been so wrapped up in everything it slipped my mind.” He stared
at his brother in shock. “I’m not even sure I can beat Rex. He’s always talked
a big game, but everyone says something is different this year and he may back
it up. It’ll be really tight. I told you about the bet?”

Gary nodded. “You can do it,
Derek. He’s a complete asshole, and he deserves to lose. It’s only right you’re
the one to put him in his place.”

“I don’t know,” Derek felt
doubt encroach on his mind. With the attacks on the girls’ apartment and the
potential involvement of their foe in Gary’s broken leg, he felt even more as
though the challenge with Rex was the least wise thing he had ever done. “I’d
planned on quitting the league after Evan’s visit, but I got so mad and
couldn’t back down.” He hesitated. “I can do this one race and then quit the
rest of the season after that. Frederick won’t be happy, but he can shove it.”

Sara ran her hand down his
arm and squeezed his hand. “You don’t have to race him, Derek. I doubt anyone
would blame you. Just say your brother is in town and had an accident. Thanks
to the paparazzi, everyone knows anyway. It won’t be that big of a deal.”

“Yeah, Derek, screw ‘
em
. What do you have to prove to anybody?” Becky said.
“It’s your life and your money, and you can do whatever you want.”

Gary knew him better. “I’ll
come out and watch with you.”

“Gary!” Sara smacked his
arm. “Why would you say that? Tell Derek he shouldn’t do it!”

“That won’t work, Sara. As
much as he knows that he shouldn’t do it, and as much as he doesn’t want to,
Derek always stands by his principles. He won’t let Rex get away with being an
absolute tool with no consequences. Besides, the money isn’t for him. He’s
already earmarked it for the charities I work with.”

“It’s true,” Derek said. “I
could bow out and donate my fifty million, but I planned on giving Rex’s as
well. And if anyone doesn’t deserve that money, it’s that pompous asshole.”

Sara’s lips thinned when she
realized his mind was set. “Well, I hope you cream him, then. And you better
stay safe.” Her finger pointed in his face. “Because I will never forgive you
if you get yourself killed over this. We have enough danger in our lives at the
moment.”

He captured her finger and
brought it to his lips. He kissed the tip.

“I promise.”

Before Derek left for the airport, Sara got him to
lend her a computer so she could get work done. Once the afterglow of their
union faded, it occurred to her she had major work to do if she expected the
relationship to last.

Do I want the relationship to last?

Sara had avoided thinking
too hard about what she wanted from her association with Derek, but the time
had come. She’d fallen for him, and that changed everything. Could she go ahead
with her investigative piece if she wanted to stay with Derek? She already knew
the answer to that.

I never wanted to do Ron’s dirty work for him, anyway.

She’d decided before she
even consciously thought about it. She would destroy the piece and not allow it
to get published. That would betray the man she was falling in love with, and
she couldn’t do that to him.

He had enough problems to
worry about without her throwing a wrench in his public life. And her research
could help although there were glaring holes that dead-ended her progress.

Luckily, she had a new
resource in the house she hadn’t had access to before.

“So, Gary,” Sara said as she
settled into the couch across from his recliner. “Derek told me you guys
inherited your father’s company?”

He looked around in what she
guessed was an instinctual response to any mention of the company. Becky was
upstairs digging through Derek’s things, searching for any raw material she
could use to rebuild her portfolio. After sleeping on things and stuffed with Sara’s
patented mood-raising pancakes, she had declared herself glad the old stuff was
gone, clearing the way for her to create bigger and better designs.

Gary raised an eyebrow. “He
said that? Wow, he’s a lot further gone than I thought. We aren’t supposed to
talk about the company with anyone.”

“I got that impression.”
Sara laid all but one of her cards on the table. “Look, I want to help. I have
certain skills as an investigative journalist, and I can help you guys figure
out what’s going on here. I have a stake in this game, too.”

“Why didn’t you ask Derek
this?”

“I was going to, but…” She
felt her face grow hot, and she bet she blushed right to the roots of her hair.
“Let’s just say we didn’t get to it.”

He lifted his hands and
turned his head, “Okay, okay, fine. I don’t need to hear it. That’s a good
excuse. I don’t know if I can just unilaterally give you information though,
what little I have. It was an agreement between all four of us not to divulge
anything outside the family. After all, we don’t even know that much
ourselves.”

Sara frowned. It was
frustrating how secretive everything about Onyx was. But it was her calling to
unravel secrets, figure out mysteries, and solve puzzles. The more walls she
ran into, the more she wanted to get to the bottom of whatever was going on
behind those military contracts and the billions of dollars changing hands.

“How much personal contact
have you had with the company? Have you been to any of the offices?”

He shook his head. “I was
never that interested, to be honest. I’ve been off doing my thing in Boston,
and the company is just this thing I knew existed but didn’t affect my
day-to-day life.”

“I’m sorry if it’s a
sensitive subject, but what about when your father died? You had a meeting with
the board of directors, right?”

Gary shifted in his
recliner, settling his leg into a more comfortable spot. “We did, yeah. They
showed us his note, written in his handwriting. There were about six or seven
of them, but we didn’t meet for long. They said that they would keep running
the company the way Father would have wanted it to go, and that we didn’t need
to lift a finger, the profits would just show up in our bank accounts. I’m
ashamed to say I didn’t care about much beyond that.”

Sara couldn’t even imagine.
Would she be willing to sit back and let countless millions roll into her bank
accounts without knowing where it came from? She thought not, but people are
saints in theoretical situations. Reality was a different beast.

“Let me state what we know
about the company. You’ve personally seen six or seven people associated with
the company, but no offices. I did a little preliminary searching and found no
mention of it anywhere.
Not at all.
And there are no
accounts associated with it, for tax purposes or otherwise.” She wasn’t yet
prepared to mention the military contracts she had come across courtesy of her
government contact. “If it wasn’t for the
firehose
of
cash shooting into your accounts, I would be tempted to say this was all an
elaborate prank and the Onyx Company is a figment of our imagination.”

None of it made sense to
her. She could see a similar level of hopelessness in Gary’s face. “Do you want
me to see if I can get Evan on the phone? He’s seen a lot more than I have. He
might tell us more.”

The chance
to talk directly to the Devereux brother who had his fingers in the pot?
Sara couldn’t think of a
better opportunity to get to the bottom of it all. “That’s the best idea either
of us has come up with so far, Gary.”