Книга - Outcast

Outcast
Joan Johnston


Ben Benedict is tortured by nightmares… Society bachelor and former army sniper Ben Benedict moves between two worlds — from high-society Washington to the mean city streets, from tuxedos to Glocks. His powerful Virginia family wants him out of harm’s way, but Ben stays on the job, determined to make amends for a past that haunts him. And becomes a ticking time bomb Dr Anna Schuster is fighting demons of her own when she crosses paths with Agent Benedict.The two become adversaries — and lovers — as they search for an Al Qaeda operative bent on revenge. Ben must fight against time — and his own darkness — to rescue millions of innocents and the woman he loves from a virulent bioweapon in the hands of a dangerous enemy.“Skilful storyteller Johnston makes what would in lesser hands be melodrama compellingly realistic. ” — Booklist












Praise for the novels of

JOAN JOHNSTON


“Johnston warms your heart and tickles your fancy.”

—New York Daily News

“Romance devotees will find Johnston lively and well-written, and her characters perfectly enchanting.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Joan Johnston continually gives us everything we want … a story that you wish would never end, and lots of tension and sensuality.”

—RT Book Reviews

“Joan Johnston [creates] unforgettable subplots and characters who make every fine thread weave into a touching tapestry.”

—Affaire de Coeur

“Johnston’s characters struggle against seriously deranged foes and face seemingly insurmountable obstacles to true love.”

—Booklist

“A guaranteed good read”

—New York Times bestselling author Heather Graham


Also by

Joan Johnston

New York Times bestselling author of the Hawk’s Way series and the Bitter Creek novels, which include

THE COWBOY

THE TEXAN

THE LONER

THE PRICE

THE RIVALS

THE NEXT MRS. BLACKTHORNE

A STRANGER’S GAME

only from MIRA Books

Please visit her website at

www.JoanJohnston.com

for a complete listing of her titles and series.




Outcast

Joan

Johnston







www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)


For Logan and Meghan

Bright lights in my life

who shine with joy.




ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


This book happened because I met a stranger on a plane. I was looking for an occupation for the hero of the first book of a brand-new series, and my new friend’s husband just happened to be an ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agent. My hero quickly joined this updated branch of Homeland Security.

I want to thank Karen Goldsberry for her inspiration and support during the writing of this book. I’m grateful for the friendship of Sally Schoeneweiss, who listens with kind ears to my work in progress. A special thanks to Karna Small Bodman for advice on who’s who in Washington. Any mistakes are mine.

Thanks to Liesa Malik and Pat Feliciano for locating information I couldn’t find no matter how hard I looked.

I especially want to thank the sales force at Harlequin Books, who are so good about making sure my books get into the hands of readers. Kudos to Margaret O’Neill Marbury and Adam Wilson, who help me make my work the very best it can be. My thanks to Mary Helms, Amy Jones and Margie Miller for their parts in creating the stunning cover for Outcast.

There is no maintenance shed behind Lincoln Middle School. I’ve created problems with the magnetometer and MPD cop on duty at the school to suit my fictional novel.

Finally, I wish to thank the (anonymous) ICE agent who provided me with background information on ICE procedures.




Prologue


Ben Benedict’s gaze moved restlessly from one potential partner to the next in the Georgetown bar. He wanted a woman. Check that. He wanted sex. Which made him a bastard, he supposed. It was hard to admit that what he really wanted—what he really needed—was to hold another human being close. To feel alive. To forget.

He gritted his teeth as his hands began to tremble. He turned toward the mirror behind the dark, crowded bar and clenched his fists on his knees. He stared down at the glass of McClelland’s single malt whiskey in front of him. Alcohol would dull his senses while he was awake, but it wouldn’t keep him from dreaming. It sure as hell didn’t stop the nightmares.

Ben pictured himself walking along a mountain trail through a fragrant forest of green pines and golden aspen, sunlight streaming through the lush foliage, and felt the tension ease from his body.

“I saw you looking at me. I thought I’d come over and say hello.”

He took his time turning to face the pretty young woman who’d slid onto the bar stool next to him. He flattened his now-quiet hands on his jeans and prayed his body would cooperate long enough for him to do the sweet-talking necessary to get her into bed.

She had spiked, light brown hair and long-lashed eyes. Several buttons of her blouse were undone, revealing a hint of enticing cleavage, and her skirt was short and tight, showing off very long legs.

Legs that could likely wrap entirely around him.

Ben tried to smile but couldn’t manage it. He kept his blue eyes on her and willed her to be the kind of woman he needed tonight. Uninvolved. Unexceptional. Uninhibited.

“You don’t have a government job, not with hair down over your collar,” she said.

He shivered as she brushed a hand through the black locks that fell over the collar of his white Oxford-cloth shirt, teasing the skin at his nape. It took all his willpower to remain still as she settled her hand on his shoulder.

She tilted her head like a small bird and slowly surveyed him from head to foot, her dark brown eyes telling him she liked his chiseled features, his broad shoulders, his narrow waist and hips. And the way his jeans cupped his sex. Her gaze was almost a physical caress, and his body reacted predictably.

She made a purring sound in her throat before her eyes met his again. “What kind of job does one do in D.C. if one isn’t in politics?”

“Does it matter?” he asked, avoiding the question.

She laughed nervously and let her hand drop.

I did something to scare her off. But what? He consciously relaxed his body, modulated his voice to make it less sharp and said, “What do you do?”

She smiled, revealing perfectly capped teeth, and said, “Secretary to an assistant undersecretary who’s an assistant secretary to a secretary. If you know what I mean.”

He knew he was supposed to laugh. But he couldn’t manage that, either. “Would you like to come to my place?” Sensing her hesitation, he quickly added, “For a nightcap?”

He watched two narrow lines appear above her upturned nose, between her finely tweezed eyebrows.

“You’re not a serial killer or anything, are you?”

He made a sound that might have been a snort. “Not hardly.”

She surveyed him for another moment, and he did his best to look unthreatening.

“All right,” she said, placing her hands on the edge of the polished wooden bar to push herself off the backless stool. “Just let me tell my girlfriend I’m leaving.”

He watched her walk over to a high-top table and confer with another woman. He nodded as her friend waved at him. Made himself wait for the woman’s return. He felt like bolting, but his need was greater than his fear that if he invited her home, she would discover his secret.

“I live around the corner,” he said when she rejoined him. “Mind if we walk?”

“No problem. I told my friend I’d take a cab home.”

“Fine.” He didn’t allow the women he brought home to spend the night. That was far too dangerous. “You ready?”

“Let’s go.” She slid her arm through his and hugged their bodies close. He could feel the weight of her breast through the arm of his black leather jacket as they left the bar.

He would take the brief escape she offered, the momentary warmth and comfort of another human body. Give pleasure in exchange. And send her back into the night.




1


The shooter aimed carefully and squeezed the trigger. One dead. He squeezed again. A second victim dropped in his tracks. He held his breath and squeezed a third time. As the third victim fell to the ground, he whispered, “Gotcha!”

The teenage boy standing next to him whistled in appreciation. “You’re a crazy man with that gun.”

Ben Benedict, former military sniper, grinned as he blew off imaginary smoke at the end of his plastic M1911 Colt .45 and shoved the gun back into its plastic holster on the arcade video machine. “That’s me. Your average lunatic with a gun. But you notice I won.”

The thirteen-year-old playing “House of the Dead” with Ben laughed. “Really, man, you’re loco. I’ve never seen anybody shoot like you. You never miss.”

Ben accepted the compliment without bothering to deny the charge of insanity. It was entirely possible the kid was right.

Ben had done his best to hide the nightmares, the night sweats, the daytime flashbacks, the trembling that started without warning and ended just as mysteriously, from his family and his new boss at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, called ICE, the largest branch of the Department of Homeland Security.

As far as Ben knew, none of them suspected his struggle to appear normal since he’d resigned his commission in the army six months ago to become an ICE agent.

“One more game,” the kid pleaded.

“It’s Wednesday. I know you have homework.”

“I can do it later.”

Ben shook his head. “I can’t stay. My stepmom’s giving a prewedding party for my sister Julia and Sergeant Collins tonight. My whole family’s supposed to be there. She’ll have my head if I’m late.”

“I can’t believe your sister’s gonna marry a cop on Saturday.”

“Sergeant Collins is not just another cop. He’s my friend,” Ben said. Their families owned neighboring plantation homes south of Richmond, Virginia. They’d been best buds until Ben’s parents had divorced, and Ben had left Richmond to go live with his father in Chevy Chase. After that, Ben had only seen Waverly when he visited his mother on holidays and vacations.

Waverly Fairchild Collins, III, possessed a notable Virginia pedigree, but his family had been forced to sell most of the land around their plantation home after the Crash in 1929. The Benedicts still owned the vast tract of rich farmland surrounding their estate, The Seasons, where their ancestors had grown tobacco, but which now produced pecans and peaches.

The family gathered at the old plantation house, a white, two-story monstrosity right out of Gone With the Wind, on holidays and special occasions.

“That cop might be your friend,” Epifanio said. “But to me, he’ll always be a sonofabitch.”

Ben bit his lip to keep himself from giving the kid a hard time about his language. At least Epifanio had given up using fuck every other word.

Ben had met Epifanio five months ago, when his older brother Ricardo had been caught in a joint ICE-MPD sting aimed at gang kids boosting cars in Washington, D.C. for shipment to South America. Sergeant Waverly Collins, head of the Metropolitan Police Department Gang Unit, was the man who’d arrested Ricardo. Epifanio didn’t know that Ben, representing ICE, had also been involved in the sting.

ICE was working with the MPD Gang Unit because so many members of D.C. gangs—the Vatos Locos, Latin Kings, 18th Street gang, and especially MS-13—had once been members of violent gangs south of the border.

Gangs had been named a danger by Homeland Security because so many of their members were illegal aliens. Ben had seen the results of gang violence—the extortion, the theft, the beatings, the senseless death and destruction. The government feared that foreign terrorists might recruit these kids, many of them gangsters without a moral compass, to commit acts of terrorism. Hence the effort to interfere with the gangs’ financial survival by eliminating all their sources of income.

Illegal aliens caught in the sting, including Ricardo, were deported back to their homes, usually somewhere in Central or South America.

Upon learning that he was being deported, Ricardo had asked if someone would notify his grandmother. His abuela didn’t have a phone, so he couldn’t call her, and she couldn’t read, so a letter wouldn’t work.

Ben seemed to be the only one moved by the eighteen-year-old’s plea. Despite warnings from Waverly not to get involved, Ben had gone to see Ricardo’s grandmother at her run-down apartment in the Columbia Heights neighborhood, a half hour north of his row house in Georgetown.

Mrs. Fuentes was a small, wizened woman with white hair she wore in braids bobby-pinned at the top of her head. She reminded Ben of his maternal grandmother, who’d died in a private plane crash along with his grandfather when he was ten.

Quiet tears had streamed down Mrs. Fuentes’s brown, wrinkled face when Ben told her Ricardo’s fate. Mrs. Fuentes offered Ben a cup of coffee, which he’d felt obliged to take.

When she had him seated in the tiny living room, where the brown couch was covered with vinyl to protect it, she told him how worried she was that Ricardo’s little brother Epifanio—who, thank the Blessed Virgin, had been born to a black father in the United States—would follow in his older brother’s footsteps and end up dead on the streets from drugs or gang violence. The 18th Street gang was already pressuring Epifanio to join.

Waverly laughed when Ben told him later how he’d offered to check in on Epifanio now and then and do what he could to keep the kid in school. Waverly warned Ben that he was asking for heartache. He’d told Ben his chances of keeping Epifanio out of the 18th Street gang and off hard drugs—highly addictive crystal meth and crack cocaine—when his brother had been a gang member and a methamphetamines addict, were slim to none.

Despite Waverly’s advice, Ben had made a point of seeing the kid at least once a week over the past five months, although he never had told the kid what he really did for a living. Epifanio thought Ben worked in an office in downtown D.C., which Ben did. It just happened to be the ICE office.

It had taken a long time to earn the kid’s trust. And there had been setbacks.

Three months ago, Ben had come by one afternoon when Mrs. Fuentes was still at her babysitting job and been concerned when Epifanio didn’t answer his knock. He’d stepped inside the unlocked apartment and found Epifanio sitting on his bed, leaning against an interior wall spray-painted with graffiti, his pupils dilated so wide that Ben could have fallen into the kid’s eyes.

“What are you on?” he’d demanded, searching around the kid’s iron cot for drug paraphernalia. He’d pulled out his cell phone to call 911, afraid the boy might be in danger of OD-ing, but Epifanio had grabbed his wrist and said, “It’s only Ecstasy.”

“Only Ecstasy?” Ecstasy wasn’t addictive, but it was still a powerful narcotic. Then he’d had another thought. “Where did you get the money to buy that junk?”

The kid had hung his head.

“Well?”

“I stole the E from a locker at school,” he’d mumbled.

Ben had been so mad he could have wrung the kid’s neck. “I’m taking you to the emergency room.”

“It’ll wear off in a couple of hours,” Epifanio protested.

Ben had hauled the kid out to his car anyway, taken him to the emergency room and waited with him while the hospital did a blood test. The toxicology report confirmed that the only drug in Epifanio’s system was the amphetamines in Ecstasy.

Ben had been standing by, his arms crossed over his chest, when Mrs. Fuentes arrived at Epifanio’s hospital bedside, her dark brown eyes huge with fear.

Epifanio had been defiantly silent in response to Ben’s disapproval. But when his grandmother sank into the chair beside his bed, crossed herself, closed her eyes and folded her hands in prayer, the kid started to cry.

“I’m sorry, Abuela,” he said. “I won’t do it again. I promise.”

Ben had kept up his visits to the household. And the kid had been true to his word. Two months later, Epifanio was still off drugs, still not part of a gang and still in school. Ben was counting his blessings, but because of constant reminders from Waverly that the good behavior couldn’t last, he was taking things one day at a time.

“I’m looking forward to having the sergeant as my brother-in-law,” he told the boy.

“I hate cops,” Epifanio said, his dark eyes narrowed, his lips pressed flat.

I’m a cop, Ben thought. But he merely met the kid’s gaze.

Epifanio made a face as he holstered his own plastic gun. “You might wanta watch yourself when you come around to the neighborhood. I been hearing rumors of something bad goin’ down.”

“Bad like what?” Ben asked.

Epifanio shrugged. “Just guys lookin’ over their shoulders, you know? That sorta creepy feeling you get when something’s not right?”

Epifanio might not belong to the 18th Street gang, dubbed the 1-8 by the MPD, but most of the kids in his neighborhood did. It was impossible for him to avoid them entirely.

As far as anyone in the neighborhood knew, Ben was supposedly a “Big Brother” from the community group Big Brothers and Big Sisters. His ICE connection was a secret. Which was why another ICE agent monitored the activities of the 18th Street gang.

“Thanks for the heads up,” Ben said.

Trouble among the gangs hit the streets like ocean waves. Some waves passed without incident. Some devastated everything in their path. He put a hand on Epifanio’s shoulder and said, “You be careful out there, too.”

“You know I will,” Epifanio said with a cheeky grin.

“How about that homework?” Ben said.

The kid grinned. “I ain’t got—”

“Don’t have—” Ben automatically corrected.

“Any homework,” Epifanio finished, his grin widening.

Ben ruffled the boy’s short dreads, something he wouldn’t have done even a few weeks ago. “Then go read a book.”

As they left the Games & More video arcade, Epifanio teasingly flashed Ben the 18th Street gang sign. He laughed when Ben frowned at the display, then sauntered down the street toward home.

Ben stuck his suddenly trembling hands deep in his pockets, clenching them into fists. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest. He had trouble catching his breath.

He felt the searing heat of the desert. The grittiness of the sand at his collar. The stickiness of blood on his hands.

“Hey! You gonna stand there all day? We’re late!”

Ben’s tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth. He jerked a nod toward Waverly, who’d pulled his Ford Explorer up to the curb.

“You okay?” Waverly asked, sticking his head out the open window.

Ben forced himself to take a step. Another step. He crossed behind the car, to give himself time to recover. After all these months, he wasn’t going to let this … shit … get the better of him. The incidents were occurring less often. They were less severe. Surely, at some point, they would stop entirely.

By the time he got to the front passenger door of the car his hands were out of his pockets and functioning without a visible tremor. As he slipped into Waverly’s Ford he said, “I can’t believe you and Julia are letting Patsy throw you a party, especially this close to the wedding.”

“Your dad was more of a dad to me than my own. When she suggested it, I didn’t want to say no,” Waverly replied. “Don’t blame me if your stepmother invited your whole family. Julia said just about everybody agreed to come.”

Ben groaned. “Everybody? My mom and the senator in the same room with my dad and Patsy?”

“Yep,” Waverly said.

Ben groaned. Although his parents had divorced twenty years ago, his mother had never forgiven his father for cheating on her with another woman. His father had never forgiven his mother for her lack of understanding and inability to pardon what he claimed was a single lapse in judgment under extraordinary circumstances.

Both had remarried within a year, and from what Ben could see, both had remarkably successful second marriages. But he was pretty sure his parents had never really stopped loving each other. Otherwise, they wouldn’t still be so miserable in each other’s presence.

Unfortunately, their continuing attraction made things pretty uncomfortable whenever their respective spouses were in the room. Which meant the party tonight would be a parental minefield, exacerbated by the warfare that went on between the very different children who’d grown up as relatives because of their two second marriages.

Ben was one of thirteen siblings. And nobody was married yet or had produced offspring.

Actually, fourteen siblings. He was forgetting the reason for his parents’ divorce, his father’s bastard son, Ryan Donovan McKenzie. Ryan was the result of a one-night stand his father had indulged in with a barmaid, Mary Kate McKenzie. His dad had insisted on acknowledging and supporting his illegitimate son, and invited Ryan to every family gathering. The Black Sheep always declined.

“How many of the Fabulous Fourteen have said they’re coming?” Ben asked Waverly.

“The senator’s three kids by his late wife, one of your three brothers, your stepmom’s twins with her ex from Texas and your three half sisters. And, of course, my lovely fiancée. In short, nearly the whole dysfunctional bunch. No surprise, the Black Sheep sent his regrets. Should be a great party.”

Ben felt his heart take an extra thump. “I can hardly wait.”




2


“How are things with the kid?” Waverly asked as he drove out of the ethnically and economically mixed Columbia Heights neighborhood toward elite Chevy Chase, Maryland, where the party was being held. Columbia Heights was becoming gentrified, forcing out the poor, but right now it was still a blend of the crumbling old and the very new. The distance to Chevy Chase wasn’t far in miles, but it might as well have been a trip to the moon, the two worlds were so far apart.

“The kid is fine,” Ben said as he reached for the rep-striped tie he’d left in the backseat with a jacket earlier in the day.

“For now.”

Ben buttoned up his shirt, slipped the tie around his neck and began to tie it. “I’m optimistic.”

“You’re naive.”

“You’re jaded.” Ben shoved the Windsor knot up to his throat.

“Maybe so. We’ll see.”

Ben hesitated, then said, “Epifanio has heard rumblings that something bad is in the works.”

“If the kid asks too many questions, they’re going to shut him up. Forever,” Waverly warned. “Don’t push it.”

“I didn’t ask for information. He volunteered it.”

“Someday somebody’s going to make the connection between you and ICE and the kid. They’ll start to wonder what he’s told you. And—” Waverly made a ragged sound as he drew his forefinger across his throat.

“I’m his Big Brother. That’s all.”

“Yeah. Right,” Waverly said.

As the man in charge of the MPD Gang Unit for the past two years, Waverly knew far more about gang behavior than Ben did. If Waverly was worried about Epifanio, Ben knew there was something to worry about.

“Have you heard something I haven’t?” he asked.

“Just the same stuff as the kid,” Waverly said. “That something is going to happen. Something big.”

“What are we talking about here?” Ben asked. “New car theft ring? Counterfeit bills? Drug shipment? Illegal weapons?”

“Terrorism.”

Ben mentally reeled. He’d chosen to work on an ICE joint task force with the MPD dismantling gangs in D.C., rather than join the investigative arm of ICE and search out terrorists, precisely because he’d had enough of war. Apparently, this time the war was coming to him.

“Terrorism,” he mused. “What does that mean? I have trouble imagining white or black or Hispanic or Asian gangs hijacking planes and flying them into buildings.”

“Maybe not. But they can help smuggle dirty bombs or biological weapons across the border from Central or South America. Or learn how to make improvised explosive devices—IEDs—and plant them in big cities across America—Los Angeles, Houston, Miami, Chicago, Detroit, New York—and of course, the District.”

“Is that really going to happen?”

“Nobody knows for sure,” Waverly said. “But you and I are going to keep a damned close eye on MS.”

Mara Salvatrucha 13, called MS by the MPD, was known to be a merciless and violent gang in El Salvador, where it had originated. Its members had brought that arbitrary death-dealing with them when they stole across the border and joined MS gangs formed in the States.

“Are several gangs involved?” Ben asked. “Or only MS?”

“MPD and ICE share info, so I’m sure you know Al Qaeda had sent lieutenants to El Salvador to recruit members of MS to commit terrorist acts. The presumption is they’ll make use of members of MS here in the States to help them, by threatening their families in El Salvador, if necessary. Which is why we’re focusing on MS.”

Ben hadn’t wanted to believe Al Qaeda would be successful in El Salvador. His job was going to change radically if a bunch of hired assassins began infiltrating across the border and joining local MS gangs to cover up their terrorist activities.

“Have you heard anything on the streets about exactly who—or what—Al Qaeda’s target might be in D.C.?” Ben asked.

“That, my friend, is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. They have a helluva lot of choices.” Waverly brought his car to a stop in front of an impressive, two-story Colonial redbrick home with white shutters and a tall, elegant front door.

“We’ve reached the end of your father’s obscenely long driveway—and this conversation,” Waverly said. “You know Julia doesn’t like me to talk about work around your mother. It upsets her.”

Ben got out of the car and dumped his leather jacket in the backseat. He grabbed a navy suit jacket from a hanger on a hook over the window to wear with his khaki trousers. He knew what really upset his mother was the idea of her eighteen-year-old daughter marrying a thirty-year-old cop. Especially since the bride and groom had only met six months ago.

And it wasn’t just the age difference, or the short time they’d known each other. His mother blamed him for the fact that in three days Julia would be marrying a man with a dangerous job that could get him killed. Worst of all, the young couple was determined to live on the paltry income of a D.C. cop.

Ben’s mother, Abigail Coates Benedict Hamilton, not only had inherited wealth of her own, but a year after she’d divorced Ben’s even wealthier father, she’d married a wealthy widower, the senior senator from Virginia, Randolph Cornelius “Ham” Hamilton, III.

Ben’s half sister Julia had been born into a life of opulence and privilege. His mother couldn’t bear the thought of Julia wanting for anything. She deplored the small apartment that was all Waverly could afford, and which would be her daughter’s first home, and had announced she was “devastated” that Julia would be attending Georgetown University instead of her alma mater, Wellesley.

Seeing that Waverly and Julia were in love, Ben had let his mother’s complaints roll off his shoulders. The fact he pretty much always fell short of pleasing his mother was something he’d learned to cope with at a very young age. Eight, to be precise.

That was the year his parents divorced. Ben had always wondered who’d come up with the idea to split up the Benedicts’ four living sons—Nash, Ben, Carter and Rhett—and give two to each parent.

Nash, who was eleven, and Rhett, who was only a baby, had stayed with his mother. Ben, who’d been a little intimidated by his father, Foster Holloway Benedict, an army officer who’d been awarded the Medal of Honor, had begged to be allowed to stay with his mother in their home in Richmond. But his father had taken him away to live in Chevy Chase, along with his younger brother Carter.

Not that Ben had spent much time with his father once he’d taken up residence in the mansion in Chevy Chase. Within a year of his parents’ divorce, his father had married a woman named Patsy Taggart. Patsy had done all the caretaking while his father was off being a soldier. At thirteen, Ben had been sent off to Massachusetts to attend Groton, an Episcopal prep school.

At the time Patsy married his father, she’d had twin two-year-old sons who lived most of the year in Texas with her former husband. But it wasn’t long before she was pregnant with Ben’s twin sisters Amanda and Bethany. A few years later, Camille had come along. Ben called the girls the ABCs, because their names started with the first letters of the alphabet.

It was hard not to love the ABCs because they so obviously adored him, and he did his best to be a protective and loving big brother.

It had taken a long time before he let Patsy fill the hole left in his heart when his mother had given him away. But his stepmother had been persistent. He loved her now far more than the mother who’d borne him.

Ben had seen the pain in his biological mother’s eyes when he’d remained aloof through the years. Diabolically, his parents had arranged for their four sons to spend time together in the same households from time to time—for holidays or vacations—so they wouldn’t lose touch with each other.

As it turned out, he and Carter were close. Rhett, no surprise, was everybody’s friend. Nash was unknowable

Ben had always been in awe of Nash, because when that Solomon-like custody decision was being made, he’d refused to leave their mother. Ben had overheard him tell their father flat out, “I’m not going.”

Of course, that meant Ben had been forced to go instead. He didn’t blame Nash. Ultimately, his mother had agreed with the decision to send him away.

Ben had never given her another chance to reject him. But he dreaded family gatherings because it dragged up all that ancient history.

He was keenly aware that he’d once again managed to disappoint her by introducing Julia to Waverly. Ben felt an ache in his chest. He focused on the peaceful forest scene that helped him quiet the demons. The last thing he wanted was to have an attack now.

He thought of how little any of his family knew about the bad things that had happened to him as a soldier. And how grateful he was that they’d never asked.

Ben intended to keep it that way, which was why he was so careful to conceal the nightmares and all the rest of the crap he was dealing with these days. If his family got an inkling he was having trouble coping with a world not at war, they’d be in his face wanting to help.

He envied the Black Sheep, who had just said no, and his two brothers, who had good excuses to be absent tonight. Carter was serving with the marines in Iraq, and Nash was out of the country doing whatever secret work he did for the president.

“Ben! You’re here!” his thirteen-year-old sister Camille squealed as he stepped into the circular domed foyer of his father’s Chevy Chase mansion with Waverly on his heels.

“I’m here,” he replied, putting a smile on his face and opening his arms to catch Camille as she leapt into them.

“Ben! You came!” his seventeen-year-old sister Bethany said, her long blond curls bouncing as she hurried toward him.

As if he’d had a choice. He hugged Camille before setting her down, then wrapped an arm around Bethany’s shoulder.

“Ben! You need a shave!” Bethany’s twin sister Amanda said as she wrinkled her nose.

Ben grinned as Amanda put her hands on either side of his bristly face and leaned forward to kiss him on each cheek, in the continental style she must have learned in the exclusive Swiss boarding school she and Bethany attended.

“Girls! Give Ben a chance to get in the door.”

His half sisters stepped back to allow their mother to embrace her stepson. His father’s second wife wasn’t conventionally pretty and she’d never been thin. But Patsy had hazel eyes that warmed to a golden brown every time she smiled.

When he hugged her back, he did it with all the love a son gave to his mother.

“Wave!” a female voice shrieked.

Ben watched a blond streak go flying by and laughed as Julia threw herself into Waverly’s open arms in much the same way his youngest half sister had flown into his. Except Julia followed the hug with a long, lascivious kiss.

Ben was pretty sure his mother would have been appalled to see her only daughter behaving like a hoyden. And equally sure that Julia would have found a way to charm her mother out of any rebuke for her behavior.

Ben turned back to his stepmother, urging her and his sisters toward the living room as he said, “I can’t believe you got that uppity Swiss school to let the girls come home for a wedding.”

“Mom didn’t give them any choice,” Amanda interjected.

Ben had long ago realized his mother and his stepmother were equally strong women in their own ways. He just saw a softer side to Patsy that his mother didn’t possess. Or had never shown to him.

“Where’s Dad?” he asked as his stepmother herded everyone toward the living room.

“Reception at the Argentine embassy,” Patsy said. “He’ll be here later. I mostly wanted to give you kids a chance to catch up with each other before the wedding.”

Ben found his youngest brother sitting on the arm of a silk-covered sofa, flirting with one of the caterer’s helpers who was passing canapés. Rhett’s job was made easier by his incredible good looks. His parents had produced five sons—Darlington, the fourth boy, had died at age four—and with the fifth, his mother had produced a perfect male specimen. At least, every girl who’d ever crossed Rhett’s path seemed to think so.

“Welcome, Ben. Hi, there, Waverly,” Rhett called as Ben entered the room with his entourage of females and the groom.

Rhett rose and whispered something in the helper’s ear that made her duck her head and blush, then crossed to Ben with his hand outstretched. Ben started to shake Rhett’s hand, but his younger brother used his grip to pull Ben close. He wrapped his other arm around Ben’s neck and gave him a hard hug.

“How the hell are you?” Rhett asked. “You’ve been slipperier than a fish lately. Where have you been keeping yourself?”

Away from all of you, Ben thought. So you don’t find out the truth about me. “I’ve been working,” he replied. “How’d you get away from West Point?”

“You know Mom,” Rhett said with a grin. “She had a word with the senator who had a word with the commandant.” He opened his arms wide. “And here I am in the middle of the week.”

Yes, my two mothers are very much alike, Ben thought. Both women had no qualms about going around the rules if the rules didn’t suit them. The result of being indecently wealthy all their lives, he supposed. Patsy’s family had land in Texas swimming in oil.

“Where’s Mom?” Ben asked as he searched the enormous living room and the four hallways leading away from it.

“The senator had some business on the Hill, so she represented him at a reception at the Argentine embassy tonight,” Rhett replied. “They’ll both be here later to toast the bride and groom.”

Dad and Mom on their own in the same place at the same time? He glanced at Patsy, wondering if she was aware that his mother and father were together tonight at the Argentine embassy, while she was here. His father who, after nineteen years of marriage to another woman, still snuck longing glances at Abby Hamilton whenever he thought no one was looking.

“Hello, Ben.”

Ben shook hands with his stepbrother John, the senator’s son. At thirty-seven, John Hamilton was the eldest sibling and the one most likely to antagonize the Benedict boys. John was a pacifist and happily defended conscientious objectors. He was militant in his belief that there were better ways to settle disputes between countries than to wage wars.

Ben didn’t really disagree. But Foster Benedict had retired from the army as a four-star general. All four Benedict boys had attended, or in Rhett’s case was still attending, a military academy. And three of the Benedict boys had served honorably, and in Carter’s case was still serving, in the military. Thus, any conversation with John often descended into controversy.

“You look beat,” John said.

Ben was surprised John had noticed—much less commented on—the dark patches under his eyes. Nightmares had been interrupting his sleep, but he wasn’t about to confess that to anyone. Instead he said, “Too much carousing.”

Which earned him a disdainfully raised eyebrow from his stepbrother. John’s two sisters, thirty-four-year-old Augusta and twenty-six-year-old Alexis, who went by the nicknames Gus and Alex, merely waved to Ben from the opposite side of the room, where they sat in comfortable chairs before a cheerfully crackling fire in the redbrick fireplace.

Ben was keeping mental track in his head of everyone he’d greeted. Fourteen siblings minus himself and the three who weren’t coming left ten. Camille, Bethany, Amanda, Julia—although she hadn’t exactly “greeted” him—Rhett, John, Augusta and Alexis. That left Patsy’s twenty-year-old twin sons from her first marriage, who weren’t in the living room.

“Where are the twins?” he asked Patsy.

She glanced around the living room and down the various hallways and said, “I’m not really sure.”

“They’re in the kitchen,” Rhett volunteered.

“What are they doing in there?” Patsy asked.

“Josh bet Reese he could—”

“Josh bet Reese?” Patsy interrupted. “Those two will be the death of me yet.” She turned and hurried toward the kitchen.

“Josh bet Reese what?” Ben asked Rhett.

“That he could swallow a whole egg.”

“Without choking to death?” Ben said. “Why didn’t you say something to Patsy sooner?”

“Josh shot me a wink. I figured he had some trick up his sleeve,” Rhett said with a shrug. “As usual.”

“This I gotta see,” Ben said, hurrying after a disappearing Patsy.

When Ben got to the kitchen he saw a smug-looking Josh with slimy egg dripping down his chin and an angry Reese counting twenties out of his wallet onto the Mediterranean-tiled kitchen counter.

“What’s going on here, Reese?” Patsy demanded. “What is that all over your face, Josh?”

“Egg,” Josh said with a grin. “I bet Reese I could swallow a whole egg.”

“Looks like you lost,” Ben said, giving Reese a comforting pat on the shoulder.

“The sonofabitch cheated!” Reese said as he laid the fifth twenty on the counter. “He broke it up in his mouth and chewed the shell before he swallowed it.”

“You did what?” Patsy said to Josh. She whirled on Reese and snapped, “Watch your language, young man!” She glanced at the two middle-aged women preparing food on the other side of the kitchen and said, “There are ladies present.”

“Sorry, Mom,” Reese said.

“It was just a raw egg, Mom. And a little eggshell,” Josh said. “It won’t kill me.”

Patsy threw up her hands. “I give up. You two are incorrigible. You talk some sense into them, Ben.” She turned and stalked back toward the living room.

“How are things on the ranch?” Ben asked with a wry twist of his mouth.

“It’s a lot warmer in Texas than it is here,” Josh said, grabbing a towel from a rack and wiping the egg off his face. “And there aren’t any females around to drive a man crazy.”

“Sounds good to me,” Ben said, unable to keep from smiling.

“I don’t know why Mom keeps insisting we come up here,” Reese said. “Why don’t you guys come down to the ranch sometime?”

“That might be a little awkward,” Ben pointed out, “considering your dad and your two uncles live there.”

“Dad wouldn’t care,” Josh said. “He doesn’t have a girlfriend or anything. And Uncle Cain and Uncle Cash are more like older brothers than uncles, they’re so much younger than Dad.”

“I know the ABCs would like to come visit,” Ben said. “They love to go horseback riding.”

Josh and Reese exchanged a glance.

“What?” Ben said.

“We heard Mom talking on the phone to your dad tonight,” Josh said.

“Overheard, you mean?” Ben said with an edge to his voice.

“They were arguing,” Reese said in his defense. “It was hard not to hear.”

“And?” Ben prodded.

After a pause Reese said, “She was threatening to take the ABCs and head for Texas if he missed this party.”

“That was all we heard.” Josh shoved Reese in the shoulder. “Because he didn’t think we should listen anymore.”

It was enough, Ben realized. He couldn’t say he hadn’t seen friction between Patsy and his father. If he’d noticed those secret looks his father shot his mother, Patsy had likely noticed them, as well. But like all kids, he didn’t want his parents to split up. Especially since he liked Patsy a hell of a lot better than he liked his own mother.

“Patsy doesn’t know you heard?” Ben asked.

Josh and Reese shook their heads.

“Keep it that way. Maybe things will change.”

“Do you really think so?” Josh asked, his eyes bleak. “I think it would kill Dad to have Mom back in Texas at her dad’s ranch. It’s too close to the Bar-3, you know. Dad would have to see her all the time.”

Another man in love with a wife he’s lost? Ben wondered. He hoped he never fell in love. The people he knew who’d done it—his father, Patsy, his mother—had only suffered as a result.

“Everything’ll settle back down,” he told the twins. It was what he wanted to believe. He hoped he was right.

Ben heard a commotion in the living room. He listened for a moment and heard his mother’s voice. And his father’s. They must have arrived together from the embassy party. He listened for the senator’s gruff voice but didn’t hear it.

He wondered how Patsy was handling the fact his mother and father had arrived together. As the perfect hostess she was, he supposed. But she would be hurting. Because his father couldn’t keep his eyes off his mother whenever she was in the same room.

Ben’s stomach knotted. He forced himself to leave the kitchen. He had to help Patsy by distracting his father.

That shouldn’t be too hard. All he’d have to do was mention his job.




3


Ben was exhausted. He sat in his undershorts on the brocade-upholstered couch in his newly furnished four-story row house in Georgetown, his head in his hands. He could see the pink-and-yellow light of dawn through the silk-draped windows. When was this going to end? How long was he going to have these damned nightmares? He’d woken up screaming. And been afraid to go back to sleep.

He rubbed a hand across his bristly face. Thank God he’d been alone. Thank God he’d sent home the woman he’d picked up at a bar last night after he’d left Patsy’s party. He didn’t remember much about her, except that her body had been a brief haven for his.

He pressed the heels of his hands into his gritty eyes. He’d been seeking escape from more than his own troubles. He’d felt bad for Patsy.

When he’d entered the living room last night, his father had been helping his mother remove her coat. Patsy would have had to be blind to miss the yearning in his eyes. And his stepmother was a woman who saw things very clearly.

Ben had been furious with his father. And frustrated by his inability to change the situation. It was a feeling he’d lived with since he was eight and understood that his father had gotten another woman pregnant, which had caused his mother to ask for a divorce.

But he was no longer a helpless child. He could protect his stepmother. And had, by refocusing his father’s attention on himself. “Looks like some kind of gang trouble is going to hit the District soon,” he’d said.

“You should have stayed in the army,” his father replied. “There you could have done some real good for this country.”

“I’m doing good where I am, Dad,” he’d said. “The threat is right here in our backyard.”

“You were a good soldier. A great soldier.”

“I’m a good ICE agent.” But it was clear from his father’s expression that there was no chance for greatness in that role.

His father snorted. “You spend your days rounding up illegal aliens and deporting them.”

“That isn’t all I do.” But he knew that, in his father’s eyes, his work as an ICE agent could never measure up to the contribution he could make to his country as part of the military. His father couldn’t understand why he’d resigned his commission after training for a life in the army.

And he wasn’t about to tell him the truth.

Luckily, within a few minutes Ham had arrived, everyone shared a toast to the bride and groom, and Ben’s mother and the senator left to return to the senator’s Georgetown home.

Ben had given Patsy a hard hug before he left. But he hadn’t looked her in the face. Because he couldn’t bear to see the silent suffering in her eyes.

Ben wondered if Patsy and his father had argued last night. Probably they had. He worried that the day was coming when they wouldn’t make up.

Ben shoved his hands through his hair. In order not to stick out as a cop on the street, he was allowed to let his hair grow long. But it was time for a haircut. He needed to get up off the couch and get moving. Get a shower. Eat some breakfast. When was the last time he’d eaten a decent meal? Breakfast yesterday, maybe. He’d had no appetite last night. No wonder his stomach felt like it was gnawing on his insides.

He had to check in with his ICE boss, Tony Pellicano, at nine. Then he wanted to spend some time driving around the Columbia Heights neighborhood. There were kids from gangs other than the 18th Street crowd who might be able to tell him something more about the storm that was threatening to break over D.C.

A half hour later, after a shower and a bowl of shredded wheat—the banana he’d planned to slice on top had been rotten—Ben was out the door. He loved living in Georgetown, loved the feel of it, the brick and the trees and the sunshine that made it feel so alive, even though most of the row houses had been built more than a century before.

But Georgetown had opted out of having the Metro come through—bringing in the riffraff—so he needed a car to get around. He’d been drunk when he’d left the Hare & Hound last night, so he’d left his car parked on the street near the pub and walked home with his nameless paramour. Which meant he needed to walk back this morning to pick it up.

He found himself gaining ground on a stray dog striding along the brick sidewalk in front of him. The heavily muscled black-and-tan rottweiler was wearing a spiked collar, from which a piece of heavy chain dangled. The dog sniffed a Japanese cherry tree, lifted his leg, then marched on down the sidewalk as though he owned it.

The dog’s head turned sharply, and Ben followed the beast’s gaze to a bunch of uniformed schoolgirls, laughing and chattering as they made their way down the opposite side of the street.

Ben felt his neck hairs prickle when the rottweiler started across the road toward the girls, disappearing between two parked SUVs.

Ben picked up his pace, afraid the stray might attack the girls, several of whom had begun skipping, seeming to flee the dog. Making themselves prey.

The dog shot out from between the parked cars at exactly the same moment as a Toyota SUV found a break in the morning traffic and barreled past. The driver hit his brakes and laid ten feet of rubber before he slammed into the rottweiler, sending it flying.

The girls screamed.

The dog howled in anguish.

Ben stared in disbelief as the driver glanced back over his shoulder, then laid more rubber as he snaked through traffic to escape the scene.

As Ben approached the rottweiler the injured beast bared its sharp teeth and growled ferociously. The bones in one of the dog’s hind legs were sticking through its flesh. The beast tried to rise, then yelped in pain and fell back to the ground. There was no way to get near the animal without getting mauled.

“I’m calling 911!” one of the schoolgirls cried as she began searching through her backpack.

Another girl pointed to a brick building across the street and said, “There’s an emergency vet right there on the corner.” She focused her teary eyes on Ben and said, “Won’t you please take him there, sir? Please?”

Ben glanced at the vet’s office across the street, thinking the vet would have some idea how to subdue the dog so he could be moved and treated.

Then the decision was taken out of his hands. One of the schoolgirls bent down and reached out a hand to the growling, slavering beast. Jaws snapping, the animal charged at her.

Ben had no choice but to intervene.




4


“Pregnant? How could she be pregnant?” Annagreit Schuster wasn’t often surprised, but the news that her Maine Coon cat, Penelope, was expecting a happy event—was, in fact, in labor—came as a complete shock. Penelope never left the confines of Anna’s small, upstairs apartment in a renovated Georgetown brownstone, except to lie in the sun on the second-floor balcony. How could she have gotten pregnant?

Anna eyed the ten-pound, tabby-and-white-striped cat lying on the emergency vet’s metal examining table. Then she turned her gaze to the twelve-year-old boy standing beside her, his head hung low. “Henry?” she said. “Is there something you haven’t told me?”

“When I first started cat-sitting for you, before I knew better, I left the front door open and Penelope ran out. I found her before you got home, so I didn’t see any reason to tell you.” He looked up at her with guilt-ridden mud-brown eyes and said, “I’m sorry, Anna.”

Anna brushed her hand soothingly across the boy’s tight black curls from crown to nape. Henry’s widowed mother was a surgical nurse, and she was often gone when Henry got home from school. Since Anna lived across the hall, she’d offered him a job cat-sitting, mostly to keep him from ending up home alone. She’d never seen him looking so forlorn.

“It’s all right, Henry. At least Penelope doesn’t have a tumor.” Which was what Anna had thought when she’d seen Penelope acting so strangely this morning and felt the cat’s lumpy belly under the thick hair that grew on her stomach.

“If you take Penelope home and make her comfortable in a box in the closet, or any quiet place in the house, she should be able to deliver on her own,” the vet said.

“Are you sure?” Anna asked anxiously. She knew virtually nothing about birthing babies, human or feline.

“She’s going to be more relaxed in familiar surroundings. If you have any concerns at all, give me a call.”

Penelope raised her head from the examining table, looked plaintively at Anna and called out to her with the chirping trill distinctive to Maine Coon cats, which didn’t meow like other cats.

“Does it hurt?” Henry asked. “For her to have babies, I mean.”

Anna looked to the emergency vet, but before he could answer, the examining room door flew open.

“Doc, I need some help here!”

Anna barely had time to register the blood soaking the white T-shirt of the man who’d burst in, and the enormous size of the injured rottweiler in his muscular arms, before Penelope gave a chirp that was more of a shriek and bounded to her feet. Her pregnant body arched, bushy tail held high. Her pretty cat face scrunched into something resembling an alien beast, mouth wide and wicked teeth bared at this sudden threat.

“Get your damned cat off the table, lady!” the man snapped. “So I can lay this dog down.” The man’s leather coat was wrapped over the animal’s hindquarters. As he leaned forward, the coat slid off the dog onto the examining table like a black snake and then dropped onto the floor.

Penelope hissed menacingly.

The dog growled back through his teeth, which Anna saw with horror were still clamped hard into human flesh. The man’s forearm was streaming blood from numerous canine tooth puncture wounds where the dog had hold of him.

She grabbed for Penelope, who raked her hand with bared claws. Anna cried out in pain and astonishment, “Penelope!” She stared at the four distinct lines of blood Penelope’s claws had torn in her skin. Penelope had scratched her when she was a kitten, but never once in the five years since.

“Come on, lady,” the intruder commanded. “Move the damned cat!”

Anna was more cautious this time, but calling Penelope’s name had made the cat aware of her, and Penelope allowed herself to be lifted into Anna’s arms.

As soon as Penelope was off the metal table, the man bent over it and laid the dog there. Even then, the dog held on. Anna didn’t want to look at the injured animal, but she couldn’t help noticing the naked bone protruding through a bloody tear in one of its hind legs.

She noticed Henry was also staring with wide, horrified eyes at the dog’s blood and bone. “Come on, Henry,” she said gently. “We need to get Penelope home so she can have her babies in peace and quiet.”

She shot an admonishing look at the man, but his attention was focused on the dog, whose teeth were still deeply embedded in his arm.

Anna would have liked to stay and help, but she felt Penelope’s belly ripple and realized she’d better get her cat back to the comfortable traveling cage in her car and drive the few blocks home before kittens started arriving.

“Henry,” she repeated. “Let’s go.”

“I want to see how the vet gets the dog to let go of the guy’s arm,” Henry said, his eyes riveted on the scene in front of him.

So do I, Anna thought. But what she said as she backed her way out of the emergency room door was, “Come on, Henry. We need to get Penelope home. And you need to get to school.”

Reluctantly, the boy turned and hurried after her.




5


Anna couldn’t believe she was back at the emergency room—this time, one for humans. One of the deep scratches on her hand had been seeping all day. She thought it might need a stitch or two. And she needed a tetanus shot.

After she’d left the vet’s office with Penelope, she’d called her office and asked the secretary to reschedule her morning patients. Anna was one of four doctors, two men and two women, practicing together in a high-rise in downtown D.C., where they did psychological counseling.

She hadn’t wanted to leave Penelope alone to deliver her first litter. The four adorable kittens arrived safe and sound, and in time for Anna to make her afternoon appointments.

She came directly home after her last session of the day because she knew Henry would be on her doorstep the instant he got home from school. She wanted to be there when he arrived, to make sure Penelope didn’t take umbrage and claw him if he reached out to pet the kittens.

By the time Henry’s mother came home, it was dark out. Anna fixed herself something to eat and watched Grey’s Anatomy, debating whether to have her injury treated, worried that she might get stuck in an emergency room half the night.

But she knew it was better to deal with problems head-on than to let them slide. So at 10:37 p.m. she’d headed out to a twenty-four-hour urgent care facility not far from the emergency vet’s office.

She looked through the glass door of the clinic to see if there were a lot of people ahead of her and counted a mother with two young boys, a father with a babe in arms, an elderly couple, a young couple with a toddler—and the stranger who’d been bitten earlier in the day by his rottweiler.

He’d changed out of the bloody white T-shirt and khaki pants he’d been wearing. He was dressed now in a short-sleeved gray T-shirt and jeans. The well-worn black leather jacket that had fallen on the examining table this morning had been replaced by a well-worn brown leather bomber jacket, which lay tossed over a nearby orange plastic chair. He had on comfortable-looking brown loafers but no socks, even though the early October evening was chilly.

He was engrossed in a paperback. Not a good sign. How long was the wait, anyway?

Anna wasn’t sure whether to say hello to him on her way to the reception desk. He hadn’t exactly exuded charm earlier in the day. He sat slumped in his chair. The David Baldacci novel he was reading suggested he didn’t want to be bothered by anyone.

He glanced up at her as she passed by. As she opened her mouth to greet him, he frowned and returned his gaze to his book.

Anna would have felt insulted at being dismissed so absolutely, except she knew exactly how he must be feeling. Her day hadn’t exactly been a bowl of cherries, either.

Many of Anna’s patients were MPD cops, District firemen and U.S. government employees who came to see her because of stress that affected their job performance and personal lives. This afternoon, she’d seen a new patient, a young fireman who’d recently responded to a violent car crash in which a little boy—the same age and with the same hair color as his own son—had been torn limb from limb by the crushing force of metal when the child restraint straps held his body snug in his car seat.

Now the fireman had trouble driving in the car with his son without his throat swelling closed and his breathing becoming erratic. He had nightmares and had wakened his wife crying. Which made him afraid to go to sleep. He was suffering from sleep deprivation and not functioning well on the job.

Anna had known she was dealing with a classic case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, more commonly called PTSD. She’d been able to give her patient suggestions for how to deal with his condition, but the sad truth was that PTSD was insidious. Even years later, some small, insignificant thing could trigger a physiological and psychological response to the original traumatizing incident.

When Anna checked in with the urgent care receptionist, she learned she might be waiting a long time.

And she didn’t have a book.

She took the empty seat farthest from the mother and two rambunctious boys, across from the stranger. Which meant she either had to stare at him or at her feet.

She didn’t remember him being so good-looking. She knew he was tall, because she was 5’10” and he’d looked down at her in the vet’s office. She knew he was strong, because he’d come in carrying a hundred-pound dog. But she hadn’t focused on his face. She found it fascinating.

His cheeks were hollowed and stubbled with dark beard, and the cheekbones looked as though they’d been carved from stone by a loving sculptor. His lips were bowed. They looked soft in comparison to the hard muscle and sinew she saw in the rest of his body. He had black hair, expensively cut. She didn’t know how she knew that, but it wasn’t a stretch, considering the price of real estate in Georgetown.

He looked up at her as though he’d been aware of her intense perusal and glared.

Anna knew she was supposed to be intimidated into lowering her gaze. But she wasn’t. And she didn’t.

“How did you get your dog to let go of your arm?” she asked.

“It wasn’t my dog.”

He returned to his book, as though that was the end of that.

Anna’s brow furrowed. “Not your dog? I don’t understand.”

With obvious irritation, he raised his eyes—an icy blue, like glacier water—to her and said, “I saw the dog get hit by a car. The driver didn’t stop.”

She waited for further explanation, but when it didn’t come she said, “Oh, I see.”

“You see what?”

“The dog bit you, even though you were trying to help, because it was hurt and you were a stranger. That was a very kind thing to do.”

“I didn’t have much choice,” he said curtly. “The dog was about to snap at a kid.” He made a point of turning the page in his book and started reading again.

She saw the white gauze bandage on his arm was stained with blood. “Henry would never forgive me if I didn’t ask.”

He looked up, clearly annoyed. “Who’s Henry?” Then he said, “Oh, yeah. Your kid.”

She smiled and said, “Henry isn’t mine any more than the dog was yours.”

At his questioning look she said, “Henry lives across the hall. He takes care of Penelope—my cat—in the afternoons.”

He made a “get to it” sign by rotating his hand.

“How did you get the dog to let go of your arm?”

“The vet injected him with a drug that put him to sleep. He was going to have to do it anyway to treat his wounds.”

“Oh.”

“Is there anything else you’d like to know? So I can read in peace?”

“Is the dog all right?” she asked.

“He was when I left.”

“You must live nearby.”

“Close enough.”

“I live a block south and two blocks east. I walked here. Wish I’d worn a coat.” Anna pulled her three-quarter-length gray wool sweater more tightly around her. “It was colder out than I thought it would be.”

Anna wished she hadn’t volunteered the information about where she lived. Especially since the stranger didn’t seem at all interested.

Which was when Anna realized that she was.

When was the last time she’d been on a date? Three months ago, at least. And why was that? She had reasonable office hours, and Penelope could easily be left for the evening. Anna had even been asked out a couple of times. She simply hadn’t been intrigued enough by any of those men to say yes.

She was intrigued now. And being completely ignored.

She looked for a wedding band and didn’t see one. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t involved with someone. Except, he was so surly, she was sure he would have used that excuse to be rid of her if he could have.

She wanted to know more. She wanted to know him.

“I just thought of something,” she said. “Do you have to get rabies shots?”

“Someone who knew the owner must have seen or heard what happened, because the owner showed up at the vet’s,” the stranger replied. “The dog had been vaccinated.”

“That was lucky.”

“Lady, nothing about this day has been lucky.”

At that moment, the nurse called out, “Mr. Benedict. The doctor can see you now.”

Anna watched “Mr. Benedict” close his book and rise to leave without another word. He was churlish. And unfriendly. And morose. Almost rude. She was glad he was gone.

And regretted bitterly that he hadn’t been more interested in getting to know her.




6


Anna stepped out of the warmth and bright light of the urgent care facility into the cold night air and gasped as a hulking figure emerged from the darkness. “Good Lord!” she said, putting a hand to her heart as the stranger with the dog bite stepped into the light. “You scared me to death!”

“I stayed to walk you home.”

She wasn’t far from home, but there was enough crime in Georgetown that it was a thoughtful gesture—if a bit suspect, considering the stranger’s off-putting behavior toward her inside.

“Why would you want to do that?” she asked, drawing her sweater tighter around her.

He shrugged. “It’s late. It’s dark. You’re alone.”

“All true.” But she was pretty sure none of that had anything to do with the reason he’d stayed. She thought it was more likely he was alone. And wanted female company. Was she willing to provide it?

“You walked here, too?” she asked.

He nodded.

“All right,” she said at last.

Anna shivered with excitement and anticipation as the stranger set a large hand at the small of her back. She was surprised at the visceral reaction she had to his touch.

During the short, silent walk, she debated whether to invite him inside. For coffee. To get to know him better. If she did, he would probably think she was inviting him inside for something else. For sex.

Anna didn’t believe in one-night stands. Safe sex was tough enough to manage if you knew your partner. This man was a literal stranger. She knew his last name was Benedict, but that was all.

On the other hand, if she didn’t invite him in, she was afraid she’d never see him again. And in that case, she knew she would always regret not knowing how his lips would feel on hers.

“How’s your arm?” she said to break the silence that had descended between them.

“I can’t feel anything right now. How’s your hand?”

She raised her hand to observe the small bandage that covered two neat black stitches. “I’ll survive.”

That was the extent of their conversation.

She knew nothing more about him when they arrived at the bottom step of the stately brownstone where she lived, which had been broken into four condominium units, than she’d known when he offered to walk her home. Except that he smelled good, a mixture of musk and man. And that she didn’t want him to walk out of her life.

“Would you like to come up for some coffee?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Why not?”

Anna used her key to get into the entryway, then took the stranger’s large, callused hand and led him to the polished wooden stairs covered by an oriental runner. “I’m one flight up.”

She had left a few lamps on, so they were greeted by soft golden light as she unlocked her front door and ushered the stranger into her small living room.

As soon as the door closed, he took her into his arms. His ice-blue eyes looked warm as Caribbean waters when he lowered his head to bring their mouths close.

Anna felt a little off balance because of the speed at which he’d moved, but she realized this was exactly where she wanted to be, that she desperately wanted to taste his lips.

She felt her pulse thrum as he set an arm around her hips and drew her close. Close enough to feel that he was aroused.

And to feel him begin to tremble.

With desire, she thought at first. But when she raised a hand to his nape, it felt slick with sweat. Strange, when they’d been walking in the cold night air.

She leaned back to look into the stranger’s face and saw he had his eyes closed. And his jaw clenched.

Oh, God. Oh, no. Not him.

He was exhibiting classic symptoms of PTSD. Anna hoped she was wrong, but she didn’t think she was. Her heart swelled with compassion. She put her arms around his shoulders protectively, leaned close to his ear and said, “You’re all right. I’m here.”

She felt him shudder and knew that whatever he was experiencing had nothing to do with desire.

She lifted a hand to brush a dark lock of hair from his forehead. “We’re in my apartment in Georgetown,” she murmured. “My Maine Coon cat Penelope has a litter of adorable kittens in a basket in the next room. Your arm might be aching because you just had stitches where a dog bit you earlier today.”

She talked to him calmly, as she would have to one of her patients, and gradually felt his trembling stop. When he opened his eyes, he seemed surprised to see her still standing within his embrace.

He abruptly let go of her and took a step back.

Reluctantly, she took another step back herself. “Are you all right?”

He looked away and down. Ashamed, she knew. Upset. Angry with himself.

“Soldier?” she asked. “Cop? Fireman?”

He grimaced, then met her gaze and said gruffly, “Soldier.”

“You should get some—”

“I don’t need any help.” He turned and reached for the doorknob.

She took two quick steps and put her hand over his. She met his startled gaze and said, “I’d like to see you again.”

He frowned and said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

Then he was gone.




7


Ben recognized his body’s heightened awareness, the thudding heart, the fetid sweat in his armpits, his rapid eye movement scouting the terrain, rigid muscles tightened to the point of pain, ready to explode into action: it was the knowledge of death waiting around the corner.

He had to remind himself he wasn’t scouting some war-torn foreign city. He was merely driving his black SUV through the Columbia Heights neighborhood in Washington, D.C.

Nevertheless, he could smell danger in the wind.

“How’s your arm?” Waverly asked from the passenger’s seat of Ben’s SUV.

Ben flinched as he flexed his injured left arm, which was stuck out the window. “Fine.”

“Dog bites can get infected easily.”

“The doctor shot me up with antibiotics last night.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Like a sonofabitch.”

“You should be at home taking it easy.”

“Not an option. Not after Epifanio called and asked me to meet him. The kid’s found out something about whatever’s going down on the streets, Waverly. I can feel it in my bones.”

“We’ll know soon enough.” Waverly’s eyes, cop’s eyes, stayed on the street. Alert. Probing.

Epifanio had borrowed a friend’s cell phone and called Ben from the bathroom at school earlier in the afternoon. He’d refused to tell Ben why he had to see him, just ordered, “Get your ass over here, man.”

“After school, right?” Ben had asked, to confirm that Epifanio wasn’t truant.

“Yeah. On the corner. Like always.”

Ben knew which corner Epifanio meant. It was the site of a convenience store near Lincoln Middle School where the 18th Street gang hung out. The kid had sounded anxious and afraid.

“Are you okay?” Ben asked. “Are you safe?”

“Sure,” the kid said.

“I can call the police and have them—”

“No cops!”

He’d sounded frightened at the possibility the cops might come for him, panicked almost, so Ben had backed off.

He’d called Waverly as soon as he’d hung up the phone and shared his concern about the boy.

“You want me to have a black-and-white pick him up?” Waverly had asked.

“I think that’ll just scare him,” Ben said. “Maybe make him run, and get him into another kind of trouble.”

“What’s your plan?”

“I’m meeting him after school.”

“How about if I come along?”

Since Waverly didn’t wear a uniform, Ben figured he could easily pass him off as a friend. But if things went south, he might very well need his friend’s help.

“You can come, but you’re a friend, not a cop, got it?”

Ben eyed the vacant faces of the truants and dropouts walking the streets of the broken-down neighborhood. “Never thought I’d see so many thousand-yard stares in faces so young. Hard to believe they’re just kids.”

“Kids with guns and knives,” Waverly said. “Don’t ever underestimate them.”

Ben had too recently fought in Iraq and Afghanistan against boy soldiers to discount the danger of a child with a gun. He was very much aware of the savagery bubbling beneath the surface whenever roaming gangs prowled the streets. And he had a gut feeling, an awful premonition he couldn’t shake, that Epifanio was in real peril.

As opposed to the phantoms that had plagued Ben last night. He didn’t know what had triggered the flashback in the woman’s apartment. He just wished it had happened later. After he’d sated himself with her.

She was different somehow from the other women he’d picked up over the past six months. He’d felt poleaxed the instant he’d laid eyes on her in the vet’s office yesterday morning. It could have been the oddity of the circumstances. It wasn’t every day you met a woman with a dog attached to your arm. But the flare of sexual desire he’d felt was so strong it had spooked him.

Which was why he’d avoided her at the urgent care clinic. The last thing he wanted to do was get emotionally involved. That led to loving. And loving led to pain.

He’d wanted—needed—to put himself inside her. What alarmed him was the equal need he’d felt to hold her in his arms and keep her safe.

Safe from what? What horror had she witnessed that had put that shadowed look in her eyes? He didn’t want to know.

In the end, she was the one who’d ended up holding him, keeping him safe. He’d been lucky to beat a hasty retreat without indulging the need he’d felt. Somehow he knew that having her once would not have been enough. Letting her into his life was simply asking for trouble.

Ben turned the corner onto 16th Street NW, just as Lincoln Middle School let out. The Latino, Black and Asian kids had formed into knots that Ben recognized by the gang colors they substituted for their maroon and khaki school uniforms and by their gang hand sign greetings to each other.

He saw a cluster of the brown pants and white T-shirts worn by the 18th Street gang and felt a chill run down his spine.

“I wish he’d given me some clue what he’s found out,” Ben muttered, his eyes still shifting right, then left, then up to the rearview mirror to check behind him.

“I don’t like the feel of this any more than you do,” Waverly said.

Ben adjusted the Glock 19 he was wearing in a slide belt holster concealed under his leather jacket, then shifted it back where it had been before he’d adjusted it.

“Why are you so jumpy?” Waverly asked.

Ben glanced at the man who would be his brother-in-law by tomorrow noon, noting his friend’s clean-shaven, thirty-year-old face, his calm brown eyes, his not-quite-regulation police haircut. Ben was the same age but felt decades older. He put his eyes back on the street. “Seen too much bad stuff, I guess.”

It hadn’t taken him more than one war, and a couple of military interventions, to realize he didn’t want a career in the army. Yet here he was, a soldier in a different kind of army fighting a different kind of war. His job, once again, was to protect the innocent, who were as difficult to identify in this American landscape as they had been in a foreign setting.

Waverly pointed to an alley on the right, a block down from the neighborhood convenience store where Ben was supposed to meet Epifanio and said, “What’s going on over there?”

Ben slowed his SUV to a crawl as he watched the altercation at the entrance to the alley. What Ben saw were two different gangs on the same turf. And neither of them happy about it.

“Looks like the One-Eight pitted against MS guys,” Waverly said.

“Not good,” Ben muttered.

“You hear about the kid who lost his fingers to a machete in a mall in Virginia? That was MS,” Waverly said.

Ben felt his gut tighten. Machetes reminded him of the time he’d spent on a special mission in Somalia. He focused on the kids in the alley to keep his mind from forming images he didn’t want to remember.

Suddenly, Waverly cried, “One of them’s waving a knife!”

Ben put the SUV in Park and was out the door before he had time to think what he was doing. “Call for backup,” he yelled over his shoulder. He heard Waverly shouting agreement behind him, but he didn’t pause, just pulled his Glock and headed toward the alley on the run.

As he raced forward he shouted, “Police! Put down the knife! Put it down!”

The boy in danger of being stabbed backed away, trying to escape. And Ben realized who it was.

He saw the look of terror in Epifanio’s eyes and felt his gut tighten in fear, which turned to horror as he watched the knife tear into the boy’s white T-shirt.

Most of the kids had fled, leaving only the perpetrator and the victim. Ben watched as a boy sporting an MS gang tatt—the number 13 tattooed in black ink on his cheek—eyed him, then reached around and purposely cut Epifanio’s throat.

Rich red blood spurted from Epifanio’s jugular.

Ben saw the shock in the boy’s brown eyes as he collapsed on the asphalt. And then watched the kid with the knife flee down the alley.

Ben felt his throat constrict with emotion, but he didn’t stop to offer comfort to the dying boy. As a combat veteran, he knew a good-as-dead man when he saw one. Waverly would do what was necessary till help arrived. There was no saving the kid. But he could catch the killer.

He darted after the boy with the knife, stumbling over debris the kid threw back into his path as he ran along the uneven brick pavement. “Stop, or I’ll shoot!”

The youth gave a hoot of hysterical laughter and ran faster.

Ben took a shooting stance and aimed for the kid’s leg. But to his surprise, his hands were shaking so badly he couldn’t get a good aim. “Damn!”

He shot once into the side brick wall above the boy’s head, to see if he could scare the kid into stopping. When the killer kept running, Ben realized he should have known better. These kids had grown up with violence. They heard gunshots every Saturday night and had seen their friends die early deaths. He took his finger off the trigger and raced after the boy.

As the curly-headed, café-au-lait-colored kid ran, he kept pulling up his jeans, which he’d been wearing down around his hips. The shoelaces on his Air Jordans were untied, causing him to trip and lose his balance.

Which was how Ben caught up to him. It was a great open-field tackle against a zigzagging opponent. The kid howled like a banshee, and Ben nearly broke the boy’s wrist getting him to drop the bloodstained knife. His knee in the small of the boy’s back, he wrestled the kid’s hands behind him and slapped on the metal cuffs he kept in a case on the back of his belt.

His chest was heaving, and his heart felt like it might pound out of his chest. He resisted the urge to shake the kid within an inch of his life. Or smash the smirk off his face. Or pick him up and throw him back down and stomp on him. All natural responses when an enemy had killed a friend. All impulses that he’d learned to control in battle.

Ben swore every foul oath he knew. He should have called the cops whether Epifanio wanted him to or not. He should have done something, anything, to make the kid understand the danger of asking questions that might put him at risk. He should have been there the moment school let out.

His mistakes had cost the kid his life.

Ben could feel the shakes coming on, his body’s response to seeing a boy he’d grown to care for killed in front of his eyes. His heart squeezed when he realized he was going to have to tell Epifanio’s abuela that her grandson had met the fate she’d always feared, the fate Ben had been trying so hard to save him from. Ben didn’t know if he could bear watching those ancient brown eyes fill with tears of sorrow.

He heard sirens in the distance and realized help was on the way. He huffed out a breath and hauled the killer to his feet. “Your ass is busted.”

“Epifanio ain’t goin’ to say nothin’ to nobody now,” the kid shot back.

Ben didn’t say another word as he frog-marched the boy back down the alley. He was met halfway to the corner by MPD cops with their guns out, backup he presumed Waverly had called in. He held up his ICE badge and handed over his prisoner.

“How’s the kid who was stabbed?” he asked.

“Paramedics are with him now,” one of the cops replied.

Ben started running again. Maybe he could get to Epifanio before the boy died. Maybe he could find out what the kid knew that was so important it had gotten him killed.

A moment later he was on one knee in the blood that had pooled around the dying youth. He looked into the eyes of the paramedic kneeling on the other side of the boy, but the woman shook her head.

“Epifanio,” Ben said, his voice harsh, his throat aching.

The thirteen-year-old’s eyes fluttered open. He reached weakly toward Ben, who grasped his hand.

“Why did he want you dead?” Ben asked. “What is it you know?”

The boy looked at him with anguished eyes. He opened his mouth, but his larynx had been severed, along with his jugular.

“Don’t worry,” Ben said in a husky voice. “I’ll take care of your abuela. I’ll make sure she’s okay. You just rest now.”

The boy’s eyes had fallen closed, but his bloody hand tightened weakly on Ben’s. A dying breath soughed out of his mouth, along with a bubble of blood.

Ben eased his hand free and stumbled to his feet, wiping Epifanio’s blood on his jeans. He recognized the familiar meaty smell. The stickiness of it.

Senseless. Stupid. His gaze searched the area. What a waste! He wasn’t sure what he sought until he saw Waverly standing near the cop car that now held the killer.

His friend saw him coming and met him halfway.

“I’ve had enough,” Ben said. “I quit.”

Waverly looked from the kid in the cop car to the dead kid on the ground and said, “You can’t quit.”

“I sure as hell can,” Ben said. “I don’t need the hassle. I don’t need the—”

“Pain?” Waverly interjected. “I know you don’t need the money. But you can’t quit, Ben.”

“Why the hell not?” he said, stalking toward his SUV.

Waverly kept pace with him. “You’re doing good work here. You understand these kids. You understand the violence that threatens them. You want peace in these neighborhoods as much as I do. As we all do.”

“There’s no such thing as peace. Just intervals without war.”

“That doesn’t sound like the Ben I know.”

“You don’t know shit about me,” Ben retorted. “I’ve changed in the years since we were kids playing cops and robbers.”

“You’re forgetting that I watched you stop squabbles between your parents both before and after their divorce. You learned to negotiate peace between warring factions when you were still in short pants.

“Besides,” Waverly said, eyeing Ben. “Only cowards quit.”

Ben’s face turned chalk white. “I’m not a—”

“No, you’re not a coward. You’re a man who needs purpose in his life,” Waverly continued relentlessly. “Which you’ve found among these kids. Kids who need someone like you to help them find their way back to the straight and narrow.”

Ben said nothing. His throat had swollen closed.




8


“Damn it, Benedict! Did you have to shoot at the kid?” Tony Pellicano, the special agent in charge of the D.C. ICE office, gripped the top of the swivel chair behind his cluttered desk with white-knuckled hands and glared at Ben. “That was the mayor on the phone. He’s not happy. I had to explain to him why one of my agents was firing bullets at a fourteen-year-old. What were you thinking?”

Ben stared at his boss with disbelief. “I watched that kid cut another kid’s throat. And I shot once—over his head. Sir.”

Ben’s boss smacked his black leather chair as though it was the back of Ben’s head, then stalked back and forth behind his desk, waving his hands and ranting. Ben followed his tall, rail-thin boss’s constant, agitated movement with his eyes, while his hands gripped the arms of the maroon leather studded chair in which he sat.

“This isn’t a war zone,” Tony ranted. “We don’t shoot first and ask questions later.”

Ben felt his heart thudding in his chest, licked at the sweat beaded above his lip, and said, “You don’t have to tell me this isn’t—”

“You returning vets have the wrong—”

Ben came out of his chair as though he’d been catapulted from it. “The last thing on earth I want to do is kill some kid. I shot over his head to slow him down. I wanted to catch a killer. What’s wrong with that?”

Tony stared at him stony-faced and said, “I want you to see a doctor, a psychiatrist who specializes in cases like this.”

Ben stood stunned. “What?” If Tony only knew how hard it had been for him to fire his weapon at all, he would realize Ben wasn’t going to be a threat to the peace and harmony of D.C. streets. “There’s nothing wrong with me, sir,” Ben managed to say.

“You shoot, you talk. Those are my rules,” Tony said implacably.

“I’m not talking to any shrink.”

“Then pass me your credentials and your weapon,” Tony said, holding out his hand. “Your choice.”

Ben’s stomach rolled. He swallowed down bile. If there was one thing he didn’t want to do, it was talk to some doctor about killing kids. Especially after what had happened in Afghanistan. But his boss wasn’t giving him any choice. He lowered his gaze and said, “Who do I have to see?”

“We’ve got a psych trauma team on the payroll,” Tony said.

“I’ll make an appointment.”

“I had them called when I heard you’d fired your weapon. They sent over a therapist—Dr. Schuster. She’s waiting for you in the conference room.”

“Waverly’s wedding rehearsal is tonight, and I have paperwork to finish. I don’t have time—”

“You don’t leave this office until you talk with a doctor. That’s an order.”

“Fine,” Ben said between tight jaws. “Are we done here?”

Tony sighed. “Until today, I’ve been happy with the way you’ve been doing your job, Ben. The gang kids like you. You write great reports. You can type. Even better, you can spell. You’re responsible. You’re respectful. You’re reliable. I just can’t have a gunslinger working for me.”

“I’m not a—”

“Go see Dr. Schuster,” Tony interrupted brusquely. “Do it now.”




9


Dr. Annagreit Schuster recognized the ICE agent standing in the doorway. He’d yelled at her yesterday morning at the vet’s office. He’d ignored her at the urgent care clinic. He’d fallen apart in her arms last night, then walked out of her apartment leaving her unsatisfied.

She noted the wary look in his cold blue eyes as he leaned against the doorway to the conference room. She saw the tension in his bunched shoulders and the anger in his tight jaws and balled fists. She looked for a bandage on his left forearm, but he was wearing a long-sleeved Georgetown University T-shirt that covered it.

He spoke without saying a word: I don’t want to be here. There’s nothing you can say or do to help me. I’m fine.

“Have a seat, Agent Benedict,” Anna said, gesturing to one of the comfortable swivel chairs across from her at the center of the oval-shaped, highly polished conference table.

Anna had read in Ben’s personnel file that his job was to make friends of the kids in local gangs, in conjunction with similar MPD efforts, in order to direct them away from unlawful activities. He was also tasked with locating and arresting gang members with a possible terrorist agenda—and, of course, deporting illegal aliens who infiltrated the gangs.

It was work with an indisputable humanitarian goal. And numerous possibilities for violence.

“How long is this going to take?” he demanded from the doorway.

“As long as it takes,” she replied in an even voice. As with all Federal government clients involved in a shooting, she needed to evaluate how the subject was coping with the traumatic incident and to make a judgment whether he needed immediate or follow-up counseling. Sometimes that took five minutes, sometimes it took much longer.

Anna had firsthand information about this man that didn’t come out of his file. She’d seen what she believed was evidence of post-traumatic stress last night. But she wasn’t sure she could—or should—use that information against him in this evaluation.

For the first time since he’d left her townhome, Anna was glad their encounter had ended so abruptly. If their relationship had become physical, she could not ethically have treated him. Perhaps it was shaving hairs to say she was emotionally uninvolved, but she very much wanted to help this man.

Anna didn’t repeat her request for Benedict to sit. She waited, letting him approach on his own. She shouldn’t have been surprised by his caution, considering what she’d learned about Benjamin Preston Benedict from the personnel file she’d been presented with when she’d arrived at the ICE office a half hour ago.

She’d taken one look at Ben Benedict’s picture and actually felt a little thrill at the thought of seeing him again. Which she’d immediately quelled. If she wanted to treat Agent Benedict, their relationship had to remain professional.

According to his file, Ben Benedict was a former army major, the veteran of several military campaigns. He’d been trained as a sniper, and he’d employed those skills in Afghanistan and Iraq. He’d apparently been a good soldier. Heroic, in fact. He’d been decorated for his valor with the Distinguished Service Cross, two silver stars and a Purple Heart.

She had her own evidence of his good character. Not many men would have tried to approach an injured rottweiler, let alone succeed in rescuing it. He was obviously a man who’d learned how to survive in life-threatening situations. Part of which was reconnoitering the terrain before venturing into hazardous territory.

Anna observed Ben Benedict, looking for signs of trauma. He hadn’t shaved this morning, and his darkly stubbled jawline made his cheekbones even more prominent. She’d known he was tall. His record said he was 6’3”. The sweatshirt emphasized his broad shoulders but hid his impressive biceps.

His body was coiled, like a cornered animal facing a threatening foe. But after that first, revealingly apprehensive glance, his blue eyes had become shuttered. As the door slid silently closed behind him, Agent Benedict snagged a chair directly across from her and slumped into it. “You don’t look like a doctor.”

“No?”

“You look like a model.”

Anna managed not to sigh with frustration. She had, in fact, modeled as a young woman. And yes, she was blond and blue-eyed, long-legged, and reputed to be beautiful, if the European magazine covers she’d graced as a teen were any measure. But at twenty-nine, she’d long since put all that behind her.

When she’d first started her practice, she’d briefly explained her modeling past to each inquiring patient. She’d also revealed, to those who’d asked, the nature of the life-altering event that had taken her from modeling to trauma therapy.

But Anna had since learned not to reveal even that much about herself to patients. So she merely said, “Tell me about the shooting.”

“I already told my boss. I didn’t shoot at the kid. I shot over his head.”

“Why was that?”

“What?”

“Why didn’t you shoot him?” Anna watched the frown of confusion form on Agent Benedict’s very attractive face.

“Why didn’t I kill him, you mean?”

Anna heard the edge of rancor in his voice and said, “Yes, that’s what I mean.”

“I’m not a killer.”

“But you wanted to kill him.” She made it a statement, to see if he would deny it.

To her surprise he said, “Hell, yes! I watched him kill a kid I’ve spent the past five months getting to know and like. I wanted to murder the sonofabitch.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

He huffed out a breath and leaned his broad shoulders across the conference table, moving aggressively into her space. “Look, Miss—whatever your name is—I was a soldier. I’ve killed men. And women. And—” He cut himself off. “I’ve killed enough people that I’ve lost count of—Haven’t wanted to count them,” he corrected. “I’ve killed often enough to know what it means to end a life. I don’t take that power lightly.

“So I didn’t kill the bastard. I caught him, and he’ll spend a few years in juvie and be out on the streets to kill again someday.”

“You sound angry.”

He lurched to his feet. “You’re damned right, I’m angry! This is bullshit. Are we done?”

“Yes, we’re done.”

He shot her the same wary look she’d seen on his face in the doorway. “What happens now?”

“I’ll make my report to your boss.”

He perched his fists on his hips. “Which is what?”

“You could benefit from further counseling.”

“In your opinion,” he said with a sneer.

“In my opinion,” she said, meeting his gaze with a steady look, even though she felt a frisson of … something … pass between them.

“Would that counseling be with you?”

“I’m available.”

“Really?” he said, the sneer becoming a leer.

Anna flushed. She should be immune to the sort of look she was getting from Agent Benedict. It was a form of attack, when the patient felt defenseless. “ICE makes my services available to anyone who needs them.”

“I don’t need them,” he said flatly. “Are we done?”

“We’re done.”

He stalked to the door, yanked it open and headed down the hall without looking back.

Anna released a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. That is a dangerous man. The thought was disconcerting, considering the fact that she’d made up her mind to clear Agent Benedict for duty. However, she would recommend additional counseling.

She realized something else equally upsetting. She still desired him. Still imagined what it might be like to have him hold her in his arms. Still imagined being possessed by him.

Anna sighed. She’d been single too long. Alone too long. Human beings had a physiological need for sex that was as basic as their need for food, water and sleep. A need she realized she would have been happy to fulfill with Ben Benedict.

Unfortunately, if he became her patient, Agent Benedict would be off-limits as a potential sex partner. Anna was glad he’d shown such animosity for her. Sessions with him would have been fraught with inappropriate sexual tension.

Anna felt a fleeting moment of regret for what might have been. If his behavior today was anything to judge by, she wouldn’t be seeing Agent Benedict again.




10


“It isn’t easy being rich,” Ben said.

“Tell that to the next poor man you meet,” Waverly replied.

Ben changed gears in his bright red 1963 Jaguar E-Type Roadster and accelerated. He and Waverly had spent an exhausting afternoon filing reports on the gang killing with their respective law-enforcement agencies. Now they were racing to Waverly’s wedding rehearsal and dinner at one of the several homes owned by the bride’s family, a former plantation called Hamilton Farm southeast of Richmond.

Racing was probably the wrong word for how they’d left D.C. Crawling fit better. They’d gotten caught in the crush of traffic on I-95 South close to the city. Ben knew they’d never arrive on time unless he kept his foot on the gas now.

“You’re going to get a ticket,” Waverly warned.

“You can flash your badge and get me out of it.”

“Flash your own badge,” Waverly retorted.

“You’re changing the subject.”

“Which is?”

“Being rich is a curse.”

Waverly snorted. “You’re not going to get any sympathy from me. I earn a living wage. Period. I’d give my left nut to have a car like this.” His hand brushed the black leather interior of the long-nosed, ragtop, six-figure Jag.

“After you marry my sister tomorrow afternoon,” Ben said, “you’ll be rich enough to afford any car you want.”

Waverly frowned. “I don’t want Julia’s money. If I didn’t love her so much, her family connections would have scared me off.”

“I had no idea when I introduced the two of you that you’d take one look at each other and go off the deep end. You’re not the kind of rich preppie she was used to dating. Which I suppose was the attraction,” Ben mused.

“I didn’t want to fall in love with her,” Waverly said, “for precisely that reason. There’s a lifetime of experience separating eighteen and thirty. And I’m a cop. I was afraid she would get tired of me and want to move on.”

Ben might have agreed that Waverly was right—that Julia was still a relative babe-in-the-woods—except she’d grown up with a senator for a father and a doyenne of the Washington social scene for a mother. Julia had probably experienced more socially and intellectually in her eighteen years than other women did in their entire lives.

And he knew for a fact that she’d been sexually active since she was fifteen, because she’d come to him for advice when he was home for a few days on leave from the army. He’d told her to wait, but she’d sworn she was in love forever. So he’d told her what he knew about the use of condoms and birth control pills.

Julia had been in love at least twice more, but he suspected she’d had more than two other sexual partners. So she probably had a pretty good idea what she liked in bed and what she was looking for in a man.

Ben had been as worried as Waverly at first that Julia would tire of him. But it hadn’t happened. Instead, she’d encouraged Waverly to propose. And he had.

“I guess if anything worries me, it’s that this is all happening in such a hurry,” Ben said. He eyed his friend and watched as Waverly shifted nervously. “Oh, shit. There’s a baby on the way.”

Waverly shot him a guilty glance. “We were being careful. The condom broke. But I’m glad she’s pregnant.”

“What about college? She’s already started the fall term at Georgetown.”

“She can still go.”

“Who’s going to take care of the baby?”

“We can get a babysitter.”

“You have any idea how much it costs for child care these days? For diapers and baby food? You have a one-bedroom apartment. You’re going to need a bigger place.”

“We can’t afford a bigger place right now, especially with the doctor’s bills,” Waverly said.

“You’re damned lucky Julia has money of her own.”

“Julia has agreed to live on my income,” Waverly said.

Ben shook his head. “How long do you think that’s going to last?”

“The rest of our lives.”

“Do you really think Julia can live without all the luxuries she’s grown up with? That she’ll want her child to grow up without a bedroom of his or her own? Even if Julia were willing, her parents won’t be.”

“Julia promised me she won’t ask her parents to buy her stuff once we’re married,” Waverly said.

“She won’t need to ask. All she’ll have to do is mention she needs something and Ham or my mother will get it for her. Which is a moot point, because Julia can buy anything she wants for herself in three years, when she turns twenty-one and inherits the fifty-million-dollar trust fund that’s waiting for her.”

“Fifty million?” Waverly blurted.

“I thought you knew.”

“She told me she had a little money coming when she turned twenty-one. I knew your family had money, but … She never said—Damn it all to hell!”

“I wish I’d never introduced the two of you,” Ben muttered.

“Don’t say that. I love her.” Waverly rubbed his palms dry on his tuxedo trousers. “I can’t believe this.” He stared at Ben, his eyes wide, as though they were ten thousand feet in the air and Ben had just told him both engines had flamed out.

“See what I mean?” Ben said. “Right now you’re thinking, ‘Why on earth would you take a regular job when you have that kind of money, Ben?’ Tell me I’m wrong.”

“You’re not wrong,” Waverly said. “Why did you take a regular job with that kind of money?”

“Just stupid, I guess,” Ben said.

After graduation from West Point, Ben had gone into the army. It had seemed romantic and exciting and challenging. It gave him something to do with his life.

Until the day came when he’d realized he couldn’t remain a soldier one more hour. That he had to quit.

But he’d lived as a soldier most of his life, in a family full of soldiers, and he’d felt surprisingly lost after he left the military. He’d needed a reason to get out of bed in the morning. He’d needed something useful to do with his life.

No one who needed to work simply to put food on the table or clothes on his back or a roof over his head could understand the utter emptiness—the unnecessariness—of a life where all those things were already provided.

Ben had thought about ridding himself of his wealth. But there were problems with that, too.

Ben grimaced when he heard a wailing siren and saw flashing red-and-blue lights in his rearview mirror. He carefully maneuvered his Jag through a slick pile of burnished leaves on the side of the road. They were less than ten miles from Hamilton Farm. “Don’t say it,” he said before Waverly could speak.

The Virginia motorcycle cop had a hand on his Glock as he approached the driver’s-side window. “License and registration,” he said.

Ben handed over his license and registration.

“Show him your badge, Ben,” Waverly said irritably. “You’ll be in trouble with your boss if you end up with a ticket for speeding.”

“What badge is that, sir?” the cop asked.

“Just write the ticket,” Ben said.

“What badge is that, sir?” the cop repeated.

Ben shot Waverly a dark look and pulled out his ICE badge. “You should ask him for his badge, too.”

The cop eyed Waverly, who said, “I’m MPD.”

“The senator’s been looking for you,” the cop said, as he handed back Ben’s license and registration. “I’ll give you an escort to The Farm.”

The cop pulled his Harley-Davidson out in front of Ben’s Jag and turned on his flashing lights and siren.

“Does this happen often?” Waverly asked, his eyes wide with astonishment.

Ben shot his friend a sardonic look. “Get used to it. Like I said. It isn’t easy being rich.”

He glanced at his friend and saw the dawning realization in Waverly’s eyes that when he married into Julia’s family, his life would take a drastic turn.

“Does Julia have to take the money?” Waverly said. “Can she turn it down?”

“You can’t get rid of my mother’s money. Or the senator’s money. Neither Julia—nor your child—will ever want for anything if they can help it.”

“I intend to support my family myself,” Waverly said through tight jaws.

“Good luck telling Julia’s parents to butt out of your life,” Ben said as they entered the half-mile-long, oak-tree-lined drive along the James River that led to The Farm.

“I plan to do just that,” Waverly said. “Tonight.”

Ben grinned as the elegant Southern mansion came into view. “This I have to see.”




11


“You’re late.”

“Hello, Ham,” Ben said, shaking hands with his mother’s second husband.

Randolph Cornelius Hamilton, III, met them in the wild-rose-wallpapered foyer of The Farm with a bourbon in hand. His glazed eyes and slurred voice suggested he’d already had a few.

Waverly cleared his throat nervously and said, “Good evening, Senator. There was an incident—”

Ben watched as Ham waved away his future son-in-law’s offered hand. Waverly accepted the dismissal without protest. Ben couldn’t imagine Waverly confronting the senator about supporting Julia. But he had a feeling it would liven up the party if he did.

“I know about the kid getting his throat cut,” Ham said. “Terrible!” He turned and headed down the oak-pegged central hallway, obviously expecting the two of them to follow.

Ham glanced at Ben over his shoulder and said, “I would think you could have arranged to do your paperwork on Monday. Everyone’s been waiting in the parlor for half an hour to go in to dinner.”

Ben exchanged a chagrined look with Waverly. The rich and powerful didn’t believe that the rules applied to them. Don’t want to hang around and do your job? Just leave. It can wait until you’re good and ready to do it.

The wedding being held tomorrow at Hamilton Farm, home to Hamiltons since Virginia was a colony, was the Washington society event of the season. The expected crowd of several hundred included the exceedingly rich and the oh-so-powerful. Julia had acceded to Waverly’s request to keep the wedding party small, so there were only four male and four female members of the wedding party.

“I assume that the ‘everyone’ waiting in the parlor includes Mother,” Ben said.

“And your father,” the senator added ominously.

Ben grimaced. He’d tried to talk Waverly out of making Foster Benedict part of the wedding festivities. Waverly had argued that since both his parents were dead, he wanted Ben’s dad to participate in the wedding as one of his groomsmen.

Even when Ben had pointed out the problems of having both his mother and father under the same roof for an extended period of time, Waverly had remained adamant. Ben could count on one hand the number of times his parents had sat down at the same dinner table in the twenty years since their divorce. This made four.

His mother was a lady in every situation. His father was a former officer and a gentleman. They’d loved each other passionately. Which meant they’d hurt each other horribly.

And the love and the pain were ongoing.

It was like watching an impending train wreck and knowing there was nothing you could do to prevent it. At the same time, you couldn’t take your eyes away.

“They’re here!” Ham announced as he entered the parlor with Ben and Waverly.

Ben took one look at the tableau—his father on one side of the room, his mother on the other—and could almost feel the tension arcing between them.

The furniture was Victorian, which meant spindly and uncomfortably stuffed with horsehair, and there was little of it in the parlor. The twelve-foot windows were draped elegantly with pale-rose-colored silk, and the walls bore an ivy-patterned rice paper above and forest-green wainscoting below.

The other two groomsmen were standing near a sideboard that held a wide selection of crystal liquor decanters. His mother, his half sister Julia and Julia’s three bridesmaids and maid of honor were arranged on the settee and wing chairs. His father and stepmother stood alone near the only apparent warmth in the room—the crackling fire in the white-marble-faced fireplace.

His mother immediately stood, adjusted her expensive, yet elegantly simple, black off-the-shoulder evening gown around her and said, “Shall we go in to dinner?”

“Abigail?” Ham said, holding out his arm to his wife.

Ben’s mother crossed and laid her hand on Ham’s arm. “Hello, Ben,” she said as she moved past him. “I’m so glad you were able to make it.”

Ben heard a world of censure in his mother’s voice. Apparently, she’d spent more discomfiting time in his father’s company than she’d wanted to.

“Julia?” Waverly said, holding out his arm to his fiancée.

Julia crossed to Waverly and tucked her arm around his. “You got here just in time to avoid World War III,” Ben heard her murmur as she kissed her fiancé tenderly on the lips.

Ben could understand how Waverly had fallen in love with Julia. She was as beautiful as his mother must have been at the same age. She had perfect teeth that she displayed in a perpetual smile and cornflower-blue eyes that gazed adoringly at his friend pretty much all the time. Her sun-streaked blond hair proved, even more than the healthy glow of her flawless skin, how much time Julia spent outdoors horseback riding and playing tennis and sailing.

Most of all, for a girl who’d been given everything she could want from the day she was born, Julia was surprisingly kind and thoughtful of others.

Ben watched as each of the groomsmen held out an arm to one of the bridesmaids. Rhett winked at him as he passed by, then turned his charming smile toward the young woman he was escorting.

He looked for his eldest brother, then recalled that Nash was off on some troubleshooting mission for the president and had said he might or might not make it to the wedding tomorrow. Ben thought of Carter, as he often did, now that he was no longer fighting overseas himself, and prayed that his younger brother was safe and well in Iraq.

Ben held out his arm to the maid of honor, one of Julia’s very young friends, who lifted her chin proudly as she put her arm through his.

“Hello, Paige,” Ben said with a smile meant to melt some of the ice he could see in her eyes and in her spine.

“Hello, Mr. Benedict,” the girl replied with frost in her voice.

“Please call me Ben.”

“I’m being polite to you for Julia’s sake,” the girl said haughtily. “But I don’t like you. Or your friend.”

“If you think Julia’s making a mistake marrying Waverly, why did you agree to be her maid of honor?”

“It is when one’s friends are being foolish that those friends need one the most.”

Despite the speech without contractions, or maybe because of it, Paige Carrington seemed even younger than the nineteen years old Ben knew she was. He felt too old and jaded to be a part of this wedding party, but he’d promised Waverly he’d be his best man. The worst was almost over. He hoped.

Hamilton Farm’s exquisite mahogany dining-room table would have seated twenty easily. The wedding party of fourteen was spread out along the length of it. Four tall silver epergnes holding white beeswax candles and layered with pale pink roses made conversation with those sitting across the table difficult, if not impossible.

Ben leaned to his left and whispered to Julia, “Remind me again why we’re having the rehearsal after dinner, instead of before?”

“Archbishop Hostetler is performing another wedding right now,” Julia said. “He should be done by the time we’re finished with dinner.”

Ben wished Waverly were sitting closer. He was at the end of the table on the other side of Julia. Ben could see his friend was uncomfortable with the undeniable evidence of the Hamiltons’ wealth—the silver service, the gold-trimmed china and the servile waiters.

He was clearly too nervous to enjoy his food. Ben watched as Waverly’s bowl of she-crab soup went back full, then watched Waverly fidget as a uniformed waiter served him orange-glazed pork loin, new potatoes and honeyed peas and carrots.

For the next hour, Waverly tossed back champagne like there was no tomorrow. And Ben was pretty sure he hated the stuff.

Ben kept his gaze focused on Waverly, because he didn’t like what he saw when he glanced at his father, who was sitting near the center of the opposite side of the table. It was annoying to watch his father glancing surreptitiously at his mother.

Ben wondered how his stepmother, who was positioned near the head of the table beside Ham, could sit there and ignore his father’s disrespectful behavior.

Ben heard laughter at Rhett’s end of the table and watched as his mother shot her youngest son an admonishing look. Rhett’s grin was unrepentant. He picked up his champagne glass and drank deep as he stared into the eyes of the blushing bridesmaid to his right.

Ben heard Waverly loudly clear his throat. His friend scraped his chair back as he stood, champagne glass in hand. It seemed the groom was about to offer a toast to his bride.

The first words out of Waverly’s mouth made it clear Ben was wrong.




12


“Mr.—Senator—and Mrs. Hamilton, I love your daughter,” Waverly began. “My goal in life is to make Julia happy. Without using her money.” He flushed deeply and added, “I mean, with the money I earn. I mean, I intend to be the one to support my wife.”

“Why, you … “ Ham spluttered.

“Honey,” Julia said to Waverly, “we can talk about this later.”

“Insolent puppy!” Ham snarled.

“Let the man have his say,” Ben’s father interjected.

“No one dictates to me in my own home,” Ham said ominously.

“Waverly has a right to speak,” Ben’s father insisted.

“He has no rights in this house!” Ham said heatedly. “Not where my daughter is concerned. I will be the one—”

Waverly interrupted, “Sir, I only want to make it clear—”

Ham whirled on the groom and said, “If you know what’s good for you, young man, you will keep your mouth shut.”

“I will not,” Waverly said, his face pale.

Ben was surprised at Waverly’s stubbornness. At his courage in the face of a very powerful—and unhappy—future father-in-law. He felt the knot growing in his stomach. He watched carefully, alarmed because his father looked agitated enough at Ham for the two of them to come to blows. Ben began figuring the quickest way to get between them if that happened.

Julia had insisted on being seated next to her future husband, and now Ben realized she must have anticipated some sort of confrontation during dinner. She reached out and laid a hand on Waverly’s arm, attempting to tug him back into his seat.

It didn’t work.

“Julia and I don’t need your money,” Waverly said to Ham, his brown eyes earnest. “We plan to live a simple, happy, loving, long life together.”

Ham’s lips became a rigid hyphen.

Ben’s glance slid to his mother. Abigail Coates Benedict Hamilton delicately dabbed at the sides of her pink-painted mouth with her napkin. With exquisite grace, she raised her eyes from the antique lace tablecloth and met Waverly’s troubled gaze.

“I know you love Julia,” she said in a calm, quiet voice. “And that you will do your best to make her happy.”

Ben held his breath. Do your best? The insinuation was there that Waverly’s best wouldn’t be nearly good enough.

“What does that mean?” Ben’s father demanded.

Ben nearly groaned aloud. Why couldn’t his father leave well enough alone?

“Just what I said,” his mother replied, her voice even.

“It sounded like you were denigrating the boy.”

“The boy?” his mother said, lifting an eyebrow.

Ben watched his father scowl as he corrected, “The young man.”

“That certainly was not my intention,” his mother said, her voice showing agitation for the first time.

Julia rose abruptly from her chair and stood beside Waverly. She stared with dismay at her mother and said, “Wave will make me happy, Mother.” She gazed imploringly at her father and said, “I love him, Daddy.”

The bridesmaids and two younger groomsmen lowered their glances nervously. Hands gripped napkins in laps.

Ben felt the muscles tighten in his neck and shoulders, felt his legs tense for action.

“I know you love Waverly, dear,” his mother said to Julia. “But—”

“But what, Abby?” his father interrupted. “He’s not good enough? Your daughter deserves better?”

“What the hell is your problem?” Ham demanded.

“Honey,” his father’s second wife implored. “Maybe—”

“Stay out of this, Patsy!” his father snapped.

Ben watched his stepmother’s hazel eyes flash. Watched her lips press flat. In his experience, Patsy Taggart Benedict gave as good as she got. She shot a look toward the end of the table, but she held her tongue.

Ben followed Patsy’s glance to his mother and saw that her eyes had narrowed. Saw her mouth begin to purse. And felt his stomach roll. His mother had a very long fuse, but the explosions when she blew were dangerous and devastating.

Ben was seven—his younger brother Darling had just died in an accident—when his parents began to fight on a regular basis. He would grab five-year-old Carter and head for the nearest closet, where they would hide until the yelling had stopped.

It had almost always started like this. With a question. And an unsatisfactory answer.

In an effort to avert the calamity he foresaw, Ben rose with his champagne glass in hand and said, “To Julia and Waverly. May they live happily ever after.”

His father was quick to join him. “To Julia and Waverly,” he echoed as he stood.

He was followed, Ben was surprised to note, by Paige, who rose and said, “To Julia and Waverly.”

Chairs scraped on hardwood as the bridesmaids and groomsmen quickly got to their feet. Ben watched tears brim in Julia’s beautiful blue eyes as she glanced toward her obdurate father.

Those glistening tears broke the senator’s will, and he stood, holding his glass out as he said, “To Julia.” And then, reluctantly, “And Waverly.”

His mother was last to rise. Her gaze was focused on her daughter as she said, “To the bride and groom. May they live a fairy-tale life … happily ever after.”

There were cries of “Here! Here!” as everyone drank.

Waverly swallowed the last of the champagne in his glass and allowed Julia to give him a loving kiss and shove him back into his seat.

The knot remained tight in Ben’s stomach until the archbishop arrived, shortly after the pecan pie was served. Everyone happily abandoned the dining-room table for the gazebo on the back lawn, where the wedding would be held. Even though most of the women were wrapped in fur, it was bitterly cold outside, and the rehearsal was brief. Everyone was happy to get back inside.

The bridesmaids meandered upstairs, where they would spend the night talking with the bride. The groomsmen got into their cars and headed to the bachelor party being held at the Benedicts’ estate, The Seasons, a mere five miles, as the crow flies, from Hamilton Farm.

The senator and Ben’s mother were walking the archbishop out to the foyer when Ben’s father stopped him and said, “How about a quick nightcap, son?”

“Dad, I’m hosting the bachelor party.”

“I want to talk with you about what happened today in D.C.”

“Can we catch up at the party? I need to say good-bye to Patsy, but then I really should be going.”

“Patsy’s in the parlor. Come on, I’ll pour you a drink.”

Ben realized his father wasn’t going to take no for an answer and nodded his acquiescence. Patsy gave his father a worried look and a kiss on the cheek. “Be careful driving home tonight, Foster,” she said.

“I will,” his father said. “You be careful driving back, too, honey.”

“I will,” Patsy replied.

Patsy and his father had come in separate cars because Foster had been late getting away from the White House. He worked as a special advisor to the president, and lately there always seemed to be some crisis brewing for which his services were required. It worked out all right because now he had a way to get himself home after the bachelor party.

Foster gave Patsy a hug and said, “I’m sorry about earlier tonight.”

“I can’t believe you let that woman get under your skin. Again.”

His father shrugged apologetically.

Patsy shook her head, then turned and gave Ben a hard hug and a quick kiss. “And you. You saved the day. As usual.”

“I don’t know about that,” Ben said.

“Trust me. If you hadn’t stood up when you did things might have gotten out of hand.”

“Thanks, Patsy,” Ben said, uncomfortable being reminded of all the times he’d acted as a peacemaker. And the reason it had been necessary.

“I’m sorry I can’t stay and visit longer,” Patsy said. “Camille has a school project to finish this weekend. Come see us more often. We miss you.”

Ben didn’t reply. He felt his stepmother’s pain from being second fiddle too much to spend more time with her. And the less opportunity his father had to chide him for leaving the military, the better.

Once Patsy was gone, Ben took the crystal glass of bourbon his father handed him and said, “I was afraid you and the senator were going to end up trading punches.”

“Waverly Collins has giant-sized balls,” his father said with a chuckle. “I’ll say that for him.”

“My friend is in love.” And has a baby on the way. Ben stared at the iced bourbon in his glass, thinking the last thing he needed was more alcohol, then swallowed it down. “And he was drunk, of course.”

“How are you doing?” his father said.

“I’m fine.” Ben didn’t feel like explaining to yet another person, especially his father, why he’d shot at some gang kid. He did his best to steer the conversation in another direction. “It was good of you to defend Waverly tonight.”

“I didn’t know Ham could turn that shade of purple,” his father said wryly. “If it hadn’t been for you, things might have gotten ugly. And Julia—”

“Julia has always been able to wrap Ham and Mother around her little finger.” Ben saw his father frown at the interruption but continued, “Neither of them is happy with her choice of husband. But neither of them is willing to make her unhappy by saying she can’t have the man she wants.”

Unfortunately, Foster Benedict wasn’t the kind of man who let himself get distracted. He looked into Ben’s eyes and said, “Are you all right, son?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Ben replied.

“I read the report from the mayor’s office on that gang killing this afternoon. You actually shot at a fourteen-year-old kid?”

Ben huffed out a frustrated breath. “Dad, he was—” Ben cut himself off as he saw his mother enter the parlor and head in their direction.

Ben watched his father’s shoulders tense as his ex-wife stopped in front of him. Ben could smell his mother’s perfume, a musky scent she’d worn for as long as he could remember. He’d been surprised as a kid when he’d realized all women didn’t smell like that.

“I wondered if you would mind giving President Taylor a message for me,” she said to Ben’s father.

Ben was surprised at the request. His father had been named a special advisor to President Andrea Taylor shortly after her election eighteen months ago. The president had taken quick advantage of Foster Benedict’s military expertise when she had to make decisions about which covert antiterrorist activities to support.

It might have been a perfect job for his father if Ben’s brother Nash hadn’t been the man in charge of planning and executing the covert activities authorized by the president. Ben’s eldest brother and his father often knocked heads when it came to how an operation should be conducted.

Ben had figured the president would get tired of referee-ing and get rid of one, or both, of them.

But his father gave consistently wise advice.

And Nash Benedict was the best at what he did, a sometime assassin who worked directly for the president with unsurpassed skill and daring.

So President Taylor kept them both. Listened to both. And made her own choices.

Abigail Hamilton had been studying to be a surgeon before she’d married Foster Benedict, and her prodigious charitable activities were directed toward medical causes. So Ben wasn’t surprised when she said, “Would you please ask Andrea if she would mind meeting with the nurses who work in the Pediatric Oncology Clinic at Georgetown University Hospital before she takes her tour of the children’s cancer ward next week? The administrator says the nurses deserve an attagirl. I don’t think Andrea will mind, but I need to make sure before we say anything to the nurses.”

“Why don’t you call her yourself?” his father said.

His mother wrinkled her nose. “There’s a new, overly protective executive administrative assistant to the chief of staff. The impertinent female makes it impossible for old friends to talk to the president without telling her exactly what they want first.”

And his mother had no intention of doing that, Ben thought with amusement. She intended to put the administrative assistant in her place by using her contacts to go around the woman.

“No problem,” his father said. “I’ll give you a call after I talk with Andrea on Monday.”

Ben saw the trap into which his mother had fallen before she did herself. She’d avoided the administrative assistant, all right, but she’d obliged herself to accept a call from her former husband. Whom she otherwise avoided like three-day-old fish.

Ben saw the momentary hesitation before his mother nodded and said, “Thank you.”

She turned her attention to Ben. “Ham told me what happened in Washington today. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Ben said, somehow managing not to snap the words at her. “I’d better get going. I’m Waverly’s ride to his bachelor party.”

“If you need anything … “ his father began.

“Dad, I’ve got everything covered.” Ben escaped the room, leaving his parents standing awkwardly across from each other. It served them right, he thought. Any animosity—or attraction—that existed between his divorced parents should have been dealt with a long time ago.

He made a detour to the kitchen hunting for Waverly, then searched each room as he walked toward the front of the house, finding no sign of his friend. He eyed the staircase that led upstairs where the bridesmaids—and the bride?—had disappeared. Surely Waverly hadn’t gone up there. Not with the senator breathing fire.

He let out an exasperated breath as he debated where to search next. Where the hell was the groom?




13


Ben caught a glimpse of Waverly standing on the front porch as the archbishop exited the front door. The groom had his arms wrapped around the bride. Ben eased surreptitiously past the senator, who was headed upstairs, and slipped out the front door. “Hey, buddy,” he said to his friend. “You ready to go?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Waverly said, his voice slurred.

“You be good, now, sweetheart,” Julia said, standing on tiptoe within her fiancé’s embrace to kiss him on the lips.

“Don’t worry, honey,” Waverly said. “I’m not going to do anything bad.”

“It’s your bachelor party, Wave. I forgive you in advance for all transgressions,” Julia said with a fond smile as she rearranged the tie on Waverly’s tux.

Ben curbed his impatience with effort. The groomsmen had left long ago to join a bunch of Waverly’s cop buddies at The Seasons. The family butler and maid were there to direct the caterers, so the bachelor party was doubtless in full swing. Without its host. Or the groom. Whom Ben was having trouble separating from his bride.

Waverly pulled Julia close for a hug. “I’m marrying the most loving, understanding woman in the world.”

“Look at those naked floozies all you want,” Julia said, returning the hug, then pulling back to meet Waverly’s bloodshot brown eyes. “Just be sure you don’t touch!”

“Damn, Waverly,” Ben said with a shake of his head. “The little woman’s already got you on a short leash.”

Julia punched Ben in the arm. “You shut up, Benjamin. There’s nothing wrong with a groom respecting the wishes of his bride the night before their wedding.”

Ben hooked an arm around Julia’s neck, and she slugged him hard in the stomach with her fist.

“Let me go, you big bully!” she said with a laugh, wrenching herself free at the same moment Ben released her.

Ben genuinely liked his half sister. She’d attached herself to him every time he and Carter came to visit, following him around like a puppy. When he was a teenager, he’d found her a nuisance, but he’d never failed to pick her up when she’d raised her arms and smiled up at him.

He hoped Julia and Waverly were going to be happy. But he didn’t believe in fairy tales. She was too young to understand the problems her money would create for their marriage. And Waverly was too blinded by love to believe they wouldn’t live happily ever after.

Julia shoved both hands through her long blond hair, fluffing it, and tugged up the bodice of her strapless pink satin dress. “I’m not a kid anymore, Ben. You have to stop treating me like one.”

“No, you’re not, Little Bit,” Ben said, his voice gruff. “You’re about to become a wife.”

“And I’m marrying the best man in the world,” Julia said with a beatific smile. She turned and grabbed both of Waverly’s ears and gave him a smacking kiss on the lips.

“Waverly was a good boy—a pretty good boy—” Ben amended “—at the rehearsal dinner. I watched him jump with alacrity through every hoop Mother and the senator put in front of him.”

“Waverly’s marrying into a political family. Hoop-jumping is a necessary skill,” Julia said.

“And—I’m—damned—good—at—it,” Waverly said painstakingly.

Ben heard in Waverly’s precise diction just how much liquid courage he’d needed to make it through the rehearsal dinner with Julia’s intimidating parents. He still couldn’t believe the announcement Waverly had made when he’d stood up, champagne glass in hand. But he admired his friend for it.

Ben was jerked from his rumination by Julia’s rough tug on the two ends of his untied bow tie. “Hey!” he said, grabbing her wrists.

“How drunk are you?” she asked.

“I’m sober enough to drive.”

“I’m counting on you to take care of Wave tonight,” Julia said. “Make sure he gets back here on time for the wedding tomorrow afternoon.”

“We won’t be leaving The Seasons,” Ben said. “If Waverly doesn’t show up tomorrow, you can come over and get him.”

Julia batted his arm. “Don’t tease me, Ben. Keep an eye on Wave for me. Don’t let him drink too much.”

“It’s already too late for that,” Ben said, pointing to Waverly, who was slumped against a wide Corinthian column on the front porch, his eyes closed, his mouth hanging open.

“Then take him home and put him to bed,” Julia said, shooting a tolerant glance in her future husband’s direction.

At the word bed, Waverly’s eyes opened and he smiled broadly at Julia. “You want to go to bed, sweetheart? I thought you said we should spend tonight apart.”

Ben smirked at Julia, lifted an inquiring eyebrow, and was amused by the rosy blush that appeared on his half sister’s cheeks.

Julia turned to Waverly and said, “Honey, you’re staying with Ben tonight.”

“Oh,” he said, struggling to focus bleary eyes. “Okay.”

“Please get him out of here,” Julia said to Ben, “before Mother and Daddy come out here and find him like this.”

“Let’s go, Waverly.” Ben slipped an arm around his friend’s shoulders and helped him navigate the front steps.

“Wait!” Julia called out when they reached the redbrick driveway.

Ben half turned with Waverly as Julia tripped down the steps. She held her fiancé’s face gently between her palms and gave him a tender kiss on the lips. “Good night, my love,” she murmured. “Until tomorrow.”

When Waverly reached drunkenly for her, she turned and ran back up the stairs.

“Take it easy, buddy. Tomorrow she’ll be your wife, and you can sleep with her every night for the rest of your life.”

“Love her so much,” Waverly said, staring after Julia.

“Yeah, I know.” As he stuffed Waverly into the passenger seat of his Jag, Ben heard a cell phone play the “Hallelujah Chorus.”

“That’s mine,” Waverly said, fumbling in his tux jacket for his phone. He dropped it on the floor at his feet.

As Ben picked it up and handed it to his friend, he said, “You had this on all night? You do like living dangerously. If that had rung during dinner—”

“‘Lo,” Wave said. “Uh-huh. Yeah. A few.”

Ben was halfway to The Seasons before the conversation was over. He turned to his friend and said, “Julia wanted to whisper sweet nothings?”

“I have to go back to D.C.,” Waverly said slowly and distinctly.

“Have you forgotten about your bachelor party? Friends? Strippers? The works?”

“Screw the party.”

Ben stared at his friend. “Who was that on the phone?”

“None of your business.”

“Look, if there’s some problem—”

“I have to go out for a li’l while,” Waverly slurred. “I’ll be back. I just have to go do something.”

“You shouldn’t be driving. If you need to go somewhere, let me take you there.”

Waverly shook his head, then put his hands to either side of it and closed his eyes, as though he were dizzy. “Just get me to my car.”

One of Waverly’s cop friends was supposed to have driven his Ford Explorer to The Seasons.

“I can’t let you drive, Waverly. Not in this condition.”

“I’ll stop and get some coffee. Don’t argue with me, Ben. I don’t have any choice.”

“Then let me drive you where you have to go,” Ben insisted.

“You’ve seen me drive in worse shape.”

“When we were stupid kids. Before I promised Julia I’d get you to your wedding in one piece. If you drive drunk—”

“Stow it, Ben.”

They’d reached The Seasons, and Ben pulled his Jag in next to Waverly’s Ford SUV. “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk.”

“If you’re my friend, you’ll let me do this,” Waverly said. “I need to settle this before Julia and I take off on our honeymoon.”

“There’s another woman?” Ben said incredulously. “Is that it?”

“Hell, no! It’s gang—It’s none of your business.”

“What’s so important you have to miss your bachelor party to handle it?”

“This can’t wait.”

Ben put a hand on his friend’s arm. “Look, Waverly, I can’t let you drive.”

Wave pulled free and shoved open the door of the Jag. “I’m not sure when I’ll get back. Tell the guys I’ll see them at the wedding.”

Ben jumped out of his Jag and grabbed for the keys to the Explorer where they’d been left above the visor.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Waverly demanded.

“Saving your life,” Ben said. “And maybe the lives of other innocent drivers. You’re drunk, buddy.”

“Give me my keys!”

Waverly grabbed for the keys and Ben deftly stepped aside. Waverly’s momentum carried him forward, so he lost his footing and landed on his hands and knees. He came up mad and he came up swinging.

Ben bunched his hand into a fist around the keys and hit Waverly hard in the chin. “Damn it, Waverly!” he shouted as he nursed his stinging knuckles. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

Waverly was out cold.

Ben stuffed Waverly’s keys back behind the visor and returned to heft his friend over his shoulder. He hauled Waverly inside, grunting with the strain as he headed up the broad, winding, Gone With the Wind staircase. He could hear the shouts and laughter of Waverly’s friends coming from the kitchen and parlor.

“Damn you, Waverly,” Ben snarled at his unconscious friend. “Julia’s going to give me hell if your chin is bruised tomorrow. But I promised her I’d get you to your wedding alive and well. And, by God, that’s exactly what I intend to do!”




14


“Wake up, you sonofabitch!”

Ben felt himself falling off the bed and realized the sheet and blanket had been ripped out from under him. He hit the Aubusson carpet on his hands and knees, searching frantically for his XM107 .50 caliber long-range sniper rifle. Which wasn’t there.

A breath shuddered out of him as he reminded himself he was no longer in the desert. He was in his bedroom at The Seasons. And he stank with the foul sweat of someone scared shitless.

He’d been dreaming again. The same lousy dream. He looked at his shaking hands, expecting them to be covered with sticky red blood. His fingertips were callused but clean.

“Get up!” Waverly ordered.

Ben sucked in a breath and shoved himself upright enough to see a furious Waverly standing in boxers and a T-shirt on the other side of the bed.

“I told you I had to get back to D.C. last night. Look at this!” Waverly leaned across the bed to shove The Washington Post under Ben’s nose.

Ben was still hung over—he’d celebrated Waverly’s wedding after he’d put the groom to bed—and he struggled to focus his eyes. The headline was hard to miss: “Gang Riot Leaves 3 Dead.”

“This is all my fault,” Waverly gritted out between tight jaws.

“How could it be your fault?”

Waverly threw the folded paper in Ben’s face. “That call last night was from my confidential informant. My CI told me trouble was brewing between MS and the One-Eight, that a shoot-out was likely. I knew those kids. I could have intervened. Maybe I could have prevented those deaths.”

“And maybe not,” Ben said, pushing himself to his feet.

“Both gangs will be out for blood now. I need to get to D.C. and find the other boy involved in that shooting—the one still left alive—before the whole city erupts in gang violence.”

“Have you forgotten you’re getting married at one o’clock? You don’t have time to go to D.C. The only place you have time to hit is the shower.”





Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Получить полную версию книги.


Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/joan-johnston/outcast-39789049/) на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.