“Nate?” He jumped like he’d been shot when the coolness of her fingers on his arm pulled him from his brutal thoughts. “Get me out of here, okay? Dad…he shooed me away. I don’t think he wanted me witnessing Mother’s breakdown and I think I can still hear her…” She choked.
Uh-huh. And Nate knew right then and there those awful sounds torn from Carla Morgan’s throat weren’t going to stick with just him. Anyone who’d been within earshot would be haunted forever after.
And, goddamnit, he liked Paul Morgan, considered him a good and honest man, but screw the bastard for not seeing that his only daughter needed comfort, too. Just because Ali put on a brave front, refusing to break down like her mother had, didn’t mean she wasn’t completely ripped apart on the inside. And damn the man for putting Nate in this untenable situation—to be the only one to offer Ali comfort when he was the dead-last person on Earth who should.
He hesitated only a second before turning the key and pulling from the curb. The Jeep grumbled along, eating up the asphalt, sending jarring pain through his injured leg with each little bump in the road. Military transports weren’t built to be smooth rides. Hell no. They were built to keep chugging and plugging along no matter what was sliding under the wheels. Unfortunately, what they gained in automotive meanness, they lost in comfort, but that was the least of his current problems. His pain he could deal with—brush it aside like an annoying gnat. He was accustomed to that, after all. Had trained for it and lived it over and over again for almost fifteen years.
Ali’s pain was something else entirely.
Chancing a glance in her direction, he felt someone had shoved a hot, iron fist straight into his gut.
She was crying.
Finally.
Now that she didn’t have to be strong in front of her parents, she let the tears fall. They coursed, unchecked, down her soft cheeks in silvery streams. Her chest shook with the enormity of her grief, but no sound escaped her peach-colored lips save for a few ragged moans that she quickly cut off, as if she could allow herself to show only so much outward emotion. As if she still had to be careful, be tough, be resilient.
She didn’t. Not with him. But he couldn’t speak past the hot knot in his own throat to tell her.
He wanted to scream at that uncaring bitch, Fate. Rail and cry and rant. But what possible good would that do them? None. So he gulped down the hard tangle of sorrow and rage and asked, “Anywhere in particular y’wanna go?”
She turned toward him, her big, tawny eyes haunted, lost. “Yeah, okay.” He nodded. “I know a place.”
After twenty minutes of pure hell, forced to watch her struggle to keep herself together, struggle to keep from bursting into a thousand bloody pieces that would surely cut him as deeply as they cut her, he nosed the Jeep along a narrow coast road, through the waving, brown heads of sea oats, until he stopped at a wooden fence. It was gray and brittle from years spent battling the sun and weathering the salt spray.
He figured he and that fence were kindred spirits. They’d both been worn down by the lives they’d led until they were so battered and scarred they no longer resembled anything like what they’d started out being—and yet they were still standing.
Right. He’d give anything to be the one reduced to an urn full of fine, gray ash. Between the two of them, Grigg had been the better man. But on top of being uncaring, Fate was a stupid bitch. That’s the only explanation he could figure for why he’d made it out of that stinking, sandy hut when Grigg hadn’t.
A flash of Grigg’s eyes in that last moment nearly had him doubling over. Those familiar brown eyes...they’d been hurting, begging, resigned…
No. He shook away the savage image and focused his gaze out the windshield.
Beyond the fence’s ragged, ghostly length, gentle dunes rolled and eventually merged with the flat stretch of a shell-covered beach. The gray Atlantic’s vast expanse flirted in the distance with the clear blue of the sky, and the boisterous wind whipped up whitecaps that giggled and hissed as they skipped toward shore.
It just didn’t seem right. A day like that. So sunny, so bright. Didn’t the world know it’d lost one of its greatest men? Didn’t its molten heart bleed?
He switched off the Jeep and sucked in the familiar scents of sea air and sun-baked sand. He couldn’t find his usual comfort in the smells. Not today. And, maybe, never again. Hesitantly he searched for the right words.
Yeah, right. Like there were any right words in this God-awful situation.
“I won’t offer y’platitudes, Ali,” he finally managed to spit out. “He was the best man I’ve ever known. I loved ’im like a brother.”
Talk about understatement of the century. Losing Grigg was akin to losing an arm. Nate felt all off-balance. Disoriented. More than once during the past week, he’d turned to tell Grigg something only to remember too late his best friend wasn’t there.
He figured he wasn’t suffering from phantom-limb syndrome, but phantom-friend syndrome.
“Then as a brother, tell me what happened…what really happened,” she implored.
She’d always been too damned smart for her own good.
“He died in an accident. He was cleanin’ an old gas tank on one of the bikes; there was a spark; some fuel on his rag ignited; he fell into a tray of oil and burned to death before anyone could get to him.” The lie came out succinctly because he’d practiced it so friggin’ often, but the last word still stuck in his throat like a burr.
Unfortunately, it was the only explanation he could give her about the last minutes of her brother’s life. Because the truth fell directly under the heading National Security Secret. He thought it very likely Ali suspected Grigg hadn’t spent the last three-plus years partnering with a few ex-military, spec-ops guys, living and working in Chicago as a custom motorcycle builder, but it wasn’t his place to give her the truth. The truth that Grigg Morgan had still been working for Uncle.
When he and Grigg bid their final farewells to the Marine Corps, it was only in order to join a highly secretive “consulting” group. The kind of group that took on only the most clandestine of operations. The kind of group whose missions never made the news or crossed the desk of some pencil-pushing aide at the DOD in a tidy little dossier. They put the black in black ops, their true identities known only to a select few, and those select few were very high up in government. High. Like, all the way at the friggin’ top.
So no. He couldn’t tell her what really happened to Grigg. And he hoped to God she never found out.
She searched his determinedly blank expression, and he watched helplessly as the impotent rage rose inside her—an emotional volcano threatening to explode. Before he could stop her, she slammed out of the vehicle, hurdled the fence, and raced toward the dunes, long hair flying behind her, slim bare legs churning up great puffs of sand that caught in the briny wind and swirled away.