Invincible

Her stomach knotted as she watched the once-invincible Harry Lassiter visibly struggle to say, “I ih e ere?”

Why is she here?

Kristin had debated whether to tell her father that Flick had gotten herself thrown out of school. It was one more thing he didn’t need to worry about. But she didn’t want to set a bad example by asking Flick to lie, and Flick would likely blurt it out anyway.

“Flick was worried when you stopped emailing. She got herself thrown out of school so she could come find out what happened to you.”

Kristin thought she saw the flicker of a smile cross half her father’s face. If so, it was the first since his stroke.

He sighed audibly. “Aw igh.”

“Well, all right,” Kristin said with a smile of her own, relieved that he’d given in so easily. “I’ll be right back. I left her—”

“Gramps!”

Kristin turned to find Flick poised in the doorway, a look of horror on her face.

“Ow! Ow! Ow!” her father howled, creating a gar-goyle face that caused Flick to whimper, before he turned away with a sound of anguish, flailing with his one good hand under the sheet.

Out! Out! Out!

Kristin fought the urge to grab Flick and run—from her father, from her job, from her self-destructing life.

But she stood her ground. Because in her head she heard: Never run from a challenge. Remember, you’re invincible.

“You’re scaring Flick, Dad,” Kristin said in a firm voice. “Flick, come here,” she said in an equally firm voice.

Flick tore fearful eyes from her grandfather’s supine body and stared dazed at her mother.

“Come here,” Kristin repeated, holding out her hand to her daughter. “I know Gramps looks different. I would have prepared you, if you’d waited in the lounge. Because of his stroke, the right side of his face droops. That’s why he looks so…funny. So…weird. So…odd,” Kristin finished, after searching for the right word and never finding it.

“Dad, look at us,” she commanded her father. “I want Flick to see your face in repose.” His face would still look strange, but not so horrible as it had when he’d howled. Kristin kept a reassuring hand on Flick’s shoulder, to stop her in case she was tempted to run.

Kristin caught the stab of betrayal in her father’s eyes as he slowly turned back to face his granddaughter.

Grandfather and granddaughter stared at each other somberly for a full thirty seconds before her father said, “Iz oo, ik.”

“I missed you, too, Gramps,” Flick said.

“Air oo, uh?”

“Yeah,” Flick agreed. “You scared me pretty bad.”

Kristin barely managed to avoid rolling her eyes. Trust Flick to be totally honest.

“I’m okay now,” Flick continued. She left the security of Kristin’s side and crossed to her grandfather, bracing her hands on the bed to lift herself up and plop her rump down next to his hips. “But your face does look bizarre.”

Bizarre: Strikingly out of the ordinary. That was the word Kristin had been seeking. Trust Flick to root it out of her enormous vocabulary.

Kristin glanced at her watch, a twenty-five-dollar Timex with a brown leather band that Flick had given her for Christmas, which lit in the dark and kept perfect time. If she didn’t leave soon she was going to be late for her meeting with SIRT. “Dad, I’ve got a meeting. We have to leave, but—”

“Ik an ay ere.”

Flick can stay here.

“I don’t know, Dad,” Kristin said, staring worriedly at her daughter.

“I’ll be fine, Mom,” Flick said. “Visiting hours aren’t over till four. I checked.”

“You’re sure it won’t be too much for you, Dad?”

“Gramps, you need to comb your hair,” Flick said, eyeing his tousled blond hair with her head tilted. “It’s a mess. Where’s your comb?”

“No om. Us.”

No comb. Brush.

Flick hopped down and rummaged through the drawer in the small metal chest beside the bed. She found a boar-bristle hairbrush, set it on the bed, then climbed back up beside him. “Where do you want your part?”

He turned relieved eyes to Kristin and said, “O. I ine.”

Go. I’m fine.

Kristin hurried from the room before she could reconsider. She couldn’t miss her investigative meeting with SIRT. And maybe, if Flick had enough trouble communicating with her grandfather, he’d reconsider the speech therapy he’d been refusing.

Kristin headed east from Jackson Memorial on the Dolphin Expressway and kept her fingers crossed as she merged onto I-95 North toward the Miami Field Office. On paper, the MFO was only a seventeen-minute drive straight up the Interstate from the hospital. But all it took was one fender bender to turn I-95 into a parking lot in the middle of the day.

She exhaled when she found traffic moving freely. But she hadn’t driven more than a mile before she found herself slowing to a crawl. “Come on!” she muttered, pounding the steering wheel of her Camry. She checked her watch. She’d given herself an extra twenty minutes to get there, just in case, and it looked like she was going to need every second of it.

She turned the radio to a station that played upbeat Latin music and imagined herself sitting on a warm beach under a colorful umbrella with an ice-cold mojito in hand. She was doing a lot of imagining these days, because her life kept shifting out of her control.

During the past week, she had been asked to spy in London, called 911 to come get her father after his stroke, been involved in another shooting incident at work, in which her partner was seriously wounded, and picked up her errant daughter at the airport after she’d been thrown out of school.

Kristin felt like she’d hit her limit of bad news for one week. Except she now had to face the Shooting Incident Review Team, which held her fate in its hands. What if the board decided to suspend her? Or fire her? She felt a knot forming in the pit of her stomach.

Breathe, Kristin. This, too, shall pass.

But where would she be when it did?

It took fifteen minutes before she passed a two-car accident, which wasn’t even blocking the lane, but which motorists had slowed down to ogle. She made fast time the rest of the way to the exit for North Miami Beach, but she could almost feel the minutes ticking away.

The concrete-and-glass MFO building took up an entire city block and more. The FBI had set up shop in Miami as far back as 1924, and there were still enough criminals—and violations of the rights of American citizens in Mexico, the Caribbean and Central and South America—to keep the MFO hopping.

Kristin heard a clap of thunder and eyed the dark clouds overhead. “Do not rain,” she muttered. “Do not rain.” It had been unseasonably hot the entire month of April and unseasonably rainy, as well. She drove as fast as she dared around the enormous MFO parking lot searching for a spot, anxious to get inside before the downpour started.

She started jogging when the first large raindrops hit her cheeks and eyelashes, but before she reached the door, the heavens let go. Kristin was breathing hard by the time she got inside and stood dripping—and swearing under her breath—at the security checkpoint.

“You look like a drowned rat, Lassiter.”

Kristin turned and saw her boss, Special Agent in Charge Rudy Rodriguez, ready to exit the building, umbrella in hand. In the four years since she’d come to Miami from the FBI Academy at Quantico, Kristin had never seen the Miami SAC caught unprepared.

Rudy was several inches under six feet, big-chested, with a thick waist and dark, sharp eyes. The SAC brushed his receding black hairline straight back from his brow with a palm and said, “I thought your meeting with SIRT was at 3:00.”

“It is.” Kristin had never gotten used to the SAC’s gravelly voice, the result of being nearly strangled to death in an undercover drug operation gone bad.

Rudy glanced at his watch, then reached into his suit coat pocket and came out with a neatly ironed white handkerchief, which he handed to her. “You might want to dry off a little before you head upstairs.”

She took the monogrammed cotton cloth, dabbed at her forehead, cheeks and chin, brushed off the shoulders and lapels of her suit jacket, and handed it back. “Thanks.”

She noticed Rudy didn’t offer advice about what she should say at the hearing. Or console her for having to go through the process of being questioned by SIRT again.

“Good luck,” he said. Then he was gone.

Kristin cleared security as quickly as she could, then took the elevator up to the office of Supervisory Special Agent Roberta Harrison, who was in charge of the MFO’s Office of Professional Responsibility. The OPR was charged with ensuring that agents conducted themselves with the highest level of integrity and professionalism. SSA Harrison did everything by the book, which made her good at her job.

But Harrison had never worked in the field, so she had very little idea how quickly decisions had to be made in moments of extreme duress. And therefore little—make that no—tolerance for honest mistakes.

Which was what the shooting incident Kristin had been involved in four months ago had been. Kristin was aware of how much it had irked SSA Harrison that no disciplinary action had been mandated by the Shooting Incident Review Team in that instance.

Unfortunately, there was no way to excuse what Kristin had done four days ago as an honest mistake. It was dereliction of duty, at the very least. Agent Harrison was finally going to get her pound of flesh. And maybe Kristin’s badge and gun.

Kristin’s crisply ironed shirt had been wilted by the rain, but she squared her shoulders anyway as she was ushered into the hearing room by a civil service secretary. Because she’d so recently been examined—interrogated—by SIRT, she knew what was coming.

Her heartbeat ratcheted up another notch and she took a calming breath to try to slow it down. Her stomach made a rumbling sound and she realized she hadn’t eaten lunch. Maybe that was the reason she felt so nauseous. Or maybe it was the result of a life rocketing out of her control.

“Sit down, please, Agent Lassiter,” SSA Harrison said. Technically, Agent Harrison wasn’t part of SIRT, but she’d apparently decided to attend the meeting.

Kristin seated herself and looked from one sober face on the SIRT panel to the next seated across from her. Three of the four FBI special agents on the Shooting Incident Review Team identified themselves as being from the Criminal Investigative Division, Training Division (Ballistics) and the Office of General Counsel.

“We’ve met,” the fourth special agent reminded her. “I’m Todd Akers, Inspector in Charge of this investigation.” Akers reminded her he was from the Inspection Division.

Kristin surreptitiously wiped her sweaty palms on the front of her trousers under the conference table as she eyed her inquisitors. No one on the Shooting Incident Review Team looked sympathetic.

She didn’t blame them. The charges against her were serious. She and her partner had been ambushed inside a home in Liberty City while they were questioning the occupants about an armed bank robbery. Because she’d hesitated before drawing her weapon—and then hesitated too long before firing it—her partner had been shot and seriously wounded. And because she’d fallen apart after her partner was wounded, the suspected bank robbers had escaped.

“I wondered whether SIRT was letting you off too lightly the last time, Agent Lassiter,” Roberta Harrison said. “I thought at the time you were acting with reckless disregard for human life when you shot that sixteen-year-old boy. You were lucky the local authorities decided not to prosecute.”

“I believed he had a gun.” Kristin felt her face flushing with the heat of anger. She’d been cleared of any wrongdoing in the previous shooting incident by SIRT, and here was Roberta Harrison, who wasn’t even part of the review team, trying her all over again.

“That poor boy didn’t even have a gun, did he?” Harrison said. “It was a cell phone. You shot an unarmed sixteen-year-old.”

“He matched the description of a suspect in an armed bank robbery. I identified myself as FBI. I told him to keep his hands where I could see them. Instead, he reached into his jacket pocket.”

“You didn’t wait to see whether he had a weapon. You just shot him.”

“If I’d waited, I might have been killed. Or seriously wounded, as my partner was when I failed to shoot quickly enough four days ago.”

“So, you admit you failed to back up your partner?” Harrison said triumphantly.

Kristin let out a shaky breath. How easily she’d fallen into the trap Harrison had laid for her. She looked toward the Agent in Charge of the review team, who wouldn’t meet her gaze.

The truth was, her failure to draw her weapon—and to shoot it—was almost predictable. She’d been warned by the psychiatrist she’d been required to see after the shooting four months ago that she might hesitate to shoot in the future.

She’d been on administrative duty for months. After she completed counseling, she’d been asked if she thought she could go back to work and fire her weapon without hesitation. She’d said yes.

She’d been wrong.

“I hesitated before drawing my weapon. And I hesitated before firing—to make sure the suspect had a weapon. By the time I realized he had a gun, he’d already shot George.” Her brand-new partner, who was busy manhandling another suspect, who was unarmed.

“In fact, the suspect shot Agent Parker twice before you fired your weapon, isn’t that true?” Harrison said.

Kristin nodded curtly. “I fired, but the suspect darted around the corner out of the kitchen, and I missed. Once George was down, the suspect he was cuffing took off. He was unarmed, so I didn’t shoot. He knocked me down and fled, along with the other suspect, through the back door. I could tell George was seriously wounded, so I stayed with him.”

“Rather than pursuing the suspects, even though one of them had shot your partner.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Kristin said. “I thought we had enough information to find them again. And I wanted to render all the aid I could to my partner.”

She’d visited George in the hospital yesterday, where he was in serious but stable condition. He didn’t blame her, but he no longer wanted to be her partner.

“You’ve got a problem, Lassiter,” one of the SIRT panel members interjected. “Better get it fixed, or no one will want to work with you.”

Most FBI agents didn’t draw their weapons during their entire careers. She’d drawn hers twice, with disastrous results both times. She’d shot too fast. Then she’d shot too slow. She supposed the fear was, the next time she’d be afraid even to draw her weapon.

Kristin wasn’t sure herself what she would do if the situation arose again. Which explained why Harrison seemed so determined to pin her wings to the wall like a butterfly in a lab experiment. Harry Lassiter’s invincible little girl was looking pretty damned vulnerable right about now.

“Do you have anything you’d like to say on your own behalf?” the SIRT Agent in Charge asked.

It could have happened to anyone, Kristin thought. But that argument wasn’t going to do her much good. Or maybe, After what happened last time, you can understand why I had to be sure he had a gun before I fired.

She didn’t make either argument. Nothing could excuse her behavior. So she simply said, “No, sir. I have nothing to add.”

“SIRT will consider the evidence and inform you of what disciplinary action it deems necessary—if any—within the next few weeks,” Akers said. “Until then, Agent Lassiter, keep your nose clean.”

Kristin rose and realized her legs felt shaky. She steadied herself and headed for the door.

“Oh, one more thing,” SSA Harrison said, stopping Kristin at the door.

She turned and waited for whatever barb Harrison had saved for a parting shot.

“You need to see Rebecca in the information office downstairs. The MFO wants to issue a press release about your lawsuit.”

Kristin stared at the SSA blankly. “Lawsuit? I’m not involved in any lawsuit.”

“A reporter from the Miami Herald has already contacted the bureau. I assumed you’d received the paperwork. After this second shooting incident, the parents of the boy you killed are suing you in civil court for wrongful death. Better get yourself a lawyer, Lassiter.”

A lawyer? She couldn’t afford a lawyer, not on top of the expenses for her father’s hospital stay and his rehabilitation and the cost of a nanny for Flick. Her father would hate the publicity a lawsuit would bring, and it would make Flick’s life a nightmare. Not to mention her own. What if she ended up suspended without pay? Or lost her job. That was a distinct possibility, considering how badly the hearing had gone. Then what?

Kristin felt her knees threaten to buckle. She curled her hands into fists and stiffened her legs. A lawsuit was just one more straw. One tiny little straw.

You can do it. Remember, you’re invincible.

To hell with that. Kristin yanked the door to the hearing room open and headed for the stairwell. She realized she wasn’t going to make it. There were no private offices on this floor, just cubicles connected with a lot of other cubicles in a large room. There was nowhere to hide and lick her wounds.

She felt the choking knot building in her throat. Her nose burned with the threat of tears. She blinked to clear her blurring vision. She wasn’t going to break down. She refused to give SSA Roberta Harrison the satisfaction. She felt a tear hit her cheek and angrily brushed it away. But she was losing the battle against the sob growing in her chest.

There was only one place she could hope for any privacy. She hurried around the corner and shoved her way into the ladies’ room, searching for feet under the stalls. With a lack of trust she’d learned from the bureau, she smacked open each stall door, letting the metal slam against the opposite wall, as though she were clearing a house.

When Kristin was absolutely certain no one else was in the room, she let the sob break free.

4

The knock on the door came at a very inopportune moment.

Max had just eased the last button free on his date’s blouse and was sliding the black silk off her shoulders. After his meeting with Kristin in Miami, he’d been irritated to discover that he was having difficulty getting her out of his mind. This seduction—of another woman—was an attempt to remove her entirely.

He ignored the knock.

Despite orders from his uncle, he hadn’t yet found a replacement for Kristin on the tennis court. As ridiculous as it sounded, he kept hoping she’d change her mind. He hadn’t wanted her as his partner, but once she’d refused him, no one else would do.

He kept wondering what he’d done wrong all those years ago to make her hate him so much. Considering everything, it was no surprise she’d said no to playing spy. He was lucky she had. He didn’t need her complicating his life—or the risky assignment he’d been given.

But he couldn’t help comparing the porcelain skin he was kissing with Kristin’s freckled shoulder. K had been self-conscious about her freckles. He’d loved kidding her about them. And kissing each and every one of them. Which had taken the better part of the one night they’d spent together.

“Max?” The perturbed female voice saying his name woke him from his reverie.

He realized he’d stopped caressing his date and was staring out the tall, mullioned windows of the bedroom in the north wing of Blackthorne Abbey where he’d brought her. The room, supposedly slept in by Henry II, had once been the lair of the Beast of Blackthorne.

Not a real beast, of course, but the younger brother of the sixth Duke of Blackthorne, a soldier whose face had been badly scarred at the Battle of Waterloo.

K had loved that story, which also involved a fair maiden, a duke with amnesia and twin eight-year-old girls lost in the hidden passageways of the Abbey leading to the dungeon.

“Max?”

He realized he’d drifted off again. Damn and blast, K. What are you doing to me?

“Where was I?” he said with a rueful grin.

“Making me feel beautiful and desired.”

Max didn’t see the feline smile that accompanied the words, because he was lost again in the past.

“You make me feel so beautiful.”

Those were the words K had said when he’d looked at her naked for the first time. She’d been surprisingly bold—taking his dare when he’d shown up at her hotel room one afternoon unannounced, two years after they’d first met—dropping the hotel’s white terry cloth robe, which she’d donned after her shower, and standing before him in all her glory. Especially since he’d still been dressed in sweaty tennis clothes. He’d been so startled by what she’d done, he hadn’t said anything for a moment. She’d lowered her gaze, suddenly a shy fifteen-year-old again.

He’d quickly taken the few steps to bring him close, lifted her chin with a forefinger, looked into her eyes and said, “You are so beautiful.”

That was when she’d said the words that had thrilled and enthralled him. “You make me feel so beautiful.” He could see it was true. She blossomed like a flower before him, her eyes full of joy and her smile wide and happy. It was the most wonderful, most powerful feeling he’d ever had in seventeen years of living—the ability to bring another human being utter joy.

And he’d only looked at her.

That precious moment had been interrupted when her father knocked on the door and called out to her. Max had raced for the hotel closet and hidden there while K grabbed the robe she’d discarded and anxiously tied it tight at her waist. Her father had wanted to discuss tactics for the next day’s match, so Max had spent an uncomfortable hour fending off a bunch of empty hangers.

When Harry had finally gone, K’s playful mood had left along with him. She’d pleaded fatigue and apologized. Max had left without touching her, without even kissing her. But he’d been entranced with her from that moment on. To say he’d wanted her would be to understate the matter. He’d craved her.

Because of their separate tennis schedules, the opportunity to finish what she’d started didn’t come for almost a year. When he’d finally convinced her to sleep with him, he’d been so impatient to be inside her—and so ignorant of the true state of her innocence—that he’d hurt her. And disappointed her. Despite only wanting to love her, he’d somehow made her hate him.

K had kept him at arm’s length forever after. Or at least until he’d been forced by his uncle to approach her and ask her to work with him.

It had been an awful lesson to learn about human nature. You couldn’t make a person love you, no matter how much you loved them. What had happened with K was exactly what had happened with his mother. Once he’d let her in, she’d shut him out. The pain the second time was terrible enough to cure him of the disease.

Love was for fools and idiots.

“Max, would you rather we didn’t do this?”

Max was startled to discover he’d been neglecting his date again. He’d spent a great deal of time talking Veronica Granville, a reporter for the Times of London, into spending the weekend with him at Blackthorne Abbey, his family’s hereditary castle—complete with moat—in Kent. He’d arranged her seduction carefully, and it was proceeding according to plan. Or had been, until that knock had interrupted them.

And thoughts of that infuriating female from my past.

Max made himself focus on pressing kisses against the throat of the woman in his arms, but as he brushed aside Veronica’s long, straight blond hair, memories of Kristin intruded. He remembered ribbing K about her corkscrew curls, which she hated. And shoving K’s lush blond curls out of the way to kiss her nape as he lay beside her. He remembered how she’d shivered with pleasure in his arms. And how good it had felt to finally press his naked flesh against hers.

He supposed it was K’s lack of sexual experience that had made kissing her and caressing her so memorable. He couldn’t help smiling as he recalled how amazed she’d looked when he’d kissed the tip of her small breast.