No Strings Attached
She glanced back at Jenny and apparently didn’t level that scary look on her as well, because there was no recoiling on Jenny’s part.
“No,” Tasha said in answer to the are you okay? question as she handed the little brunette first one wine bottle, then another. She must have gathered the rest of the containers as well, for she rose to her feet and extended the cloth sack to Gina, an elegant, slightly darker version of her daughter, Harper, who was Luc’s other half brother Max’s woman.
Christ. All these relationships were making his head hurt.
“I’m so sorry,” Tasha said as the older woman accepted the bag. “I hate the thought of both you going back to Winston-Salem and me missing your party, but I don’t feel so hot.”
“Yes, you look quite pale, dear,” Gina agreed, reaching out to give Tasha’s forearm a soothing rub. “You go home and go to bed. Hopefully you can sleep off whatever this bug is.”
“It’s not the flu, but bug sure seems like an appropriate word for it.” Tasha shot him another lightning-fast malevolent glare, then said a touch grimly to the older woman, “I suddenly feel like a hairy, nasty spider is crawling up my spine. I haven’t felt this awful in almost a decade, and what I’d like to do is shoot the bastard between his beady little eyes.”
Twisting to set the wine on the table, Jenny narrowed a thoughtful gaze on Luc, then turned back to study Tasha for a second. “Poor baby. You want me to drive you home? Jake can bring your car back in the morning.”
Luc watched a look perilously close to panic flash across Tasha’s face. Or maybe he only thought that was what he’d seen, because when he blinked, she appeared perfectly calm.
Tasha patted Jenny’s hand. “No, I’m fine to drive. I’ve just been burning my candle at both ends since tourist season started, and I guess it’s finally caught up with me. I desperately need some sleep.”
“Good thing you’ve got an extra helper in the works,” Jenny said.
An edgy laugh escaped Tasha. “Ah, yeah, about that. It turns out that’s not going to happen.” She suddenly seemed ready to wilt as she shoveled long, pale fingers through her hair. “I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.” She looked away from the little brunette to the rest of the company gathered around the table.
Well, except for him. Now that she’d finished eviscerating him with her death-ray stare, she evidently had no desire to even glance his way again.
“I’m sorry for the drama,” she said to the group at large, then focused her attention on Gina once more, bestowing on her the sweet, generous smile that had been branded on Luc’s brain for seven long years. “Have a safe journey home,” she said, giving the other woman a hug. When she pulled back, she gazed at Gina with warm-eyed affection. “I’ve just loved getting to know you. I really hope you’ll come back soon.”
“Oh, I intend to, darling,” Gina said. “My favorite daughter lives here now.”
“Uh, Mom?” Harper said dryly. “I’m your only daughter.”
Gina gave an elegant shrug. “But you’re still my one and only Baby Girl.”
Harper’s olive-green irises all but disappeared behind the lashes-fringed crescents her eyes became as she grinned. “That’s true.”
Tasha exchanged a few more pleasantries with the guests. Then between one moment and the next, she’d said her goodbyes, strode out through the kitchen and was gone.
Luc pushed back from the table and rose to his feet. “Okay if I grab myself a beer?” he asked Max.
“Help yourself,” his half brother invited even as Harper said, “Here, let me get it for you” and started to rise to her feet.
No! his mind snarled. But he hadn’t spent more than a decade in deep cover for the DEA for nothing. He flashed her the friendly charmer’s smile that years of practice had rendered second nature and merely said, “Please, Harper, you don’t need to wait on me.”
“Yeah, Harper,” Jake said. “He’s family. Which means he can do the dishes, too.”
“Or at least fetch my own drink. Anyone else want anything while I’m in there?”
No takers chimed in, and he left the room with an unhurried stride that nevertheless ate up the distance between the table and the back door. Silently letting himself out, he spotted Tasha heading toward the end of the attached garage, with the obvious intention of making a beeline for the parking apron around front. Clouds the color of a day-old bruise hung low in the sky, but for the moment at least, it was dry, and ignoring the few back steps, he dropped directly to the lawn, landing lightly on the balls of his feet.
He could move fast and silent as ground fog when the need arose, and he came up on Tasha’s flank just as she rounded the end of the garage. He moved into its shadow one step behind her and reached out, his fingertips brushing her arm. “Hey, Tasha, wait—”
With a gasp, she whipped around. Wild panic flared in her clear gray eyes, and watching her suck in a breath and open her lips, Luc knew she was about one second away from screaming down the house. Snaking a hand around her nape, he clamped his free palm over her mouth to keep her from cutting loose with a screech that would bring everyone inside stampeding to her rescue.
Not that there was anything she needed rescuing from—Jesus, he would never hurt her. All the same, he really didn’t want his deputy sheriff half brother thundering down on him. He didn’t doubt for an instant that if Max heard a woman scream, he would be out here in a red-hot hurry, his big-ass service pistol drawn.
“I’m sorry,” he said in the most soothing, nonthreatening voice he could summon. Her lips were soft and her skin warm beneath his hands.
He shoved the tactile sensations into a far corner of his mind where they could just wait to be examined when his concentration wasn’t demanded elsewhere. “I didn’t mean to scare you—I just want to talk to you for a minute. I’m going to let go of you now, okay?”
He obviously didn’t follow through with the promised action quickly enough to suit her, for she narrowed her eyes at him as if to say, Then get on with it! Wondering if they’d be right back where they started, he gave her a hard-eyed stare back. “And you won’t scream, either, am I right?” It was a command, not a question, and he stared into those crystalline eyes without blinking.
She hesitated a second, then dipped her chin in a slight nod.
Slowly, he released his light grip on the back of her neck and lifted his hand from her mouth.
Tasha promptly knocked his hand aside and scrubbed the back of hers over her lips as if they’d come into contact with hazardous waste. Pushing past him, she marched back into the rear yard before turning to face him. “If you want to talk to me, you can damn well do it out here, where people can see us,” she said.
He nodded. But what the hell—why was she so mad? He wasn’t the one who—
Being on the business end of another of her eat-shit-and-die glares chopped the thought in two, and he was still regrouping when she demanded, “So who are you pretending to be today, Diego?”
He kept his wince strictly internal, but...hell. She had him on the ropes with that one, since he could hardly say he hadn’t been pretending to be someone else when they’d met. So he simply gave her a level look and said calmly, “My real name is Luc Bradshaw. I’m Max and Jake’s half brother—”
“Oh, please,” she said in disgust.
He blinked, baffled by her. “What do you mean, oh, please? At least give Max some credit. Don’t you think he had me thoroughly checked out?”
She made a rude noise, and his brows came together. “I’m not sure what your problem is. All you have to do is look at the three of us together—the general consensus here seems to be that there’s a strong family resemblance. So why would you doubt that I’m—”
She got all up in his grill—and it didn’t say much for him that he found it kinda hot. “Look,” she said, eyes narrowed to burning slits and her long, narrow nose mere centimeters from his own. “I don’t know who you are, buddy, or what your game is. But you stay the hell away from me, you hear? How dare you come here impersonating Jake and Max’s brother?” She poked him in the chest—but before he could grab her finger, she dropped her hand to her side and took a large step back.
“Tell you what,” she said with a calmness that didn’t match those eyes. “I’m feeling pretty generous, so if you pack your bags and get out of town—tonight—I’ll let bygones be bygones.” She gave him the slitty-eye-of-death look again and said, “If you’re smart, you’ll take that offer and go, because it runs counter to everything my gut’s telling me to do.”
Trying to reconcile this woman with the sweet, laughing girl he remembered—and failing miserably—he shook his head. “Say what?”
“You have trouble understanding English, Diego?”
Apparently so, because he didn’t have the first idea what she was talking about. Rather than telling her that, however, and demanding to know what her problem was and exactly what it was she thought she knew, he instead heard himself say, “My name is not Diego. I know I told you it was, but I was undercover with the DEA at the time, and my continuing good health precluded telling anyone my true identity. But I am Luc Bradshaw, son of Charlie Bradshaw. Half brother to Max and Jake.”
“Oh, good, you stick to that story. In fact, I really hope you do. Because if you’re still around tomorrow, I’ll enjoy nothing more than going to Max and telling him you’re nothing but a lousy drug dealer named Diego Who-the-hell-knows-what. And then, Dee-A-Go, he will haul your skeevy butt off to jail.”
He froze. He’d spent most of their short time together mining for every piece of her story he could get—while keeping his own to himself. He hadn’t told her much more than that he was on vacation and didn’t want to spend it talking about work. The one time she’d pushed for details, he’d turned on the charm and steered the subject in another direction. So how the hell had she tumbled to his cover story?
He didn’t have time to figure it out before she stepped back and shook that pretty cloud of hair behind her shoulders. “And if that happens,” she said in a voice edged in tungsten, “trust me, I’ll have only one regret.”
Shoving his hands in his pockets, he stared down at her. Taking in the flushed cheeks and electric eyes, he thought it was a damn shame that he was still so attracted to such an obvious head case.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” he said. “What would that regret be?”
“That unlike the tiny hundred-and-two-degree black hole of a Bahamian jail cell where I spent the two most terrifying nights of my life, thanks to you,” she said flatly, “American jails are probably downright plush.”
Then, before he could ask so much as one question, she whirled on sandaled feet and stalked back into the murky shadows thrown by the side of the garage.
Leaving him wondering what the hell had happened the night they’d spent together.
CHAPTER TWO
“TASHA RENEE RIORDAN, you’ve been keeping secrets from me. When the hell did you get the chance to meet Luc Bradshaw and why do you dislike him so much?”
Tasha stared at her friend openmouthed. She had barely opened her door to Jenny’s knock before the question knocked her back a step as if it were an honest-to-God battering ram catching her squarely in the chest. Jenny crossed the threshold at the same time that Tasha remembered to breathe. And breathing was good, if a bit tricky around the ragged rhythm her heart was banging out. But she tried her best to sound calm and collected when she said, “What? I met him yesterday. You were right there, Jen.”
“Don’t kid a kidder, sweetie. You looked at him as if you knew him. So when on earth? I didn’t think you’d come up for air long enough to leave Bella T’s.”
She tried to keep it to herself; she really did. But this was Jenny, to whom she told everything, and she simply caved. “I met him seven years ago.” She shoveled her fingers through her hair and stared at her friend. “It knocked me for a loop when I walked into Max’s last night and saw that Max and Jake’s so-called brother is the Diego I told you about from my Bahamas trip.” Admitting it out loud was both scary and a relief. There was no taking it back now, but neither was it a secret any longer, pooling its corrosive acid in her stomach.
Assuming more importance than it should warrant.
Jenny’s face promptly went serious, showing why she was Tasha’s best friend. “Oh, crap, Tash. How is that possible? And yet...you were too...not you, with all that bug stuff and shooting it between the eyes and the I-hope-you-die-from-a-raging-case-of-herpes looks you gave him.”
“Oh, God.” They reached the breakfast bar dividing the small galley kitchen from the body of her living area just as her leg muscles turned to pudding. She sagged onto one of the stools and stared at her best friend as the petite brunette climbed onto the stool next to her. “It shocked the hell out of me to see him sitting there cool as you please at Max’s table. But...dammit, Jenny. I hate that I was so obvious.”
“You weren’t, sweetie. Or, okay, you were—but only to me.” Jenny leaned forward to give her a quick, fierce one-armed hug, then straightened back on her stool. “And I’ve known you damn near half our lives.” She shot her a sly smile. “And now that I know, I’m surprised I didn’t figure it out for myself. Because it makes sense, doesn’t it? He’s the only man you’ve ever reacted that passionately to.”
Tasha ignored that, since the last thing she wanted to talk about in conjunction with that man was passion. “I told him he had until today to get the hell out of town. But how do I break the news to the Bradshaw men that he isn’t their half brother if he doesn’t leave?”
“Tash. Sweetie.” Jenny rubbed the back of her hand. Gave her sympathetic but firm eye contact. “You only have to look at him to see that he is.”
“No,” she insisted—even though the truth of it had been rattling the cage she’d locked it in from the moment Diego—Luc—had said the same thing. She slid her hand out from under Jenny’s and used it to shove her hair out of her face. “He’s not gonna just go away, is he?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Crap.” She sucked in a breath. Then blew it out again in resignation. And said what she’d been thinking all night long. “What were the damn chances that the one man I never wanted to clap eyes on again as long as I lived would turn out to be Max and Jake’s half brother?”
“I know, right?” Jenny agreed. “It really is a freaking small world.”
* * *
LUC HAD JUST finished packing up his duffel bag when an authoritative fist pounded on his motel room door. Old habits died hard, and silently he unzipped the bag’s end pocket and pulled out his SIG Pro. Pistol at his side, he kept to the wall as he approached the door and stopped just this side of it. Craning around, he peered through the peephole.
And saw his half brother Max in his khaki deputy uniform shirt.
He tucked the gun in the small of his back, covered it with his shirttail and opened the door. “What brings you to Silverdale?” he asked curiously. “And how the hell did you get my room number?” As if he didn’t know.
“It’s amazing what a badge can get you,” Max said in his usual unsmiling, straightforward manner. “Can I come in?”
“Yeah, sure.” He stepped back to allow him by. “So you came to Silverdale just to see me?”
“Yep.” The bigger man gave the room a quick, comprehensive examination that Luc was damn sure took in everything there was to take. Then Max focused his attention on him. “Can you shed some light on why Harper heard Tasha say you’re not Luc Bradshaw but some guy named Diego?”
Luc had been expecting the question in one variation or another, but now that it was asked, he realized he didn’t know how to address it. That wasn’t like him. He was the master of improvisation and deflection, killer charm his go-to line of defense. But there was something about looking into the steady, uncharmed eyes of a man who was still a virtual stranger while the knowledge that they were brothers punched him in the damn solar plexus the way it had every damn time he’d seen Max or his other half bro, Jake, this past week. He found he couldn’t lie to those eyes.
And that sure as hell threw him off his game.
This brotherhood gig might be tougher than he’d anticipated. Having grown up an only child, once he’d located Max and Jake he’d been kind of excited at the prospect of getting to know them. But he hadn’t really figured where he would fit in this new family dynamic when the other two had a lifelong history with each other. His sole excuse was he had only recently discovered that his late father, Charlie—a man he’d thought he knew inside out—had two other sons Luc had known nothing about until the day he’d cleaned out his dad’s desk and come across the information.
But thinking about it wasn’t getting the question answered, and he blew out a breath. “You want a cup of coffee? The story has background that might take a little time to explain.”
“Sure. That would be good.” Max made himself at home on the small couch in the sitting area of the narrow suite.
Luc made a cup of coffee at the amenity counter and brought it over to his sibling. “Look,” he said, standing in front of Max with both hands held easy but away from his body. “I’m going to take my SIG out of the back of my jeans real slow now, okay?” It had been stupid of him not to put it away the minute he’d seen who was there.
Max’s hand came to rest on his own pistol. “Wanna tell me why the hell you’re packing a gun?”
“I thought you did a background check on me. Shouldn’t you know I’m DEA?”
“You bet. If you really were.”
“I’m gonna let that pass, since this relationship between you and me and Jake is only—what?—ten days old. I’m currently on a leave of absence, but I’ve been with the agency for thirteen years.”
His half brother merely looked at him with watchful eyes. “I’d just as soon not pull my weapon on you, so do us both a favor and don’t reach for your gun until you’ve shown me the ID.”
“You got it.” He indicated the duffel resting on the end of the bed. “It’s in my bag over there.”
Max climbed to his feet, his right hand still on the butt of his pistol. “On second thought, pull the gun out real slow like you said and put it on the table. Then I’ll get the ID for you.”
Luc felt a slight smile tugging at the corner of his lips. It was ridiculous and probably misplaced to feel proud of his half brother, but he kinda did anyhow. Because Max was clearly nobody’s fool. You never, but never, let an unknown quantity paw through a bag that for all you knew could be bristling with weapons. “Good plan.”
He did what the bigger man instructed and slowly retrieved his gun from the small of his back. Keeping his finger away from the trigger, he made no abrupt movements as he bent to place it on the table between them. Max swept it up.
Luc waved a help-yourself hand at the duffel. “ID’s in the end pocket.”
Max didn’t pat him down but he clearly suspected the possibility of a backup piece, for he kept an eye on him as he crossed to the bed, then turned sideways to keep him in sight when he reached for the pocket zipper. Luc linked his hands behind his head to alleviate some of the tension in the room and watched in satisfaction as Max’s wide shoulders relaxed a fraction.
His half brother felt around in the pocket for a moment, then made a little wordless sound of discovery deep in his throat. A second later, he pulled out Luc’s leather badge wallet and flipped it open. He glanced down at it and the rest of the tension flowed from his big body. He took his eyes off Luc long enough to give the gold-and-black eagle-and-circle insignia a closer inspection. Slapping it shut, he turned to give him a penetrating look. “Undercover?”
“Yeah.” Dropping his hands to his thighs, he sat up. “How’d you know?”
“Please,” Max said. “Diego? Plus, I doubt most field-office agents on leave feel compelled to answer a knock on their motel room door packing a semiautomatic.”
“It was a pretty aggressive knock.”
The smile Max gave him was so small as to barely be present, but Luc had been around him enough by now to recognize it for what it was: his version of a big grin.
“Then there’s the not showing up in my background check,” Max said. “My guy does very good background checks.” But he quickly sobered and pinned Luc in the beams of his hard-eyed heard-every-excuse-so-don’t-even-try-to-bullshit-me cop’s gaze.
“The question is, how did Tasha come to know?”
Thrusting his fingers in his hair, Luc scrubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands. Then he blew out a breath and lowered them to his sides, tucking his fingers into the front pockets of his jeans. “She doesn’t know about the DEA part—she believes I’m a drug dealer named Diego and I honest to God don’t have a clue where she got that idea.” He gave an impatient jerk of one hand. “Not the name part—I introduced myself as Diego. But how the hell did a twenty-two-year-old on vacation cop to my cover?”
“Maybe you had something she found?”
“No, I wouldn’t live long if I was that sloppy.”
Max looked at him over the lip of his coffee mug. Nodded. “Where and when did you meet?”
“In the Bahamas seven years ago. Spanish is my first language, so most of the cases I’m assigned to tend to be in South or Central America. The one I was on at the time concerned a cartel in Colombia, but I was on temporary R & R a continent away from the action, so all I told Tasha was my first name. My cover first name, not my real one, because you just never know when you might run into the wrong person at the wrong time, y’know? Even thousands of miles away. And before our relationship could get much deeper than that, I got called away. I thought it was just going to be a quick check-in, but that turned out not to be the case.”
Christ, there was an understatement. And for a moment he was plunged back seven years to Andros Island.
* * *
“WHAT’S SO URGENT?” he demanded the minute the door to the safe house was opened by a silent agent who appeared barely old enough to have completed his training. Dammit, this was a too-rare R & R for him and he wasn’t happy about being summoned by Special Agent in Charge Jeff Paulson. But he had six years in with the DEA and duty first had been drummed into his head from day one.
So he spared the other agent the briefest scan before looking past him to his superior, who was seated in a comfortable-looking chair situated deeper in the room. Without glancing up from the sheaf of papers he was going through, Paulson indicated the much less comfy-looking chair across from him. “Come in and take a seat.” When Luc complied, the older man set aside the papers, locked Luc in his sights and wasted no time coming to the point. “Intel gatherers have been picking up chatter about you.”
“What kind of chatter?” He’d been an undercover operative for too many years to be caught flat-footed by much, but this sent a little punch of shock through his system.
“The word they’re hearing is that you’re gonna get yours while you’re in the Bahamas.” Paulson gave him a half smile. “Someone clearly doesn’t like you.”
And he knew exactly who. “Hector Alvarez.”
Paulson sat forward. “Morales’s second lieutenant Alvarez?”
“Yes, sir. He doesn’t like that Morales appreciates my sense of humor, because Alvarez is the original Mr. Grim. And he really doesn’t like that his girlfriend likes to flirt with me. He refuses to see that her actions have more to do with the fact that I treat her with respect while he treats her like shit than it does with any burning desire for me as a man.” He’d spent the past fifteen months with the Morales cartel and ordinarily he was all about the case. Right now, however, only one thought kept intruding during his recitation of the facts. “Tasha.”
The SAC frowned. “Beg pardon?”
“This trip was supposed to be a short break for me and I left a friend at my room when I came to meet with you. If Alvarez is bragging about ‘getting’ me while I’m here, it’s not a stretch to assume he knows where I’m staying by now.”