Run From Fear (2 page)

But news moved fast, especially in the Internet age. Though Seattleites had clearly reveled in the opportunity to rehash one of the few lurid scandals to hit their comparatively whitewashed city, as far as the rest of the world was concerned, Margaret Grayson-Maxwell’s arrest and the nefarious activities of her dead husband were lost in the ether.

And as Rosie had so wisely pointed out, Talia should have let it stay lost, in the past, rather than spend all of her free time delving back into every lurid detail of the past she worked so hard to escape.

As she went back to the kitchen to retrieve Rosie’s and Kevin’s meals, Talia vowed that from now on, she would avoid any further information about Margaret Grayson-Maxwell, even if it meant she had to cut her Internet connection to do so.

What she’d done and the choices she’d made were all
in the past now. And she’d fought too hard to escape that past to let it ruin what had become a very nice present.

She’d no sooner had that thought than she turned the corner back into the bar and saw Rosie enthusiastically hugging a very large man. After a few seconds the man released her, and Talia’s confusion morphed into shock at the first flash of recognition.

Jack.

She must have said it out loud, because his head whipped around even before the plates holding Kevin’s burger and Rosie’s chicken breast slipped from her suddenly nerveless fingers. The sound of shattering crockery was enough to jolt her from her stupor, and she felt her cheeks burn with embarrassment as she scrambled to clean up the mess.
Real smooth, Talia.

What did she have to be embarrassed about? she chided herself. No doubt she’d looked clumsy and stupid, standing there with her mouth hanging open while the plates slipped out of her hands, but that wasn’t the worst Jack Brooks had seen of her.

Not even close.

And after two years with no contact, suddenly he was kneeling on the floor next to her. “Let me help,” he said, his voice a familiar rumble that tugged at something in her chest. Ignoring her protests, he helped her gather up shards of pottery and mounds of food onto the tray a busboy had helpfully provided.

Finally Talia stood, wiping her hands on a towel, her mind buzzing with a thousand questions as her tongue remained stubbornly glued to the roof of her mouth.

“Judging from your reaction, I probably should have called ahead,” Jack said, flashing her a grin that softened
the harsh lines of his face and warmed the glacial blue of those eyes.

“What are you doing here?” she blurted with absolutely no finesse. But who cared? It was too late to pretend his unexpected appearance hadn’t completely thrown her for a loop.

She moved back behind the bar, partly because a customer was signaling her for a refill, and partly because she wanted the physical barrier between herself and Jack. It had been two years, another lifetime, and still she found herself overwhelmed by Jack’s presence.

It wasn’t just the way he looked, though at six-four, packed with hard muscle and a square-jawed face that was all planes and angles, to call Jack intimidating was the understatement of the year.

But it was more than that. It was in the way he carried himself, the way he could be perfectly still yet be ready to spring into action at a second’s notice. The way he could scan a room and memorize every detail of every person and object in it.

Mostly it was the way he looked at you. Jack had a way of looking at a person that made you feel like he knew all of your secrets, even the ones you didn’t know you were hiding. She’d felt it that first day he’d walked into Club One and looked her up and down. At the time she’d told herself there was no way Jack knew a damn thing about her, and she was keeping it that way.

Now, she supposed, Jack knew all of her secrets. The good, the bad, the horrifically ugly.

She held herself still as he did a quick scan of her face and body. Was he mentally comparing her to the vixen she’d once been and finding her lacking?

Or was he relieved to see she was no longer the bone-thin, pale shadow of a woman he’d last seen in a safe house less than twenty miles from here?

Whatever he was thinking, his expression didn’t give a clue. Nor was there anything approaching attraction or appreciation, and Talia was shocked to feel a little pinch of hurt at the realization. She certainly wasn’t the glammed-out man-eater who’d once had men salivating as she walked by, but she wasn’t exactly a dog.

Stop it.
She mentally slapped herself.
You should be grateful Jack doesn’t want anything like that from you. If he did, sooner or later he’d be calling in favors.

The thought made her a little queasy, and she filled herself a glass of club soda.

“You’ve been working out. You look strong,” Jack said.

Talia nodded, unsure if she should thank him, unsure it was a compliment. There was a time, a lifetime ago, when she would have come back with something snappy, shown some attitude, run her hands over her body to make sure Jack got a good look at what she had to show.

All Talia could do was stare, tongue-tied, unable to make even the simplest small talk with the man who had saved her life.

Rosario was more than capable of taking up the conversational ball. “You never answered Talia—what are you doing here?”

Broad shoulders shrugged under his jacket. “I thought I’d stop by, make sure you were doing okay with all the noise going on with Margaret’s release.”

Talia’s brows knit over the bridge of her nose. “You flew all the way down here to check up on me?” It was
ridiculous to even consider, but Talia couldn’t deny the tiny burst of warmth at the possibility.

A warmth that was quickly doused by Jack’s reply. “Of course not,” he said with a chuckle, and shook his head. “Sorry—I just wrapped up an assignment and have had about four hours of sleep in as many days.”

Now that she looked closely, Talia could see the dark, faintly puffy circles under Jack’s eyes, the weary lines around his mouth. It did nothing to take away from a face that was undeniably attractive in a chiseled, hard-jawed, sharp cheekboned kind of way.

“Danny just landed a new client and they needed me to come down to help out, so I’m relocating here for the next month or so.” Jack managed the Seattle operations of Gemini Securities, a firm based in the San Francisco Bay Area that specialized in corporate and personal security. The firm was owned and operated by Danny Taggart, one of Jack’s team members from his time as a Green Beret, along with Taggart’s younger twin brothers. “I figured I’d save myself a phone call and come see how you were doing myself.”

“As you can see, I’m doing just fine,” Talia said.

Rosario rolled her eyes. “Except for the part where she’s spending hours online reading everything she can about the old bitch’s release and reading all kinds of trash about herself in the process.”

Jack sighed and rubbed his hand over his face, his weariness almost palpable. “You shouldn’t read that stuff.”

“I’m a big girl, Jack. I can manage my own reading material. I don’t need you to save me from myself anymore.” Talia winced at her snotty tone. What was wrong with her? She hated herself when she got like this. But
it was too much, Jack showing up unexpectedly after she’d spent the week rehashing the past. Suddenly she was back in that place where she was like a cornered cat, spitting and hissing in her desperation to get free.

Her rudeness seemed to bounce off his broad shoulders. “I know you can take care of yourself, and Rosie,” he said with a nod to her sister. “I just don’t like the idea of you reliving everything that happened. You barely made it through the first time, and I hate the idea of it still hurting you. You deserve to be happy, after everything that happened.”

There was something in his voice, a fierceness that made her chest feel tight, her stomach feel wobbly. And the look in his eyes—there was an intensity there, a heat like she’d never seen before.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a customer flag her down, and another server handed her a long list of orders. Talia filled the orders as her mind churned over Jack’s appearance tonight. He made it sound so casual, just checking up on her.

But there was something going on; she couldn’t put her finger on it. And in her experience, nothing was ever casual with Jack.

As she moved back to his end of the bar, she heard him chatting with Rosie about her first two quarters at school. He nodded sympathetically as Rosie complained about the physics class that was kicking her ass.

“You can call me or e-mail me anytime for help, you know,” Jack said.

“That’s right,” Rosie said. “You were a physics major at West Point, right?”

Talia frowned. She had no idea Jack had gone to West
Point, much less been a physics major. But apparently Rosie and Jack had talked enough for her to know all sorts of details about his life.

Talia busied herself wiping down the already immaculate bar, telling herself there was no reason to feel this stab of hurt over the fact that Jack and Rosario were apparently BFFs when the only contact she’d had with him in the past two years was a terse, one-line e-mail refusing any payment for the security services he and Gemini Securities had provided while keeping her and Rosario safe from David’s reach.

Not that she wanted anything more, she reminded herself forcefully. Jack was a six-foot-four, two-hundred-plus-pound reminder of everything she wanted to leave buried.

And yet, seeing him here… it awakened something inside her, something struggling to dig its way through the rubble left over from the life she’d left behind.

“So are we ever going to eat, or what?” Kevin interrupted her thoughts in a tone she’d last heard used by a three-year-old. It was clear from his sidelong glare at Jack that Kevin was not happy with Rosie’s very obvious case of hero worship.

Jack turned his steely blue glare at the boy as though he’d just noticed him. He looked him up and down and turned back to Rosie. “This is the guy you told me about?” he said, not bothering to hide the skepticism in his voice.

“Yes, this is Kevin, my boyfriend,” Rosie said with a tentative smile.

Talia winced at the uncertainty in her sister’s voice. She looked up and caught Jack’s gaze. As their eyes met, she knew his thoughts echoed her own.

Douche bag.
His mouth tightened in resignation, and in that moment she felt a little crack in the wall that had always existed between them, even after Jack had pulled her out of a basement and saved her from a psycho killer.

Kevin, so sullen his bottom lip was practically protruding, reluctantly reached out his hand to take the one Jack offered. His thin hand was swallowed up by Jack’s massive palm, and Kevin winced as Jack gave it a firm squeeze.

“Kevin,” Jack said, his voice scarier for its icy calm. “Let’s get something straight, okay?”

Kevin nodded.

“These two have run into enough creeps for three lifetimes. I’ve taken it upon myself to keep an eye on them and make sure they don’t run into any more. Got it?”

He released Kevin’s hand, and the younger man glared sullenly as he absently rubbed his sore palm. “Yeah.”

“Good,” Jack said with a baring of white teeth that couldn’t quite be called a smile. “I’m going to be in town for a few weeks, and while I’m here, think of me as their very big, very protective older brother who will come after you if I find out you’re giving either of them any trouble.”

Kevin gave a grunt and heaved himself up from his seat. “Yeah, that’s cool and all, but I think I’m out of here. Rosario, I’ll catch you at school. It’s getting a little heavy in here.”

“No!” Rosario grabbed her coat and purse and started after him, shooting daggers at Jack.

Talia went after her and grabbed her arm. “Rosie, let him go. This is one of the only nights of the week I get to see you—”

Rosie jerked from her hold. “Dammit, Talia, let me go! Jack, you’re as bad as her, thinking everyone in the world is out to get us. Just let me live my life,” she said, whirling dramatically as she stomped after Kevin.

“Be back at my place by midnight,” Talia called to her sister’s disappearing back. She sighed and turned to Jack, whose usual poker face had cracked to reveal a faint sheepishness.

“I’m sorry if that was out of line…,” he began.

Talia waved him off as she went back behind the bar. The crowd was thinning out and it didn’t take her long to refresh a handful of drinks. “It’s okay. Kevin is a jerkoff but he’s mostly harmless. But I do wish she’d find someone more motivated, not to mention someone who’s actually nice to her,” she said as she rejoined Jack where he was leaning against one end of the bar.

His full lips quirked into a rueful smile, revealing the flash of a dimple in his lean cheek. “Why is it the good ones always go for the assholes who don’t deserve them?”

“I don’t know.” Talia sighed with a tired smile. “But with my track record, I’m hardly in a position to question her judgment.”

Jack’s eyes darkened. “You can’t keep blaming your-self.”

Talia felt like a snake was curling around her insides as the guilt, the shame over her own bad decisions tried to claw free from the dark corner where she had shoved them. “I really don’t want to get into this right now,” she said, shooting a smile at a customer a few seats down. God, five minutes in Jack’s presence and she was already back there, scared, powerless.

Guilty.

“Shit, Talia.” Jack reached out a hand, stopping short of actually touching her. “I didn’t mean to… I didn’t come here to upset you.”

There was something in Jack’s face that made her swallow hard and made her feel… something… she couldn’t quite pinpoint. An ache, a curiosity—

“Hey, who’s your friend?”

Whatever it was got pushed away in a wave of perfume and blond hair striding across the room, a glint of interest in her blue eyes and a toothpaste-commercial-worthy smile on her face.

“This is my… uh… This is Jack Brooks,” Talia said. “And, Jack, this is Susie Morse, the owner of Suzette’s and my boss.”

Talia watched Jack’s huge hand swallow up Susie’s much smaller one. She grabbed a rag and gave the bar a vigorous wipedown so she wouldn’t see the inevitable flare of attraction on Jack’s face. Who could blame him? With her thick, honey-colored hair, blue eyes, and tall, athletic body, Susie was a dead ringer for Christie Brinkley in her
Sports Illustrated
days. Normally Talia didn’t pay enough attention to her own looks to let the contrast bother her, but suddenly she felt like a small dark mouse in the shadow of Susie’s blazing sun.