•••
Impersonating his dead best friend in an e-mail to his sister was pretty low. And John was feeling guilty, even if it was for Brittany’s own good. But what else could he have done? He had to stop her, and God knew—he sure as hell did—the girl didn’t take no for an answer.
Case in point, the e-mail that had just come through on the account that he should have deleted on the phone that he should have tossed. But he’d known she would respond, and Kate had routed the account through a special IP address and network. It looked like a popular e-mail account, but that was just a mask for whatever Kate had cooked up to make it impossible—or as close to impossible as possible—to trace.
He’d told Brittany in the note not to contact him, but what had she done? Contacted him, of course. He wasn’t surprised she’d ignored him. He was more surprised that it had taken her more than a day to do so.
He stared at the envelope button for a moment. He should probably just delete it. God knew he felt guilty enough already for what he’d done, and she had a talent for making him feel like an asshole, but like some kind of masochist, he hit the button.
The message took a second to load. There was an attachment. A few moments later he was staring at the picture of him, Brand, Miggy, and Tex that had been plastered all over the news. There was a note that went along with it:If this is Brandon, tell me when and where this picture was taken.
She was like a damned pit bull. Couldn’t she let something go just once? He was trying to help her, for shit’s sake.
John didn’t hesitate. Jaw clamped, he furiously banged out a response on the keypad.
Only then did he delete the account and toss the phone.
•••
Brittany paled as she read the response:Fourth of July five years ago at Imperial Beach in San Diego, a few blocks from the beach house.
Oh my God.
She would have sunk to the couch if she hadn’t already been sitting on it. She stared at the laptop screen in disbelief. She’d sent the e-mail while watching a hockey movie on TV—trying to get in the spirit of the second date that she’d agreed to go on next week (Mick had called to check on her that morning)—and hadn’t even had a chance to set it aside before the message came through. Could it really be Brandon? Was her brother alive?
She felt tears push up her throat to sting behind hereyes. One of the hardest things about losing her brother had been knowing that he’d died when they’d barely been on speaking terms and that she would never have a chance to repair their relationship. But if he was alive...
There were only a handful of people who could have answered that question—especially so quickly—and most of them were in that picture. She looked at the four faces in the image. Something she rarely did for two reasons. First because the photo reminded her of the big blowup fight she’d had with Brandon. And second because, even after five years, the sight of John Donovan’s grinning, I’m-so-gorgeous face looking back at her could still make her chest—and cheeks—burn.
Five years ago had been the second-worst time of her then twenty-two-year-old life. The worst had been when her parents were killed, but she’d had Brandon then. Maybe that was why her first instinct had been to seek him out when life had handed her another big shit sandwich.
She and Brandon had been so close before the car “accident” that took their parents’ lives. Their entire family had been unusually close, perhaps because their father’s job in sales caused them to move around so much.
They’d all been in the car together when another driver slammed into them, sending their car head-on into an enormous concrete pillar of a highway overpass.
Their parents had died on impact. She and Brandon had been injured as well, but both had been able to tell the police exactly what had happened: the other driver had run the red light and barreled right into them at an extremely high speed.
When they learned from the police that the driver had been drunk and high on cocaine, it had seemed a slam-dunk case of vehicular homicide. Until they found out whom the driver was—or rather who his father was.
It was Brittany’s introduction to the horrible abuses ofdiplomatic immunity and government cover-ups. The driver was the twenty-two-year-old son of a Saudi “diplomat.” She never did find out exactly what the father did. The son had been pulled over multiple times for speeding, reckless driving, and drunk driving. Later she’d heard that he’d been accused of raping a girl he’d picked up at a bar. But the police had to let him go each time with—unbelievably—an apology.
But apparently being given a hall pass for killing her parents wasn’t enough. The public pressure to have his son sent back home or for Saudi Arabia to waive immunity angered the father. And he was important enough for the government—her government—to want to appease. Photos from the intersection suddenly materialized showing her father supposedly running the red light.
But far worse was what had come next. Brandon had reversed his statement and agreed with the government’s lies and doctored “evidence.”
With that she’d lost not just her parents, but her brother as well. At fifteen, she’d gone to live with her aunt and uncle in Baltimore, while the eighteen-year-old Brandon had joined the navy.
She hadn’t seen him in years when she’d shown up out of the blue five years ago in San Diego.
Despite all the horrible words exchanged between them after their parents’ death, when she’d lost her job, her first instinct had been to reach out to him.
But “lost her job” made it sound nice, when it was anything but. She’d been fired, discredited, and publicly humiliated after being accused of manufacturing “proof” for an article she’d written on backroom deals and corruption on Capitol Hill. Her “deep throat” had disappeared, and the documents were found to have originated on her computer. The circumstances surrounding her parents’ death were resurrected, and Brittany was madeto seem like a wacko spouting conspiracy theories or as someone with an ax to grind.
Maybe she did have a bit of an ax. But for the second time, she’d come up against the wrong people and paid the price.
She’d reached out to Brandon, but ironically, it had been his drop-dead-sexy friend who’d been her lifeline this time.
She’d never forget the first time she’d seen John Donovan. Not long after she’d arrived, he’d walked into the beach house he rented with her brother, dripping wet, half-covered in sand, carrying a surfboard under his arm and wearing nothing but a killer smile and faded low-slung board shorts, which perfectly accentuated the tanned, muscular torso above them.
