Fallen Angels 03 - Envy (54 page)

“You al right?”

“We have an angel,” she told him. “He’s watching over us. Over Sissy.”

“You think?”

“No,” she said, going into her husband’s arms and closing her eyes in exhaustion. “I
know
.”

And with that, she fel into a deep, abiding sleep . . .

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T
wo weeks after Reil y got out of the hospital, she stood at her bureau in her bedroom and wondered if it was moral y wrong to wear lingerie under your clothes—assuming you were going to your parents’ for Sunday dinner.

Maybe she’d just throw on the black lace. Sexy, but nothing peekaboo—

“What you doin’,” Veck said as he came up behind her and put his arms around her.

He was naked, as usual, and very glad to see her—as usual.

Glancing over her shoulder, she smiled and held up the bra in question. “The black. I was thinking the black. What say you?”

“Good choice. It’s one of my favorite sets to take off of you.”

As he kissed her slow d deep, and rubbed that arousal against the back of her bathrobe, Reil y gave herself over—but only for a moment.

Inching away, she shook her head. “We’re already late.”

“Won’t take me long,” he murmured, going for the tie in front. “Promise.”

“But I’l have to explain to my father why we delayed dinner.”

Veck stepped back sharply. Cleared his throat. Al but glanced behind himself to see if the man in question was in the room with them. “Good God, why aren’t you dressed yet, woman. Come on—shake a leg.”

She laughed as he headed over to the suitcase in the corner and started throwing on clothes like the house was on fire.

Her partner was stil the tough-cored, straight-talking, sexy man she’d fal en in love with: Ever the dogged detective. Always alert and very protective of her. Precisely the kind of guy who never backed down, rarely gave an inch, and somehow managed to stil cater to her.

But if there was one person on the face of the planet who could snap his BVDs, it was her father.

Veck and Big Tom, as Veck cal ed him, were cut from the same cloth, but Veck never overstepped, and was always on his best behavior. And the fact the pair got along so wel was just one more reason to love both of the men in her life.

“You’re stil in that robe, Reil y,” he shot over while he yanked his pants on.

“I love you, you know that?”

He didn’t even pause, the flapping continuing as he pul ed on a button-down. “That’s nice, honey. Now come on, get dressed.”

Reil y laughed again, grabbed her Victoria’s Secret, and did her own, toned-down version of the DelVecchio shuffle in the bathroom.

It was amazing how much had changed . . . and how little. Bails’s body had been found in the rubble of the quarry three days later, and the cause of death had been ruled a suicide, as the gun he’d used had stil been locked in the grip of his cold hand. Kroner had also woken up dead: Medical staff at the hospital had discovered that very night of the quarry col apse that he’d stopped breathing and they’d been unable to revive him, something which had not been a surprise, given the extent of his injuries.

As for Sissy Barten, her death had been unofficial y hung around Bails’s neck: Her body had yielded no DNA to tie the two together, but forensic IT

specialists had gotten into the man’s various computers and found a web, literal y, of madness and scheming—al of which revolved around Veck and Veck’s dad. Turned out Bails had often spoken in his postings online of kil ing someone just as Sissy had been kil ed, using precisely those techniques and markings, as a way to honor Veck’s father.

Needless to say, Veck had been cleared of al suspicion—in fact, an audit of the security camera files from the evidence room showed that the system had conked out for a period of time one night between when the Kroner stuff had come in and when Bails had put forth his false accusation. The implication that Bails had somehow engineered the malfunction was obvious.

And that . . . was that.

In the aftermath of it al , Veck didn’t talk much about what had happened—or remark on the fact that his father had been executed on schedule, or seem to dwel on that moment in the cave when the wrong decision on his part could have ended both their lis. But there had been enough nights when she and he had lain together and he’d said a few words here and there. She was giving him time, and he was taking it, but she’d never gotten the feeling that he’d hidden, or would hide, anything from her.

God wil ing, they had the next fifty years to keep up the dialogue.

“Are we ready?” he cal ed out from the bedroom.

“Yup! Coming!”

A quick brush of her hair, a spritz of that perfume Veck liked, and she rushed out of the bath—

In the center of her room, right by the bed they shared, he was down on one knee, with a little velvet box on his outstretched palm.

Talk about skidding to a halt.

Putting her hand to her beating heart, Reil y blinked like an idiot for a moment.

“Two guesses what I’m going to ask you,” he murmured, flipping the top open.

For a long moment, she just stood there in shock. Except then she got with the program, al but floating over to him.

Looking down, she saw a smal , perfect diamond in a simple pronged setting.

“Just so you know,” Veck murmured, “I asked your father a week ago. He gave me his permission—and vowed to beat me to a bloody pulp and bury me in your mother’s rose garden if I ever do wrong by you.”

Reil y got down on her own knees with him, tears waving everything up. “It’s . . . real y like him to say that.”

They both laughed.

“Yeah. So.” Veck cleared his throat. “Sophia Maria Reil y, wil you be my wife? Please?”

She nodded, because she didn’t trust her voice—and forget about the rock; she threw her arms around him and held on hard. “I love you. . . .”

Veck crushed her to him, and then eased back. With hands that shook ever so slightly, he took the ring out of its velvet slot . . . and slid it on her finger.

“Fits perfectly.”

She took some time to admire the winking, flashing bril iance. The stone was incredibly bright and lively, almost impossibly so.

“It’s not big,” Veck said, “but it’s flawless. That was important to me. I wanted to give you something . . . flawless.”

She pressed her lips to his. “You already have, though. And it’s nothing you could buy me in a jewelry store.”

Veck kissed her back for the longest time . . . forever it seemed, and that was just barely enough for her.

And then, with his mouth stil against hers, he whispered, “Now do you mind if we get in your car and break the speed limit? Much as I love your mother’s garden, I’d prefer not to be Miracle-Gro, especial y on a night like this.”

Laughing, Reil y got to her feet and helped her . . . holy crap,
fiancée
. . . to stand up. “You know what I just realized? We both go by our last names.”

“And neither one of us can cook.”

“See,” she said as they raced for the stairs side by side. “We were meant to be together.”

Halfway down, he tugged her to a stop, pul ed her into his arms, and kissed her again. “Amen to that, my love.
Amen
.”

One last kiss . . . and then just like that, they were out the door . . .

And off into their future.

Read on for a sneak peek of

LOVER UNLEASHED

from J. R. Ward’s

#1
New York Times
bestsel ing

Black Dagger Brotherhood series.

Available now!

M
anny Manel o didn’t like other people driving his Porsche. In fact, short of his mechanic, no one else ever did.

Tonight, however, Jane Whitcomb was behind the wheel because: One, she was competent and could shift without grinding his transmission into a stump; two, she’d maintained the only way she could take him where they were going was if she were doing the ten-and-two routine; and three, he was stil reeling from seeing someone he’d buried pop out of the bushes to hi-how’re-ya him.

So many questions. Lot of pissed off, too. And yeah, sure, he was hoping to get to a place of peace and light and sunshine and al that namby-pamby bul shit, but he wasn’t holding his breath for it. Which was kind of ironic. How many times had he stared up at his ceiling at night, al nestled in his beddy-bye with some Lagavulin, praying that his former chief of Trauma would come back to him?

Manny glanced over at her profile. Il uminated in the glow of the dash, she was stil smart. Stil strong.

Stil his kind of woman.

But that was never happening now. Aside from the whole liar-liar-pants-on-fire about her death, there was a gunmetal gray ring on her left hand.

“You got married,” he said.

She didn’t look at him, just kept driving. “Yes. I did.”

The headache that had sprouted the instant she’d stepped out from behind her grave instantly went from grouchy to gruesome, and shadowy memories Loch Ness’d below the surface of his conscious mind, tantalizing him, making him want to work for the ful reveal.

He had to cut that cognitive search and rescue off, though, before he popped an aneurism from the strain: As maddening as being lost in his own mind was, he had the sense that he could do permanent damage to himself if he kept struggling.

As he looked out the car window, fluffy pine trees and budding oaks stood tal in the moonlight, the forest that ran around Caldwel ’s edges growing thicker as they headed north from the city proper and the twin bridges of downtown.

“You died out here,” he said grimly. “Or at least pretended you did.”

They’d found her Audi in and among the trees on a stretch of road not far from here, the car having careened off the shoulder. No body, though, because of the fire.

Jane cleared her throat. “I feel like al I’ve got is ‘I’m sorry.’ And that just sucks.”

“Not a party on my end, either.”

Silence. Lot of silence. But he wasn’t one to keep asking when al he got in return was
I’m sorry
. Besides, he wasn’t total y in the dark. He knew she had a patient she wanted him to treat and he knew . . . Wel , that was about it, t.

Eventual y, she took a right hand turn off onto . . . a dirt road?

“FYI,” he muttered, “this car was built for racetracks, not roughing it.”

“This is the only way in.”

To where, he wondered. “You’re going to owe me for this.”

“You’re the only one who can save her.”

Manny flashed his eyes over. “You didn’t say it was a ‘her.’ ”

“Should it matter?”

“Given how much I don’t get about al of this,
everything
matters.”

A mere ten yards in and they went through the first of countless puddles that were as deep as frickin’ lakes, and as the Porsche splashed through, he gritted, “And screw this patient. I want payback for what you’re doing to my undercarriage.”

Jane let out a little laugh, and for some reason, that made the center of his chest ache—but nothing good was going to come from dwel ing on the emotional crap. It wasn’t like the pair of them had ever been together—yeah, there had been attraction on his part. Big attraction. And, like, one kiss. That was it, however.

And now she was Mrs. Someone Else.

About five minutes later, they came up to a gate that looked like it had been erected during the Punic Wars. The thing was hanging at Alice in Wonderland angles, the chain link rusted to shit and broken in places, the fence that it bisected nothing more than six feet of barbed cattle wire that had seen better days.

Yet the thing opened smoothly. And as they went past it, he saw the first of the video cameras.

While they progressed at a snail’s pace, a strange fog rol ed in from nowhere in particular, the landscape blurring until he couldn’t see more than twelve inches ahead of the car’s gril e. Christ, it was like they were in a
Scooby-Doo
episode out here.

The next gate was in slightly better condition, and the one after that was even newer, and so was the one after that.

The last gate they came to was spit-and-shine sparkling, and al about the Alcatraz: Fucker reached twenty-five feet off the ground and had High Voltage warnings al over it. And as for the wal it cut into? That shit was nothing for cattle, more like velociraptors, and what do you want to bet that concrete face fronted a solid twelve or twenty-four inches of solid horizontal stone.

Manny swiveled his head around at her as they passed through and began a descent underground into a tunnel that could have had a “Hol and” or

“Lincoln” sign tacked on it for al its sturdiness and lighting. The farther down they went, the more that big question that had been plaguing him since he’d first seen her loomed: Why fake her death? Why cause the kind of chaos she had in his life and the lives of the other people she’d worked with at St.

Francis? She’d never been cruel, never been a liar, and had no financial problems and nothing to run from.

Now he knew without her saying a word:

U.S. government.

This kind of setup, with this sort of security . . . hidden on the outskirts of what was a big-enough city, but nothing so huge as New York, L.A. or Chicago? Had to be the government. Who else could afford this?

And who the hel was this women he was treatg?

The tunnel terminated in a parking garage that was standard issue with its pylons and little yel ow painted spots, and yet as large as it appeared to be, there were just a couple of nondescript vans with darkened windows and a smal bus that also had blackouts for glass.

Before she even had his Porsche in park, a steel door was thrown open and—

One look at the huge guy who stepped out and Manny’s head exploded, the pain behind his eyes going so intense, he went limp in the bucket seat, his arms fal ing to the sides, his face twitching from the agony.

Jane said something to him. A door was opened. Then his own was cracked.