drinking bourbon and branch, and handing out copies of the Carlyle family tree.
They’d stapled it together with a list of the previous year’s dearly departed, along with stories the two had penned from their earliest recollections. In Boo’s case, there wasn’t much written on account of “the sugarbetes.” What an insulin deficiency had to do with her memory, no one was quite sure, except that it always got her out of doing anything she didn’t want to do.
“Aunts Bunny and Boo, I’d like you to meet my friend, Max Zamora,” she introduced him to the women who were both in their mid-eighties. “Max, these two ladies are my aunts.”
“Ooh, a Latin lover,” Boo announced, because of course, since Lola had modeled lingerie, it stood to reason that she was loose as a slip knot and Max was just naturally her lover. “Do you speak Spanish?”
“
Bunny belted back her bourbon. “You’re as handsome as a silver dollar,” she told him, her voice raw and gravelly from her three-pack-a-day habit. She flicked her Bic, fired up a smoke, and got down to business. “Where are your people from?”
“Texas, mostly, ma’am,” he answered as his hand slid from the small of Lola’s back to rest on her hip.
Everyone knew Texas was southern, but it wasn’t quite as good as being a North Carolinian. Obviously it was good enough for Aunt Boo. “I dated me a fella from Texas once,” she said. “W. J. Poteet. I don’t suppose you know the Poteets?”
“No, ma’am.”
“I remember W. J.,” Bunny joined in. “Isn’t he the one who liked silkies?”
“Yep. Couldn’t abide no cotton undies. Ever since W. J., I only wear silkies, or I wear nothing at all.”
Lola felt her eyes widen and hoped the horror she felt didn’t show on her face. Max simply laughed and gave her hip a gentle squeeze.
“You like silkies?” Boo asked him.
“Well, now-”
“We have to go,” Lola interrupted. “Max hasn’t met Natalie,” she added, referring to her sister.
“It was nice to meet you ladies,” he managed before Lola pulled him away.
“I think my aunts were coming on to you,” she said as they moved past a group of children whacking each other with badminton rackets.
“They’re nice ladies.”
“They’re crazy. Between them, they’ve been married eleven times. They have a weakness for tobacco, bourbon, and husbands. And not necessarily their own. It’s a wonder they aren’t dead of lung cancer, liver failure, or shot by jealous wives,” she said as she found Natalie and her husband standing beside one of the many picnic tables. Natalie held her youngest, two-year-old Ashlee, and Lola immediately took her in her arms.
“Hey, baby girl,” she cooed, and buried her nose in the toddler’s neck where she smelled of baby lotion and of her little cotton dress. She glanced around the yard and began to wonder if she was the only cousin over twenty- five who’d never been married. She’d bet she was, and she wondered why. She was attractive, successful, and had all her teem. Yet she was alone. It hadn’t bothered her last year, or even last month. It did now.
She wanted more. More than her work and more than the faithful love of her dog. She wanted a man who loved her and a family of her own. She was thirty, but this wasn’t her biological alarm dock signaling the hour. This was different. After the past week, this was knowing firsthand that her life could be taken from her and she hadn’t lived it fully.
She glanced up at Max. At his profile and the fine lines in the corners of his blue eyes. Her stomach got all queasy like she was on a roller coaster, and her heart paused in anticipation of one of his smiles. She knew the feelings for what they were. She was falling for Max. She watched his mouth move as he spoke with her sister and Natalie’s husband Jerry. He was obviously at ease and comfortable with her family. He told them about his security company, yet he said very little about himself. She was falling for a man who kept his secrets locked up tight.
“Do you want to hold the baby?” she asked him.
He looked at her as if she’d spoken a language he didn’t understand. Then he shook his head. “No.”
She was falling for a man who might not be capable of returning her feelings. A man who preferred to live on the edge, never knowing if the next day might be his last.
The cell phone clipped to his belt rang and he reached for it. “Excuse me,” he said, and moved a few feet away to take the call.
She was falling in love with a man who answered calls from secret government agencies. Who disappeared, perhaps never to return. A man who preferred living a shadowed life.
“Did you get enough to eat?” Natalie asked, and Lola forced her attention to her sister. That was the thing with having had an eating disorder: The people who loved you watched to make sure you weren’t skipping meals or heading off to the bathroom after gorging yourself. No matter that you’d been recovered for years. And she
“Aunt Wynonna brought her pea casserole again this year.”
“Did you eat it?”
“You know how she gets. I had to, but if you don’t look at it, it isn’t too bad.”
Ashlee held her arms out for Natalie and Lola handed her over. “I’m going to take your word for it.”
She glanced over her shoulder as Max moved behind her and wrapped his arm around her middle. He pulled her back against his chest, and she might have melted into him if hadn’t said next to her ear, “I need to talk to you alone for a minute.”
Her lungs constricted, and she closed her eyes. This was it. He was leaving, and she might never see him again. Would she know if was killed? Would anyone think to contact her?
Max took her hand and they moved away from the others to stand behind an oak tree. Leafy shade cut across his forehead and nose while the sun caressed his mouth and chin.
“You have to go, don’t you?” Lola began before he could speak. “You have to go on one of your insane missions and get beat up and shot at.”
He stepped closer. “I don’t get beat up.”
Just shot at. “You forget how you looked when I first saw you.”
“That was a rare exception.” He placed his hands on her bare shoulders. “I don’t usually get caught and tortured. That was really the only time.”
“Tortured?” She raised a hand to her chest and her voice caught in her throat. “You were tortured?”
His mouth compressed before he said, “Roughed up. I was just roughed up a bit.”
Before, when she thought he just got shot at and beaten, had been bad enough. Now he was telling her he got tortured, too? The backs of her eyes stung, but she refused to give in to her tears. She would not cry for him. Would not cry for a man who took such stupid risks with his life. “Why do you have to go get roughed up at all? Can’t someone else go?”
“You don’t understand.”
“Then make me understand,” she pleaded, because he was right. She didn’t understand.
“It’s what I do, Lola. It’s who I am.” He took a deep breath, then continued. “If I didn’t, I don’t know who I’d be anymore.”
“You’d be someone who lived to see another day.”
“That’s not living.”
She looked away from the pull of his blue eyes. What could she say to that? For some reason, he felt he needed to save the world, or at least a bit of it. Which might not be bad if he were Superman and bullets bounced off his chest. He seemed determined to get himself killed, and her problem was that it didn’t seem to make a difference to her heart. Now who was insane?
“None of that matters right now. That was my cell phone, not my pager.” With a touch of his finger beneath her chin, he brought her gaze back to his. “I had a guy I know track down your ex-fiance. You’re right. He lives in Baltimore. I’ve got his address. When I get back from Charlotte Wednesday, I’ll check out the area.”
A light breeze carried the scent of his starched shirt and a hint of his cologne. He wasn’t leaving to save the world. And while that knowledge brought a certain relief, she also knew that someday his cell phone would ring or his pager would go off, and he would leave. If he was killed in some foreign country, on some covert operation,
