“Life is full of little oddities,” Jake said after performing the introductions. He invited Ian to join him at the table where he kept a stack of sketchpads and pulled one free.
He showed Ian the sketch of some chainmail he’d drawn after the man’s last visit, plus some of the wire gauge he had on hand to determine the size and shape he might want. As promised, it only took about five minutes.
Jake didn’t miss how, surreptitiously, Beryl and Ian kept looking at each other. Beryl seemed intrigued; Ian looked disturbed.
Ian said he was interested in going ahead with the work, but needed to think about some of the details. He promised tocome back in a few days to finalize the project and make a down payment for the materials.
Jake let him out through the front door and locked up, eager to return to his workshop and his date, Beryl.
“Are you ready to go?”
“Yes. Do you really forgive me for being a big snoop?”
“Of course. If you didn’t find it, I’d have never known it was there. Now I know where to hide my valuables.”
They laughed and exited his shop out the back door, where his truck was parked in the alley behind his store.
“Do you want to follow me in your car? Or I could just drive you back after dinner.”
“You can drive me back after dinner,” Beryl said with a smile.
Jake’s heart flipped over in his chest at the lovely shape of her mouth.
Darkfall left Jake’s shop like his butt was on fire because meeting Beryl had been so surprising. Not in a love interest sort of way, because clearly Jake and Beryl had feelings for each other, but the redheaddidlook remarkably like Olivine.
His younger sister had the same raven-black hair as his brother, Onyx, and both of their parents. Well, Obsidian did have a few red glints sometimes, but only if he spent an extended period of time in the sun.
However, his surprise didn’t excuse what he’d almost revealed. What a rookie mistake, blurting out something so personal as the fact that Beryl looked like his sister. What was wrong with him? He had never outed a member of his family while on a mission, not even accidentally. Not ever.
He blamed his near lapse on the greater shock of seeing Luca’s stash out in the open with Beryl snooping through it. The hidden compartment was standard operating procedure for members of the Alpha-Prime Command Secret Service. They were all trained to set one up while on long mission protocols in order to hide their alien identity papers, gadgets and notes.
Beryl had apparently rummaged through the hidey-hole, nabbing Luca’s mission notebook, but obviously she didn’t know what it was. It sure seemed to Darkfall like Jake had no earthly idea that the stash was his. Or that heshouldknow what all those things were.
The world was upside down.
Despite the surprise of meeting Beryl, and the fact she’d been snooping, she seemed sweet. Darkfall liked her for Luca. It was too bad that his friend would probably never leave his clandestine job for her. Then again, if Luca never remembered who he was, maybe this would be a great life for him, post-clandestine career.
The logical step, of course, was for Darkfall to break into Dark Matter Metal & Leather to retrieve Luca’s stash. He needed to read his friend’s notes on his mission in Alienn before he could figure out what his next move had to be.
Maybe Darkfall could decode his operation notes and figure out what had happened to Luca and why he’d lost his memories. Best-case scenario, he could help his best friend recall his secret life before coming to Earth. Worst-case…well, he wouldn’t think about that.
Skeeter Bite Sheriff Wyatt Campbell leaned back in his office chair with a strong temptation to pop his heels up on top ofhis desk and cross his legs. He resisted the temptation, because he knew if he did that, he’d be asleep in ten seconds.
While his children were older now—not the babies who once kept his sleep level at near zero for months—he didn’t get nearly as much shuteye as he should for lots of reasons.
He loved his twins. He really loved his wife, Valene. His life was dang near perfect. Lack of sleep was a small price to pay.
It was why he felt so strongly about Jake Jones losing his memory, and why he’d quietly kept up the investigation into what had happened to him. Not because he’d been the responding officer when the bro van found Jake in the road unconscious, but because he couldn’t fathom a worse fate than losing a lifetime of memories.
It was a fate he might have shared if he hadn’t discovered he was part Alpha. When he and everyone else thought he was a full human, Wyatt faced losing a year’s worth of time with Valene when they’d been dating.
Jakewasa human, though. Beryl being an Earther made any long-term relationship between them problematic. Still, that part was not his business, even if he could commiserate.
Jake seemed to be taking the loss of his memories better than Wyatt would have.
