Troublemaker

  If she hadn’t had such a wall around her in high school, would she have made close friends then? She’d never know, she couldn’t redo the past, but she had to wonder. People were pretty much the same, big city, small town, or rural; they made friends, and they protected their own.

  Eventually the procession dwindled and she settled down to work in earnest. Morgan took Tricks out for a walk. As soon as they were alone, Loretta got up and left her cubicle, coming over to give Bo a pat on the arm. “Congratulations,” she said.

  Startled, Bo looked up. “What?” she asked in bewilderment.

  “Morgan. That’s more man than most women could handle, though if it weren’t for Charlie, I wouldn’t mind giving it a shot,” she mused and went back to her cubicle.

  Well, hell. Evidently that was something else the entire town was clued in on. She thought about it for a minute, then shrugged mentally. She wasn’t embarrassed. She hadn’t even thought of telling Morgan to keep their new involvement on the down low, which said something about how drastically things had changed for her.

  The days slipped from May into June, easing from late spring toward summer. The wheels of law weren’t in any hurry and Kyle was still in jail, waiting arraignment so he could enter his guilty plea. Bo half-expected Warren Gooding to pay her another visit, but all of the Goodings seemed to be making themselves scarce. Melody wasn’t seen shopping in town, and neither was her mother. The people who worked at the sawmills had no gossip to report, nothing overheard, no threats made. Perhaps Kyle had stepped so far out of bounds this time that his parents knew there was no making this go away; Bo wouldn’t bet the farm on it, but she’d take what she could get.

  Morgan began working out like a fiend. He swam every day that it didn’t rain, and some days when it did. His reasoning was that “wet’s wet.” As long as there was no lightning, he swam. He ran; he started out with what he called an “easy hour,” which seemed to extend every day by five or ten minutes. Of course she knew he’d already been doing some running, but it was astonishing how fast he built his endurance. She could almost see the difference every day as he began packing on hard-toned muscle.

  One day he took Tricks out for a walk to give Bo some uninterrupted time to finish a tech job. She pushed hard, her concentration aided by caffeine, and finished just in time to grab a bite to eat before leaving for town. She got up from the desk, stretched, turned to say something to Morgan—then noticed that they hadn’t returned. She checked the time; they’d been gone well over an hour.

  Alarm shot through her, her stomach bottoming out. Had Morgan tripped, maybe hit his head or broken his leg? Had Tricks gotten hurt? The ideas of eating and work vanished, and she ran to the door, only to skid to a stop so fast she almost slammed into it. Through the glass she saw Morgan and Tricks in the yard. Tricks was nosing around, her tennis ball forgotten on the grass, and Morgan was doing push-ups.

  Just that fast Bo went from panic to admiration as she watched his shoulders and arms bulge with each rep. His gray tee shirt was dark with sweat, which meant he’d either been running with Tricks or he’d been doing push-ups for a while. While she watched, he stopped, lying on his stomach, and called Tricks to him. She pranced over and when he patted his back she seemed to know what he wanted, because she daintily stepped onto his back and lay down. Morgan began doing push-ups again.

  Bo’s mouth fell open. Tricks wasn’t a huge dog, her weight staying around sixty-two or sixty-three pounds, but still—that was sixty-two pounds! Push-ups were tough enough, at least Bo thought they were, but Morgan was popping them off as if he could keep going for hours. How long had he been using her dog as added weight?

  Long enough for Tricks to be comfortable with it, evidently. Her tongue was lolling out to one side as she half-closed her eyes in bliss. She liked new things, she liked Morgan, she liked going for rides. Being on his back while he did push-ups hit a lot of her likes.

  Bo opened the door. She was intending to just stand there for a few minutes—the scenery was fine—but as soon as she moved, Tricks noticed her and gave a welcoming bark. She shot straight off Morgan’s back and over his head, her paws digging into him for purchase, as she rushed to get to Bo. Morgan yelped, because those paws had to hurt, not to mention that he was startled by the way she bolted over his head. Bo laughed as she knelt down to welcome Tricks into her arms, hugging her and receiving a few enthusiastic licks.

  Morgan rolled to a sitting position and used his sleeve to wipe off his face. His dark hair was black with sweat, all visible skin glistening. He’d smell pretty rank, she thought, and didn’t care. She wanted to throw herself against him despite how sweaty he was, wanted him to take her down to the ground and get on top of her. Her lower body clenched at the thought and she tightened her muscles against the temptation to do exactly what she wanted to do. She had to go to work.

  “How long have you been using Tricks as weight?” she asked, getting to her feet and stepping to the edge of the patio.

  He squinted up at the sun. “A week or so. She caught on fast. I need to up the weight, though, so you’re on board next.”

  She gaped at him. He wanted her to get on his back while he did push-ups? “Are you nuts? I weigh a lot more than Tricks!”

  “You don’t think it’d be fun?”

  Okay . . . that put a different slant on the idea. She gave Tricks one final pat and tilted her head. “I’ll think about it. How many push-ups do you do?”

  “You don’t want to know. Hell, I don’t want to know. A lot.”

  “More than a hundred?”

  The look he gave her as he got to his feet and strolled toward her told her she’d underestimated by a lot. “A thousand?” She couldn’t imagine doing a thousand push-ups. She was healthy and strong, but push-ups had always challenged her.

  Again the look.

  “I can’t deal with this,” she muttered. “The idea of that many push-ups makes my head hurt. What am I supposed to do while you rip off fifty thousand push-ups with me on your back? Nap? File my nails? Read War and Peace? You should go to the gym and lift weights like normal people.”

  “Not quite the same thing, but I see your point.” He went past her into the house and she realized she’d been right about his smell. She was also right that it didn’t matter at all.

  Oh, shit. She didn’t mind if he stank. She’d accepted that she was in lust with him, accepted that he meant way more to her than she’d felt comfortable with, even accepted that he could cause her a lot of heartache, but until now she’d managed to avoid admitting the truth to herself. Not minding if he smelled like a bear was the kicker, and she couldn’t dance around with her emotions any longer.

  She was in love with him.

  CHAPTER 23

  TOWARD THE END OF JUNE, ANOTHER LETTER ARRIVED for Morgan. It came on a day when he’d gone to town with Bo, and while she dealt with things in the police station, he’d ridden patrol with Jesse. He’d become friendly with all her officers; she suspected it was some guy instinct, that they sensed that his level of expertise in weapons and explosives and hand-to-hand far exceeded theirs even though she knew he wouldn’t have talked about it, and they gravitated to him. After her refusal to sit on his back while he did push-ups, he’d started working out at the small gym in town, and whoever wasn’t on duty had begun working out with him. Her guys made an effort to stay in pretty good shape, but Morgan’s idea of “in shape” made theirs look like kids playing in the yard. Sometimes she marveled that they didn’t all choke on the testosterone levels, but they were trying to keep up with him.

  He executed the U-turn and pulled up to her mailbox, retrieved the mail, then passed it all to her to sort while he wheeled into the driveway. Bo sifted through the catalogs and sales papers, extracting her lone credit card bill and the plain envelope without a return address that was for Morgan. Silently she held it up to catch his attention. He gave it a quick look. “Open it. It won’t say anything you can’t read. If there was any news, he’
d have called your cell.”

  She tore open the envelope and extracted the single sheet of paper, on which had been typed two whole words: No news. No one would ever accuse Axel of being chatty.

  Morgan scowled in frustration. “Shit. It’s been over three months. I know Axel, know he’s been spreading word that I’m recovering my memory, but no one is moving. Whoever it is is playing a waiting game, but that’s dangerous.”

  “Or they suspect a trap,” she pointed out.

  “There is that. Anyone who knows Axel knows how devious he is.”

  “In which case, they don’t really believe you’re recovering your memory—which you aren’t, given that you never lost it to begin with, but let’s not quibble.”

  He reached over the console and patted her thigh. The familiarity of the gesture made her smile. They’d been sleeping together for a month now, and she didn’t know if she’d ever stop going off like a rocket every time he touched her. On the side of fairness, he seemed just as hot for her. She knew she was attractive, in a noncurvy kind of way, but she’d never felt sexy—until Morgan. She’d look up and find him watching her with an intensity so hot her skin felt seared. She didn’t even have to do anything, at least not anything special. As far as she could tell, just watching her load the dishwasher turned him on. She honestly thought he’d made love to her more often in a month than her ex-husband had in the almost-year they’d been married.

  She was happy. She was peaceful. What they had was so great she thought it was worth the pain she’d feel if/when he eventually left. Every so often he’d mention something they could do in the future, but it was always near future, not long-distance future. She didn’t make any assumptions based on that, because assumptions led to expectations and expectations led to disappointment. She simply accepted, and lived—more joyously than she’d ever lived before.

  When they got to the house, he tossed the envelope and letter into the trash with the rest of the junk mail. The weather was hot enough that they were waiting until closer to sundown to take Tricks on her last walk; she fed Tricks, then she and Morgan began throwing together a quick supper. He was quiet, and whenever she glanced at him she saw the narrow-eyed intensity of his expression, meaning he was mentally attacking his situation from every angle, trying to worry loose some detail he hadn’t noticed before. His work was dangerous but important, and until this situation was resolved, he couldn’t do it, couldn’t live under his own name, couldn’t drive his own vehicle or live in his own home. She was happy, but he was in limbo, his real life on hold.

  Perhaps she was part of his real life now, but she’d never know for certain until he got his real life back. Her instinct was to let the issue lie untouched, to take what she could get of him while circumstances still favored her, but—was that fair to him? He’d built the life he wanted, put himself through inhuman training and lived on the knife edge of danger in order to do what he did. If he chose to walk away from it at some point, that was different—because it would be his choice. Being locked out would eat at him.

  She knew that he had mentally gone over and over the details of the day he’d been shot, knew that he and Axel would have analyzed it all down to the nth degree, and come up with nothing. Going over it again likely wouldn’t accomplish anything, but she did have an orderly mind and could listen, and sometimes a little back and forth could knock something loose that he’d realize was significant.

  “You want to do a rundown of that day, start to finish?” she asked, keeping her tone even so he wouldn’t be able to read how much she really didn’t want to do this.

  He frowned down at the salad he was tossing. “I’ve gone over it until I want to punch the wall. It’s frustrating, knowing something is there but damn if I can see it. What the hell are these little green things?” he asked, poking at the salad.

  She leaned over and looked. “Capers.”

  He filched one out of the salad and tasted it. “What exactly is a caper?”

  “Pickled flower buds.”

  “Who the hell ever thought of pickling a flower bud?”

  “Someone hungry.”

  He laughed and popped another caper into his mouth. “Yeah, that’ll do it. I’ve eaten some weird shit a time or three because that’s all there was. Okay, let’s go over it; a fresh point of view can’t hurt.”

  She braced herself to stay noncommittal, to just ask questions and let him sift through the details. “Start at the beginning. What did you do when you got up?”

  “Called a teammate, asked him if he wanted to go fishing. He said no. He had companionship of the female variety, and that’ll outweigh fishing with him every time.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “Only with him?”

  He hooked his arm around her neck and pulled her over for a hard, hungry kiss, one that involved tongue, lingered, and ended with them both breathing a little harder. He lifted his head and wiped her mouth with his thumb. “I didn’t say that. If I had you naked in bed—yeah, I’d skip fishing, too.”

  “Oh, thank you so much.” She slid her hand along his ribs, feeling the hard layers of muscle, then regretfully eased away in the interest of keeping up the conversation because if they kept kissing, then dinner would go on hold and they’d end up naked. That had already happened too many times for her to think otherwise. “Did he know where you were going?”

  “No, but he knows where I live so he wouldn’t have had to hack any database to get my address.”

  “That could have been to fake people off.”

  “That’s what Axel said.”

  Bo scowled at him because she didn’t like thinking she had anything in common with Axel the Asshole.

  Morgan grinned and tapped her chin with his finger but continued, “I don’t see it, myself. Kodak is a friend, has been for a long time. If I got crossways with him during the mission we were on—and I didn’t—he had plenty of opportunity to take me out and make it look legit. I’ve trusted him with my life a lot of times, and vice versa. My gut says no.”

  “Okay, I trust your gut. What happened next?”

  “I went to the marina where I keep my boat. On the way I stopped for breakfast—drive-through fast food—but didn’t see or talk to anyone other than the kid in the window. At the marina I said hello to the marina owner. He made a phone call immediately afterward, but Axel checked that, and the call was to his wife. Nothing there.”

  “Unless his wife is some kind of master spy and you saw something you shouldn’t have seen at the marina.”

  She expected him to laugh again, but he said, “I checked out the marina, sure, like I always do. Everything looked normal. There weren’t any piece-of-shit boats with an expensive antenna array, no unusual license plates, and Brawley—the marina operator—has been there since before I started renting a boat slip. He doesn’t click for me.”

  She blew out a breath, trying to get her head around the mindset and level of alertness required to check out a familiar place every single time he went there. It was mind-boggling. After a few seconds she gave up and shook it off. “Does anything click?”

  “Not really. Next up: I saw a congresswoman and her husband on the river in their boat, went over to say hello. I know them both—not well, but their son was kidnapped and we got him back alive, so I’d say they’re both kindly disposed toward me.”

  “I don’t remember anything in the news about a kidnapping involving a member of Congress,” she said as she took a pair of baking potatoes out of the microwave. Yes, it was heresy to zap potatoes instead of baking them, but so what; she was going for speed.

  “It wasn’t in the news. The whole episode was kept dark.”

  “Was anyone else on the boat with them?”

  “Not that I saw.”

  She had put pork chops in the slow cooker that morning; she got a platter and dished out the chops. “If you don’t know them well, how did you recognize their boat?”

  “I didn’t. I recognized her hair. It was Joan Kingsley.”
br />   “Oh,” Bo said, thinking hard. A face flashed into mind. “I know who she is! White hair. She’s big time.”

  “Yep. She’s on the House Armed Services Committee.”

  “Do you think she’s behind this whole thing?”

  “In my experience, politicians are to blame for almost everything, so that’s what I default to. Her husband is a D.C. lawyer, which is almost as bad because in that town they’re all in bed with each other. But even with that tilt, I can’t make it work.” He took the salad to the table, then got the plates and silverware.

  “You know what Sherlock Holmes said: eliminate the impossible, and what’s left is the truth no matter how improbable. Paraphrasing, of course.”

  “All of it’s improbable. Every possible suspect.”

  “Except for the one who isn’t. Okay, how far from the congresswoman’s boat were you when you spotted her? Did you know it was her?”

  “Not for certain, but that hair’s distinctive. I was about a hundred yards away, give or take. Their boat was anchored in a fairly open stretch of water, though it was a long way down the river toward the bay.” He paused, thinking. “Where the boat was positioned, no one could come up to them from any direction without being seen from some distance away. That’s good safety strategy.”

  They took the food to the table, sat down, and began serving themselves. Bo ate quietly for a minute, thinking about what he’d already told her but also taking the time to savor the fork-tenderness of the pork chop. God bless the inventor of the slow cooker, was all she could say.

  “Would she need to be so safety conscious?” she asked, when their immediate hunger had been satisfied.