Wounded Courage (Lucky Thirteen) (15 page)

My eyes traveled down from his eyes to his high cheekbones with the perpetual blush on them to his lips, two gorgeous, full lips I just wanted to caress with my tongue. I licked my lips, then realized, gasping, what I’d done. Those beautiful lips turned up in a knowing smirk.

He leaned in, so he was only centimeters from me, and I was sure he wanted to continue. I could already taste his lips in my mind. “Tell me the truth. No more secrets with us.”

The truth? The truth was that I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak. He stole all the oxygen in the room, and my body ratcheted up its heat to a hundred times what it normally was, being that close to him. And at some point, my leg had wrapped itself around his, pulling him that much closer to me.

“I love you, Eamon Murphy.” The words came tumbling from my mouth before I could stop them but I meant them. My face warmed, the blush rising high on my cheeks. Fear of the way I was exposed to him pounded through my veins. His mouth slid up into a huge grin. His lips brushed the side of my mouth, a soft, affectionate caress. “This whole thing is new for me.”

“What?” He pulled back just enough to see my face, though his body remained flush against mine.

“Being with someone who considers me an equal.” His smile slid a smudge so I hastily explained. “I mean, Alex wasn’t bad, not to me, but I was always the arm candy, you know? I played that part so well I believed it was real myself. I used to be that girl, and maybe I still am some.”

“You were always more than that girl. I couldn’t love you if you weren’t,” Murphy replied, and then he kissed me and made me forget completely that anything other than him existed in this world.

Murphy

We pulled into the small storage lot in Chula Vista in the middle of the afternoon. I was tired. I didn’t sleep well on planes. Flight time usually meant missions, so my body was trained to get keyed up during flight. And after Chris woke up, he and Addison spent the rest of the trip bickering with each other. When they weren’t arguing about something or another, I would close my eyes and see Addison happy with Alex Giroux, and the anger I felt would bombard me so loudly I couldn’t sleep.

I shouldn’t have let it bother me. She had every right to have a relationship with whomever she wanted. I didn’t expect her to save herself for me or to not think about her future and marriage and family, but I couldn’t stop the possessive feeling inside me that didn’t want her to be with anyone else. I’d spent so long ignoring these stupid feelings for her that having let them surface for only a few hours was torturous. I couldn’t ignore them anymore. It was like trying to repack a suitcase after a long trip and not everything fit back inside the damn thing and it was a marvel that the suitcase closed in the first place.

We stopped outside the unit Addy named, and got out of the government Suburban. Addison fingered the locket around her neck, rolling her bottom lip between her teeth. Her eyes darted around us, taking in everything, like she was expecting something to happen.

Hardy frowned at his sister. “What’s wrong?”

She cleared her throat. “It’s just… No one but Alex and I have ever seen what’s in here. It’s weird, I mean, that he’s not around anymore.” She swallowed hard, having obvious difficulty with it. “I wonder if that’s how he really wanted it.”

Hardy glanced at me, and then back to his sister. “Do you love him?” Both of us whipped our heads around in surprise. How did he know? I couldn’t read him, couldn’t tell what was going through his head at all. Was he angry? Upset? Happy? Ecstatic? He cleared his throat and added, “Alex Giroux. Do you love him?”

I resisted the urge to exhale in relief. He didn’t know. I turned away so I could give myself a second to recover without him seeing when I heard her voice. “That’s… complicated.”

Complicated? Complicated why? Because she did love him and didn’t want to say that in front of me? Or because she didn’t and admitting it would be like admitting she’d made a mistake? It still surprised me that she was involved at all, and had been for a year, because she’d never made any of our watch lists. But I had a feeling that Master Chief had been the reason behind that. He’d known about her since she’d met Giroux.

“Addison, can you never just answer a question?” Irritation pinched Hardy’s brows together.

Her gray eyes flared with anger and she opened her mouth to retort. I stepped between them. “Let’s just get this thing open and see what we got, okay?”

Hardy muttered an agreement, begrudgingly, and I was glad. I didn’t want to know the answer to that question he’d asked. I wanted to live in delusional happiness for just a little bit longer and believe that Addison really did love me.

“How do you open this door, Addison?” I asked her.

Her eyes narrowed at me, just slightly, acknowledging that she knew exactly why I’d cut them off. She huffed out and reached behind her neck to unclasp her necklace. “With a key.”

She depressed the top right of the little square and the bottom left corner until the locket clicked. Her dainty fingers pulled up the middle that had come loose and twisted it so it laid flat on the stationary part of the locket she held. Then she held up the miniature key now revealed. “Let’s get this party started.”

I grabbed her wrist as she turned and nearly cursed at her sharp inhale of surprise. She blinked and her slate-colored eyes stared up at me. “Is there anything dangerous in there?”

“Depends on what you mean by dangerous,” she whispered. We locked eyes for a minute, and then she rolled her eyes. “Relax. It’s not actually wired to explode or anything. At least, not now.”

She yanked her arm free, and this time, I let her go. Then she deliberately turned her back to me and inserted the key into the padlock. It popped open easily, and she slid it off with a loud clang. Then she pushed the door up and out of the way.

I hadn’t thought I was going in with any kind of expectation, but I was kind of disappointed by the contents of the storage unit. On one side were a bunch of banker boxes, all duct-taped shut. Four rows of them, stacked four high. In the middle, against the back wall, were another set of boxes. Not as many. Maybe ten. The rest of the unit was clear of anything. Somehow, I’d expected a lot more stuff. But this… On quick appraisal, there were twenty-six in all, the majority of them on the right.

I stepped past both Hardys. “What is this stuff?”

“Records, mostly. Almost all digital files. Hard drives, flash drives. There’s at least one box of physical records though. Those are the ones on Simon. He never leaves anything on a computer. He scrubs them all clean as soon as he uses them.”

“And those?” I pointed to the boxes on the right.

“Cash.”

“All of them?”

“Yes.”

Damn. That was a lot of cash.

Chris walked over to the middle box, cut off the tape and pulled the top off. He glanced inside. “What kind of records are we talking about?”

“Records of Giroux family movements. Who works for them. Where their family homes are. And I’m not talking the public ones. I’m talking about the ones that paranoid Simon didn’t want the world to know about. Also, Simon’s personal businesses, most of them highly illegal.”

She crossed her arms while Hardy dipped one arm into the box and pulled out a couple file folders. He skimmed over the papers in that folder, shaking his head. “The amount of intelligence in here is massive. Things we only dreamed about acquiring, Murph.”

“You didn’t have the right connections.” Addison’s voice cut through the sifting of papers. Was that smugness I heard in her voice?

Hardy stopped and glanced at his sister. “I just can’t believe that my sister was involved in this.”

“I could continue it,” she said. Both of us snapped our heads toward her.

“What?” Hardy said.

“Alex’s will was designed to work with or without my signature.” She leaned against the doorway. “The will went into effect no matter what. The only way to stop it would be if I declined it. It’s all automatic. And if I die, the money gets tied up in so much legal, Giroux wouldn’t see it for years.”

She didn’t seem upset at all by this point. In fact, she was the most calm I’d ever seen her. It was a little unnerving to see her this way.

“So what happens when you inherit?”

She smiled, soft and mischievous. “I become a billionaire, and your best source of information on Giroux Enterprises.”

Chris’s eyes narrowed at his sister. “You’re not playing spy. It’s too dangerous.”

“Damn straight,” I agreed. The idea of Addison, my Addison, being anywhere near people like Simon and Jean Giroux was enough to make me vomit. After admitting to her how I felt about her? After finally telling her the truth? I couldn’t let her do that.

“I’m almost twenty-five, Chris. Last I checked, I was an adult.”

“I could put you in jail.”

“If you were going to, you’d have done it by now.”

“Don’t test me.”

“Go ahead,” she challenged him. The defiant glare was backed by the straightening of her spine. She’d always been independent, even though she’d deferred to her family’s judgments as a child… but now she was showing strength with Chris she’d never had growing up. It was damn sexy. “I’ll be gone in two days the second you do.”

Chris slammed his fist into the metal wall. “Goddammit, Addy!”

To her credit, she didn’t even flinch. Who was this girl? The Addison I’d known years before wasn’t this tough, this confident. Sure, she had the confidence of head cheerleader in school, and she’d always been good with people. But this woman here? So much more than that.

“Who else knows about this place?”

“Other than you guys?” She shook her head. “No one, really. I have the only key and it goes to all the units we have. It was my job. No one would have ever suspected me, the arm candy to have the most important possession Alex ever had. Even if they’d somehow figured out we had this place, they’d never know how to open it, and forcing it would blow the whole thing.

Chris glanced over the boxes, disbelief plain in his expression. “Addison, what did you get yourself into?”

“Look, you do what you can to protect those of us at home, right? You go on missions, you put your life in danger, in front of insurgents and terrorists.”

“That’s different. I’m trained for my job. You’re a civilian, Addison. My job is to protect you.”

“Maybe not all of us are willing to sit around and rely others to protect us. I was in a position to make a difference and I took the opportunity.”

“So, you and Alex?” I asked. She turned toward me. Her slate eyes struck me right between the eyes like a laser sight. I lost my breath for a moment, but cleared my throat. “You were really going to give up your life for him?”

“It’s complicated.”

What the fuck did that mean? Either she was or she wasn’t. I didn’t get the gray area here.

“So, you were going to marry him?” I asked.

She nodded. “We decided that he could marry me under an alias and we could manage the fortune jointly. Love was a factor, but it wasn’t The Factor.”

Anger pulsed from my chest, but I didn’t say anything, nor did I want to know any more. She was talking and being honest with us. I had to give her credit for that. She could have lied her ass off, and I was glad she gave us the truth. Even if I hated her responses. I focused on Chris. “We can fit all this in the car. We don’t need to call in a truck.”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

Addison slid the key back into its locket position, and re-clasped it behind her neck. As it laid against her chest, she pressed her hand against it, and shut her eyes. Did she miss her fiancé? Did she wish he were here instead of me? Did she regret sleeping with me?

Hardy hit me in the chest and pointed to the boxes. “Where should we take these?”

I frowned. It was likely with Addison’s latest declaration of her intent to take up the Giroux mantle, that Master Chief would have no choice but to arrest her now. “Let’s load it up. We’ll take it back to Coronado and have Battles’ new team look at it.” The auxiliary team was new, not a normal SEAL team. They didn’t deploy with us mostly, and they handled a lot of the investigation that Master Chief didn’t want to turn over to our partners at the NSA.

While we loaded, I noticed Addison got really quiet, and she absently rubbed the locket while she stared at some unknown spot on the wall. I walked over to her, and rested my hand on the small of her back. “You good?”

I wanted to be furious with her, but I just couldn’t muster it up. Like it or not, I did love her. And I would, even if she decided she didn’t love me back. I was such a sucker.

She shook her head. “No, I’m not good. These boxes… they’re the culmination of all the information we collected. Getting these… getting ready to visit the other locations… it means that he’s really gone.”

So she really did love him.

“It’s not that,” she said.

I blinked. I had said that out loud?
Crap. Way to go, moron
.

“It was never really about love at all. This has been a constant part of my life for a year. I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about it coming to an end, or changing so drastically. I’d give anything to be back home right now.”