12
HUNTER SAT IN THE CORNER of the dimly lit bar, glaring at his Scotch.
“You stare at it long enough, it might even be palatable.”
He slid his gaze sideways, blinked in surprise to see his best friend standing there, then he shook his head.
“Not much makes rotgut palatable,” he said, shrugging and pushing the glass aside. The rickety table wobbled. As appealing as it was, getting drunk wasn’t a very good answer to his woes. But a better one might have just hitched himself onto the adjacent bar stool.
“This is a surprise,” Hunter decided, keeping to his habit of understatement.
Caleb Black’s eyes gleamed gold as he gave a wicked grin. “Consider it an early birthday present.”
Hunter made a show of looking past his college roommate’s shoulder, as if searching for a gift, then gave him a slow once-over. “You got a bow on you somewhere I don’t see?”
“You asking about my package?” Caleb quipped. He looked as if he’d just dropped in for a drink and friendly hello, but Hunter knew him well enough to see the intensity in his oldest friend’s eyes.
Hunter’d had enough rotgut to smirk, but not enough that he felt obligated to answer the questions in his old friend’s eyes.
“You’re a long ways from home. And my birthday is in November. So what’s the deal?”
“San Francisco isn’t that far from the Santa Cruz Mountains.” In the years since they’d left college, Caleb had left an illustrious career with the DEA to settle in as sheriff of a small California town, but the two men were still tight. Probably tighter now, since Caleb wasn’t spending half of each year undercover, and more likely to send Hunter dirty emails and regular texts. Or, like now, show up out of the blue. Caleb dragged the bowl of peanuts closer from the middle of the table.
“I heard you’d be here testifying, thought I’d come up and spend a day or so,” he said. “I thought it’d be fun to watch you do the feebie dance, put a bad guy behind bars.”
“He’s not locked up yet.”
And the case wasn’t nearly as open and shut as Hunter had hoped. It wasn’t that the feds’ prosecutors weren’t good. It was that Burns’s money was paying for a top-notch team of sleazy sharks with the predatory skills of starving jackals.
The prosecution was winning. But it was taking a hell of a lot longer than any of them would like. Hunter knew from the increased frustration on Burns’s face each day that he hadn’t thought this would take more than a day or two, either.
Every day Hunter sat in that courthouse, ignoring the stink eye Murray kept throwing his way, trying to convince himself that keeping Beverly Burns in a safe house and out of the case wasn’t a bad plan.
All the while he had this ticking time bomb in the form of a gorgeous, sexy blonde. He had no idea if she’d go off. No clue when. But the minute that story broke, the defense was going to call a mistrial, and very likely Burns would slide out from under the charges like the snake he was.
“So what’s the deal? You’re not usually the sleazy-bar drinking-alone type. Did the ferns die in all the preppie bars and this was your only option?”
“This case is getting to me,” Hunter confessed, his words so low the tinny jukebox tunes almost drowned them out. “I called the strategy on it, and it’s looking like it might blow up in my face.”
Caleb pursed his lips, contemplating the far wall as if he could see the future in it. Maybe he could. His pretty little wife specialized in woo woo. Finally he slid his gaze back to Hunter.
“Worst-case scenario, you crap out at the FBI. I’ve got an opening for a deputy. You can come work for me.”
After staring for one stunned second, Hunter threw back his head and laughed until his stomach hurt.
“Right. That’s what I’m going to do if my career plunges into free fall. Plant myself in a tiny town, surrounded by known criminals.”
“Suspected criminals,” Caleb corrected with a grin, breaking open a peanut. “And given that two of them are married to FBI agents themselves, I’d say it’s unlikely you’d have to worry about arresting anyone when you sat down to Sunday dinner with my family.”
Now that was quite an image. Still grinning, Hunter let himself imagine a big, fancy Black meal with the guests lined up on either side of the table like cops and robbers. Paired off, boy, girl, boy, girl. And then there’d be him.
Alone.
No career, and no girl.
His grin slid away.
“What the hell is it with women?” Hunter finally asked. He peered at Caleb through eyes dimmed by enough rotgut to guarantee he’d feel like crap in the morning. “Why do they have to be so complicated? Or worse, so freaking obstinate.”
“That’s part of their appeal,” Caleb mused, cracking open another peanut and popping the meat into his mouth. “Don’t forget irritating, exasperating, confusing and, oh, yeah, sexy as hell.”
Yep. That was Marni in a nutshell.
“You ever regret everything you gave up?”
“Gave up? For Pandora?”
Hunter nodded.
“I suppose you mean other than all the gorgeous women who’d constantly throw themselves at my feet?”
This time Hunter’s nod was accompanied by a smirk.
Caleb lifted the basket of peanuts to poke through them, shook a couple into his hand and considered the question.
“It wasn’t a matter of giving anything up. I’d already resigned the DEA, so the job wasn’t in question. I might not have moved back to Black Oak if she wasn’t there, but I’ve actually gained a lot from being there.” Caleb chose a few more peanuts. “There are drawbacks. My father. Pandora’s mother. They’re more work than the criminals.”
Hunter didn’t doubt it. His own father had spent years trying to build a lock-tight case against Tobias Black, Caleb’s dad. The man was a con extraordinaire. But a con with a heart of gold.
“What’s her name?”
Caleb still had plenty of contacts in the DEA, and his own resources as a California sheriff. A name was all he needed to put together the entire story. Since Hunter was playing fast and loose with his stomach lining trying to decide if he’d done the right thing, he figured it was probably better not to offer up that information just yet.
He didn’t insult either of them by playing stupid, though. He just shrugged.
“She tied to the Burns case?”
Hunter slanted a glare at his old roommate, wondering just how much digging Caleb had done before tracking him down.
“What’s your interest in the case?” he asked instead.
“Not a whole lot other than wanting the trial to finish up quick enough that you still had time while you’re on this coast to visit Black Oak.”
“It should be this week. We’ve got him on the ropes, but his team is dancing fast. Still, unless something huge breaks, we’ll be hearing closing arguments by Friday,” Hunter hazarded, more open to discussing the realities of the case with Caleb than he’d be with any fellow FBI agents. Or even himself.
Especially since the biggest reality was that one juicy story hitting a national magazine could derail the entire thing.
He tossed back the Scotch with a pained grimace.
“You gonna come down this weekend, then? It’d be good timing. Maya and Gabriel are in town to celebrate the old man’s birthday.”
Once again numbed by the Scotch, Hunter smirked.
“You want me to attend your father’s birthday party?”
Caleb matched his smirk with one of his own.
“Why not? Your dad will be there.”
Shit.
Tension pounded.
“I’m not sure I’m up for seeing either one of them,” he admitted.
Caleb didn’t say a word. Just tossed back a few more peanuts, then signaled the waitress for a beer. He gave Hunter’s empty Scotch glass an assessing look, then lifted two fingers.
It seemed Caleb thought it was time to switch up his drinking preferences. Since he was swimming on a comfortable sea of booze already, Hunter didn’t mind.
The scantily clad waitress, her hair a brassy shade that made Hunter miss Marni’s soft flaxen curls all the more, dropped two steins on the table, held out her hand for Caleb’s cash, then sauntered away.
Caleb took a drink, then pulled a face. Hunter probably should have warned him that what they had on tap in this place was a step up from horse piss. Then again, Caleb had been in enough dives to know that. He was just getting soft.
“It’s never easy living up to certain reps, is it?” Caleb mused, referencing the comment about their fathers. “Or down to them.”
Meaning their respective fathers.
Hunter shrugged like it didn’t matter.
Then, Scotch-induced honesty forced him to admit, “I never figured living up to my old man was a problem. I mean, I had it figured out, you know? All the advantages he didn’t have, a clear plan and a lot less holding me back.”
“Like a wife and kid?”
“I’m not saying it was a bad idea for him,” he shot back, grinning. “I think the results worked out pretty well. But for me? That kind of commitment would put a stranglehold on my trajectory.”
“Or give you a nice cushion against your slightly obsessive drive to win.”
Hunter frowned.
“Did you just call me obsessive?”
“Did you just claim you won’t open your life to a wife and the possibility of kids because they might slow down your climb up the FBI ladder?”
Hunter’s head spun a few times clockwise, then once counterclockwise. Once it landed, he sighed.
“Okay, maybe I’ve been known to be obsessive. But that’s what it takes, right? I want this career, and if I want it to shine, then I’ve gotta make sacrifices.” Choices. Like letting the potential destroyer of his career move ahead with her story, just because he couldn’t bring himself to play badass with her.
He’d listened to so many of her stories, watched how she lit up when she talked about writing, he knew how important her career was. But unlike him, she didn’t have a strong family support system. Didn’t have anyone who believed in her ability to make it happen.
No matter what it cost him, he couldn’t be the one to crush those dreams. To intimidate the hell out of her so she was afraid to take a chance at them. Instead, he’d just cross his fingers and hope she didn’t screw up his career on the way to making hers?
It was all Hunter could do not to drop his head into his hands and groan. He’d hit heretofore-unimagined levels of pathetic-ness.
“You’re a mess,” Caleb observed with his usual tact and diplomacy. “You never worried about trials before and usually take tough cases in stride. You want to talk it out?”
Hunter didn’t know how to explain, even to himself, why he’d walked out and left Marni with the option to take her information public. He wasn’t a do-gooder. Nor was he the kind of guy who left huge decisions up to other people, banking on his faith in humanity. Hell, he figured most of humanity was on the take, out to screw over the next guy.
Since he was clueless to explain the mess in his head, he shrugged instead.
“So you’re saying I gotta go to your old man’s birthday bash this weekend if I’m gonna get my own birthday gift? Isn’t that called dirty pool?”
“You’ll actually get the gift in November,” Caleb clarified. The only thing missing from his canary-eating grin were a few feathers. “I’m just giving you the official heads-up this weekend.”
Hunter narrowed his Scotch-blurred gaze.
“You might want to spill it before you burst.”
“You might want to wrap up this case before the end of the year.” Caleb tossed another peanut into his mouth, crunched, then grinned. “Because we’re gonna want you in Black Oak then. You know, since Pandora wants you to stand as godfather.”
The Scotch blur faded from Hunter’s brain in a flash.
“Pandora’s having a baby?” He grinned, feeling good for the first time in a week. He clasped Caleb’s hand in a hard shake. “Seriously? Congrats, man. That’s great.”
Caleb shrugged like it was no big deal, but his beaming smile screamed his joy.
Hunter reveled in his friend’s happiness for a few seconds. Then the alcohol haze lured him back to his own black thoughts.
“How do you do it? Juggle the demands of your career, marriage and now a kid?”
“I’m not undercover anymore. I don’t think I could do it if I was. You lose yourself. Lose your life.”
Hunter nodded, having done enough undercover to know what Caleb meant.
“Otherwise, juggling is just like anything else. If it’s something that matters, you make it work.” Still straddling the chair, Caleb leaned forward, so it perched on two legs. It creaked in protest. “So, what’re you thinking about?”
“I’m not thinking anything,” Hunter dismissed.
“Right.” Caleb ate a few more nuts, then let his chair drop flat to the floor. “Look, you’ve done me a few favors. Now, officially we’re square since I did you one last year. But in the name of friendship, I’m going to spot you another.”
“That favor, as you call it, was what snagged you the pretty little wife you’re so crazy in love with. So I think we’re even.”
Caleb waited.
Finally, Hunter shrugged. “Yeah, okay fine. I’ll owe you one.”
It spoke to what a solid friend he was that Caleb didn’t smirk. He just nodded, dropped his arms to the table and leaned forward.
“You got it bad for this woman. Bad enough that you’re questioning things you’ve always seen as black-and-white.”
Hunter didn’t need to ask how Caleb knew.
“The thing is, relationships, women, they always dance in the gray. They aren’t going to simply fall in line behind your career. At least, the right one won’t.” Caleb stared into his beer for a second, his big dorky grin back. Then he met Hunter’s gaze and shrugged. “You just gotta ask yourself what matters. What’s life like with this woman in it? And what’s it like without her.”
Hunter shook his head, wanting to dismiss the idea of anyone lining up ahead of his career with an easy smile.
But the image of Marni’s face kept flashing in his brain.
“Then what?”
“Then you accept the inevitable. You’re in love enough to ask the questions, you’re in love enough to find a way to live with the answers.”
* * *
MARNI PACED.
From the tall black statue shaped like a menacing umbrella, then back to the squat one resembling a demented rabbit. Back, forth, again and again.
She pushed her hand through her hair, her fingers tangling in the unbrushed curls. She was a mess. Three days of alternating between pacing, writing and crying hadn’t left much room for grooming and tidiness.
“Well?” she finally asked, unable to stand the wait any longer. Or the view. These statues were getting uglier by the hour.
Robin didn’t seem to care about her torment, though.
The older woman held up one finger and continued to read. Marni went back to pacing. She only made it to squat and ugly, though, before her aunt set the pages aside.
“Well?” Marni asked again. She sat on the black leather bench opposite Robin. Then, too worried to take the news sitting down, she jumped up and started pacing again.
“Well...” Robin gave the printed pages another look, then hummed.
Marni had only met her aunt five days ago, but she’d already figured out that while the woman was quick to ask questions, she was slow to answer them. She weighed each word like it was gold, and she was a miser. It was harder to use a quote against someone if the words went unsaid, she’d informed her niece over dinner the previous night.
Still, frustration surged through Marni’s system. It was all she could do not to dig her fingers into her hair and tug.
Finally, Robin pushed the papers away and smiled.
“I think you’ve a great deal of talent. You have a spark in your writing, an edge and humor that are balanced by a depth of emotion that tugs the reader in before they realize it.”
Oh. Eyes huge, Marni started to smile. That was nice.
“You need editing, of course. You’re a little wordy in places, meandering in others. But the core is here, and the impact is huge.”
Marni’s mouth opened, but no words came out.
Wordy and meandering were editable. Huge, with a core and impact? Holy cow. She wanted to dance with the tree. To throw her arms wide and embrace the entire weird room. To curl up on the leather bench and cry.
She’d spent three days working on that piece.
Three days of second-guessing every word, of lecturing herself five ways from Sunday over making a major mistake. She’d searched her soul and spent endless hours trying to decide if she was making a mistake.
“So you think I’m doing the right thing?”
Robin sighed, then, looking so much like her brother that Marni hunched her shoulders like she did when her father lectured, the older woman folded her hands in her lap.
“I think the right thing is a subjective question. You have to live with the results, girly. You’re the one taking a huge step and quite possibly shifting your entire career.” She unfolded her fingers to tap the pages again. “If this has the impact I think it will, you’re going to see some huge career opportunities open. It’s smart to be sure you want to accept those opportunities, and their repercussions, before you submit this.”
As if her aunt had just pierced a balloon, the words sucked all the energy out of Marni in a shockingly fast swoosh. She dropped to the bench and wrapped the fingers of her left hand around the fingers of the right, trying to figure out what to do. She switched hands, staring at her manicure but not seeing the chipped pink polish.
“If I write this profile instead of the Burns article, I’m taking my career in a completely different direction. I love writing biographies, but they will never get the same kind of attention hard-hitting stories would.” Marni pushed one hand through her hair, her fingers snagging on the snarls. “Am I doing it because I think it’s the right thing? Or because of Hunter?”
“Only you can decide that. Life is made up of choices. And choosing is tough. Anyone who tells you different is lying, girly.” Robin sighed and gave a jerk of one shoulder. “As for right or wrong, I don’t know. I really don’t. I’ve never met anyone who I cared about as much as my career. I’ve never had a lover I could imagine lasting as long as my career. I’ve never met a man who made me feel as special as being a reporter does.”
Well, there ya go. As much as Marni had enjoyed weaving a fantasy around the idea of happy-ever-after with Hunter, she knew, really, that it was just that...a fantasy.
And just because she was feeling an overwhelming deep emotional onslaught that she wanted to call love, that didn’t mean it really was. Nor that it would last. Nor, her gut clenched, did it mean that Hunter had any reciprocal interest.
Given how they’d left things—or rather, how he’d left things when he’d stormed out—she’d be tiptoeing along the edge of insanity to think there was something solid between them. Something strong enough to build the hopes of a future on.
Marni chewed on her thumbnail, the tiny flakes of polish leaving a nasty taste in her mouth. Giving up her career ambitions, making a serious one-eighty in her goals for the remote, so-slim-it-was-barely-existent possibility of a future between her and Hunter?
She’d have to be insane to do that.
Her fingers tightened around each other so hard, her wrists were numb.
Wouldn’t she?
“I guess depending on a career is a lot smarter than banking on a relationship,” she finally said, her words hoarse and painful. She cleared her throat, then met her aunt’s gaze with her brightest, fakest smile. “Which is what I’ve always said. Always believed. That just confirms it.”
As if she’d seen something painful in that smile, Robin grimaced. Then she sighed and lifted both palms to the heavens, as if asking for guidance.
“Look,” she said, her words halting, as though she had to search for and weigh each one, “I’m not saying that’s the right choice. It’s the choice I made. But I made it based on the options in front of me. If I had a man who made my toes curl, who made me think and made me laugh? That’d be harder to resist. If he was a guy who understood me. Deep down, totally got me... I’ve never had that, Marni. But if I had, well, that’d be a hard choice to make.”
With each word, Robin leaned closer, looked older.
Marni shoved her hand through her hair, trying to process all of that.
It was like laboring for years, pushing and climbing to get to the top of a mountain. Then breathlessly, painfully reaching the top, only to have the grand guru of all that was bright and shiny offer a shrug and a dismissive Nah, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. She was torn between sympathy, pity and horrified tears.
“I told you once, I’ve told you a bunch of times, girly. You have to make your decisions based on your baggage. And sometimes that baggage looks pretty damned awesome in the beginning, but loses its appeal after living with it a few years. Or a few months.” Her aunt waved a hand at the statues standing in stark relief against her bloodred walls, as if they were the perfect example.
Marni grimaced. She wasn’t so sure of equating Hunter with baggage or butt-ugly artwork, but she was sure he qualified as pretty damned awesome.
The risk was huge.
This wasn’t a choice she could backtrack on. Whatever she did, regardless of the results, she was stuck with it.
“I want him,” she murmured, finally looking up to meet her aunt’s patient gaze. “Even if this doesn’t work out, even if I’m making the wrong choice for my career, I still want Hunter.”
Robin bit her lip, as if she was bursting to say something. But she settled on a nod.
“What?” Marni prodded. “Please? I came to you for advice, I’d really like to hear your honest thoughts.”
“You don’t know me that well, girly. And despite the fact we share blood and looks, I don’t know you.” Robin got to her feet. Now it was she who was pacing from ugly statue to ugly statue. Marni dropped her eyes back to her nails, preferring to see her mangled manicure to those monstrosities.
“Look, I hate giving advice. I’m a selfish woman. I live my life for me, for my goals. I’ve dedicated myself to my career on purpose. Not because I don’t think a woman can’t have it all. To hell with that kind of thinking. Women can have anything and everything they want, if they work their asses off.”
Marni agreed, but didn’t want to set Robin off on another rant about gender equality. So she settled for a silent nod.
“I chose to go it alone because that’s who I am,” Robin finally said. She dropped back onto the bench, making it safe for Marni to look at her again. “I am ambitious, selfish and lazy. I’m also terrified of failure.”
Marni shook her head.
“Ambitious and selfish to make those ambitions a reality, maybe. But I don’t buy the rest.”
“Like I said, we don’t really know each other yet.”
Marni’s lips twitched, and she gave a gracious nod, acknowledging the point.
“You’ve got a lot of me in you, girly. You’re ambitious, too. Clever with words and you have an eye for seeing the story within the story. An eye that’ll take an average piece to excellence.”
“Do you think I’d be making the wrong decision?”
“Doesn’t matter what I think. The question is can you live with making that particular decision?”
“As long as Hunter can, I can,” she decided.
“And if he doesn’t?”
Marni lifted her chin, pressing her lips tight together to keep them from trembling.
“I’ll just have to convince him, then, won’t I?”
“You think it’s gonna be easy to convince a guy like that to accept you doing this to him?” Robin asked, waving the pages of Marni’s story in the air.
“Nothing about him is easy. But I’ll make it work,” she vowed.
Because she wasn’t taking no for an answer. She’d do whatever it took, use whatever tools were necessary to convince Hunter to forgive her. To give them a chance.
If he wouldn’t listen to reason, she’d fall back on the one thing she knew he couldn’t resist.
She’d strip naked and offer to show him her pole dancing skills.