Midnight Pursuits

  Juliet let out another breath. “I want to say something encouraging, but as you already witnessed, I’m not very good at this shit. But I can tell you this—things could be a lot worse, Anastacia.”

  “Stacie,” she said shyly.

  “What?”

  “Everyone calls me Stacie.”

  “Ah. Okay. Well, Stacie. I know it must hurt that your father doesn’t pay much attention to you, but think about it this way. You live in a huge mansion, there’s always food on your table, you’ve got your health, you’re able to go to school, and you’ve probably got a trust fund. A lot of kids aren’t lucky enough to have even one of those privileges, let alone all of them.”

  Stacie hesitated, then asked, “Did you have any of that growing up?”

  “Barely.” Juliet spoke in a noncommittal tone. “No home, no food, no education, no money. Had my health, though. That’s always a plus.”

  “I guess I sound like a spoiled brat when I complain,” she said sheepishly.

  “Of course not. You should never apologize or be ashamed of the way you feel. Just realize that you don’t have it as bad as you think you do. And listen, I know being stuck here on your birthday sucks ass, but trust me, I have a few birthday horror stories of my own.”

  “Like what?”

  She blurted out the question before she could stop herself, her eagerness bringing the flush of embarrassment. But she just wanted to know everything she could about this beautiful and fierce and mysterious woman.

  “Oh, honey, you don’t want to know.”

  She tried to mask her disappointment, but Juliet must have sensed it because she offered a wry look. “All right, fine. Pick an age and I bet I can top you when it comes to bad birthdays.”

  Stacie thought it over. “Ten years old.”

  “Ten years old . . . I spent that birthday in the emergency room after the kids in my group home pushed me down a flight of stairs. I broke both my arms.”

  Stacie gasped, which made Juliet smile. “Oh, don’t look so upset, Stacie. Now that I think about it, it wasn’t too bad, actually. After all, I got a few free hospital meals out of the deal.” She shrugged. “Go ahead, pick another birthday.”

  “Twelve,” Stacie said.

  “Spent that one locked in a closet with my brother. We’d stolen some money from our foster parents because they forgot to feed us dinner, but we got caught and that was our punishment. I think we were in that closet for more than a day.”

  “Fifteen.”

  “That’s a bad one—it was pouring rain and I was huddled in a cardboard box, trying to stay dry. I was living on the streets for that one.”

  Stacie’s breath hitched in sympathy. “Seventeen.”

  When Juliet’s expression froze, Stacie knew she’d hit a nerve.

  “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” she said quickly. Although she wondered what could be worse than the other birthday memories.

  “No. No, it’s fine. My seventeenth birthday . . . Well, that was the night I got arrested for stealing a car.” Juliet’s throat bobbed as she swallowed. “It was also the night that someone close to me betrayed me.”

  “Your brother?” Anastacia guessed.

  The woman shook her head. “No.” She paused. “The man I loved.”

  Chapter 16

  Ethan knew he should walk away. Walk away right now. Just put one foot in front of the other, march back to the living room, and pretend he’d never stumbled onto this conversation.

  The man I loved.

  He wasn’t surprised that she’d never mentioned this mystery man before. Juliet was a closed book, only allowing snippets of information to escape when it suited her. But even though he was no stranger to secretive, complicated woman—he lived with Abby Sinclair, after all—he’d thought he’d succeeded in breaking down most of Juliet’s barriers.

  Walk away.

  Christ, he really should. This was a total breach of privacy. He had no right listening in on such a private conversation.

  And yet his feet stayed rooted to the floor.

  Like the insensitive ass he apparently was, Ethan leaned against the chipped wall and continued to eavesdrop, wishing like hell the two females weren’t speaking in a foreign language that he couldn’t completely understand. But even though he missed a word here and there, he still got the gist of everything that was being said.

  “His name was Billy.” Juliet’s quiet voice wafted from the bedroom door she’d left slightly ajar. “I met him when I was living on the streets. I was sixteen at the time. He was twenty-one and working as a booster for one of the big chop shop owners in Chicago.”

  Anastacia must have looked quizzical, because Juliet quickly elaborated. “That’s what you call folks who steal cars—boosters. Billy would steal a car, bring it to the shop, and then it would be dismantled for sellable parts. It can be a lucrative gig, depending on how many cars you boost, which was why I was desperate to do it.

  “Billy introduced me to his bosses, and they decided to give me a shot. At the beginning, I tagged along with Billy and learned everything I could from him.” She sighed. “And I fell head over heels for him. He was larger than life. Fun, exciting, sexy. And I was young and stupid and considered him my knight in shining armor. I moved in with him two weeks after we met and I was convinced we’d get married one day and live happily ever after. We kept boosting cars, made lots of money. For a girl who grew up with nothing, I was on top of the world.”

  Ethan heard the wistful chord in her voice, and he could easily understand why Juliet had been so overjoyed back then, even when living on the wrong side of the law. He’d had his parents’ love and support growing up, but Juliet had never been loved or supported by anyone. It was no surprise that she’d fallen under the spell of an older guy who offered to take care of her.

  “Now, as painful as it is to admit, back then I wasn’t as strong as I am now. I thought I was, though—I’d been taking care of myself for years. I was wily and scrappy and considered myself the toughest girl in Chicago. But it turned out I wasn’t tough at all, at least not when it came to relationships. And it turned out that Billy wasn’t the man I thought he was.”

  “Was he mean to you?” the girl asked hesitantly.

  “Very mean.” There was a pause. “I was pretty damn naive, Stacie. I was so happy that he wanted to take care of me, but after a few months, I realized that he wanted to control me. Billy got jealous every time I talked to another guy, he monitored where I went, he even picked out the clothes I wore. I had no say in my own life, but I was so thrilled that someone finally loved me that I didn’t fight him. I wasn’t strong enough to leave him, or smart enough to know that relationships weren’t supposed to be like that. Anyway, this went on for about a year, getting to a point where I was scared of my own shadow, terrified of saying or doing something to make Billy angry. And then came my seventeenth birthday.”

  Sadness washed over Ethan as he listened to her story. Juliet’s infinite strength was what he admired most about her, and it killed him to hear that she’d allowed someone to take that away from her.

  Juliet let out a heavy sigh. “Billy and I weren’t supposed to be boosting that day. He was taking me out to a fancy dinner. I didn’t want to go, but I couldn’t say no to him. Ever. But just as we were leaving the apartment, he told me we had to make a quick stop. Turns out he’d promised our bosses a boost that night.”

  “That wasn’t very nice of him.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” Juliet agreed. “But my ex was a greedy bastard. Now, you see, the better-quality car we brought in, the more money we earned, so Billy had set his sights on a gorgeous Cadillac XLR.”

  “And the alarm went off when you smashed the window?” Anastacia guessed.

  Ethan had to smile at the girl’s innocence. That kind of naïveté was rare in this day and age. r />
  “That’s not how it works,” Juliet said with a laugh. “We broke in by using a computer. I won’t bore you with all the technical details, but let’s just say we managed to steal the Caddy just fine. Except there was one hitch. Billy’s source said the owner was gone for the weekend, but it turned out he’d stayed home. And he was walking out of his house just as we zoomed away in his car. Billy and I didn’t know that, though—we thought we’d pulled it off. But as we were driving to the shop, all of a sudden there were three cop cars with screaming sirens behind us.”

  She went quiet, and Ethan held his breath, waiting for her to continue.

  “I was driving,” Juliet said flatly. “He always made me drive when we boosted together—that way if we ever got caught, I’d take most of the heat. He was twenty-one, so if he got busted, he would be charged as an adult. Me, on the other hand, I’d probably get off with a warning.”

  Ethan remembered her telling him this same story mere days ago, so he already knew how it ended—with Juliet arrested and being carted off to a juvenile detention center.

  But clearly she’d omitted one key plot point the other day.

  “But you know what he did, Stacie? While I was pulling over, resigning myself to the fact that we’d gotten caught, Billy hopped out of the car and took off like a bat out of hell. He left me there to take all the blame. So I’m sitting there in a stolen car, Billy had just abandoned me, and then the cops were pulling me out of the Caddy and handcuffing me. And that’s how I spent my seventeenth birthday.”

  Anastacia’s sympathetic voice drifted out into the hall. “What happened afterward?”

  “I got sentenced to a year in juvenile detention.”

  “Did Billy come to visit you?”

  “Once. He showed up and broke up with me. Told me he didn’t see the point in waiting for me to get out, that I wasn’t important enough to put his life on hold for. That’s when I realized he never loved me at all. He was just using me—for sex, for the cars I stole, for the opportunity to have power over someone who wasn’t going to challenge him. So yeah, he dumped me and I never heard from him again.”

  Anastacia sounded amazed. “But . . . that’s awful!”

  “Yep,” Juliet said. Ethan could practically see the lazy grin on her face now. “So, do you feel any better about spending your birthday in a safe house with strangers?”

  The teenager laughed. “Honestly? I kind of do.”

  “Good. Then I’ve succeeded in cheering you up.”

  There was a rustling sound, followed by the squeak of the mattress springs, which prompted Ethan to hastily duck back into the bathroom.

  “Get some rest,” he heard Juliet say. “I’ll come get you for dinner.”

  Her footsteps echoed in the hall, and he waited until they’d faded before flushing the toilet and turning on the faucet. He let it run for a moment, pretending to wash his hands as Juliet’s story continued to play over in his head.

  He understood her so much better now. Her reasons for not trusting men, for keeping everyone at a distance. But that Billy character sounded like a real piece of shit. Obviously he hadn’t deserved a woman like Juliet.

  Ethan longed to tell her that she shouldn’t give her ex so much power over her, but he’d never be able to, not unless she told him the whole story herself.

  Or unless he confessed that he’d been listening in on a private conversation.

  But when he stepped out of the bathroom and found Juliet outside the door, glaring at him, it was clear he didn’t have to confess a damn thing.

  “Really, Ethan? Eavesdropping?” Her face was cloudy with resentment.

  He sighed. “You knew I was standing there the whole time, huh?”

  “Damn right I did. I kept talking only because Anastacia was sitting there, waiting for me to go on.” Juliet’s jaw clenched. “You should have walked away. You had no right to listen to all that.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said roughly.

  “Apology not accepted.”

  She stalked off without another word, leaving him staring after her in dismay. He desperately wanted to race after her and apologize again, but when he heard Sully and Liam’s voices in the living room, he decided against it. It was probably better if he gave her some time to cool off.

  He dragged a hand over his scalp, frustrated and confused. Damn it, he was starting to care about this woman. To really care about her. And, more than that, he wanted her in his life. He didn’t want a fling or even a casual relationship.

  Back in Vermont he’d been trying to figure out why he felt so unfulfilled, and now he knew why. He’d been looking for a connection. A real emotional connection that he hadn’t been able to find with the women he’d dated in the past.

  But he’d found it with Juliet, and he wanted so badly for her to view him as a man she could rely on, a man she could open up to.

  You went about it the wrong way, dumb-ass.

  A defeated breath lodged in his chest. Yeah, eavesdropping on her probably wasn’t the best way to prove he could be trusted.

  He only hoped all the promising progress he’d been making hadn’t been lost because of it.

  • • •

  Jim Morgan turned every female head when he entered the crowded restaurant. From across the room, D watched in mild amusement as his boss marched through the place as if he owned it, dark blue eyes observing, then dismissing each admiring look aimed in his direction.

  Morgan always had that effect on women. D suspected it had something to do with the man’s imposing presence, the ripples of sheer danger that rolled off him, the confidence of his long stride. In his olive green cargo pants and tight white T-shirt, Morgan was severely underdressed compared to the other men in his vicinity, but that only seemed to make the female hearts beat faster. Jim Morgan played by his own rules, and women wet their fucking panties at that thrilling notion.

  Well, not all women.

  The one currently seated to D’s left had stiffened at his boss’s entrance.

  “This place had better serve good grub. I’m starving,” Morgan said in lieu of greeting. He slid into the chair opposite D and nodded at his soldier. “Nice getup. I’ll make sure to get a picture of it so I can include it in the company newsletter.”

  D just scowled. He was damn tired of the potshots being taken at his ridiculous frat-boy disguise. “How’d the Bolivia job go?”

  Morgan shrugged. “As well as can be expected. Kane nearly got his head blown off by one of the rebels holding the CEO hostage, which pissed off Abby, who practically cut the guy in half with her machete.”

  “Sounds like Abby.”

  “And Luke got bitten in the ass by a pit viper, which gave everyone a good laugh. We were carrying antivenom in our kits, so the Cajun lives to see another day.”

  D snorted. He definitely wasn’t going to let Luke Dubois live that one down. The former SEAL was far too cocky for his own good. Maybe a snakebite on the ass would knock him down a peg or two.

  “What about Holden? Any word from him?” D’s tone turned serious as he voiced the questions.

  Morgan sounded equally grave. “Still no contact. At this point I’m operating under the assumption that he’s officially off the team.”

  D wasn’t surprised to hear it. Holden McCall had lost his wife in the attack on their compound last year, and he’d been AWOL ever since. D didn’t expect to ever see the man again, which both annoyed and confused him. People died all the time—he couldn’t imagine ever experiencing grief so powerful that he’d abandon his teammates because of it.

  But he and Holden were very different men—that much was clear.

  “Anyway,” Morgan went on, signaling a passing waitress, “what’s the sit rep for this job? Has the rookie checked in today?”

  D noted that his boss hadn’t addressed Noelle yet, and the blonde hadn
’t said a word to him either. She simply sat there in her pretty white sundress, fingers toying with the stem of her wineglass. To a random observer she might appear bored, but D knew better. The woman was listening to every word being exchanged, and was not only aware of the man they were supposed to be protecting, who was sitting nearby, but of Morgan’s every movement as well.

  “He and Juliet met with the leader of the People’s Revolutionary Front today. The dude claims he’s not working with Orlov,” D told his boss. “I’m assuming they’ll go after Orlov next.”

  “Good,” Morgan replied with a nod. “The sooner Orlov is dead, the sooner we can put this bullshit behind us.”

  Noelle finally joined the conversation. “What’s the matter, Jim? You’re not enjoying our little reunion?”

  Morgan’s hard gaze collided with Noelle’s mocking one.

  Palpable waves of hostility moved between them. Two pairs of blue eyes—one dark as midnight, one pale as ice—narrowed with bitter acrimony and deep malice and years of bad blood.

  Watching them together was bound to make grown men squirm in discomfort, but D remained unruffled. If anything, their interactions never failed to intrigue him.

  “Baby, I always enjoy seeing you.” Morgan’s voice was low and dripping with contempt.

  She raised her glass to her bloodred lips and took a ladylike sip. “Oh, really? And why is that?”

  “Because it serves as a reminder of all the loose ends I’ve yet to tie up.”

  Noelle laughed humorlessly. “I know exactly what you mean.”

  A petite, red-haired waitress dashed over to their table, looking harried. “What can I get you?” she asked the new arrival.

  Morgan spared a brief look at the menu before requesting an order of chicken paella and a plate of patatas bravas.

  “You sure that’s not too spicy for your delicate palate?” Noelle said after the waitress rushed off.

  Morgan offered a harsh chuckle. “I like to live on the edge.”

  A contemplative note entered her voice. “You know, I believe you said that exact same thing when we first met.”