A Forever Kind of Hero Read online

  Maybe it shouldn’t have, but he was beyond that now. He had the operation to think of.

  Garrett waited a beat longer, to give the impression that he was thinking about it further. “If I say yes, we play by my rules.”

  She raised both hands to shoulder level in a sign of surrender.

  “You can have the whole game board.” Megan dropped her hands in her lap again. “All I want is one pawn.”

  So she kept saying. God, he hoped he wasn’t going to regret this. The engine of his car began to whine a little as the vehicle started to climb to a higher altitude. “I’ll try to make sure you get it.”

  She didn’t like the qualifying word, and wouldn’t go along with it by keeping silent. “Don’t ‘try.’ Do it.”

  He shifted the vehicle to another gear. “You always been this demanding?”

  His tone told her he was giving in, even if he didn’t say it. “Ever since the day I was born, they tell me.”

  Garrett frowned. But not deeply. “I had a feeling.”

  She laughed for the first time since he’d seen her walking with Jake. He had to admit that there was something about the sound that went right through him, nestling down into parts of him that he had long since thought abandoned.

  “Partners?” Megan stuck out her hand.

  Stopped at a light, he glanced at it. “Don’t get carried away.”

  With one eye on the traffic light, she took his hand, shook it, then dropped it. “Don’t worry, Wichita. I won’t get carried away. I know exactly where I stand with you.”

  That, he figured as the light turned green again, put her one up on him.

  Garrett saw the dead man first, and tried to shield Megan, grabbing her by the shoulders and turning her away before she had a chance to enter the room.

  Megan’s heart stopped in her throat, then beat wildly as she came to the first logical conclusion. “Is it Kathy?” As she demanded the answer, she broke away from him.

  She came to an abrupt stop less than two feet away. Her stomach lurched at the sight of the pool of blood staining the white rug. It framed the dead man’s body like a ghoulish outline.

  It took her a moment to find her voice. She felt Garrett beside her.

  “Velasquez is going to have to start looking around for another color to decorate with, or learn how to hold his temper.” At least it wasn’t Kathy, she thought. “Know who he is?”

  Garrett knew, by face and reputation, most of the people inside Velasquez’s inner circle. The baby-faced kid had only been part of it for less than a year. His death bore testimony to how heartless Velasquez actually was.

  “Yeah. Jaime Caldron.”

  She knew the name and stared incredulously at the man’s face. “Velasquez’s nephew?”

  Crouching beside the body, Garrett looked for signs of life, knowing there weren’t any. This job was meant to be thorough. It was a warning.

  “Yeah, his nephew. Guess Jaime won’t be keeping his rendezvous with Skinny’s daughter.” Disgusted, he dragged his hand through his hair as he rose again. “Velasquez must have found out that Jaime made that call.”

  “And he killed him?” She knew all about men like that. But even coming face-to-face with evidence, it was still difficult to fathom.

  After all this time, Garrett knew exactly how the other man thought. “The organization’s more important than anyone except for Velasquez himself. Jaime was careless. He put it all in jeopardy because he let another part of his anatomy do the thinking for him. Velasquez was never known for his forgiveness and understanding.”

  She nodded. So here they were at another dead end. Literally. Megan stifled a shiver and looked at Garrett. “Now what?”

  For just a moment, frustration got the better of him. Two leads gone in almost as many days. It was as if he were being toyed with. Because Megan was standing next to him, he swallowed the barrage of curses that popped so readily into his mouth. His one last hold on polite society, he supposed. And his last link to his very religious parents. Garrett buried the thought.

  “I don’t know,” he said finally. “Got any tricks up your sleeve?”

  She reacted instantly to his tone. “Don’t snap at me,” she warned. “It’s not my fault that Velasquez got away again.”

  Garrett had been tottering on the edge so much lately that he felt as if he were going to slide off any second. He was spoiling for a fight. But picking one with her over this wouldn’t be fair. He knew that.

  “No—” he blew out a breath “—it’s not.”

  In control again, he took out his cell phone and pressed one key. In less than ten seconds, he had Oscar on the line.

  “Our fish swam upriver again.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Megan looking around the huge room. Covering the bottom of the phone, he cautioned, “Don’t touch anything.”

  It irritated Megan that he thought she needed the warning, and that he kept treating her like some bumbling novice when she’d been able to keep’ up with him every step of the way so far.

  Maybe if she had been a little quicker instead of just keeping up, she would have Kathy by now, she thought. Frustrated, she made a face at him and went into the next room.

  Like all the other rooms, in this house and in the one in Scottsdale, it was decorated completely in white. There wasn’t a dash of color anywhere to break up the monotony. It was more of a mausoleum than a house.

  Clearly the man had some sort of complex, she thought, needing to surround himself with so much unblemished-looking decor.

  She heard Garrett entering behind her and turned around. He wasn’t on the phone any longer.

  “Anything?”

  Guessing at Garrett’s frustration, Oscar had mentioned a couple of potential leads, but nothing concrete yet. “Possibly.”

  “Are you going to tell me, or has our alliance been deep-sixed already?”

  He would have liked to deep-six it, but had temporarily abandoned hope of doing so. “If I said yes, you’d only find a way to follow anyway.”

  She smiled at him then, and linked her arms through his. “Smart man, you’re learning.”

  The display of friendship caught him off guard, but he managed to cover it.

  He was also learning a few things about himself, things he wasn’t about to share with her. Things he didn’t want to even acknowledge to humself. But they were there nonetheless.

  The unnerving fact that even at the height of all this, she kept worming her way into his mind, interfering with his focus, with his purpose. He didn’t like that, didn’t want it. Yet he kept returning to it with an unshakable curiosity.

  He nodded toward the front door. It was time for them to leave. “The cleanup crew’s on their way. If there’s anything to learn, we’ll know in a few hours.”

  That sounded logical enough. “What’ll we do to entertain ourselves until then?”

  A couple of things suggested themselves to him, fueled by the invitation in her voice. “You know, I can’t quite figure you out.”

  Her eyes smiled at him before she did. “That’s the general idea.”

  He shook his head, laughing shortly. “Always keep ’em guessing, is that it?”

  Megan inclined her head, letting Garrett know that he’d guessed right, then added, “And never let them see you sweat.”

  But he wanted to, he thought. He really, really wanted to. He wanted to see and feel the damp sheen of perspiration along her body after a night of intense lovemaking.

  “You up for something to eat?” he finally asked when his breath returned to his lungs.

  He wanted her to be up for a lot of things, he realized. And therein lay the problem.

  Looking at him, Megan sensed that he had the power to slash her concentration while heightening her awareness of things that had nothing whatsoever to do with recovering a runaway girl.

  She wanted to let him know that he had that power, but knew she couldn’t afford to.

  If she did, it might very well be her dow
nfall.

  It was better this way, at least for her.

  “Yes,” she murmured, the look in her eyes giving away far more than she intended. “I’m up for something to eat.”

  Chapter 10

  Megan found a telephone directory in the closet in the foyer. Flipping through the pages, she chose a restaurant based on the fact that it was close and that the food promised to be simple and good.

  The choice surprised Garrett. He read the name above the pink-tipped nail as she pointed it out to him. It was the name of a popular chain throughout the Southwest.

  He looked at her incredulously. “You like steak houses?”

  She shrugged, replacing the directory. Except for the telephone book, the closet was empty. Like all the other closets in the house.

  She closed the door. “I like steak. I figured you did, too.”

  Opening the front door for her, Garrett waited for Megan to pass before going out himself. Steak was always his first choice, but she’d have no way of knowing that. It wasn’t the kind of thing that was in his file.

  “What makes you say that?”

  She walked down the long driveway, holding her jacket closed against the sudden breeze coming from the desert. She should have brought something warmer with her, but who knew she was going to go traipsing around the countryside?

  Megan looked at him. She figured that she had Wichita pretty well pegged, at least when it came to food. The rest, she was still working on.

  “You’re a complicated man, but your tastes are probably very basic and simple. No fine wines, no dishes that take six hours to prepare and have names you can’t wrap your mouth around.”

  The only thing he knew that he was interested in wrapping his mouth around right now was walking next to him—and it bothered the life out of him.

  Trying to block the feeling, Garrett crossed to the car first. “Am I being insulted?” He opened the door for her.

  It would help a lot, he thought, if they could get back to arguing. But even that road seemed to have only one inevitable end.

  “You’re being observed,” she corrected simply as she got into the car. Alerted by the sudden, rhythmic ringing coming from his pocket, she looked at his jacket. “You’re also being paged.”

  He already had the cell phone in his hand. “Wichita.” Garrett listened carefully, then nodded, remaining silent and giving nothing away.

  Megan tried to interpret his expression, and got nowhere. It annoyed her not to be able to read him. She’d never cared for uncharted waters; she liked knowing exactly which direction the current was heading.

  Garrett flipped the cell phone closed.

  She looked at him impatiently as he walked around the front of the car and got in on the driver’s side. “Well?”

  “The steak house is going to have to be put on hold.” He had no time to sit and linger over a meal with her. And maybe that was all for the good. Garrett had a feeling that she was more than capable of dulling his edge. “I’ve got to go.”

  Did he expect her to get out of the car? And do what? Wait for a taxi?

  “We’ve got to go,” she corrected. He looked at her sharply. She was beginning to be able to read some of his expressions. This one was sheer annoyance. “Temporary alliance, remember?”

  Garrett blew out an exasperated breath. He began to say something, but he thought the better of it. “I don’t have time to sit here and argue with you.”

  “Good, now you’re being sensible.”

  “I won’t tell you what you’re being,” he muttered as he started the car.

  “I’m being an asset,” Megan pointed out cheerfully.

  He laughed shortly. “The first three letters enter into the description, all right,” he muttered under his breath.

  She heard him, but since she’d gotten her way, Megan saw no reason to get into a heated discussion over his comment. Instead, she clipped on her seatbelt and sat back.

  “Where are we off to?”

  That “we” just didn’t sound right, Garrett thought. Even temporarily.

  “Reno.”

  He tried to remember just where to catch the expressway from here. “That was my real partner on the phone. The department just found out that the drop site has been changed to Reno.”

  If he meant to put her in her place with the crack about his real partner, he could have saved his breath. It would take a great deal more than that. But something else he’d said did catch her attention.

  “Drop?” It was the first she’d heard of this added twist.

  Garrett debated the wisdom of telling her, then decided that she’d find out on her own eventually if she tagged along long enough. “Velasquez’s supplier is coming in.”

  Coming in. From out of town or out of the country? Obviously, since they were playing musical states, it had to be some distance away. Megan wondered if putting in a call to her ex-partner at the Bureau would yield anything. She and Murray had remained friendly, despite her abrupt career change.

  She studied Garrett’s profile. “You know who the supplier is?”

  “We have our suspicions.”

  He knows, she thought. But if he wanted to keep that a secret, fine, she’d grant him that. It made no difference to her who the man or the organization was. All she wanted was Kathy.

  There was no reason why his being close-mouthed should bother her.

  But it did. A great deal.

  Covering, Megan shrugged indifferently. “As long as I get to Kathy before anything goes down.”

  He knew from experience that things became hairy when nets finally closed. “You might not be able to.”

  Megan bristled. He was losing sight of things, so intent on the forest that he was oblivious to the trees that might be cut down. “She’s fourteen years old—”

  Garrett cut her off tersely. “So are a lot of other kids who are ODing on the white powder that slime is supplying.”

  Megan backed away. She’d learned a long time ago that she couldn’t go through walls. But there had to be a door around somewhere. The trick was finding it.

  “No argument.” Taking a breath, she pointed to a hamburger drive-through coming up on the next block. “I’ll spring for something to eat.”

  Garrett’s first impulse was to just keep driving, but they were going to need to eat something. The trip ahead promised to be a long one.

  “Put your money away,” he told her, turning at the corner. “I’m buying.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He ignored the grin he heard in her voice.

  They’d been on the road for the last four hours, stopping only twice to refill the tank. He’d turned Megan down each time she’d offered to spell him and drive. Obviously the man was very possessive of his wheel.

  She let him have his way. It was easier than arguing.

  Megan blinked, prying her eyes open. The monotony of the road was threatening to lull her to sleep. The music coming from the radio wasn’t helping. He had it set to a classical station. It was obvious that he preferred listening to talking. One endless piece linked into another, enhancing the drowsy atmosphere within the car. She felt her mind going numb.

  His choice surprised her. If asked, she wouldn’t have guessed that he was the type to like classical music. As for herself, she hated it—with a passion.

  It finally got to be too much for her. Reaching over, she punched in another preset button, searching for something more appealing.

  “What are you doing?” Garrett demanded. Moving her hand aside, he reset the radio.

  “What does it look like I’m doing?” she snapped at him, her irritation getting the better of her. “I’m changing the station.”

  He knew damn well what she was doing, and he didn’t like it. She seemed to enjoy interfering with every part of his life. “Leave it alone,” he warned. “I like classical music.”

  “Well, I hate it.” But she didn’t try to change the station again. “It’s putting me to sleep.”

 
; He didn’t see how that was a bad thing. Awake, she might start talking again. “How can you hate classical music?”

  Annoyed and restless, she stared out the window at the passing tumbleweeds. In the distance, there were the shadowy figures of broken and decaying cacti. “I just do, that’s all.”

  With Mozart playing in the background, and nothing but the open road in front, Garrett glanced at her for a long moment. She’d said that with far too much passion for it to be an arbitrary matter of taste.

  He made an educated guess. “Your father like classical music?”

  Her shoulders stiffened. “Are we going back to Pysch 101 again?” she asked flippantly. And then, because Megan could feel his eyes on her as he waited for a response, she gave him one. “Yes, he did. He used to listen to it all the time.”

  It wasn’t difficult for Garrett to piece things together. She’d been Daddy’s little girl, and he had betrayed her trust. On top of that, when her father had stolen one of his children to keep with him, it hadn’t been her. She’d been hurt on all fronts. He knew what that kind of hurt felt like.

  “So,” he said quietly, “you’ve sworn off everything that reminds you of your father.”

  Megan hated being analyzed, and lashed out before she could impose her own restraints. “Just because we’re confined to a small space doesn’t give you the right to probe and dissect me.”

  “Hey, you’re the one who invited yourself along, not me.”

  The big jerk made it sound as if she’d done it on a whim. “I’m not going along on a joyride. I’m trying to heal the rift in a family.”

  “Will it help to heal your own?”

  She had no intention of rebuilding anything that had once been. As far as she was concerned, you had to move on. And forward. “It’s too late for that.”

  Twilight would be coming soon. Garrett figured they would reach the next town about an hour later. “Seems to me that as long as you’re breathing, it’s not too late to make your peace with things.”