The Closer Read online

  Long, wavy dark brown hair framed a face that was heart-shaped but lean, emphasizing her high cheekbones and lush mouth. Her skin was luminous, practically glowing with good health and vitality. It looked soft, touchable. Her eyes were large, an unusual misty gray and surrounded by thick, sooty lashes. Hidden humor lurked in that gaze, as though she was privy to some private joke. She was smiling, almost shyly, and there was something about that hint of vulnerability that made her especially attractive. She wasn’t merely beautiful or pretty, though those words certainly fit. She was...lovely.

  And hot.

  Oddly shaken, Griff handed the photo back to the office manager and shook his head. “She doesn’t look familiar, sorry.”

  Juan Carlos swore hotly under his breath. “Damn them. This isn’t funny anymore. They can’t keep playing the same joke on every new agent. It’s not professional.”

  Joke? What joke? Confused, Griff frowned. “Come again?”

  Juan Carlos straightened, then seemed to give himself a little shake. “No worries, Major Wicklow, you’ll recognize her soon enough,” the little man said grimly. He gathered up a sheaf of papers from his desk, then stood and swiftly retreated before Griff could press him for further clarification.

  Rather than dwell on the bizarre exchange, Griff shook it off. After all, he had a strategy to plan...and a very expensive bra to protect.

  * * *

  PAYNE WAITED UNTIL he was certain Griff was out of earshot and then turned to face the other two. He arched a questioning brow. “First impressions?”

  “I don’t think we could have matched him up to a better first assignment,” Guy said, dropping back into his chair. “If anyone needs to be able to find the humor in a situation, it’s him.”

  Jamie nodded thoughtfully. “I agree. Granted, he hasn’t had a lot to laugh about of late, but by all accounts he’s always been rather...serious.”

  Thanks to Charlie, their female hacker extraordinaire, they knew more about Griff than he’d no doubt be comfortable with. School records showed a well-rounded, bright, promising athlete until the seventh grade. Beyond that, various counselors and teachers had noted a distinct withdrawal from social clubs, sports and the like. By all accounts, Griffin had abandoned normal school-age pursuits and started working various odd jobs. He cut grass, hauled hay, raked leaves, bagged groceries, walked dogs, anything that would net him a cash return for his services. And the impetus that had caused this change?

  His father had left.

  As the only “man” left in the house, amateur analysis suggested that he’d prematurely stepped up to try to fill his father’s role and had developed an early sense of obligation and duty. No doubt that’s what had appealed to him about the military, where the lines were clearly drawn and order was law. He’d earned an ROTC scholarship, graduated at the top of his class and quickly moved onto Ranger School. He’d excelled in the military, had been routinely given difficult assignments because he’d proven time and time again that he could see them through and, as a result, had been given the nickname “the Closer.”

  A quick glance at his financials had revealed that, in addition to buying the house his mother and sister currently lived in, regular monthly transfers had been deposited into his mother’s account. Both his mother and sister had obtained their nursing licenses and worked for a small home-health company in Chapel Crossing, just outside the city. Payne would be willing to bet that Griff had paid for that, as well.

  “He seems to have recovered well from the surgery,” Guy remarked.

  “He does,” Payne agreed. “Dr. Jackson cleared him for work without any restrictions, so I think the physical toll is past him.” In addition to Griff’s own doctor, Payne had insisted that theirs take a look at him, as well. Better safe than sorry, right?

  Jamie shot him a look. “What about his emotional health? You think his head is on straight?”

  Payne hesitated. “I think it’s on straight enough to do the job. I think he’s struggling with the sudden, unwanted relationship with his half brother.”

  Guy grunted knowingly and his eyes widened. “That had to have raked up some shit. Go seventeen years without hearing a peep from his father and then a phone call out of the blue from the man, asking him to give up a kidney for the son he actually raised?” He grimaced significantly. “That would screw with any guy’s head.”

  “Yeah, but it wasn’t the kid’s fault, was it?” Jamie added. “Griff’s dad was the bastard, not the boy.”

  “And the kid was dying,” Guy said. “It wasn’t like Griff had a choice.”

  True enough, Payne supposed, but it couldn’t have made the ordeal any less difficult.

  And no doubt figuring out where to go from here was going to take serious thought and consideration. Even from the outside looking in, the family dynamics were a nightmare. Even if Griff decided that he wanted to get to know his little brother, how would his mother and sister feel about it? Would they approve? Or would it be too painful for them? He didn’t envy Griff, that was for damn sure.

  “Are we certain Jessalyn Rossi is going with him?” Jamie asked.

  “Last I heard,” Payne told him. “She wasn’t thrilled with the idea, but I gather her father is a bit of a recluse and her siblings no longer have anything to do with the family business. It’s her or no one and, evidently, letting someone else accompany the bra isn’t an option either.”

  “What do we know about her?”

  Payne chuckled. “She’s hell on wheels. Literally. She works for the company and by all accounts is a top-notch jeweler.” He hesitated. “In addition to that job, she moonlights as a mechanic and dabbles in amateur stock-car racing. She’s doing quite well this season,” he added mildly.

  Both Guy and Jamie swiveled to look at him, their faces identical masks of shock.

  “Seriously?” they echoed.

  Payne nodded, enjoying their expressions.

  “Well, that should certainly make things...interesting,” Guy remarked.

  “Something needs to,” Jamie remarked, tossing a jelly bean into his mouth. “This case seems pretty cut-and-dried.” He shot them a sardonic smile. “In other words, boring.”

  Payne smiled but wasn’t convinced. He had an odd feeling about this assignment—a premonition of...something he couldn’t seem to shake—and intuition told him there was more to this mission than met the eye.

  He just hoped Griffin Wicklow was ready for it.

  2

  JESSALYN ROSSI WIPED her hands, stuffed a grease rag into the pocket of her coveralls, then dropped the hood into place with a soft click. She turned to the car’s anxious owner. “It’s the water pump, Walter,” she told the older man. “You know I’d fix it for you if I had time, but I’ve got to go to New York for a few days for Dad.” A shudder of dread rippled through her middle.

  Hell would undoubtedly be a more pleasant destination.

  She didn’t mind the city, per se, but spending any length of time around stick-thin, surgically enhanced lingerie models wasn’t her idea of fun. She had enough body-image issues, thank you very much. She didn’t need to compound them by being made to feel like a gluttonous hog with a sugar dependency. If it had been up to her, she and her “child-bearing hips,” as one kind but misguided soul had once told her, would stay here.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t up to her.

  Walter’s frown deepened, but he nodded nonetheless. A senior citizen on a fixed income, she was sure the older gentleman would have preferred that she fix his car because he knew she’d be willing to take a basket of garden vegetables in exchange for parts and labor.

  “Take it to Shorty Greene and tell him I sent you.” She grinned at him. “I know for a fact that the deer got into his tomatoes and he’s running short.” And she would call Shorty and promise to make up the difference. So wha
t if he chided her for being such a soft touch, telling her that the rest of the full-time mechanics in Shadow’s Gap would thank her not to accept produce in lieu of cash. It was a refrain she’d heard often enough before from her old mentor.

  Shorty Greene, one of her father’s oldest friends, had taught her everything she knew about cars. While nothing gave her as much pleasure as her jewelry, casting the perfect set and embellishing it with beautiful things, being able to rebuild a motor came pretty damn close. Having spent every summer from the time she was six to sixteen with Shorty and his late wife, Sybil, while her parents were at various trade and gem shows, Jess had found she liked being in the garage with Shorty more than being in the kitchen with Sybil. She preferred the smell of motor oil to cooking oil and liked the weight of a tool in her hand.

  It had all started innocently enough, by her merely handing Shorty the appropriate tools, but it hadn’t taken long until she’d wanted to know how the tools worked. Figuring out why a car wouldn’t run properly quickly became a mystery she had to solve and once she’d solved it, she reveled in fixing it, setting things right. Listening to a motor catch with the first turn of the ignition, then hearing the engine purr. She smiled, remembering.

  Music to her ears.

  Naturally, her mother, who’d sadly lost her battle with cancer when Jess was seventeen, hadn’t approved of a teenage daughter with grease under her nails. But she’d later revealed that she admired the fact that Jess hadn’t let her gender get in the way of doing something she loved. After all, it was one thing to tell a kid they could do whatever they wanted and then discourage them when they chose something not deemed “proper.”

  This was the argument Jess had used when she’d wanted to start racing, as well. Not surprisingly, it had come in very handy.

  Walter was too proud to look relieved for more than half a second, but his shoulders relaxed and a smile broke across his weathered, lined face. “Well, you know I’ve got plenty of tomatoes,” he told her.

  She inwardly snorted. He had plenty of everything. His green thumb was positively legendary in Shadow’s Gap. “I’ll give Shorty a ring and let him know you’re coming. You don’t want to drive any farther than his place, though, Walter,” she warned. “If the car overheats too much, you’ll crack a head and then you’ll really be in trouble.”

  “I’ll go on over there now,” he said. “Thanks, Jess.” His brow wrinkled once more and he shot her a look. “You’re going to New York?” he said. “Today?”

  Jessalyn’s cheeks puffed as she exhaled noisily. “Unfortunately, yes.”

  “Will you be back in time for the race on Saturday?”

  No, dammit. She’d still be babysitting the bra. “I’m afraid not.”

  He grunted, his face falling into a moue of regret. “That’s a shame. I think you could have given Lane Johnson another run for his money.”

  She did, too. Lane Johnson was a cocky, loudmouthed blowhard with more luck than skill and a sickening following of track whores—not to be confused with crack whores, though they could be easily mistaken for those as well—who stroked his giant ego, among other things, Jess thought with a shiver of disgust. They contributed to his misguided perception that he was, first, God’s gift to women, and second, almost on par with Dale Earnhardt Jr. behind the wheel.

  He was neither.

  Gallingly, while she’d taken plenty of heat for being a “woman driver” when she’d first started racing, she’d quickly won the respect of the majority of her fellow drivers. There were always going to be a few with the old-school boys’ club mentality—she’d be foolish to think otherwise—but of them, Lane was definitely the loudest. She’d thought beating him would shut him up, but instead he’d upped the trash talking and told everyone that he was going to “put her in her place” the next time they shared asphalt.

  That should have been this weekend, but she hadn’t been able to get either of her siblings to accompany the damn bra, so now it was going to look as though he’d scared her away.

  As if.

  It made her blood boil.

  Jess had always been proud of her Rossi heritage and took a keen sense of pleasure from being a part of the family business. She was a fourth-generation jeweler and thanks to inherent talent and creativity, the Rossi name was synonymous with excellence. Unfortunately, with the exception of her father, she was the last of the family with any interest in continuing the traditional trade. Her younger brother, Sean, played guitar for a popular country-music band and traveled all the time, and her even younger sister, Bethany, was a professional student, happy with higher education and her job at the Gap. Neither of them were likely to change their minds.

  Which just left her.

  To complicate matters, her father had developed agoraphobia after the death of her mother. It had begun gradually. At first, he simply refused to travel. He’d said that his wife had always been his companion and he couldn’t face going without her. Because her parents had genuinely been soul mates, Jess had understood and hadn’t pushed him, assuming that it would only be temporary, that, in time, he’d be able to move forward.

  She couldn’t have anticipated how wrong she’d be.

  Citing the need to “be closer to work,” the second her new home, a tree house, was finished, her father had sold the family house in the country and finished an apartment above the store. Initially, Jess had thought this would be a good idea. The house was still a painful reminder of her mother, being in town would keep him from being lonely, etcetera. But it was when the apartment was complete that she really began to notice a difference.

  Frank Rossi loved Shadow’s Gap and the town square, where their business had stood for the past hundred years. He routinely ate at the diner next door and visited the other business owners around their little block. He’d played chess at the five-and-dime and shopped for all his clothes at Billy Walter’s, an upscale men’s store. He not only knew every proprietor, he knew their families, as well. He’d been social.

  But shortly after moving into the apartment above the store, he’d started manufacturing reasons not to go out. He’d have the diner deliver his meals and he stopped visiting the other stores. He’d stand at the front door and look out, but when Jess had casually suggested that he go see if Billy had any new ties in stock, he’d shake his head and retreat to the backroom.

  She’d begun to seriously worry at that point, but she hadn’t realized how dire the situation had become until she’d discovered that Paula, one of their part-time workers, had been doing his grocery shopping for him. She’d also gone to the post office for him, picked up his prescriptions and generally did anything that would require a trip outside the shop.

  At that point, Jess had confronted her father and had tried to get him to talk to a therapist, but her concern had been met with an uncharacteristic angry outburst and an order to mind her own business. He was fine, he insisted, though it was obvious that he wasn’t, that he’d become a prisoner in his own space. He’d started spending an inordinate amount of time on the internet, his only window to the outside world.

  It was then that Jess had started traveling for him—it would be good for her, he’d said—and, while most of the people her father had done business with over the years didn’t think too much about the fact that he’d stopped doing the legwork, there were a few who did find it odd. One of those, a representative of the Montwheeler Diamond Company, made an unannounced visit to the store to share the news that Rossi’s had made the final cut for the Clandestine design. When the man had asked her father to go out to celebrate and her father had declined, it was then that the older Rossi had become labeled a “recluse.”

  Interestingly enough, it was the “recluse” part that would seal his ultimate nomination for the Clandestine bra. Everyone assumed that her dad had retreated so far into his work that the outside world had become a distraction he co
uldn’t afford and wouldn’t indulge. It had given him a certain mystique that the press had instantly loved and capitalized on.

  Their web hits had tripled and orders were pouring in faster than they could fill them. Even her own signature line, If It Crawls, featuring bejeweled insects and bugs, had seen a significant bump in sales.

  There was no doubt that the bra, much as it pained her to admit it, was already netting the results her father had expected. And it hadn’t even had The Big Reveal yet. Once it was covering the breasts of one of the world’s sexiest supermodels, the buzz would really get going. And that was good for business.

  In today’s lagging economy, there wasn’t a single company that wasn’t affected in some way, theirs included. High-end jewelry was a luxury item and when money got as tight as it was now, fewer and fewer people had the ready cash to splurge on something like fine jewelry. They’d made good investments and her father had always been a big believer in gold, but they’d certainly had to tap into their reserves over the past couple years.

  The Clandestine bra would change that.

  And really, when one considered what was to gain, she really didn’t have any business being put out over missing a race, one that she only wanted to run in order to prove a point.

  With a quick glance at the clock, Jess sighed and closed up her garage, then made the quick walk through the woods to her place. She’d already packed, but still needed to shower and change. The security agent hired by Montwheeler was set to arrive at the shop at three to collect both her and the bra, and she’d promised her father she wouldn’t be late.

  If she intended to keep that promise, she’d better get a move on. She mounted the steps to her tree house—an eleven-hundred-square-foot architectural wonder of reclaimed wood and leaded glass—and leaped lightly over her cat, Pita (short for pain in the ass), who liked to lie on the next-to-last step, solely in order to better trip someone, Jess believed. Shorty had promised to come out and feed her while she was gone.