The Risqué Target (30 page)

“I want to know everything about you, Tantum,” she said. “Good or bad.”

Bad
? He wondered what was considered bad in her book. “In 2004,” he said, “while cleaning out their deceased mother's home, a couple in Boston discovered a painting by Michelangelo. The painting was worth over $300 million. They auctioned it off with the stipulation that $100 million of the proceeds would be donated to St. Jude's, the cancer institute for children. See, they had a child who’d fought cancer and won, and they wanted other children to have the chance. But right after the auction, Valerie stole that painting.”

“That's terrible! What a—”

“Bitch? Yes, Valerie Barton is a self-serving bitch, and no, I cared nothing for her. The only thing about that case I cared about was finding the painting for that couple.”

“Did you?”

“No. It's still out there somewhere. When I finally obtained enough evidence against her and we had her in custody, I tried to convince her to tell me.”

She sat cross-legged, obviously intrigued by his story. “Is that why you go to see her every year?”

Her question caught him off guard. “How do you know that?”

“You're not the only agent who knows how to investigate.”

He chuckled. “True. Yeah, I see her because of that. And because she knows who I am. A few years back, my father found her in my home in London.”

“What was she doing there?”

“I don’t know. Snooping, maybe, because she somehow put two and two together and discovered my real name. I visit her, I lie to her that I care, and she keeps quiet about what she knows.”

“I lied to your father, too.” Her eyes lowered. “I feel bad about that. You weren’t angry with him for letting me use his limo?”

This Nala, gentle and unselfish, rarely made an appearance. But when she did, it crumbled his resistance. If anything, she was more dangerous this way than when she was on the attack. Tantum tapped her chin and died a little inside when her baby blues lifted, glossy and guilt-ridden. “I was at first, but I realized it wasn’t his fault. It was mine. I was stupid, Nala,” he said and lifted his thumb to her cheek, stroking her soft skin. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. About you. About caring. About people changing. I'm thinking about giving him another chance, and he has you to thank for that, sweetheart.”

She smiled, and the gesture warmed him. “That makes me happy,” she said. “I thought those scars inside you, from whatever he did to you as a child, would never heal.”

“I'm covered with scars, inside and out, sweetheart,” he said, glancing down at the ugly scar on his stomach. “I’m damaged goods.”

“I think they're sexy. They remind me of what's made you who you are.” She shrugged. “We all have them.”

He released his hand from her face. “Yeah? What scars do you have, Nala Dekker? What's made you who you are?” Waiting for a story, wanting to know more about her, he watched her hands lift to her head.

She leaned in toward him and spread the hair at the top of her scalp, revealing a thin, jagged red line approximately an inch in length. “I have a scar right here, courtesy of NESA.” She echoed his earlier mockery on the subject.

When he saw the marred flesh, anger seared to his core. “How the hell did that happen?”

She dropped her hands. “When my partner and I went to investigate the bombing in Niagara Falls, someone knocked me out. When I came to, I found him dying.” She was whispering, as though the event was too painful to remember aloud.

Every nerve in his body froze. He held her close as the realization of what she was saying seeped into his bones. “Nala, I'm sorry.” He squeezed her, no doubt hurting her, but he couldn’t stop himself. The turmoil persisted, rushing through like water from a broken dam, out of control, the damage tearing down everything around him.

“Tantum, how did you know Gabe? And why did you lie to me about him?”

“Not tonight. Lie down,” he said, tugging her closer. “Let's get some sleep.”

“But I need to know,” she said, trying to pull away from his chest.

He gently drew her back down. “No. I want to sleep with you. I don’t want to talk anymore. In the morning, we will talk about it.” Even as he made the promise, he feared it might be his last chance to hold her in his arms. He didn’t relax, though after a time, her steady breaths told him she'd fallen asleep. He lay there, cursing silently to himself. All his fears were coming true. He'd already fucked it up.

****

“Hey, sleepyhead.”

Tantum heard Nala’s teasing voice and lifted his head. She stood with a cup of coffee in her hand, her hair messy and warmth lighting her blue eyes. She was a vision he could become accustomed to first thing in the morning.

Pushing himself up from the bed, he accepted the steaming mug and shoved his fingers through his own overdue-for-a-cut hair. “Thanks.”

“Get the java into your system, and when you're fully awake, come out to the den. I need to show you something,” she said. “Your clothes are on the dresser.” On her way out the door, she glanced over her shoulder, and her playful blue eyes seized him straight down to his balls. “But if you want to show up naked, that's okay with me.” A twinkle flashed in the corner of her eye and she left the bedroom.

Shaking his head, he took a few swigs of the rich coffee. She remembered he liked it black. After consuming half a cup, he started to get out of the bed. Then the grim revelation from the night before slithered back into his head, and that terrible feeling took over again.

****

He walked out fully dressed, prepared, with his gun and handcuffs in their rightful places. The bad feeling wouldn’t go away. Something terrible was going to happen, and he wanted all his defenses up. He needed to be ready for it.

It was an ordinary cabin, somebody’s fishing or hunting retreat, rough-wood walls, a battered sofa and a few chairs, an old desk against the wall. Nala sat there, typing on her laptop. She twirled around to face him. He didn’t want anything to change, but it was going to. Maybe it had to.

Maybe it was the only way to crack the case.

He leaned down and gave her long kiss. It might be their last. He was reluctant to stop, but eventually summoned the strength to pull back from her.

“Well, good morning to you, too,” she said, rising. “Here, sit down.”

He settled on the chair, strummed his fingers on the wooden armrests, and waited.

She took a deep breath, planted her hands on her hips, and he became nervous about the uncertainty lurking in the depths of her eyes.

“What is it?” He didn’t want to play games. Not now. He needed to know what was so important to her.

Still, she hesitated.

He reached out, grasped her by the arm, and pulled her onto his lap. “It's all right. Just tell me, sweetheart.” He pushed a lock of hair from her sullen face to behind her ear.

“I researched you, Tantum, and… and….” She stumbled for her words.

“Nala, just go for it,” he said, much as he dreaded what he was about to hear.

“We didn’t know each other during the bombings, but we both investigated them. I thought that’s when we made these enemies, whoever they are, and why they have been after us.”

He nodded. “They think we know more than we do. They believe we’re a threat to them.”

“What if that’s not it?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if this goes back further than we’ve imagined?” She met his gaze directly. “I think you’ve been the real Target all along. I think someone is out for vengeance.”

“Who?” he asked, confused as all hell. “And for what?”

“I know about your mother, Tantum.” She palmed his cheek gently. “I'm sorry you lost her at such a young age.”

“It's been twenty years, Nala,” he said gruffly. “I've come to terms with it.”

“The accident that killed her, it happened—”

“Yes, Nala, I know. She was coming to pick me up. It was my fault she died. You think I didn’t look into it?” The old guilt, always there, thickened to a heavy weight in his gut.

“But it wasn’t your fault. Just as Gregory Rowan’s death wasn’t your fault. Your mother wasn’t driving.”

“I know,” he grated out, unwilling to go through all of this again, especially with Nala.

“Her friend, Marcy Stone, drove the car. Did you know Marcy?”

“No. I heard my mother talk about her a few times. Hell, I was just a kid, had other things on my mind. I didn’t pay attention to what my mother was doing, or who her friends were.” But now, Tantum wished he had paid more attention to his mother. She'd survived cancer, and as a teenager, he'd come to think she was indestructible.

“Well, the report said that Marcy was hypoglycemic, suggesting she had some kind of diabetic seizure that caused the accident. According to her medical records, Marcy was diagnosed with diabetes a few months earlier, but she didn’t have any follow-up visits with her doctor for consultation and treatment.”

Tantum stood, not wanting to face the truth, nor to hear it. But she wouldn’t stop.

“They'd already left the charity together when your father called their car phone. They were already driving. It didn’t matter where they were going. It would have happened either way.”

He was stunned. He hadn’t discovered that one small fact. One small fact that changed everything. He’d never let his father talk to him about it, never heard him out. Instead, he shoved half his guilty self-hatred onto his old man.

He’d never known for sure if his father was the one who set him up for that stuff he’d never done, the drugs in his school locker, the gun he’d never had. If his old man had wanted to get rid of him, it worked. He was sent to military school. At the time, in a way, he felt he deserved it. Since then, he’d ridden his guilt for fifteen long, hard years.

“I'm not bringing this up to hurt you, Tantum. If I could explain this to you in any other way, I would.” She gently stroked his face.

His first impulse was to recoil from the tender touch, but he reminded himself this was Nala, the woman he'd die for, the woman who owned his heart. He allowed her to put her arms around him, but couldn’t respond.

She accepted his stillness with a brief kiss on the cheek and let him go. “I have to show you something.” She sat in the desk chair and pressed a key on the laptop. “Marcy Stone was engaged, but her fiancé was in the Navy. He was at sea and couldn’t get back for the funeral.”

“So?”

She moved aside so he could see the screen. “This is Marcy Stone's fiancé.”

Tantum leaned over her shoulder. It was no NESA database on the screen. It was an ordinary newspaper’s online archive. He leaned in closer, hardly believing what he saw. “Is that Hark Sullivan?”

“Yes.” Quickly she started to hit the keys again. “And this man is a police officer who works for the city of Palm Springs.”

Tantum recognized the man, though he wasn’t sure from where.

“He's Sullivan’s brother, but get this. He's also the cop who discovered the drugs in your school locker. He signed the reports on your gun charge and your DUI.” She glanced over her shoulder at him. “I think Hark Sullivan set you up. You blamed yourself for your mother’s death. I think Sullivan blamed you for Marcy’s.”

He turned away, pacing across the room. He felt numb and needed to stretch his legs. Everything she said made sense. He’d prided himself on his hard-headed pursuit of the truth, on his research and his ability to put facts together, but he’d missed the obvious because he hadn’t really wanted to look. He’d wanted only to shut himself off, to turn blindly away.

If he’d looked into Marcy's background, he would have discovered that Hark was her fiancé at the time of the accident. It came back to him, only now making perfect sense, why Hark had blamed him for taking away his fiancé. But had Sullivan really blamed him all these years, the same way he’d blamed himself for that accident? Or had the guy’s hatred grown out of their repeated tangles, and the times Tantum had shown him up? How far was he willing to go for revenge? As far as committing murder?

Tantum wasn’t sure he was right, but if so, Nala was in danger because of him.

“I think when you changed your name, Hark lost you,” she continued, “but something must have put him onto you again.”

He glanced over at her. “I know what happened. He was the instructor of one of my training courses a few years back,” he slowly said, recalling Hark's callous behavior toward him.