Lola Carlyle Reveals All

Chapter 13

The Carlyle family reunion was always held on the first Saturday in September, on account of the first Saturday also being the anniversary of the day the Yankees had ridden through North Carolina and burned down the original Carlyle “place.”

Never mind that the “place” had been nothing more than a shack, that the original Carlyles slept with their chickens, and that the war had ended in 1865. Carlyle men had fought and died in the War of Northern Aggression, and their genetic memory lived on in the souls of the current generation.

This year the reunion was being held at Lola’s parents‘, much to her mother’s dismay. The Carlyle woodpile had its share of bubbas and bubbettes, and Lola’s mother didn’t especially care for hell-raisers and beer drinkers in her own backyard. She was a little fearful of that particular breed of men. Those who were devoted to hunting and NASCAR, driving around with Lynyrd Skynyrd cranked on their cheap stereos while lobbing empties in the back of their pickups.

And she would never understand women who thought the sun rose and fell on bubba, who fixed Rotel dip and kept the kids quiet so he could enjoy his Monday Night Football. Those women whose hair could survive the wind whipping through bubba’s truck windows. Although, if her mother was honest, she’d have to admit that her own ‘do could outlast an Oklahoma twister.

The Carlyles’ half-acre yard was shaded with old maples and towering oaks. Long tables were burdened under the weight of fried chicken and cornbread, ham and redeye gravy, Brunswick stew-minus the squirrel-and various homemade pickles and chutneys. A myriad of salads and casseroles took up one table, while three full tables were devoted strictly to cakes and pies.

As with all families, some relations had not traveled beyond their original countrified roots, while others held corporate jobs and lived in the most elusive neighborhoods in Chapel Hill. Rusted-out Chargers and pickups with Confederate flag stickers in the windows were parked next to shiny new Cadillacs and gleaming SUVs.

All of them had come wearing their best. The women in floral print dresses and skirts, Lola in a simple silk chiffon dress with a square neck and little cap sleeves. The men wore nice pants and dress shirts, but none of them looked as good as the man with his hand resting casually in the small of Lola’s back. Max’s tailored shirt was the same blue as his eyes and was tucked into a pair of charcoal pants. European cut, they were fuller around his big thighs and long legs and were cuffed at his hand-stitched loafers. Tall and dark and gorgeous, he looked good enough to eat with a spoon, and Lola thought she might like to sink her teeth into him.

Shortly after they arrived, she introduced Max to her parents, and his gaze turned a bit bemused when her father shook his hand, slapped his shoulder, and thanked him for taking care of his “little girl.” Her mother couldn’t thank him enough for Lola’s safe return, and within moments, everyone at the reunion knew that Max Zamora was the hero who’d saved her from certain death aboard the disabled yacht.

“You forgot a few little details about the night we met,” he whispered next to her ear as they headed across the lawn toward Lola’s great-aunts, who were waving like the lunatics they were.

“You mean the part about you tying me up with my skirt?”

She felt his smile against her temple when he said, “That and you shooting a flare gun at me.”

She didn’t bother telling him that the flare gun had accidently discharged. She figured it was best to keep him on his toes.

Lola introduced Max to her great-aunts Bunny and Boo, who sat at the genealogy table, puffing on Viceroys, 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?”

“Si. Buenos tardes, senoras Bunny and Boo. Como esta usted?” rolled perfectly off Max’s tongue, and the two aunts gazed up at him as if he’d suddenly turned into Julio Iglesias.

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 was recovered. She’d had a rocky week, but she hadn’t let it suck her into the cycle of sickness again. That part of her life was over. “We haven’t eaten yet,” she said.

“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-fiancé. 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, would she ever know? Or would she just never see or hear from him again?

“Tonight, we’ll brainstorm a plan to get those pictures back for you,” he said, and suddenly she felt small and petty. He was offering to help her. Putting himself at risk to take care of her problem with Sam. Including her when she knew he’d rather work alone, and she owed him more than her anger. Max was who he was. She could not ask him change to please her; all she could do was protect her heart.

From several car lengths away, Max followed Lola’s ex-fiancé to Camden Yards in downtown Baltimore. The Orioles were playing Toronto at seven o’clock in the first of three before they took it on the road. Max watched the man’s car pull into Oriole Park, then he backtracked to the simple white house in the suburbs. He parked down the street beneath the shade of an oak, and he reached for his phone and dialed Lola’s cell number.

She picked up on the third ring, and just the sound of her hello twisted his gut. “Where are you?” he asked.

“At work,” she sighed. “Where are you?”

“About a hundred feet from your ex’s. He’s at the Orioles game just as you suspected.” Max glanced at his watch. “I’m going to wait until it gets dark before I venture over there and get a look at his security system. See what toys I’ll need to bring day after tomorrow.”

“A gun?”

“I doubt I’ll need a gun.”

“Oh,” she said, sounding disappointed as hell.

“Might bring a Taser,” he added to cheer her up.

“Can I zap him with it?”

“Hopefully we’re going to be in and out before he returns home.”

“Dang. I kinda wanted to zap him.”

Max laughed. “You’re bloodthirsty. But I’ll tell you what. If you’re nice, I’ll let you look at the weapon.” He lowered his voice and added, “Maybe even touch it.”

Several moments of silence passed before she spoke again. “Are we talking about your stun gun, Max?”

“I am.”

“Right,” she said, but she didn’t sound convinced. “So we’re still on for Friday?”

“Yep, I’ll pick you up at Ronald Reagan at six.” He quickly went over the plan they’d talked about over the weekend, but instead of trying to disguise her appearance to get her in and out of town before anyone could recognize her as they’d discussed, Max had revised the plan that morning. A disguise of any kind would automatically make her appear guilty, and when Sam noticed his hard drives were wiped out and the photographs missing, the first person he’d suspect would be Lola. Since Max would be Lola’s alibi, the last thing he wanted was for either of them to seem as if they were hiding.

He figured the police would question Lola- him, too-but they would have no proof to tie either of them to anything. With no evidence, the case would get shoved in a file and just be one of a thousand other unsolved crimes in an area of the country that had its share of crime.

“Are you sure that’s the wisest thing to do?” Lola asked after he’d relayed the latest.

“Yep. We’re going to hide in plain sight. Let everyone know you’re in town.” He thought of that red dress she’d been wearing the other night when he’d driven to her house. He’d liked that dress. It had been classy and sexy at the same time. Then she’d changed into shorts and that T-shirt and he’d about lost his mind. “Maybe act like we can’t keep our hands off each other. That we’re so hot for each other that when we leave a little bar I know, people will naturally assume we’re headed straight for bed instead of breaking and entering into your ex-fiancé’s.”

“Hmm, are you sure that will work?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. So wear something memorable,” he added before he pushed the disconnect. He tossed his cell on the passenger seat and prepared to wait for the first shadows of dusk. He leaned his head back, closed his eyes, and tried to catch a few, but his thoughts of Lola made sleep impossible.

He’d ended up spending the weekend with her, and it seemed as if he’d spent a lot of it right there on her purple sofa, surrounded by all those doily pillows while Baby laid on the top of the couch by Max’s head and licked Max’s ear.

Lola hadn’t made him sit through six hours of Pride and Prejudice as threatened, but she had popped in some boring-as-hell Kevin Costner flick about some guy building a boat. Max had fallen asleep, but Lola had woken him in time to catch a part of another movie. One about Mel Gibson reading women’s minds and knowing what they really wanted. He’d kind of liked that one, although his favorite Mel movie would always be the first Lethal Weapon.

The Carlyle family reunion hadn’t been the torture he’d envisioned. In fact, they’d all seemed to be real down-to-earth people, and for some reason they’d liked him. He supposed that had a lot to do with Lola herself, and her stretching the truth so far that he’d come off as a hero who’d saved her from all but certain death.

After they’d eaten at the reunion, he and Lola had returned to her condo and sketched out an op plan. Then he’d gone to bed. Alone. And for the second night, he’d gotten very little sleep. He’d left early the next morning for Charlotte and checked into a hotel just so he could catch some z’s before meeting with the Duke people the following day.

He was obsessed with her. When he wasn’t with Lola, she wasn’t far from his thoughts. He’d been in Charlotte for two days, but it had seemed longer. As he’d met with the heads of the Duke Power Company, she’d played hell with his concentration. That had never happened to him before. He’d always been able to focus on the job before him.

But as he’d toured the Duke facilities, pointing out the weak links in their security, images of her popped into his head. The way she’d appeared in her backyard, the moonlight tangled up in her short hair. Simple things, too: the way she smiled when she walked toward him and held out her hands.

After he’d concluded his business in Charlotte, he’d planned a short stop off in Durham. It was on his way home, and he always had the excuse of going over the final details of their plan with Lola. But in the end he’d driven past every exit. He hadn’t given in to his weakness to see her.

Oh, yes, he was definitely obsessed. And there was only one thing to do about it. As soon as he took care of her problem for her, as soon as he handed her those photographs, he had to stay away from her. No more excuses. No more playing hero just to insinuate himself in her life. He had to get out before his thoughts got any crazier, before he was in so deep, there was no way out for him. Before he did something desperate and gave up his life to be with her. Before he changed who he was to fit into her world. Before he changed so completely he didn’t know who he was anymore. Before he was nothing.

Yeah, once he put her on a plane back to Durham, he’d get back to his own life.