Operation Willow Quest (21 page)

“We can do whatever you want,” he said, pushing
open his door and climbing out.

“Except go home,” she muttered beneath her
breath, as she opened her own door to meet him.

The beach stretched out before them, and besides
a family with two small children off to one side, it was empty of people.

“You think they have it worked out?” he asked.

Willow
glanced over at Del with a confused
frown. “Who?”

“Them,” Del
said, nodding his head over at the two adults throwing a ball to their
children. “Maybe
I am
coming down
with something,” he muttered, kicking at a shell beneath his foot and watching
it tumble into the oncoming wave as it lapped against the sand.

Willow
eyed the family. “Who
knows? Maybe they
think
they’ve
worked it out, that they’ve made the right choice, getting married and having
kids.”

“Maybe that’s all it takes, that you
think
 
you’ve made the right choice?”

Willow
produced a heavy sigh.
“Maybe. But then again, one day you might just wake up and wonder what the hell
you were thinking. You might look at the other person and wonder when you
started growing apart.”

“Sounds like that comes from experience. Is
that what happened to you?”

Willow
turned away from the
little family and let her gaze rest on the swell of the waves rolling into
shore. “I should have been a better wife.”

“What makes you think you were a bad one?”

“I wanted a career.”

“Michael didn’t want you to work?”

“At first he did, he loved that we both worked
in the same industry. He didn’t like to be tied down in the one spot for too
long, he loved being out on assignment—loved the freedom of his work. But then
after a while he got tired of coming home to an empty apartment—he wanted the
best of both worlds—a wife who didn’t moan about him being away for months at a
time but who was home when he was.”

“Sounds a bit unreasonable,” Del commented.

“I guess it was in a way, but I have to admit,
after a while it didn’t even feel like I was married any more. We hardly saw
each other—we were lucky to be home at the same time for more than a handful of
weeks a year.”

“And they say the military’s hard on a
marriage.”

Willow
gave a small grunt of
agreement. “It worked for us for a long time, until he began to talk about
wanting a family.”

“You never wanted kids?”

“It’s not that I didn’t want them, I just
wanted to make sure I was finished doing what I wanted before I gave up my
life.”

“You make it sound as though it’s the end of
the world.”

“It is. The end of the woman’s world, that is.
She ceases to exist after she has kids.”

“How do you figure that?”

“I saw my own mother go through it. Do you know
I was eight before I
realised
my mother’s name was
Rose? I can still remember the shock of
realising
my
mother’s name wasn’t ‘Mum.’”

Del
gave a quiet chuckle.

“I’m actually serious—she had no other life but
taking care of Summer and me and yet before we were born, she’d been an artist.
She gave up painting when she had kids because she thought she couldn’t do both
properly, so she chose her kids over her art and then she died. I find that so
sad, that she never had the chance to paint again. She sacrificed everything
for her children.”

“You don’t have to give up your career to be a
mother, Willow.”

“Maybe not, but I know I don’t want to end up resenting
being a parent if I were forced to give up my career before I was ready, and I
knew when Michael wanted to have kids, I wasn’t ready.”

“So what happened?”

“Not a lot. He’d bring it up every now and
again and we’d end up arguing. He’d storm off and go on another assignment, and
things would go back to normal until he’d bring it up again down the track. He
stopped bringing it up after a while, but it put a strain on the marriage. In
the end, we were more like absent flat mates than husband and wife.”

“You know, he had to take some of the blame. He
wanted you to give up something important; he should have been willing to meet
you halfway.”

Willow
sent Del a quick glance; a small smile touched
her lips. “I think that was the thing holding me back. Somehow, I knew he
wasn’t going to change his own life to fit in a child; he just liked the
thought of having one waiting for him when he came home. I don’t think that
would have been fair on a baby.” She stared down at the water rippling over her
feet on the water’s edge and wriggled her toes in the wet sand. “Sometimes I
wish I was more like Summer. She’s never done a selfish thing in her entire
life.”

“Choosing not to have kids isn’t selfish. If
you think about it, it’s actually the complete opposite. I think it shows a lot
of character to know yourself that well. It just wasn’t the right time.”

Willow
looked up and studied Del’s face intently,
surprised by his insight. That pressure against her rib cage was back again, an
emotion he seemed to provoke within her, catching her off guard. “You called me
self-
centred
the other day, remember?”

Del
bent down and picked
up a broken shell, rubbing it between his fingertips idly. “I was scared for
you. It was an automatic reflex. I didn’t mean it.”

“
No
,
you were right. I am self-
centred
. I don’t mean to
be. It doesn’t start out that way,” she said, her tone drifting off sadly. “I
know you all think I act like some airhead dimwit most of the time, by putting
myself in danger, but I don’t do it intentionally.”

“That’s the problem, Sheldon—you act on impulse—and
that’s dangerous.”

“I know,” she conceded miserably. “But the
thought of
Trèago
hurting Summer or Tate…or you, I
just can’t bear it. I go into an insane full-throttle knee-jerk reaction.”

As she watched, his neutral expression from
just moments before softened slightly. “You have to stop, Will,” he said
quietly, stopping beside her and reaching out to put a hand on her arm gently.
“You can’t keep putting yourself in danger like you have been. You mean too
much…to all of us.”

Willow
swallowed past a
tightness in her throat at his solemn words and blinked away the sting behind
her eyes.

The thump in the wet sand beside them broke the
fragile silence between them as a bright red ball rolled to a stop at their
feet.

Del
bent down and picked
it up, holding it out to the man they’d seen earlier with his children, as he
carried a toddler over to retrieve their ball.

The chubby arms of the two-year-old reached for
the ball and a small smile tugged at Willow’s
lips as she watched the delight on the baby’s face.

“The beauty about second chances, Sheldon, is
that it’s never too late to start over.”

“You can see me standing over a hot stove with
a baby on one hip and a camera hanging over the other?” she asked doubtfully.

He seemed to consider the image for a moment before
a lopsided grin broke out on his face. “I think you can do whatever you set
your mind to, Willow Sheldon.”

“I think you’ve been hanging around my sister
too long,” Willow
said with a nervous chuckle. “You’re getting in touch with your
maternal
 
side a lot lately.”

“I’ve had a lot to think about lately.”

Willow
wasn’t sure she wanted
to hear what he’d been thinking about, not when she had an uneasy feeling it
involved her, and whole lot of worms in a tin he wanted to set free.

Realising
you were on a hit
man’s list wasn’t exactly the kind of news that put you in a frame of mind to
handle talking about having babies. It was more than a little nerve-racking and
Willow could
feel her trusty shield beginning to slide back into place—it was survival tactic
101—protect yourself at all costs. Only somehow Del had managed to put a significant dent in
the shield and it didn’t go all the way up like it was supposed to. The
knowledge left her feeling unsettled.

Chapter 14

A phone call early in the morning brought Tate
to Willow’s
bedroom door a few moments later, his usual concerned frown etched on his
handsome face. “I have to go back to base, something came up. Don’t leave the
house, okay?”

“Yes, Dad,” Willow muttered, then pushed her annoyance aside
for a moment when she caught his distracted glance as it darted around her
room. “What’s happening? Have they found
Trèago’s
guy?”

“No, it’s nothing to do with that,” he said
with a shake of his head. “Just work. I shouldn’t be gone too long. I’ll call
if there’s a change.” He headed off down the hall, presumably to tell Summer he
had to go into work.

Willow
put down the book
she’d been trying to read, finally admitting it was a lost cause with her mind
too distracted by the possibility of some crazy assassin running around with a
shopping list of names in his pocket, for her to focus on the story.

Her phone rang beside
her and Willow
picked it up, smothering a groan as she read the name that flashed up on her
screen.

She tried for an upbeat
greeting and hoped it passed as one. “Hi, Irene.” The missed meeting hadn’t
gone over terribly well, but Willow
had given a family crisis as an excuse and didn’t feel too bad about it—she
had
almost been abducted so she figured
missing one meeting wasn’t the end of the world.

“How’s the story coming
along?”

“It’s getting there,”
she hedged.

“These documents you
have, you’re sure they’re worth all this fuss?”

Slightly irritated by
the woman’s tone, Willow
struggled for a calm, even
demeanour
. “You’re
doubting my
judgement
?”

“Not at all, but I’m
hearing
rumours
you’ve lost your focus. I expected
you back home weeks ago.”

Willow
defended her absence
quietly. “My sister just had a baby.”

“Do you have a
midwife’s degree I don’t know about? You’re not getting clucky on me are you?”

Clenching her jaw,
suddenly strangely irritated by the woman’s usual bluntness she normally found
amusing, Willow
itched to end the conversation. “No, I’m not getting clucky, I’ve been working.
You’ll have the story as promised—if you’ll get off the phone and let me get
back to work.”

“All right, just wanted
to touch base. You’ve got seventy two hours, darling, tut-tar.”

“Tut-tar,” Willow mimicked in a dark
tone, knowing the fake cheerful sign-off all too well.
Clucky, indeed. And what
rumours
?
 
She knew staying here this long wasn’t a good
idea. Now she had her colleagues speculating about her professionalism… Well,
when she blew open this coup story they’d soon
realise
she was serious…
And professional damn
it!
If the targets didn’t get crossed off the hit man’s list before hand,
that is.

Her phone rang a few
minutes later and Willow
decided to leave it. She was struggling to catch a wave of momentum with
Terry’s story that just wouldn’t stay afloat. When the phone rang a second
time, she snatched it off her desk and growled out a not so welcoming. “Hello.”

“Why didn’t you answer
your phone?” She got a small tingle as Del’s
deep voice sounded in her ear, despite the irritation at being interrupted
while she was under so much pressure to get the story finished.

“I was working. What’s
wrong?”

“I’m on my way over to
pick you up.”

“I can’t go anywhere
today—I’m on a deadline,” Willow
told him, shaking her head firmly even though he couldn’t see it.

“Not negotiable,
Sheldon.”

“Not
negot
—” she began, her attention now off the screen before
her and on the conversation. Only to have him cut her off.

“Be there in twenty.”

Willow
was left holding a
phone that bleeped in her ear after he’d disconnected the call, staring blankly
at the computer before her.

She wasn’t happy when Del turned up exactly
twenty minutes later on the dot, but she was poised, foot tapping and arms
folded, waiting as he approached, and she tried not to take notice of how good
the man looked in his uniform. As he drew closer, she noticed his rank insignia
on his sleeve was changed—beneath his Sergeant’s chevrons there was now only
one stripe.

Raising an eyebrow
slightly, she asked, “You missing a stripe now days?”