Page 23 of Grissom
Damn it, Grissom had put that uncertainty in her head. He was the problem here, not Tuesday. He needed to turn this around. He’d goofed up, again. If he could only get his brain to stop throwing him off the cliff of despair every time he had second thoughts. Being paranoid was exhausting.
His mind went back to his original realization:She’s just like me.Afraid to trust. Afraid to fall in love. No sooner had that epiphany swept over him when something in his head clicked. Tuesday Smart wasn’t the threat here, and neither was he. They were both fighting the same dragon: Emotional Trauma.
The weight of the world lifted off his shoulders. Something that felt a lot like his old confident self, surged to the surface of his psyche, as if it were fighting for air. He could breathe again. Okay then. Grissom reached his right hand across the table, the palm up and open in invitation. “Can you stay long enough to have dinner with us? I grill a pretty mean steak.” He shrugged both shoulders. “I mean, I am a guy, and that’s what us guys do.”
Talk about lame.
“Yes!” Tanner shrieked, bouncing his butt on the bench beside Tuesday. “Please, oh please, say yes. It’ll be our very first picnic in our brand-new house!”
“And I got Tonka trucks,” Luke proudly announced, as he climbed to his feet and squeezed her neck. Damned if the little guy didn’t press his sticky face into her cheek and plant a sloppy, syrupy kiss on Tuesday.
Grissom’s eyes teared up. There he sat, looking at the woman who’d jumped at the chance to save his sons. Yet they weren’t worried Tuesday might hurt them. Not at all. They already knew she wouldn’t. If anything, they loved her because she’d loved them first. She might not have said the words, but she’d surely proved it. Over and over again. Just look at her. Sitting there with her arms full of—my boys.
He coughed, then closed his eyes. He couldn’t see anyway, not through the tears about to run down his face. That was when he felt it, Tuesday’s delicate hand in his palm, skin against skin, squeezing some of her special kind of warmth into him. His fingers circled hers carefully. Getting close to a woman again was a dangerous thing. He didn’t want to mess this up.
“Please say yes,” he begged, sounding a lot like Tanner. “I know we just ate, but stay long enough for me to fix dinner for you. It’s the least I can do.”Stay with me. With us. Please, just for one evening.
“I’d love to,” she replied.
Before he knew what he was saying, Grissom blurted, “That’s my girl.”
Tuesday winked at him, as if she really, truly was his girl.
Chapter Thirteen
It felt strange to be sitting beside Grissom again, in his truck, his boys jabbering on the rear bench seat behind them. It felt—domestic. Natural. As if Tuesday had traveled back in time to days when family meant familiarity and rules and acceptance and—love.
It felt like déjà vu had metaphorically reached across the universe and slapped the back of her head when he’d said what he’d said.“That’s my girl.”Her father’s words. Freddie’s words, too. Simple words of encouragement spoken by men from the generation before the plague of political correctness strangled the life out of every innocent little thing. Just because the all-knowing, anonymous“they”thought“they”knew better than everyone else. Comfort Tuesday hadn’t heard in so, so long, she hadn’t realized how much those words meant or how much she’d missed them. Fresh out of Grissom’s mouth, they’d tunneled into her heart.
Once again, he’d taken his boys to the restroom before they’d climbed back into his truck and hit the road. They’d just passed The TEAM’s property and were on their way from Cakes and Honey to the McCoy household, which was somewhere north of TEAM Headquarters. Striving to keep her heart locked up, she turned both shoulders toward Grissom and asked, “What exactly does The TEAM do?”
He shot a quick glance her way before looking back at the road. “We’re a group of mostly veterans trying to make a difference in the world. At least, that’s what I’m trying to do. Sometimes, we go into other countries to retrieve kidnapped victims or to take out HVTs, high-value targets. Alex has a groupin Southeast Asia that rescues children from the rampant human trafficking trade over there, another in Florida that deals with the same shitty business coming north out of Cuba and South America.”
Tuesday brought her left knee up on the seat and turned more fully toward Grissom. Making herself more comfortable, she rested her elbow on the console between them. “And Alex Stewart? I tried to find information on him, but he has no social networking sites. The only things I found were a couple old newspaper articles and some really slanderous press stories that don’t match the man I met.”
Grissom grunted. “Yeah, he hates reporters. Won’t give interviews, not even to the big-shot national agencies. They’re all owned by billionaires with political agendas anyway, and covert surveillance companies don’t do politics and they don’t advertise. At least, they shouldn’t. You know, covert means invisible. So yeah, he keeps a low profile.”
“Hmm. Then I guess he wouldn’t consider letting me do a photo shoot of you guys and your families.”
That brought Grissom’s full attention to her. “That why you’re here this morning?” he asked, his voice taut. “To do a photo shoot or… or did Alex tell you it was okay?”
“Not yet.” Tuesday put her hand on his forearm. “Like I said, I guess he wouldn’t even consider it, would he?”
“Oh, yeah. You did say that, huh?”
“But I did come here to ask Mr. Finnegan if I could.” Man, this guy was tense again. That muscular forearm felt like it was carved out of granite and pulsing molten lava instead of blood.
“Why would you want to?”
“The idea came to me at La Guardia when I saw Mark and Libby, that’s all, and” —she shrugged both shoulders— “I don’t know. They’re the perfect couple, and yet they’re both busy professionals and manage a large family. I guess because theyseem so much in love, I thought it’d be good to let the world see what I see. So here I am, still thinking it’s a great idea, but—”
“How do you know Mark and Libby?”
“I spent a day with them and the Stewarts after that shooting in Little Rock. Everlee was still in the hospital, and Heston and Shane were working on some kind of reports—”
“AARs. After action reports. Yeah, okay.”
“And I needed to thank Alex for believing in me when nobody else did. I tracked him down through Mr. Finnegan. Alex was so kind, and he listened to my version of everything that happened, so—”
