Page 84 of Backlash

“And Noah still thinks you had something to do with the missing contraband?” she guesses. “Why didn’t he believe you?”

“We used to play poker. There’s not much else to do at night in the desert. According to Noah, I have a tell when I bluff,” I admit to her with a bemused grin. She’s not going to find this funny. “He swears I was bluffing to the investigation unit.”

“And Jack and Luca, what do they think?” There’s a softness in her voice that says she already knows the answer. It’s not accusatory or judgmental. She’s giving me a choice. I can lie to her and she won’t push it, but I have no doubt I’ll lose her. Or I can tell her the truth and probably lose her anyway. There’s no way to win.

I turn my head away from her just long enough to reconsider what I’m about to say. In the end, it’s not really a choice. “They know I was lying, Lucky.”

“What did you do?” she asks, her words turning to stone.

“We had a couple days before anyone reached us. I waited until the others were asleep and I was on watch and I hid it.”

“You hid…the guns?”

“I knew we were facing discharge. I knew no one was going to give two shits what happened to us.” I suck my lower lip into my teeth, wondering if I made the wrong call. It’s not the first time I’ve considered that.

“How could you do that?”

I expected this response. It’s not as though I could ask her to look past my crimes. “For a long time, it didn’t seem to matter. I had nothing to lose. Then Sutton showed up on my door and everything changed.”

“You had a family,” she says distantly. “What about Francie? Does she know?”

“I told myself I was doing it for her—that I’d be able to take care of her—” there’s something thick swelling in my throat that makes it hard to speak “—like she took care of me. But she didn’t want anything to do with me.”

“What?” Adair shakes her head like she can’t believe this. “She loves you like a son.”

“Maybe she did,” I say, “but when I showed trying to buy her a new place, get her a new car, she had a lot of questions.”

Adair sighs and crosses her arms over her chest. “Let me guess. You didn’t answer her questions.”

“What was I going to tell her? I told her I got discharged because my commander was a piece of dirt and that they gave me my enlistment bonus anyway.”

“An enlistment bonus doesn’t buy you an Aston Martin and a penthouse,” Adair says dryly. “She knew that.”

“Neither did one shipment of small arms. Francie might have believed me. She told me to keep the money and set myself up. She didn’t expect me to go back to the Middle East. I think that’s what tipped her off that there was more to this story.”

“You went back?” She seems genuinely shocked.

“I’ve been all over the world for the last three years. Jack and Luca, too. We had our own little operation. With Luca’s connections it was easy to stay under the radar. Plus, we had a plan. Once we hit a certain amount, we’d pull out, go in our own directions, and let the chips fall where they may.”

“But they’re all here,” she says, blinking, “so that means you’re still doing whatever you were doing.”

“Not exactly. Jack wanted to open a blues bar. Always has. Luca tends to come and go as he pleases in our lives. We’re all doing our own things now except one last mission.”

“What on earth could you be doing in Nashville?”

It’s a charmingly naïve thing to say. If Adair knew half the organized criminal activity that went on down the street from her privileged enclave, she’d never see the city the same way. “I had a list,” I tell her, realizing the only chance I have at keeping her is to be painfully honest. It’s the only way to prove to her that I’m all in.

“What kind of list?” She sits back on her heels, shifting the smallest bit away from me. Maybe it’s a coincidence. I doubt it.

“A blacklist of people who ruined my life,” I confess. “A list of people I wanted to hurt, and every name on that list lived in Tennessee.”

There’s a pause so heavy I swear it brings the night crashing down on us. Maybe I hadn’t noticed the sky fading to midnight blue, or the stars coming out overhead. Or maybe darkness finally caught up with me. She doesn’t speak. She only studies me, her face as blank as fresh paper. When she finally opens her mouth, her voice hitches on her question. “Was I on that list?”

I tell myself it’s the only way to keep her, but I know it’s not true. There’s nothing I can say that won’t cost me Adair MacLaine’s love, so I choose the path I should have taken years ago. “You were on the very top of it.”

21

Sterling