Christine Feehan - Conspiracy Game

“I know. I don’t say anything, but it’s damned difficult some days.” Jack tossed her on the bed, ending the subject because if they continued to talk about it he might cry like a baby. “Before I left this morning I cleared out a couple of the top drawers and there’s plenty of room in the closet. Make sure you take a good look at the spare bedroom so you can tell me how you want to fix it up for the baby.”

“I will.”

“And stay the hell out of the bathroom. I don’t want you near the tile saw.”

“Jack.” Briony traced the pattern on the cover, looking around her at all the bright packages. Her fingers crept up to her earlobe, stroked the fiery rubies, and slid to her throat. “You can’t order me around, no matter how charming you are.”

Pain swirled in the depths of his eyes for just a moment. She caught the surge of sorrow in his mind. He turned away from her to open the closet door. “I told you I wouldn’t be an easy man to live with.”

“What does that mean?” Briony asked, frowning, trying to grasp what he wasn’t saying to her. She sank down onto the edge of the bed. “I’m a grown woman, Jack.”

He glanced at her over his shoulder, rubbed his brow with the pad of his thumb, and sighed. “I’m a control freak, Bri. It’s one of the biggest reasons we live here, so far away from everyone. It’s why I mostly work alone. I go out on my own and I control the situation. If I work with a team, I run the team. It’s who I am.”

“That isn’t big news, Jack,” Briony pointed out. She pulled clothes from the packages and began removing tags. “It isn’t an excuse to take away my rights as an adult to make my own decisions. Control is an illusion anyway. No one can control another person.”

“I control what I can, and it helps to keep everyone safe.”

“You don’t trust yourself.”

“No. I realized a long time ago I don’t think or react like other people. Under the right circumstances, things could go wrong.”

Briony busied herself with putting clothes in the drawers, all the while trying to grasp what he was saying. Jebediah, Ken, and now even Jack were all warning her about something in Jack that even he feared. She turned to look at his face. Whatever it was, he was more afraid of it than he was of a sniper’s bullet.

“I don’t think you’d ever hurt me, Jack. Not ever. You don’t have it in you. Is that what you’re afraid of?”

He looked at her, something moving in his eyes. Pain? Sorrow? Haunting fear? She couldn’t read his emotion. “I don’t know,” he answered honestly, ashamed.

She went to him, framed his face with her hands. “I do. Remember Luther? He hit me with no problem. I made him angry and he punched me. He didn’t slap me. He didn’t try to restrain me, he punched me with his fist. Maybe if I were your enemy… ”

He caught her wrists and yanked them down, holding them hard against his chest. “That’s just it, baby. That’s just it.” He dropped her hands and went out of the room. She heard the door slam as he left the house.

Briony let out her breath and sank down onto the bed more confused than ever.

The cursory knock didn’t startle her; she already knew that Ken’s stocky frame filled the doorway. “You okay?”

She nodded. “Where’d he go?”

“He’s probably headed to the shop. He hangs a bag there and works out when the devil rides him too hard.” He shrugged. “Either that or he’ll soothe himself with woodworking.”

“Why would he think I could ever become his enemy, Ken? I told him I knew he’d never hurt me, maybe if I was his enemy, but never otherwise. He’s afraid of hurting me, isn’t he?”

A muscle jumped in Ken’s jaw. He rubbed his thumb along a scar down the left side of his face. “He’s afraid of hurting everyone. He has to tell you himself, Briony. It has to come from him-and then you have to decide if you’re strong enough to live with him.”

“This is temporary.”

He shook his head. “You’re deceiving yourself and you know it.”

“He walked out. He said I was a liability. He told me he wasn’t the kind of man who would ever have a woman or kid.”

“I’m sure he did say those things. He believes he shouldn’t have a family. It doesn’t mean that he doesn’t want a family. He isn’t going to walk away from you ever again.”

“I don’t want him like that. Trapped because we were forced together by an outside source and now he’s stuck because I needed help.”

Ken leaned his hip against the doorjamb, a gesture very reminiscent of Jack. “What do you think he would have done had you been kidnapped and word got back to him? Even if he didn’t think the child was his, what do you think he would have done?”

Briony plucked at the comforter. “I have no idea. I barely know Jack, and when I think I do know him, everyone warns me off-everyone including Jack.”

“He would have come after you and he would never- never -have stopped until he found you and got you out-or they killed him. Jack would never abandon someone who did what you did for him.”

“My brother helped him get out of Kinshasa. I just slept with him.”

Ken’s eyes darkened to a turbulent gray. “Don’t do that, Briony. Don’t cheapen what you did and don’t belittle yourself. You saved his life. He told me what happened.”

“He doesn’t owe me anything. If that’s why he’s doing this… ”

“You’re here because you’re carrying his child and he never wanted to walk away from you in the first place. He did it for you. He walked out of your life so you could have a normal life. And this time, if you want out-you’ll have to be the one to walk away, because he isn’t going to do it.”

Briony burst out laughing, but it sounded too close to hysteria, so she hastily crossed to the drawers and began looking through them for something to wear to the doctor’s office. “I don’t have a normal life, Ken. I can’t have a normal life because some megalomaniac dragged me out of an orphanage and experimented on me.” Her voice was getting louder, swinging out of control, but she couldn’t pull back. “And when he adopted me out, he made certain he could still experiment on me. And as an adult-well… ” She threw a sweater into the drawer and spun around, spreading her arms wide to encompass the room. “Here I am. Not like any other mother-to-be. No, I’ve got a man who doesn’t mind having sex with me because of the experiments, but would much rather I didn’t come near him, so no, Ken-my chances at a normal life frankly suck.”

“You in here upsetting my woman, Ken?” The voice was pitched so low-so soft-that for a moment Briony wasn’t certain she’d actually heard right, because those soft-spoken words sounded like a threat, but her body went still and her heart accelerated into high gear.

Jack moved into the room. His shirt was off, and a fine sheen of sweat covered his body as though he’d been working hard. Muscles rippled beneath scarred skin, and he crossed to her side, taking a T-shirt from the top of the bureau and wiping his face with it. He looked at his brother over the shirt, his eyes a peculiar silver.

“I thought you’d already done that,” Ken said easily.

Briony frowned. Ken sounded easygoing enough, but his body shifted slightly into a much more defensible position. She looked from one brother to the other. “ Hello! Are you both morons? I’m pregnant. That means emotional. I’m not supposed to be the one with the cool head here. I’m supposed to fall apart at the drop of a hat; it’s my prerogative. You two are supposed to smile and nod and agree with everything I say.”

Ken’s eyebrow shot up, and a ghost of a smile played for a moment with his mouth, and then disappeared. “Was I upsetting you, Briony?”