Midnight Secrets

  Who knew if Joe would or even could understand that? He seemed so...straightforward. So sane. He’d probably had a Putting Joe Harris Back Together Program going the instant he woke up after the explosion. Yeah, that sounded like him. He probably had some kind of timetable for recovery, and was moving ahead with it, step-by-step.

  Get wounded, do rehab, get better.

  Whereas she was still mired back at step one. Lose family. She’d never really gotten beyond that in any way. Every night when her nightmares woke her up, she felt the pain of their deaths every bit as keenly as when she’d woken up in the hospital and the nurse had given her the news. She relived that, night after night after night, in some hellish endless loop, but was never able to remember anything else in the morning, only grief and horror and terror.

  When the dizziness passed, Isabel stood, exhausted. She hung up her coat in the hallway and moved to the kitchen for a glass of water. Her feet were shuffling and she had to remember to pick them up, to walk normally. Every single thing she did had to be done like a child learning it all for the first time.

  Except...except walking back home. That had been great. Arm in arm with Joe Harris she’d felt almost normal for the first time since the Massacre. He’d kept pace with her, moving as slowly as she did but making it seem perfectly normal. She had a feeling that if she’d crawled, he’d have crawled right alongside her.

  Clearly, he could walk faster than that. Hell, he ran almost every morning. But coming back from the park, he’d kept step with her without making any kind of big deal about it. And it had felt just great. Arm linked with his, feeling him so big and warm and strong at her side, well...she’d felt strong too. Just a little. It wasn’t like the old days when she was fit and happy and energetic. Those days were over, maybe forever. These days she felt a hundred years old.

  But she’d definitely felt better with him by her side. She didn’t need to watch her feet. He wouldn’t let her fall if she tripped. So for the first time in what felt like forever she’d walked with her head upright, seeing the street for the first time. Acutely aware of the big man by her side. Wishing they could walk together forever.

  But that was crazy. He was just walking his nutso, next-door neighbor back home because she’d nearly been knocked over by a dog. Couldn’t even be trusted to take a short walk to a nearby park.

  Oh, God she was so tired of this! So tired of being a pale shadow of herself, so tired of not sleeping, so tired of feeling guilty because she hadn’t died together with her parents and her brothers and her aunts and uncles and cousins.

  Yes, she should have said. I’d love to come over. Sit by his side while he played cards, listen to the male banter, laugh at their corny jokes. They’d probably watch their language around her but she didn’t care. Teddy had passed through a stage where fuck was a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb and an exclamation. He’d been so funny.

  Isabel sat down and ducked her head back between her legs as the dizziness came back, together with a pounding headache.

  She missed her family. So. Fucking. Much.

  Would the pain ever go away?

  Would it have helped if she’d accepted Joe’s invitation? Could she shed this dry husk of sadness that enveloped her, just for one evening? Go back to her old self?

  No dizziness, no sudden crippling bouts of sadness, just a sense of play among strong, confident men.

  She liked guys. Growing up with three brothers had given her a sense of ease around men. In college, it had been a game the girls played—finding new and inventive ways to describe the dumbness of the guys. They were fine for fucking but none of her friends stuck to one guy for long. One of her friends, when asked why she’d dumped the date du jour after only a couple of nights, simply rolled her eyes and said, “The Y chromosome.” And everyone laughed and understood.

  Not Isabel. Granted, guys could be clueless most of the time but they never took offense and she loved their take on things. Her best friends in college had been two jocks who were smart as whips but who were having big problems passing the obligatory English exams. English profs objected to jocks almost on principle. So she coached them through the exams and they kept her car running and everyone was happy.

  Could she have that with Joe and his friends?

  Maybe if she reached out. But she hadn’t been attracted to her two jock buddies, not at all. Sex hadn’t been any part of the equation. She was attracted to Joe, so maybe that wasn’t a good idea.

  Joe was hot. In every sense of the term. She hadn’t really understood it completely when her friends said that a guy was hot. Usually it meant he had money, or tons of charm or dressed well. Mostly, though, in her circles, it meant he had money. Money left her cold. The fact that a guy was rich wasn’t in any way a factor in attraction as far as she was concerned. She’d moved among the wealthy all her life and if there was one thing she knew, right down to the ground, it was that money did not make a person a better human being.

  Joe didn’t seem to be rich but he was definitely hot. And by hot she meant he made her hot. Or at least that icy crust around her heart melted a little when she was near him, or thought of him.

  But if grieving, semi-crazy Isabel Lawton thought Joe Harris was hot, then lots of other women did, too, guaranteed. And he was a former navy SEAL. Ever since she discovered that, she also discovered that SEALs were considered rock stars. The hottest of the hot. Women lusted after them, they were babe magnets. There were calendars of bare-chested SEALs and they sold like crazy. SEAL seemed to be synonymous with sex.

  She hadn’t seen women flocking to Joe’s door but then he was often gone. Who knows where? And with whom?

  And she really had no business thinking these thoughts because she was barely human these days. She wasn’t good company for herself, let alone for someone else.

  And sex. God. She’d enjoyed sex back in the day, but now? Now she shuddered if someone got too close to her. Claustrophobia clawed at her in an enclosed space with too many people. Her hands and feet turned to ice and her stomach churned and panic rose in her throat. Walking with Joe had been really nice but who knew how she’d react if it ever came to intimacy? She’d freeze, surely. Curl in on herself, incapable of reacting like a woman.

  Isabel rested her head against the back of the couch. Sadness and weakness nearly overwhelmed her.

  Was this going to be the rest of her life? Missing her family like crazy. Unable to stop grieving them. Nightmares every night. Despair and exhaustion her constant companions during the day.

  These thoughts were toxic thoughts, just as surely as if she was taking poison, drop by drop. She couldn’t go on this way. She was dishonoring her family, who had loved life and lived it to the fullest. Though the dizziness and the nightmares were beyond her control, her thoughts weren’t. She could control her thoughts, or at least try to.

  Doing something. That was usually a good antidote. But do what? The house was spotless. Her accounts were in order. She’d neglected her food blog for so long she had no more followers, so that was out.

  Food.

  Okay.

  She’d cook something else for Joe, to thank him for saving her from the big bad slobbering puppy. Baked ziti. A hearty recipe a friend’s Sicilian grandmother had taught her. He could freeze the pan and share with his buddies over poker some other time.

  The thought energized her enough to propel her from the couch and back into the kitchen. Her hands took over. When she cooked she rarely had to think. Her hands just did the work without much input from her. It was magic.

  So she switched on her cook setting and went along for the ride.

  There was something so magical about food. Food and sex, the eternal healers. In her heart of hearts, if someone put her feet to the fire to make her tell the truth, she thought food was better than sex. More reliable as a source of pleasure. Good food never let you down like people did.

  Before the...before. Before, she’d been making a name for herself as a food blogge
r because all of it interested her. Foodways, her blog was called. Well, it had been called that when it was active. Now it was dormant, dead. She still got puzzled inquiries from fellow food enthusiasts who hadn’t put together that Isabel Delvaux of Foodways was one of the Delvauxes, the political and artsy family. The family that had died in the Washington Massacre.

  The contacts were falling off fast and other food bloggers had picked up her readership. Foodways was dead. Last week she’d even canceled her personal Foodways email address.

  But in its heyday Foodways had received hundreds of thousands of hits a day. A million and a half readers. A best of collection of her posts had been published and enjoyed a modest success. Before...before. Before, she’d received several offers from publishers about writing a big book about the history of food, about food folklore throughout the world, including recipes. She’d been in negotiations with a major publisher when...

  When the bottom dropped out of her world.

  Memories usually carried sharp-cutting edges, slicing deep, making her bleed. It was only in the kitchen that she was able to chase memories away.

  Right now she resolved to make the best pan of baked ziti in the history of the world for Joe. She’d put it into the biggest pan she had and leave a note on top that he could freeze the pan until the next poker night if he wanted. All he’d have to do was take it out of the freezer and pop it into the oven an hour before his friends were due to arrive.

  Not the microwave oven, she’d have to add that to the note. She knew the attraction microwaves held for bachelors.

  The real recipe, the true one, for baked ziti took hours. It was something only a grandmother could possibly cook. And, well, Isabel, who had hours to kill. Great aching vast oceans of hours to kill.

  So she set to it, making the sauce from scratch, making almost a hundred tiny flavorful meatballs, undercooking the ziti because they’d finish cooking in the sauce in the oven, grating the scamorza cheese. It was a rich dish full of carbs and fats and protein. The kind of dish you’d need if you were walking across Antarctica.

  Not the kind of dish she could eat, though she could certainly cook it. That was another thing that had fled from her world that night, together with sleep. An appetite. She’d always loved food and now most food tasted like cardboard, like a simulacrum of food. No matter what the dish, whether she’d prepared it or a master chef had, she couldn’t taste anything. Her stomach often clenched shut so tightly her abdominal muscles hurt.

  Months ago, she’d have vomited if her plate was too full. Now she’d learned to nibble at the blandest, most tasteless things possible. Dry toast, small bowls of plain rice. Nothing with taste and color.

  Right after the Massacre she’d completely lost her desire to cook. Cooking was recently reintroduced in her life, thanks to Joe. He helped her so much with things she couldn’t do that she knew she had to do something in return, something she did know how to do.

  Crazily, cooking for Joe didn’t make her dizzy or nauseous. She could cook the most elaborate dishes and as long as she didn’t have to eat a bite of them, she was okay.

  Like now, putting together the ziti dish, delicious smells coming from the stovetop, and all she felt was pleasure.

  She’d often toyed with the idea of actually inviting Joe over for dinner, instead of leaving something on his doorstep like the cooking fairies. He went out of his way for her so much that cooking a meal and serving it was the least she could do.

  The thought even gave her a crazy kind of pleasure. She’d started over completely here in Portland, getting her furniture from IKEA and her linens from Bed Bath & Beyond. But she’d shipped over all her culinary equipment and her Limoges dinner service and the Delvaux silver cutlery. She could wow him with an elegant meal as a thank-you.

  It was so incredibly tempting. Not spending an evening nursing a cup of lukewarm milk, with the TV on to a show she wasn’t watching, simply so she could hear the sound of human voices. So she wouldn’t feel at the bottom of a deep well, the only person in the world. Having Joe over would be fun. He was an interesting guy and, well, there was that hotness factor.

  But...she wasn’t an ordinary woman. She didn’t do well in company. The days of bursting into tears with people around her were over but that didn’t mean she was back to normal. She could throw up. She could become so dizzy she’d faint. She could lock herself in the bathroom because she couldn’t deal with him.

  They were all fun possibilities. She didn’t trust herself at all. Joe helped her because she was visibly wounded and still relatively weak. He never asked, bless him, and she never said what was wrong. Keep it like that. Let him think she’d been in an accident and was putting herself back together again.

  Because the truth was much blacker and bleaker. The truth was that she had been in an accident that had torn her family from her but she wasn’t putting herself back together again. Maybe she’d be like this for the rest of her life, unfit for human company.

  Missing her family like crazy, for the rest of her life.

  Put like that...put like that maybe all she really was good for was to cook things for someone who’d suffered but who was pulling himself out of it.

  She swiped angrily at her eyes as she finished the pan of ziti and started making naan bread.

  Chapter Three

  “Well?” Joe asked Felicity impatiently, ignoring the nasty look Metal was shooting at him. Everyone always treated Felicity with kid gloves. Apart from the fact that she was Metal’s love and Metal would pound anyone who was disrespectful to her, she also earned a hell of a lot of money for the company as their in-house computer guru.

  And she beat everyone’s ass at video games.

  “Sorry, Joe.” Felicity Ward, soon to be Felicity O’Brien, pushed herself away from his desk where she’d been using her own computer. Some kind of woo-woo piece of tech that could have been time-traveled from the future, it was so advanced. Felicity had taken one look at his laptop and sniffed in disdain. “Whoever sent you that message is scary good. I can’t identify the IP. Believe me when I say that’s unusual.”

  Oh yeah, he believed Felicity. She was a computer genius and ASI had snatched her up, right after she’d unmasked an international conspiracy. An international nuclear conspiracy no less. She was smart in everything but she was off the charts smart when it came to IT. If she couldn’t track down the sender of the mystery message, no one could.

  “Whoever sent it must be as smart as you,” he said.

  Felicity smiled and waved Metal, who’d risen from his seat, down. It was a pillar in Metal’s thought system that Felicity was the smartest person on earth. “Yeah. Hard as it is to believe.”

  “Scary stuff,” Metal rumbled.

  “Yes.” Joe nodded his head sharply.

  It was scary stuff. Someone Felicity couldn’t ID had sent a message about Isabel. That blew his mind. That someone knew about Isabel and that that someone knew she was connected to him. How could that happen?

  “So,” Felicity said. “Let’s look at the object of the message. Isabel Lawton. Who is completely off the grid.”

  Joe frowned. “What do you mean?”

  Felicity was frowning, too, only at her monitor. “She almost doesn’t seem to exist. No Facebook page, no Twitter handle, I can’t find any trace of her educational or job background anywhere in the US. I’ve found plenty of Isabel Lawtons but they’re either too old or too young and no one fits what you’ve told me about her. Which, frankly, isn’t much.” She sighed and turned a serious face to him. “You’d almost think she is me.”

  Hmm. Felicity had grown up in the Witness Protection Program. Her father had been a famous Russian nuclear scientist who had defected and Felicity had basically been undercover her entire life. She’d changed names several times during childhood.

  “Like...a spook?” Joe asked. “Or a spook’s daughter or sister or—” He swallowed. “Someone’s wife? Maybe the wife of someone dangerous? And she’s run away from hi
m?”

  That thought burned in his chest. Isabel married to an abusive husband. It was a thought he didn’t want to have but it sort of made sense. Instead of being a woman of mystery maybe she was a woman on the run. Maybe someone was after her, which would explain how she seemed always on edge.

  If that was the case, her running days were over. Joe wouldn’t let anyone hurt her. No one was going to touch her. Except him.

  “Not a nice thought,” Metal said.

  Metal hated abusers as much as Joe did. They’d both been sick at heart when they’d had to negotiate with a warlord in Helmand for safe passage for a convoy of marines. The warlord, who was in his sixties, had called in his pregnant wife, a girl in her late teens, to serve them. Her shaking hands had spilled some hot tea on Joe and the warlord had punched her in the face.

  Joe and Metal had kept their faces bland because the mission was an important one with the lives of a marine battalion at stake, but they didn’t forget. It had been Joe’s immense pleasure to find the warlord’s head in his crosshairs after a double cross had cost the lives of fifteen marines. Pulling that trigger and seeing that fucker’s head explode had been one of the great pleasures of Joe’s life.

  “What do we know about Isabel Lawton, besides the fact that she makes the best boeuf bourguignon I’ve ever tasted?”

  “The best what?” Joe and Metal said in unison.

  Felicity rolled her eyes. “The best boeuf bourguignon. Hello? What we had for lunch and which we all agreed was fabulous?”

  “Oh.” Joe sat back. “The beef stew.”

  Felicity rolled her eyes again. “Yeah. The beef stew.”

  “Great stuff,” Metal said.

  It had been. They’d practically inhaled it. The instant Joe had seen that message he’d invited Metal and Felicity over for a late lunch, making it clear that if Felicity didn’t come along, Metal wouldn’t get to eat.

  It was a threat with bite. By now, getting a chance to eat whatever Isabel cooked was a fought-over privilege. Joe got points for Isabel’s cooking.