“We couldn’t handle missions without you.”
He nodded.
She chuckled. “Glad you’re not conceited or anything.”
He smiled and kissed the top of her head. “So what about the kids?”
“We can’t stay here. This is one of Meara’s cabins to rent. So I’m thinking we’ll need a house.”
“Okay,” Bjornolf said.
“On the coast.”
Bjornolf nodded. “I like the area. Close to other pack members. Finn’s got that property farther south of here. He’s trying to sell the land. Maybe we could make an offer he couldn’t refuse.”
She smiled. “I like that idea. Beautiful vista. What do you think about us having a garage apartment? Or a mother-in-law house behind ours?”
“Nathan’s got money, you know. His parents left him money and a home that he also sold.”
“Okay. So he could buy his own place,” Anna said.
“But you want him close by.” Bjornolf studied her expression, noticing that even though she didn’t want to let on that she had a mothering instinct, she had one.
“Yeah,” she said softly. “He reached out to us first. He made me view Christmas in a different light and brought us closer together. How long would it have been if you had continued to ghost missions before we got this far on our own?”
Bjornolf snorted. “Not long.”
She looked up at him, brows raised quizzically.
“I seriously contemplated changing cabana arrangements when we stayed at that jungle town.”
She laughed. “You know Allan and Paul were trying to get a reaction from you.”
“That’s why I whispered in your ear. I was dying to kiss you.”
“And you did. Some kiss.” She licked his nipple and snuggled tighter against him. “Nathan made us recognize how important the pack is. I want to see him and Jessica do well.”
“We’ll discuss it with them and see what they want to do.” Bjornolf wasn’t sure he was ready to be a surrogate grandfather when he hadn’t even had his own kids yet. He ran his hand over Anna’s belly. He was working on that, though.
“We haven’t even talked about our schedule for after this business is finished,” she said.
“Schedule?” he asked. He hadn’t found anything in her profile that indicated she was fanatical about scheduling herself for anything on a regular basis.
“Sparring practice,” she said.
“Every day of the week,” he wholeheartedly agreed. He definitely would ensure that they had one room for sparring in their new home—and whatever else came up in the process. “And massages.”
“You had regular masseuses rubbing your muscles down after a workout?” She looked cynically at him.
“No, but now that I’m going to have a regular sparring partner and she’s you, I’m adding massages to the schedule. After the workout. Maybe before… to loosen us up a bit.”
She chuckled. “Yeah. Like we’re going to get any workouts done then.”
“Oh, I’ll guarantee you that we’ll get workouts. Plenty of them.”
Still grinning, she shook her head. “And weekly trips to the firing range.”
“Gotcha,” he said.
“If I get a mission that you aren’t invited to go on, then what?” she asked.
“I’ll go. Just ghost you.”
“Okay. If you get a mission that I can’t go on?”
He hesitated to answer. If the job was too dangerous, he wanted her home. He was certain she wouldn’t like that answer. He’d even thought of saying she could go on a different mission without him. But he couldn’t go along with it. For one thing, he didn’t want her anywhere on a dangerous job without him watching her back. For another, he was certain she wouldn’t appreciate that he’d sound like he was telling her what she could and couldn’t do.
He smiled and kissed her head. She was watching him, observing him as if she could read every thought going through his mind. He finally said, “If someone asks me to take on a job that’s too dangerous for you to go on, it’s most likely too dangerous for me.”
He loved the way she smiled up at him, and that led to him kissing her all over again.
The fire had gone out, but the Christmas lights were still twinkling on the tree when Bjornolf’s phone rang in the laundry room around two that morning. He carefully replaced the cheery, yellow-and-red quilted comforter over a sleeping Anna and then sprinted for the room.
He missed the call but saw the text. Call me. Nathan.
Bjornolf hit autodial as he pulled Anna’s white sweater out of the washing machine and laid it out gently on top of the dryer to dry. He stared at the streaks of light brown and frowned.
The phone was asking him to leave a message, so he did. Then Bjornolf pulled her jacket out of the wash. Pale mud stains streaked the front and the back. He checked the labels on the jacket and sweater, and decided it was time for some online shopping. He left the jacket to soak some more.
He opened a browser on his phone and began searching for a replacement for Anna’s lacy white sweater. Elated to find the online version of the store, he clicked on the link for sweaters and saw hers on the first page.
He glanced at the color selections. Ice white! Yes! He began to click on the links to the other colors just to see what they looked like. Stunning Black. Ecru. Royal Blue. Red Hot, Pleasing Purple. Hell, yeah, he’d have to get them all. She’d look amazing in any of the colors. Then he looked for white fleece jackets, found one, and ordered it, too.
In the meantime, he tried calling Nathan again.
“Bjornolf,” Nathan said, his breath short as if he’d run to get the phone.
“Yeah, what’s up?” Bjornolf let the water out of the laundry sink, squeezed the excess water out of each article of clothing, and then threw them into the washing machine.
“Jessica and I couldn’t sleep. She told me there’s a safe in her parents’ home where they keep important papers. She thought it might help us find some answers about the DEA agents or maybe even about her birth.”
“The feds will have a search warrant and investigate the deaths,” Bjornolf said.
“Yeah. If they can find the safe—it’s hidden. Even if they do, would they be looking into her birth records? What if they open the safe and just take everything? Then we’ve lost the chance to learn who her parents were.”
“There might not be any record of her birth. We make up our own birth records when we need to because we live so long that we have to change our records from time to time. We homeschool our children so they don’t go to public school.”
“She did.”
“Okay, so she would have had some records. Falsified maybe. It might not help.”
Nathan didn’t say anything.
Bjornolf said, “What’s going on, Nathan? Why do you really want to go to the house?”
“Jessica says that they’ve got some evidence against the Wentworths,” Nathan said. “She heard her parents talking about it. Her dad knows William Wentworth is up to his eyeballs in illegal stuff in Colombia. Everton’s mother died two years before his father. Before that, the will stated that if both parents should die, the estate would be divided equally between William, Jeff, and Roger. If either parent died first, the will remained the same. After Everton’s mother died, the will was changed.
“William coerced their father to alter the will. When their father died, all the money was left to William and Jeff. Roger got a dollar from the estate, showing that the father hadn’t left Roger out of the will by accident. That was all he got. He and Dottie talked about it a lot. A year has passed and they are still mad that William cheated him out of the estate.”
Bjornolf frowned. “So he had evidence to blackmail William.”