Crashed, p.8
Crashed, page 8
Travis no longer worked for the federal government—hadn’t for years, not since he’d refused a direct order to leave some kids behind on an op. They’d been kids. How could he leave a couple of kids behind in that hellhole?
Miles had tried to go to bat for him, but even Miles had people had to answer to his superiors. And when push came to shove, Travis had said he hadn’t regretted his actions, because those kids were alive, and safe.
So he was what they considered freelance, working with a handful of other freelance assets to ferret out useful information ... and do the occasional rescue. He’d saved more people doing it his way and he didn’t have to answer to Uncle Sam, either.
Still, it wouldn’t be a good idea to be seen anywhere near the bureau ... not that he didn’t know how to blend in. But it was never a good idea to get cocky.
Travis wasn’t a fan of the bureau, never had been, even during his brief, and unconventional employment, working under Miles to obtain information focused on human trafficking rings that fed into the US.
If he was linked to the bureau in any way, his career was over. Travis wasn’t entirely sure he cared, but it could put his family at risk, and that, he did care about.
But he also cared about that stubborn ass, Miles.
He’d had an uneasy feeling in his gut about how Miles had looked when he’d seen the grouchy bastard a year ago.
But he’d let Miles distract him and the next time he’d seen his handler, Miles had looked ... well, not okay, but almost normal. For him.
At the hospital last week, though, Miles had most definitely not looked okay.
He hasn’t told you, has he?
Knowing sleep wasn’t likely to happen but rest was necessary, he took his phone and a bottle of water dosed with a healthy serving of a nutritional supplement that was meant to help with wound healing, he made his way out to the deck and sat down.
Normally, the sound of the waves soothed him.
He had his own place in Oregon, a small house on the coast that he’d bought for its isolation and because he could let the sound of the ocean in on the rare occasion that he spent any downtime there. But he didn’t go often. It turned out that being alone in his head was one thing Travis didn’t like.
Right now, the endless rhythm of the water did nothing to ease the knots of tension tightening his muscles.
He picked up his phone and started to dial, just as he had a half dozen times over the past hour but always stopped just short of calling. And he did the same this time.
Miles would have received his messages.
He’d call in his own damn time and Travis knew that.
When that would be?
The fuck if Travis knew, although his gut told him it would be before morning. Miles wouldn’t risk him making good on his threat—and Travis wasn’t going to risk it, either, even if he told himself otherwise.
It was just as he was eying the cell, debating on starting a seventh dial when the phone rang.
The clouds had started to go all pink and gold with the coming sunset, but Travis hadn’t been able to appreciate their beauty or how soft the air had become.
Now, struggling to clear his head as he saw his mentor’s number on the screen, he blew out a breath.
It rang again and he answered, going through the rote process of identifying himself even though both he and Miles knew this call had nothing to do with the job.
“Identity confirmed,” Miles said, as he’d said for what was probably the thousandth time.
Then there was nothing between them but silence.
Travis swallowed.
Miles sighed.
“Who is going to go first?” the older man finally said.
“I might as well, since I’m the one with all the questions,” Travis muttered, feeling foolish, angry ... and so fucking sad. Miles’s silence over the past several moments had said far more than words could. “I know you’re sick. What’s wrong?”
“Cancer. I’ve got maybe a year if I keep up with chemo, but ... son, I’m fucking tired.”
Tears burned Travis’s eyes. As much antagonism as he’d often felt toward Miles, they’d developed a friendship over the years and he truly did respect his handler. “So there’s no real hope?”
“It was already spreading by the time I got diagnosed, Travis.” He huffed out a laugh. “When they tell you to get those damn screens once you start hitting your late forties, kid ... just do them. Don’t put them off.”
Unable to stay still, Travis pushed upright and paced over the railing of the deck, staring out over the water. The tide was out, baring rocks covered with seaweed. Gulls came swooping in, leaving just as swiftly. Travis saw all of it, but couldn’t focus on a damn thing.
“So, you’re fucking dying,” he finally said.
“Yes. I’m fucking dying,” Miles replied. “But, hell, aren’t we all?”
“Don’t get philosophical on me,” he snapped as he spun around. He wanted to hit something. Wanted to scream. He drove his fist into the rough wood of the house and felt pain hot and bright. “What the fuck, man? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You were in deep on a dangerous op.” Miles’ response was blunt and to the point. “The last thing you needed was to be distracted. Then I would have been worried about you dying ... on my watch.”
“And now I’m going to be stuck watching you die!”
“Trav ... ” Miles’ voice was gentler now. “I’m sick.”
That gentle voice cut through Travis’s rage like nothing else could. Numbly, Travis half-stumbled, half-walked over to the Adirondack chair where he’d been sitting and he sank down, watching the deepening colors of the sunset. “I don’t want to do this work without you there. I don’t trust anybody like I trust you.”
“That’s your call.” Miles cleared his throat. “I hope you don’t mind me saying this ... Travis, I want you out. You’re young. You’ve done enough. You never should have been in this to begin with.”
“There is no enough,” he said. But he couldn’t regret the words he’d spoken. Although ... what the fuck was he going to do with himself? He knew how to fight. He knew how to charm and seduce information out of people. He knew how to infiltrate places he wasn’t supposed to even know about, much less be in. And he knew how to kill people. Those weren’t useful skills that would fit in with the life he’d been meant to live. And now he didn’t even know what fucking life that was supposed to be.
And just like that, his thoughts landed squarely on Isabel.
“Why did you send me here, Miles?”
“Because I’m running out of time to fix the damage I did to two people I care about,” the older man said. He didn’t pretend not to understand. “And it’s the one thing I have to do before I can leave this earth.”
“That’s not on you.” Feeling his chest go cold and tight, Travis dragged his hand down his face. “I’m the one who doubted her.”
“You were a kid and I knew damn well what I was doing.” Miles knew how to use his voice and how to weld words and now he used them like a blade. “I’m tired of seeing you punish yourself when I’m the reason you acted as you did.”
“I could have trusted her.”
“And she could have told you before she arrived at the Cape that year, couldn’t she? But she didn’t. How would you have felt if you’d seen her in town? You would have still been hurt, still been confused. I made it worse twisting it the way I did. I fucking well knew what I was doing, so don’t try to absolve me of this.” Miles stopped abruptly as his phone clicked. “I have to go. But we’ll talk ... soon.”
“Not about this.”
But he was already gone.
It was past eleven before Isabel let herself slow down.
The second she did, thoughts of Travis all but overwhelmed her.
That wasn’t to say she hadn’t been fighting the intrusion of him in her head all day—and she meant all day, from the time she’d seen those impossibly blue-green eyes staring at her out of a face far too thin, and looking far, far too old for his years.
Ten years had passed since she’d seen him.
He’d be thirty-two now, the same age as her, separated by only a couple of months.
But he looked older. Not old in years. He just ... carried a weight in his eyes.
She’d seen that weight in her own eyes back when she’d been living under the interminable pressure of her father’s influence, knowing what sort of man he was, what he was capable of. She hadn’t always known the full degree of his cruelty, hadn’t always known just how corrupt he was, but after what Stephen Beresford had done, and when her father had just shrugged it off ...
She curled her lip and told herself not to go down that road.
Her father had died in prison four years earlier, although he’d kept trying, until the very last, to get his conviction overturned.
In the end, it had been somebody he’d sent to prison that had gotten him ... indirectly, or at least that was what everybody believed. There was no concrete evidence to support the theory, but there were enough threads that Miles felt secure enough to tell her that was what he believed had happened.
He told her he was pretty certain her father’s death had resulted as a ‘favor’ by a lifer on the account of somebody in another federal prison in a completely different part of the country, a rival of sorts, in the sex and drug trafficking trade—one Benedict Jenkins. Jenkins’ trial, from what Isabel had learned, had been one of the cornerstones of her father’s career, catapulting him to his appointment as a US District Attorney.
But the man who’d killed Wilson had been clever, going after him when there were no witnesses and he had injuries of his own to back up his claims that Isabel’s father had attacked him first.
Isabel knew her father, though.
He wasn’t a fighter.
He was a tough bastard, but he’d never start a physical confrontation.
However, when she’d been asked whether she had doubts about how the ordeal supposedly went down, she’d smoothly said, My father was a man with a lot of secrets. Who knew what he was capable of?
Nobody had spared a lot of time on the matter.
Wilson Steele had been a criminal who’d caused a lot of pain and had made a mockery of the US justice system. That he’d died in prison had been just desserts as far as most people were concerned.
She still had to occasionally testify, either in court or at a probation hearing, the last time being at Stephen’s attempt to get probation. He’d served ten years of his fifteen-year sentence, but he hadn’t been the easiest man for those on the panel to feel sympathy for, his natural arrogance showing through his attempts at piety.
He wouldn’t ever serve a day for what he’d done to her—or his part in what he’d cost her, but she relished sitting in court the day he’d been sentenced and on his one attempt at an appeal, as well as his recent attempt at early probation.
“Stop it,” she told herself, dropping down on her bed and staring out through the wide, elegant window that faced out over the ocean. “If you keep thinking about him, about your pissant father, you’ll have nightmares.”
But her thoughts were caught in a loop and had been ever since seeing Travis earlier.
Travis, with his too-handsome face and his too-old eyes.
What had he been doing with his life to put that sort of weariness in his gaze? And those wounds on his body?
So many scars ...
It hit her then.
Miles ...
Slowly, she sat up, her feet hitting the floor with a solid thud as a sick realization came to her.
Hoping she was wrong, she grabbed her tablet and put in a video call to Miles. She had to see his face when she asked this question. If he lied ... she’d know. Wouldn’t she?
The line rang and rang and rang.
Just when she thought he wasn’t going to pick up, his face appeared on the screen, his thinning hair disheveled, eyes heavy with sleep but clearing with each passing second.
“Bella, is there a problem?”
“No ... not that kind, at least.” She had an instinctive twitch at hearing that name on his lips, even though she’d gotten used to it years ago. Why it was bothering her now ... well, she knew. Of course, she knew. Seeing Travis threw her back to when she’d been a teenager, back to when she’d been Isabel Steele, in love with a boy who’d promised to take her away from a life she’d hated.
On the screen, Miles’ eyes flickered before his face took on a calm expression.
She knew that mask.
It was the one he almost always wore with her.
“Why are you still in touch with Travis?” she asked bluntly.
Another flicker of his lids, then he inclined his head. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t try to play stupid with me,” she bit off. “There’s no reason for you to have kept in touch with him. But he’s here—and yeah, I’ve already figured out you’re trying to meddle again. You’ve probably already heard from him, and I’m afraid I let that cat out of the bad ... he knows you’re sick.”
He sighed and looked away. “Yes, Bella, I talked to him.” He held up a hand when she would have blasted him for hiding the information—she’d seen the shock, the pain, the hurt in Travis’s eyes when she’d inadvertently revealed Miles’s poor health to him. “I wasn’t hiding the information from him—there just hadn’t been a good time for us to talk. It’s not something you tell somebody in email and we hadn’t been able to talk on the phone for some time ... and now? Well, he’s recovering from an accident—”
“Don’t you mean a gunshot wound?” she fired back. It was a stab in the dark, but earlier, she’d done some googling as she tried to solve the puzzle of what kind of injury he had and that was the only thing that made sense.
Travis Barnes, related to a couple of famous or semi-famous guys, had one healing gunshot wound and at least one other that was fully healed and now an ugly scar on the side, as well as numerous other scars.
And only one thing made sense.
Back when they’d been secretly seeing each other, and for several years after, they had been the occasional picture of Travis in tabloids or online, but not any in years—at least not that she knew of, and she’d made herself stop looking, too, although she hadn’t always been able to keep herself from clicking when she saw pictures of his famous brothers.
Her stab in the dark hit true—Miles flinched.
“How do you know about that?” he asked.
“I saw it.” She narrowed her eyes. “We had ... an altercation with my loudmouth neighbor—again—and Travis got involved. He ended up ripping open a couple of the staples holding the injury closed and starting bleeding. I followed him to the house and made him let me look at it.”
“He actually let you?” Miles’ brows shot up almost to his hairline.
“Stop stalling.” She leaned closer to the screen. “Why are you still in touch with him? And why the fuck does he have a gunshot wound?”
“Isabel ... ” Miles gave her a smile she hadn’t seen in some time.
But it wasn’t one she’d forgotten.
It was the one he always offered when he was about to lie to her.
Maybe if they hadn’t become friends, she never would have learned to tell that smile from the real one. But she had. Or maybe she was just too attuned to lies after a lifetime of living with her father.
But the next words out of his mouth were utter bullshit.
“I just stayed in touch with him because I kept hoping for a chance to fix the mess I caused between you two ... that’s all. We became friends. A few days ago, he reached out and told me he needed a place to crash. Since the house was open and you were gone, I didn’t see the harm.”
Isabel stared at him for several long seconds. Then, with a cool tilt of her head, she said, “You’d think a federal agent would be a better liar.”
Disconnecting the phone, she rose and slid through the door to the attached deck, needing to look over at the house.
She didn’t expect to see Travis.
But the scent of woodsmoke filled the air and when she walked to the very end of the deck that ran the length of the house, she saw the firepit situated outside the house where he was staying.
And there he was, seated on an Adirondack chair, the firelight limning his lean, muscled form so that all she could make out was his shadowy form.
It was him, though.
Her heart leaped at the sight of him and before she knew it, she was sliding on a pair of worn sandals she kept on the deck and moving down the steps to cross to him.
Chapter 8
Isabel appeared out of the night like a dream.
For a second, Travis wondered if maybe she was.
But then he brushed the fanciful thought aside.
Even in all the dreams he’d had of her over the years, she hadn’t been this beautiful.
When she came to a stop a few feet away, he inclined his head back against the seat and watched, trying to get a read. It was a lot harder than it had once been.
Slowly, she sat down on the arm of the chair closest to him and the firelight, warm and golden, flickered over her, highlighting her lovely face.
Her green eyes looked almost black in the night and they held a glassy, hard glitter.
So. She was angry.
Tipping back his bottle of beer, he took a sip.
“I don’t plan on being here long, Isabel. Give me a couple of days and I’ll be out of your hair. You won’t ever see me again.”
“I don’t recall telling you that you had to leave,” she said, her husky voice soft and low. She angled her head to the side and the firelight played off the stubborn line of her jaw.
Oh, yeah. She was pissed, alright.
“Somehow, I don’t see you being pleased about me being here.” He took another long pull of his beer, staring out over the night-dark ocean. It was either that or stare at her, feast on her while he could. Fuck, she was so beautiful. Seeing her filled a hole in him even as it cut gouges into his heart and soul. He’d missed her so much. Every fucking day for the past fourteen years, until missing her was just part of who he was, just like loving her. He didn’t know who he was without that love, without that need. Without that longing.
