Chapter 2
“Since I forgot my parachute at home, Gov, that ain’t happening.”
“You got a nonstop flight? Damn it, Blaise—no one gets a nonstop flight to Sydney Australia. Get the plane to land somewhere else.”
Dane looked at the pilot, who eyed him over his shoulder upon hearing the parachute quip.
Dane smiled, keeping the governor’s suggestion to himself.
No need to get the pilot worried or any more annoyed than he already was.
And especially no need to get Shana worried.
Not yet. That part would be trickier. She knew the governor wouldn’t call them like this to ask for a cookie recipe.
She knew Dane too damn well to be fooled by his calm.
Her expression went from grim to neutral, to her professional game face, the minute he mentioned the parachute. Now Dane didn’t dare look at her squarely as he spoke as quietly and conversationally as he could.
“We’re over the ocean now. Looks like we’ll have this lovely view for a good fifteen hours now.” He looked at his watch as if it were relevant. He lowered his voice. “Give me a clue.”
“Mrs. George called me when she couldn’t get hold of you and Shana. There’s a trap for Shana when she lands.”
“At the airport?”
“It wasn’t clear to me—or her—how or when, only that it was certain.
She shared some details with me. Apparently, there was a police pension fraud case that Shana helped resolve just before she left Australia—her involvement in the case was key and was what got her the job as investigator for Scotland Yard.
They’d kept who’d been involved under wraps because there had been threats at the time—from organized crime in Sydney.
Her mother had testified, among others, and some bad people got put away for a long time. ”
“I remember. Chancy Peterson got put away. Shana talked about it.” Dane remembered the deep despair in her voice when she did.
“Until recently. Peterson was sprung because he’s supposedly become terminally ill.
Mrs. George said she’d gotten threats—or promises—that he wanted to exact revenge, but she thought nothing of it because lots of the people involved in the case were getting them, the police commissioner told her.
Then somehow someone found out you and Shana were headed Down Under and the threats ratcheted up, accusing Shana of retaliatory action.
“Today Mrs. George got scared when she recognized one of the men in an SUV that was following her and she was too scared to call the police—she was told not to. She was told to get rid of you two or something bad would happen to you—and her. They’re sitting on her house.
She didn’t know what to do besides call Shana, but it was too late to reach you. ”
Shit. Shit. Shit. Dane said nothing and forced himself to breathe regularly, not something he usually had to force. Shana watched him closely. He wanted more intel.
“They do anything else?” To scare Shana’s mother.
He left half the question unspoken, but Peter was smart and knew what he meant.
There was a beat of dead air on the other end of the line, long enough to send his blood pressure up a few more counts, long enough for him to cool himself down, put up more walls of professional distance.
“She said she was worried about her dog. She hasn’t seen Scruffy in a while.”
Dane didn’t know what to say about that, so he said nothing, kept breathing evenly, letting the pause grow into a silent gap pretended to Shana’s flashing green stare that he was still listening, that Peter was still talking.
“Sounds like a legitimate threat to me,” Peter said. “Take your vacation somewhere else. Somehow arrange to have her family meet you there—have them take a few detours to throw off Peterson’s men.”
“Sounds like the sensible thing to do.,” And it was, but there was no way in hell Shana would leave her mother vulnerable with some bad actors in the neighborhood while she detoured out of harm’s way. Hell, there was no way Dane wanted to leave her mother vulnerable either.
“But you’re not going to do it, are you?”
“No. We’ll be watching for trouble, though. Thanks for the heads-up.”
“Anytime. Let me know if you need back up.”
“You going to fly to Sydney?” Dane said quietly, not allowing the pilot to hear him.
“Don’t scoff. This desk job has been killing me lately.”
Peter wasn’t serious. He knew the governor fought political battles every single day. Not the same as when he’d been the special ops team leader back in the day, of course. These days his battles involved less action, but Peter was up for the fight all the same.
“Maybe you can send Joe since my main man, Acer, is unavailable. I wonder how long he’s going to take on that honeymoon?”
The governor snorted. “I’ll send Joe. You stay low. Keep me in the line.” He hung up without saying “of communications.” It was the way they’d signed off back in the day when he’d been their fearless leader. He hadn’t heard it in a while, but he remembered it like it was last week.
Dane smiled in spite of himself, in spite of the tension settling into his shoulder blades, knowing he’d have to tell Shana about the situation.
He waited a few beats, leaving the headset in place, not letting her know the conversation had ended.
His mind raced to come up with a plan of action before he briefed her on the problem.
But in all likelihood, she would know more about what they were up against than the governor or even her mother knew.
Worry about her mother caved in his defenses as he looked into Shana’s eyes. Her mother was a vulnerable spot in his normally rational, cool, collected professional armor, ever since he’d lost his own mother to one of his enemies.
If he was entirely honest, he knew he’d become more vulnerable than was healthy for a man in his profession ever since Shana had come into his life, ever since he’d fallen for her.
Hard. Since their first case together—rather mission, because he couldn’t call any of their escapades cases, as if they were the usual follow-the-deadbeat jobs—when he first watched her step off the plane at Martha’s Vineyard Airport, he’d known she was trouble.
He’d given her a beach rose that day for pity’s sake. How much more evidence did he need?
Since then he’d been steadily losing the war between his need to protect his loved ones and his need to fight against badasses, exposing those same loved ones to the danger of having world-class nasty enemies.
Before Shana had come along, the only loved one whose vulnerability he’d needed to worry about had been his mother.
And look what happened to her.
But no matter how much he told himself he should have learned his lesson, having lost more than one person he’d cared about, he couldn’t keep from caring for Shana, from falling shamelessly in forever-love with the exact wrong woman—the mirror of himself.
As she had told him before, Shana was the girlie version of Dane Blaise.
Reaching up, he finally removed the headset after murmuring a pretend sign-off to dead air.
Both the pilot and Shana watched him expectantly but neither prompted him to explain.
Must be the impervious granite-wall look on his face that discouraged the pilot.
As for Shana, he knew he had only a temporary reprieve until they returned to their seats.
He felt the reinforcing layers of defenses being erected around his heart and soul, shadowing his face with a mask of professional indifference as he switched from vacation mode to fighting badass bastard mode, shutting down all the emotional vulnerability he could manage so that he could think coldly and rationally.
He hoped to hell he was up to it.
But that had to be the last pinch of doubt that played with his head until the threat was eliminated. In the meantime, he had some homework to do and he’d need to do it surreptitiously while Shana slept. If he could make that happen he’d be impressed with himself. But he was up to it.
“Thank you for putting the call through, Emory.”
Captain Emory Lane raised a brow at him before nodding.
Being a wiseass was his favorite part of the professional mask.
Shana knew this, but he was counting on her to put on her mantle of professional calculation, being the well-trained expert that she was.
Hell, the notion that she was better than him at going cold tripped through his head, not for the first time.
They would both need to rely on their well-honed survival instincts and keep the danger meter front and center for the duration.
Taking Shana’s arm, Dane moved to leave the cockpit without any further explanation.
“Sure you won’t be needing a parachute?” Emory said.
“Not today,” Shana said.
Dane wrestled the cockpit door open and they made their escape back to their seats. He recognized the smile on Shana’s face. Calculated disarmament of any opponent was part of her game. She didn’t need him to spell it out that there was some kind of danger afoot.
The dazzling smile she gave their flight attendant Wendy didn’t invite familiarity.
There was no warmth. The coldness in her eyes didn’t let anyone mistake the gorgeous curve of her mouth as friendly.
In the dozens of times he’d seen it, on every mission they’d had together, that smile never failed to make Dane shiver with admiration.
As they took their seats, he knew there would be suffocating curiosity applied by Wendy and her cohorts.
Raising his own best version of Shana’s curiosity-defying smile, albeit a scarier version, he settled into his seat next to his partner and future wife to attempt a covert conversation against prying ears and eyes.
They could handle the curiosity, scary off-putting smiles or not. What was Wendy going to do? Slip a drug in his drink to pry the secrets from him? Call her friends in Sydney’s organized crime scene to snitch that they were on their way?
That was his frame of mind as he leaned into Shana to whisper the words she likely suspected.
“Your mother’s been threatened.”