Complicated Creatures: Part Two Page 10

  Jack had been grateful for the distraction, tired of inadvertently staring at Samantha during the flight, failing in his attempts to avoid her. He watched as she smiled fondly at Jaime, kissing his cheek before stepping aside to allow the nurse room to get his brother situated for landing. Sam moved on to Carey, patting his shoulder as she looked out the window.

  “Hundred bucks says your daddy brought the sheriff and the deputies with him to see us back to the ranch and run patrols,” she teased, squeezing his shoulder.

  Carey smiled up at her, patting her hand. “You’re on. Though as small as the county is, we only need a handful of nosey neighbors to keep watch for strangers and anyone who looks remotely foreign.”

  She grinned down at him. “Ain’t that the truth?”

  “Will you be staying here for a while?” Jack asked her before he could stop himself. She looked up at him, surprised at the first words he’d said to her during the long flight north.

  Samantha shook her head. “Just long enough to get Bear situated. I’ve got a flight to DC in a few days.”

  “We’ll be on the ground about ten minutes before you take off for Chicago,” Marvin informed him as he stepped from the galley. “Mitch will meet you two at Midway with our doctor, Jay Ross, and a full-time nurse we’ve hired to help out. They’ll get you back to Jaime’s house and see to anything he needs.”

  “I know JR,” Jack nodded. “He helped stitch me up a couple months back.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Marvin grinned. “Heard about that bout. Wish I’d been there to see it.”

  “The way my mood’s going, you’re likely to see another one real soon,” Jack muttered under his breath as he watched Samantha sit down next to her team of commandos, all of whom would be helping guard Carey and the ranch.

  The jet landed as the hot orange sun dipped low into the horizon. Jack held his breath and his tongue as the men disembarked, the medical staff helping Carey off the plane and into the waiting arms of his parents. Sure enough, the town sheriff and a handful of deputies waited at the airfield, their patrol cars surrounding the ranch SUVs that had the Wyatt logo emblazoned on their sides.

  “Bear owes me a hundred bucks,” Sam told Marvin with a wink as he got ready to disembark.

  “Sure thing,” Marvin replied easily. “I’ll update the running tally.” He glanced over his shoulder at Jack before he descended the stairs. “Jack, call if you need anything. I mean that.”

  “Will do,” he replied, thankful for Marvin’s efficiency. He didn’t tell him he already has his number memorized from all the updates he’d received from him on Jaime on his way down to Rio. “Thanks, Marv.”

  Samantha stopped beside Jack as she pulled her duffel strap over her shoulder.

  “Jack—” she began to say goodbye.

  He snagged her waist and held her close to him before she could say anything else. The press of their mouths tender at first, then intense and sublime before it morphed into painful. Because while he may have meant for it to be a gentle parting, the severance of their electric and powerful connection felt more like being ripped apart. Jack had unwittingly knit his soul to hers, and it seemed to him that leaving her would mean leaving a piece of himself with her forever, the hole substantive and altering. He would never quite be the same. Never quite.

  When he pulled back, Jack brushed her hair gently over her shoulder, his fingers trailing down her neck. Samantha looked up at him, dark eyes full of regret. He consoled himself that she might feel as wretched as he did right now.

  He was in love with this woman—this goddess, this killer, this exquisite, scarred beauty. But nothing was unconditional. He’d thought he could take anything she’d give him, anyway she could give it. He thought that he could wait for her and that he wouldn’t ask her for more than she was willing to give, but he’d been wrong.

  He’d been so very, very wrong on that score.

  “Non potrò mai smettere d’amarti,”9 he told her. “Al fine.”10

  “Isn’t it terrible?” Samantha murmured. “When love is not enough?” She ran gentle fingertips down his cheek before stepping away from him and disappearing down the steps and into the deep indigo twilight of the Texas evening sky.

  *

  December 6th—Early Evening

  The Wyatt Ranch, Texas

  S A M A N T H A

  “Please tell me those are hot toddies,” Carey said as Samantha stepped out onto the broad, whitewashed porch circling the ranch house, two mugs in hand.

  “You’re still all hopped up on painkillers,” she teased. “What do you need alcohol for? You’ll just pass out at the dinner table, and I know how you hate to miss out on a meal.”

  Carey put down his tablet before sipping his drink, making a face. “Hot cocoa?” he asked. “I don’t even get coffee? What am I, like ten?”

  “Hush, you ungrateful jerk,” Sam smiled as she sat down beside him on the porch swing. The sun had already set, washing the ranch lands in a deep cerulean dusk.

  “You’re meaner than my mama,” Carey replied, sighing contentedly as he sat back, absently rubbing at the chest bandage under his shirt. She noticed his color was back. He looked better than he had in days, much to her relief.

  They sat quietly, enjoying the cool evening air and listening to the sounds of the crickets and katydids calling out to each other in the fields. Inside, Aunt Hannah was making dinner with Marvin. She’d turned on the stereo, and Sam could hear George Strait and Johnny Cash playing as she and Marv chatted.

  “You went out today?” Carey asked after a while.

  “Yep,” she replied, sipping her coffee. “The guys have secured the perimeter with motion-sensor alarms and cameras rigged all over the place. Did a good job.”

  “Haven’t seen many of ’em. Where you got them hiding?”

  “They’re dressed like the hands,” she replied, “And blending in pretty good.” Sam smiled to herself. “Hell, I think most of ’em are in hog heaven, getting to live out some of their cowboy fantasies. Next thing you know, they’ll be handing in their semiautomatics for six-shooters.”

  Carey chuckled at that. “Mama must be having a field day trying to feed all of them.”

  “Keeps her from fussing too much over you, doesn’t it?” Sam replied, slanting him a look.

  Carey grinned back at her, pinching her arm. “You sly witch. I was wondering why she wasn’t driving me crazier than a squirrel in a cage.”

  “Let it never be said I don’t take care of you, Carrick Nelson,” Samantha replied with a wink.

  “Much obliged,” he chuckled, glancing back down at his tablet.

  “What are you reading?” she asked, enjoying the gentle breeze that brushed past them along with a teasing waft of Aunt Hannah’s cooking.

  “Just an update from the guys,” Carey told her. “Wes is eager to get out of Rio now that the riots have died down. Talon and Rush will be here by tomorrow night. Michaelson and Henri are heading back to London to help Ian track down leads on Lightner, and the rest of the guys are either on new assignments or heading back home to Chicago.”

  “Talon and Rush could probably use some time off after this last one,” Sam commented. “I’m gonna need those boys fresh for whatever comes next.”

  “Sammy, running around a ranch and eating my mama’s home-cooked meals is as close to vacationing as those boys get,” Carey commented, turning off the tablet and setting it aside.

  Sam smiled, knowing Rush and Talon’s loyalty precluded their need for any kind of R&R. In some bizarre way, she suspected they felt a little responsible for what had happened in Rio, unable to fully protect either of them, though they had no reason to feel that way. She figured they’d be eager to arrive, just see with their own eyes that she and Carey were fine.

  “They’re coming into Austin on the NBS jet with Wes. Marvin’ll send one of the hands out to pick them up,” Carey told her.

  “Let’s set the boys up in the main house with us, then,” she adde
d, looking over her shoulder into the picture windows facing the kitchen. Marvin stood laughing with Aunt Hannah as he helped her prep the trout for the evening’s dinner.

  “Those two are getting thick as thieves.”

  “God help us,” Carey laughed, following her gaze. “She’s probably telling him all our secrets. Like he needed more help figuring out how to manage us.”

  “I ain’t scared,” she drawled, her Texan accent stronger after a couple days running around with the hands and talking with her Uncle Grant and Aunt Hannah. “You’re the one about get Marv full time,” Sam smirked. “Between him, your mama, the nurse and your daily doctor’s visits, you’re fixing to get all henpecked to hell.”

  Carey turned to her, his brows raised. “You’re not taking Marv with you to DC?”

  Sam shook her head. “You need the help more than I do with the business meetings that I won’t be able to teleconference into. I’ll be tied up all day at the Pentagon and on the Hill.”

  “Then at least take Rush and Talon with you.”

  “Nah,” Sam replied, sitting back against the swing. “They need a break, and I want them here with you and the family. It’ll be a fast couple days. Last thing I need is to be worried about y’all while I’m out. Besides,” she continued, cutting Carey’s argument off at the pass, “I’ll have a couple guys with me on the trip. Don’t worry.”

  “How am I not supposed to worry?” Carey asked with furrowed brow. “We don’t know where the hell Lightner is, and Marvin knows our system got hacked.”

  “Only a handful of people will know where I am,” she answered. “Don’t go looking for more trouble than we’ve already got, Bear. Besides, you’ve got bigger problems to sort out. You tell Willa yet what happened?” she asked, referring to Carey’s girlfriend and one of her closest friends in Chicago.

  Carey groaned, rubbing a hand down his face. “Shit, she’s gonna kill me dead once she finds out.”

  “You called her yet?”

  “No,” he replied with a wince. “When I came to at the hospital, I texted her. Told her I was on a mission and had to go dark a few days.”

  “She’s gonna go apeshit,” Sam predicted.

  “Christ, I’m more afraid of what she’ll do than I am of Lightner coming back for a second try.”

  “You oughtta be,” Sam chuckled. “Just give her a couple days to cool off, and find a backfill at the shelter to cover her. She can come down here for a bit—keep you company.”

  “Willa at the ranch?” Carey smirked. “That’s gonna be a sight to see.”

  “Between her and your mama, you’ll be so glad I left Rush and Talon with you,” Sam grinned.

  Carey chuckled, teeth gleaming in the darkness.

  Samantha gazed up at the stars dotting the indigo dusk, her eyes tracing the low-hanging drifts of spindly, dove-colored clouds. She let loose a long, low exhale, her eyes closing.

  “You ready to talk about it?” he asked after a moment of quiet.

  Sam nudged her toe against the porch boards, rocking the swing gently. “Which part?”

  “Whichever part you feel like you can tell me about,” Carey replied, his big hand finding hers on the swing, giving her a gentle squeeze. “Wes came to see me before we left.”

  Sam heaved a sigh. “He’s persistent. I’ll give him that.”

  “He said your daddy tried to pay him off with the Reuters gig.”

  Sam smiled in spite of herself. She’d have been furious years ago, but that all seemed so far away now. “Sounds like Daddy.”

  “He also said he left you like he did to make sure you’d hate him enough to let him go,” Carey continued.

  Sam rocked them gently, listening to the crickets and the mellow refrain of music from the kitchen.

  “I think I knew that,” she admitted after a time. “I think I always knew he did it that way to make it so I’d never look back.”

  “Don’t think he’s done chasing after you, Sammy,” Carey observed. “He thinks it’s divine intervention: you two running into each other like that the night everything went down.”

  Sam shrugged, suspecting he was right on both counts. She just hadn’t decided what to do about it yet. Between securing the ranch, figuring out what to do about Nazar and Lightner, and trying not to think about Jack, thoughts of Wes had barely teased the edges of her consciousness. The old wound was there, that familiar ache, but she’d lived with that particular regret so long, it was almost routine.

  Habitual hurts, she mused. She had so many; it was getting difficult to keep track of them all. Her thoughts turned to Jack. She wondered when the sear of their demise would burn just a little less, the pain of it a little less acute.

  Sam let her head fall back against the swing as she closed her eyes again. “Jack and I are over.”

  She could feel Carey’s startled gaze on her as she kept her eyes on the pasture. “When the heck did that happen?”

  “Before Rio, during—” she shrugged, allowing a moment of weariness to show through. “It just became glaringly clear to both of us that it wasn’t working.”

  Carey squeezed her hand. “You alright, Sammy girl?”

  “I will be,” she assured him, squeezing his hand back as they swung quietly in the dark of their childhood home.

  Chapter 9

  December 1999

  Kosovo, Balkan Peninsula

  W E S L E Y

  “I’ve got…” Wes counted out the wrinkled and dirty bills in his hand. “Two hundred and thirteen US dollars. It’s yours if you can get me to the border of Montenegro. Please.” He stared at the embattled Albanian truck driver. The old guy considered him for a moment, inhaling from his hand-rolled cigarette, the smoke curling around his face in the freezing night air.

  “You are like lost American boy,” the man muttered in heavily-accented English. “Your NATO is here. Go ask them for help.”

  “They’ve shut down the airport,” Wes explained, glancing back at the NATO forces herding refugees and the displaced from the terminals while they took over ground control and brought in air support. Prishtina, Kosovo’s capital and largest city was now being shelled by mortar fire from Yugoslav and Serbian forces. Overrun by widespread violence, people fled for their lives and were forced from their homes by Milošević’s military and Serbian police. Wes had been all over the country for months reporting on the violence and ethnic cleansing. And the one week he desperately needed to get out, all doors swung shut.

  “Please,” he beseeched. “Sir, I’m begging you—I have to get out of Kosovo tonight. Please—”

  “I have full cargo,” the man shook his head. “And if I have room, American boy, I would help my people first.” He took a final drag from his cigarette, flicking it into the dirty snow before swinging his body up into the old supply truck. “Paç fat!”11 the old man shouted with a wheezy laugh as he rolled up his window on Wes in the snow bank.

  Wes’s heart sank as he watched the truck disappear into the freezing cold night. The airport had been shut down a couple hours earlier; all non-military flights in and out of Prishtina were halted as NATO prepared to mount a fresh offensive against Yugoslav forces. Cars were being stopped and searched at every major artery by Serbians looking for ethnic Albanians, and the train stations had basically become Milošević’s private cattle cars for exiling non-Serbs to Macedonia and other neighboring nations.

  Wes was dirty, tired, hungry, and so goddamn heartbroken at the realization he wouldn’t be able to get to Sammy, he nearly dropped his rucksack in the snow and sat down in defeat. He’d spent the last week trying desperately to find a way out of Kosovo. The irony was particularly vicious considering he’d deliberately stayed in the mix for the better part of seven months, capturing horrific shots of the ethnic violence; trying to do justice to the stories from the hundreds of thousands who had become homeless and lost in the war-ravaged country.

  Sammy would be in Paris by now, waiting for him. After months of not seeing each other, he
was dying for her. All their relationship had to survive on the past year was a handful of hasty, breathless calls and brief emails whenever he could get to the foreign press offices. Hopelessness gnawed at him, his presence of mind already shaky; the volatility that he’d been immersed in day-in and day-out eating away at his sense of self, at his belief the world was populated with inherently-good and decent people. He needed Sammy. Needed her desperately to feel alright again; her presence in his heart just about the only link he had to home anymore.

  “Fuck!” he shouted into the winter air. “Think. Think!” Wes yanked off his wool cap and ran his hands through his hair in frustration. He paced in the snow, first left, then right, thinking of what to do, how to get out. A row of armored vehicles passed alarmingly close to him, snapping him out of his panic as he realized he was exposed, defenseless in the snow drifts that were piling up around the city. He snatched up his rucksack and camera bag, cramming his wool cap back on his head as he stalked back toward the city.

  A dozen or so foreign press agents had set up a makeshift office near the commercial center of Micros. Wes found himself trudging his way there, his jeans frozen and his boots wet, unable to think of anything other than Sammy.

  Martin Perry, a freelancer from Australia greeted him with surprise on his face. “Mate—what the hell are you doing back here, hey?” he asked, scratching his beard. “Thought you were getting out.”

  “Me too,” Wes muttered, pulling off his wet hat and shaking his hair out. He’d let it grow out the past few months. “Fuckin’ NATO shut down the airport tonight of all nights. Can’t get a car out either. You got any contacts?” he asked, glancing around the messy, spare office. He moved toward a desk across the room, pulling off his damp coat as he sat down.