“No, I haven’t heard from him in over three days,” Tessa told Aunt Freckles the following Saturday afternoon via video chat from the comfort of the sleek leather sofa inside her Georgetown town house. Freckles must have set her smartphone on the counter while she poured batter into cupcake cups because Tessa could see most of the Twin Kings’ kitchen in the background.
She was surprised at the pang of wistfulness for her childhood home. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that everyone in her family was busy today prepping for a birthday party for Marcus’s twins. After spending so much time in Wyoming recently, Tessa suddenly felt as though she was missing out on something.
“So he split, just like that, huh?” Freckles called out over her shoulder as she slid a tray of cupcakes into the oven. “Do you know if he’s still in Philadelphia?”
Tessa shook her head. “At least, I don’t think so. I ran into Agent Doherty in the Ritz lobby the day after we, uh, had drinks.” She certainly wasn’t going to give her aunt too many details and risk Freckles wanting to return the favor by offering up details of her and Uncle Rider’s bedroom time. Tessa shuddered before continuing. “Doherty said Grayson was transferred from the assignment. He didn’t say where, and I was too embarrassed to ask.”
“What do you have to be embarrassed about?” Freckles asked as she returned to her mixing bowl, which must have been where the phone was propped because all Tessa could see was a close-up view of the Cowgirl Up Café logo across the woman’s too tight T-shirt.
Tessa blinked several times before deciding it was easier to focus on the cherry blossom trees outside her window than on her senior citizen aunt’s substantial bosom. “Because it was being with me that cost Grayson his job. Or at least his job in the Protective Intelligence Division.”
“Darlin’, don’t you ever apologize for being a woman in the prime of your life. You have physical needs. Heck, we all do.” Freckles added with a chuckle, “It’s why I keep letting your uncle Rider talk me into staying at his cabin every night.”
This was the exact visual Tessa had been trying to avoid. But how could she fault anyone for sharing too much information about their love life? Half the world had seen that intimate picture of Tessa and Grayson making out in some dive bar in Philadelphia.
“Now, I know sometimes men don’t always think with the head upstairs.” Freckles used a measuring spoon to point at her helmet of orangish-colored curls. “But, from what I saw, that Agent Wyatt is a planner. One of those fellas that calculates risks and strategies and keeps an eye out for hidden land mines. You never pretended to be anyone other than yourself. He knew exactly what he was getting into from the moment he first met you.”
Tessa let the words settle over her. “Maybe that’s why he seemed to already have his exit strategy in place.”
“Then again...” Freckles tsked as she returned to the center island to pour out another batch. “Fame’s not for everyone, darlin’. I couldn’t wait to leave it all behind the second I turned eighteen. The day after my debutante ball, I hauled butt outta Boston so fast, those Beacon Hill society matrons’ heads were spinning.”
“I know.” Tessa frowned, trying to figure out if her aunt was on her side or his. Freckles could play a mean devil’s advocate. “I don’t blame Grayson for not wanting to be a part of all that. Deep inside, I think we both knew that anything serious between us wouldn’t have worked in the long run. I guess I was just hoping things could’ve lasted a little longer.”
“If I’ve learned a little something from my seventy-plus years on this earth, it’s how to deal with heartbreak.”
“Seventy-plus years?” Tessa’s mother glided into the kitchen just then and stopped at the specialty blender on the counter behind Freckles. “More like eighty-plus years.”
Freckles flicked some of the flour off her hands and the white powder clung to the back of Sherilee’s bright cashmere sweater.
Tessa rolled her eyes at the two women. Maybe she didn’t miss home as much as she’d first thought. Normally, she would’ve called Duke for advice, but he was on a classified assignment.
“I’m not suffering from anything as serious as heartbreak, Aunt Freckles,” Tessa said, knowing full well it was a lie. If she hadn’t already been half in love with Grayson when he’d been on that diving board with her, then it would’ve happened when he’d done the gentlemanly thing and given her the space to figure out her feelings on her own.
“When you think about the man, does your rib cage get all tight? Do you spend so much time thinking about what he might be doing that when you walk into a room, you forget why you went in there in the first place?” The loose skin on Freckles’s neck wobbled as she nodded knowingly. “If so, it’s definitely a broken heart.”
“It could also be another panic attack.” Her mom dropped a bag of fresh kale as she rushed over to the smartphone screen. “Have you seen your neurologist yet, Contessa?”
“It’s not a panic attack, Mom. Or heartbreak. It’s just...” An empty feeling, Tessa thought. A feeling of jumping off a high dive and expecting to hit the water but just free-falling into air. She bit back the words to keep from saying as much out loud. “I don’t know what it is.”
“Uh-oh.” Sherilee narrowed her eyes as though she could study Tessa’s emotions through the screen. “You don’t know what it is because you’ve never felt it before. I experienced the same thing when I fell head-over-heels for your father. I was young. I’d never been in love before. I thought I had my life all planned out in my mind. Then Roper King showed up and turned my whole world upside down. One minute I was telling myself all the reasons why this older guy with a campaign bus full of baggage was all wrong for me and the next I couldn’t imagine spending my life without him.”
Tessa didn’t like how eerily similar her mother’s past experience was sounding to her own. She shook off the feeling. “In this situation, though, I have to imagine my life without Grayson. His job and mine just aren’t compatible and neither one of us could ask the other to give up so much. Unlike you and Dad, it’s just not meant to be.”
“Not meant to be?” Sherilee King asked. “You’re talking to a girl who went from the trailer park to the Twin Kings to the White House. You think being married to Roper King was a walk in the park? He was a recovering alcoholic and I was a cocktail waitress and half his age. Talk about incompatible lives. You should’ve heard what the press used to say when we’d show up at an event. But we didn’t let that stop us. We didn’t throw up our hands in the air and say it wasn’t meant to be.”
“Wait. You were a cocktail waitress?” Of all the things her mother had just shared, Tessa wasn’t sure why she’d narrowed in on that one tiny detail. Maybe it was because of Sherilee’s well-known disapproval of Dahlia running Big Millie’s. “Dad met you in a bar?”
“He’d fallen off the wagon, so to speak, and I helped him get back on. So contrary to popular belief,” her mother gave a pointed look at Aunt Freckles, “it was me who rescued him first. Not the other way around.”
“Wow. I never knew that.” Tessa let out the breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding. “Clearly, Dad wanted to be rescued. And lucky for all of us that he did.”
“But?” her mom prompted.
“But, I don’t think that’s the case with Grayson. He likes his life the way it is.”
Sherilee brought the phone so close to her face, Tessa could practically see the hidden incisions of last year’s eye lift. “If his job’s an obstacle, I could always have a word with the director. He won’t ever have to know.”
“Oh my gosh, Mom! You sound like a mob boss. I don’t want you to have Grayson fired.”
“How about we just get him reassigned to something more manageable? Maybe he’d like a desk job once he got used to it. The commissioner over at the Internal Revenue Service owes me a favor...”
“Mom! Stop! You can’t fix this. I have to let Grayson go.”
“But what if...”
“The best way to get over a man—” Freckles’s bright fingernails flashed on the screen before she wrestled the smartphone out of Sherilee’s grip “—is to learn and grow from the relationship, no matter how brief it might’ve been.”
“Well, you’d be the one to know, seeing as how you’re the queen of brief relationships,” Tessa’s mother muttered to her aunt.
Freckles thankfully refused to take the bait. “Listen, darlin’. What you need to do is find something good that came out of the affair. What did you learn from it? How are you a better person from it?”
“Or you can always throw yourself into charity.” Her mom stuck a spoon into a bowl of chocolate frosting. “That’s what I always do to get my mind off things.”
Mom shoved the spoon in her mouth quickly, but Freckles had eyes in the back of her head. “Then why don’t you go volunteer somewhere, Sherilee, instead of stress eating all my food before this afternoon’s party?”
“Because my kids all need me here right now.” Her mother continued to list every single cause for stress—no matter how insignificant—currently occurring on Twin Kings Ranch. Each one involved one of Tessa’s siblings and whomever they may or may not be dating.
By the time Tessa disconnected the call, she suddenly wished she had her own tray of cupcakes to shovel down her mouth. She walked to the kitchen, wanting to dive into a meal or something else that would take her mind off her heartbreak. Disappointment, she quickly corrected herself, wishing her aunt had never used the H word.
But the only food in her refrigerator was a three-day-old chicken-and-pesto wrap from the craft services table at work, and half a jar of green olives. Tessa decided to avoid the risk of any lurking photographers camping out in front of the gourmet market down the street and placed an online order for grocery delivery.
Shopping for dinner on an empty stomach had been a mistake, though, she later realized when all the items in her virtual shopping cart totaled over five hundred dollars and couldn’t be delivered for almost three hours. Instead of waiting patiently for her groceries, she called her favorite Thai take-out place and the manager promised to have her order of coconut chicken soup and drunken noodles at her front door in less than thirty minutes.
With dinner on its way, Tessa was left to ponder how she could grow from her extremely short-lived relationship with Grayson. She returned to her laptop and tapped absently at the mouse. What did she learn from Agent Wyatt? Other than that little trick he did with his tongue when he...
Focus, she commanded her brain. Opening the internet home page, she tried scrolling through her search history. She really needed to clean out her web browser, she concluded as she looked at everything she’d researched in the past few months. There had to be something in here that might trigger an idea.
She was still tapping at the down arrow when her eyes landed on it.
EDMD.
Maddie’s medical condition. Tessa had asked Grayson about his sister at some point during the evening when they’d slept together. He’d told her that Maddie’s procedure was showing some signs of progress and allowing her more movement. He’d tamped down Tessa’s excitement by reminding her that Maddie would never regain the full use of her muscles. But even Grayson couldn’t hide the twinkle of hope when he’d added, “The good news is that the doctors think she might be able to eventually get back on a horse one day.”
His words about getting back on a horse replayed in Tessa’s mind as she ate her Thai food and researched equestrian therapy opportunities. By the end of the night, she’d scribbled down a slew of notes and had the perfect idea on how to implement both Freckles’s and her mother’s advice at the same time.
Tessa would use what she’d learned from her relationship with Grayson to make someone else’s world a better place.
Grayson hadn’t seen Tessa in almost a month—in person at least. He’d caught a glimpse of her on a television set in the lobby of the hospital when he’d been waiting for Maddie to be discharged a couple of weeks ago. Then again last Tuesday when she’d been on location in the Midwest, discussing the aftermath of a multivortex tornado that had left the residents of a poorer community without electricity and running water while a neighboring county with a higher tax revenue had its power restored immediately.
Seeing her on the screen each time made his lungs seize midbreath, as though someone had sucker punched him in the solar plexus. If it was painful enough for him to watch her from hundreds of miles away, he didn’t want to think about how painful it would be if he saw her in person.
When the inquiry board had concluded its investigation and he’d been cleared to return to his team, Grayson had expected to feel a sense of relief. A sense of closure where Tessa King had been concerned. But then an instructor at the James J. Rowley Training Center referenced the funeral incident involving Tessa as a case study in tactical emergencies, and asked Grayson to speak to a class of recruits about unusual protective detail scenarios.
The presentation and subsequent role-playing drills during Grayson’s crisis training simulations went so well, the director at the JJRTC invited him to formally transfer to Maryland and become a permanent instructor. The change in assignment was not only closer to his family in Baltimore, it meant that news vans had less access to him on the enclosed five-hundred-acre facility.
While he’d always preferred being in the role of operative—the guy who comes in and gets the job done—he had to be totally honest. Ever since that night on the diving board with Tessa, Grayson had gotten a taste for inspiring others. Now he looked forward to the challenges of training the up-and-coming agents.
Plus, the new assignment came along with his pick of challenging physical endurance courses, firing ranges and bomb detection simulations whenever he needed an adrenaline fix. Intense tactical training and hand-to-hand combat beat a boring six-mile jog any day of the week.
Grayson’s phone vibrated against his belt right as he finished his workout on the rope course with the Spec Ops team. He was still catching his breath when he swiped his thumb across the screen to answer.
“Hey, Mads. How was pool therapy today?”
“Forget about pool therapy, Grayson.” His sister’s words came out in a rush. “Have you seen the pledge drive?”
“What pledge drive?” he asked, digging into his duffel bag for his stainless steel canteen.
“The one Tessa King launched last night on her show. Didn’t you watch?”
Grayson almost choked on his gulp of water. He cleared his throat and then unclipped himself from his harness. He didn’t tell his kid sister that watching his ex—did Tessa even qualify as an ex if they’d only spent one night together?—made him feel as though a hiking carabiner was clamped around his heart.
“Nah, I missed it.”
“Well, she did an hour-long special about neurological disabilities and the need for physical therapy facilities outside of doctors’ offices. Grayson, remember that horse camp I went to when we were teens?” Maddie didn’t give him a chance to answer. “She had the owner of Let’s Ride on her show talking about how it’s not just kids that need to be on horseback, or zip-lining through the trees, or rowing across lakes or any of other things that get people rehabbing in the fresh air. And she’s right. I mean, it’s great for the kids, of course. And I’m all for her raising money for camps like that. But those kids are going to grow up someday, hopefully, and then where do they go? No more fancy unconventional rehab programs for them. No more horses or aquatic centers unless they have the money to pay for them out of pocket.”
“Slow down,” Grayson told his sister, but should’ve told his own mind because his head was already spinning. “You’re saying Tessa King is trying to raise money for adults with physical limitations to go to horse camps?”
“Not trying to, Grayson. She already did. After only twenty-four hours, the fund she started, called—get this—the Coach Oliver Foundation, has already raised twelve million dollars. She’s also lobbying for more insurance companies to cover alternative forms of physical therapy.”
He stood motionless as the information sank in. All of the football players at Montgomery High had loved Coach Oliver Wyatt. He’d never told Tessa anything about his father, yet somehow she’d found out and named the foundation after a man she hadn’t even met. Grayson’s heart went from being squeezed to being in danger of flying out of his chest.
Maddie kept talking and it took Grayson a few seconds to catch up to what his sister had just said. “What did you just say about sweeps week?”
“I said that every other station and newspaper is reporting nonstop about that scandal with General What’s-His-Name. But Tessa waited for the peak week during the Nielsen sweeps, when TV ratings are at an all-time high, to use her time on the air to help people like our family. See, Grayson. Not everyone in the media is a vulture out to pick your bones clean.”
Grayson chugged more water, as if he could refill the sudden emptiness churning inside. “When did I ever tell you that?”
“The day before the doctors released me. Mom had just seen that article with you and Tessa King kissing in some magazine she’d found in the hospital cafeteria. She asked you if you were actually dating Tessa and you told her not to believe everything she read in the news. Then she told you a picture was worth a thousand words and—”
“I remember,” he interrupted before she could get to the part where their mom warned him that being in the spotlight was preferable to him living in the shadows. “I thought you’d been asleep when she brought that up.”
“You guys always have the best conversations when you think I’m sleeping. Like that time you told her that you were enlisting in the military instead of going straight to college, and she told you that Daddy would’ve wanted you to finish your education. Or that time when you told her that you and Jamie were getting divorced, and she told you that someday the right woman would come along and you’d realize that there was so much more to life than sacrificing yourself to the overtime gods.”
Grayson’s stomach was now full of both water and guilt. He tossed his empty canteen back inside his bag. “Did you also overhear us the time we were talking about you no longer watching those true crime documentaries because you were the worst detective ever?”
“Nah, I must’ve been sleeping for real during that conversation.” Maddie laughed. “Hey, I gotta go. I have an online class starting in two minutes. But make sure you check out the website for the Coach Oliver Foundation.”
They disconnected and Grayson hauled his gear and rucksack across the sprawling campus to the dorm rooms where some of the instructors stayed during the week. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept in a bed that he actually owned.
His mom and Maddie had downsized to a smaller, inexpensive apartment when he’d joined the Marines. Grayson’d had a handful of furnished rental units here and there, including the six months he and Jamie had lived overseas. But he’d lived most of his adult life out of barracks, hotel rooms and bunkhouses.
As he let himself into the dorm and appraised the cheap blue comforter, along with the basic dresser and matching desk, a vision of the main house at the Twin Kings Ranch popped into his head. What would it feel like to actually live in a real home? Not one that expensive or vast, obviously. But one that had been built and decorated specifically for his tastes. One that had Tessa relaxing inside after they’d both come home from a fulfilling day at work.
Grayson took a quick shower—at least these temporary accommodations had a private bathroom—then powered on his laptop. He had a few minutes before teaching his next class and should’ve spent the time researching apartments in the nearby town of Laurel, Maryland.
Instead, he found himself scrolling through the Coach Oliver Foundation’s website. The digital counter on the bottom of the screen kept changing numbers as donations poured in by the minute. Even though he’d once lumped Tessa into the same boat as tabloid reporters on the prowl for a sensationalized story, deep down he’d known she’d always used her media platform for good. Whether it was bringing awareness to those in need, or exposing corporate and government corruption, or interrogating some of the most powerful people in the world, she didn’t back down from a challenge. Just like her diving, she did everything thoroughly and with exacting precision.
She also didn’t invest herself in a matter unless it was important to her. All this time, Grayson had been so preoccupied thinking about that video recording of her in the staging center tent, and worrying about her throwing him under the bus, he hadn’t realized he’d been doing exactly the same thing to her when he’d left her like that.
Tessa was one of the few people who knew that Maddie’s care was a top priority in his life. Instead of cutting all ties with him when he’d told her he couldn’t date someone with her level of fame, she’d spun that fame to his advantage. Or, at least, to his sister’s.
That had to mean she still cared about him, right? And maybe if she still cared, there was a chance he could convince her that he’d made the biggest mistake of his life when he’d walked out of the hotel room. Grayson wasn’t convinced she’d forgive him, but for the first time in weeks, he was also full of hope.
There was no way to know if Tessa would even consider the possibility of a partnership again after he’d already refused to go into battle with her once. All Grayson knew was that the most successful missions required an advance plan. He picked up his phone and called the only person he knew with a special forces background and a working knowledge of seeking forgiveness from a female in the King family.
When Rider King answered, Grayson cleared his throat.
“Hello, sir. I was wondering if I could talk with you about Tessa.”