CHAPTER SEVEN

. . . . .
. . . .
. . .

When the knock came, John was sitting on the sofa, having reluctantly agreed to let her answer. She'd mellowed him into this agreement by kissing him luxuriously, whispering an assortment of endearments against his warming skin, and cozying up against his lean and tempting body until he couldn't resist anything at all. The fact that she was in absolutely the same state? Collateral damage.

Deep composing breaths. Smooth the hair he'd tousled. Made him swear she didn't look freshly kissed.

She pulled the door open and was momentarily surprised to see a man who looked like a cross between Denzel Washington and the Allstate insurance guy—not Mayhem; the other guy.

He was looking toward the road, unaware of her scrutiny.

But when he turned back, his expression became neutral in a split second.

She smiled. "Hi. You must be Donovan. I'm sorry, John didn't tell me your first name."

Donovan let out a sharp breath which carried with it the word, "Crap."

Yep, he knew who she was.

Keeping the smile in place, she said, "If you don't mind my saying so, that's a terrible name. Must have been hard on you growing up. Come on in." Standing back, she let him pass, feeling his tension—feeling it fill the room.

He glared at John, gave her an icy once-over, and took up a position near the door where he could see them both clearly.

For her part, she stood near her man at the end of the sofa.

John just waited, wary.

Donovan spoke tersely. "I need immediate answers to the following three questions. How, how long, and who else knows?"

"Yesterday is the answer to 'how long,'" John said. "And no one else knows."

The other man's eyes narrowed. "You skipped past the first question."

"You probably won't like the answer," Juliet said pleasantly, because she had a sixth sense he found pleasant people annoying and she wasn't ready yet to forgive him for her five years of misery.

"Ms. O'Hara," he retorted, "I spend most of every damned day not liking the answers I get."

Probably true in his line of work.

"Chance."

He studied her, frowning. "You're right, I don't like that answer. What the hell do you mean, chance?"

"You know I left the SBPD after you blew up my partner—"

"We did not blow up your partner. We didn't blow up anybody or anything," he interrupted, annoyed. "That was the work of the opposition."

Still felt good to score the hit. She smiled faintly. "I joined the National Park Service and went into—"

He interrupted her again. "I know. Special Investigations. Did some good work from what I heard, but never stuck around long in any position." He listed the first five places she'd worked, with just a touch of smuggery, and then stopped as if he'd shown her.

Except she didn't like smuggery. "You missed one."

"I don't miss things. Which one?"

John answered. "The one she has now, at the ranger station up the road."

Donovan closed his eyes for a moment. "All right. Chance. I'll allow it. How?"

I'll allow it? The arrogance...

No embellishments for him, she decided. "I saw him in town. First time I thought it was a fluke but the second time he was too close for me not to be sure. I found out where he lived, came out here yesterday afternoon and punched him in the face."

"That part wasn't chance," John added, gently rubbing his tender jaw.

She spotted Donovan's glance at her hands and promptly held both up, palms down, so he could see which one had the bruised knuckles.

He scowled. "And you didn't say anything to anyone?"

"Of course not. I don't know what kind of rube you think I am, Crap, but the odds that I—"

He cut her off. "My first name," he said tightly, "is James."

John said, "Huh."

Donovan glared. "What? You didn't know that, after five years?"

"You don't share a lot," John admitted.

"No. I don't. You will continue to address me as Donovan." To Juliet, "Please go on, without trying to provoke me."

She withheld her inner snickering. "I was saying—"

But again he interrupted, to say to John disbelievingly, "How could you not know my first name? It's on your assignments, your performance reviews. Hell, it's in your email. Are you screwing with me? And is this, seriously, the best time to be screwing with me?"

He shrugged. "There's never a best time to screw with you, but the thing is, all I've ever seen are your initials, J. X. Never had the nerve to ask what the X stood for, and never gave much thought to the J."

"Oh."

After a pause during which Donovan did not offer up what the X stood for, Juliet said, "If I could get through the answer without any more rude interruptions, no, I didn't tell anyone. I'm a stranger here. There wasn't anyone I would have even thought about telling that I'd seen a guy who looked like a guy who died five years ago."

Donovan gave her the stinkeye again. "Good. Glad to hear it. All right. Now you've had your reunion, I'll see what I can do about getting your reassignment expedited."

"No," John said sharply, before Juliet could even find breath.

"No? You're not in a position to tell me no. This is the only solution to the problem."

"No, it's not," she managed. "It's not the only solution. It's not a solution at all."

"And you are definitely not in a position to tell me no," Donovan snapped.

She drew in a breath, as John stood up and moved closer to her, hand on his cane. "I don't think you understand."

John muttered, "Uh, he really doesn't like being told he doesn't understand things."

"No, wise-guy, I don't. Let me spell this out. You weren't supposed to—stop that!" he ended in frustration, as Juliet reached out to take John's free hand, which he brought to his lips for a kiss. "First of all, I don't ever want to see that kind of nauseating display again. Am I supposed to infer you're in love? Think you're soulmates? That twenty-four hours together after five years apart means you're ready to chuck it all and go work for Hallmark writing sappy-ass greeting cards?"

"Bitter much?" she muttered.

His dark eyes narrowed. "Second, what do you think happens now? I high-five you both and say good job guys, now don't get caught, and then I go away whistling? No. No, you naïve little dreamers. Doesn't work that way." He pointed at John. "The guy she knew is dead. Been dead a long-ass time." He pointed at Juliet. "The woman that guy knew moved on and changed her life and her work. She's a stranger to both of them. Twenty-four hours doesn't change a damned thing."

"No," John said with resolve. "It doesn't. It reestablishes what was. What we hadn't admitted to before."

Juliet squeezed his hand and he squeezed back, and the warmth of their connection made her feel ten times stronger.

Donovan ran his hands over his head. "Help me Jesus, 'cause I know I'm gonna hurl. Okay, let's make it more businesslike. This agency isn't made of money. We don't reinvent people because they think they're in love." Glaring at John now, he added, "We certainly don't reinvent them twice."

"I don't expect you to. I don't expect you to do anything. I just wanted to keep you informed."

"Informed of what, exactly? That you think it's okay to risk exposure so you can have your succulent little slice of cake here and eat it too? That you think it's okay to put us in the spotlight if anyone from either of your pasts sees you together and says hey wait a minute I'm pretty sure he's supposed to be dead, what's up with—"

He stopped talking abruptly because Juliet had advanced across the room quickly enough—and he'd been watching her, she knew, but was engaged in the rant and convinced of his own untouchability—to stomp on his foot.

She hadn't dared try a punch or slap; he'd have seen that coming and stopped her cold, if not struck back. But few people expect a good old fashioned foot-stomp.

His next string of words would not have been approved of by either his mother or Sunday school teacher, but he didn't retaliate, and not just because she returned to John's side immediately after.

Coolly, she said, "I am not anyone's cake. Your HR department should have provided training on sexual harassment and sexism to teach you to avoid using terminology like that."

"Yours should have sent you to anger management," he muttered, looking as if he really wanted to take his shoe off and massage his foot.

John—straight-faced—said, "She left a bruise on my foot."

"Yeah, I can see why you want to be with her."

"Oh, I'm adorable." She smirked. Couldn't help it.

Donovan rolled his eyes and finally moved to a chair, and damn if he didn't try to conceal the slightest of limps.

After they sat too, Juliet next to John—close enough to be sure it annoyed Donovan—he said with slightly less snark, "Okay, here's two words you might not have fully absorbed into your plans for a rosy future."

He paused.

"Shawn Spencer."

. . . . .
. . . .
. . .

John felt his chest tighten, and not in a good way. Truth was, he had thought about Spencer more than once already.

Next to him, Juliet had tensed as well. "We're prepared for that."

"Are you? Really? Looking at press clippings and videos, it doesn't seem anyone was ever prepared for him."

No one ever was, John reflected. Even Henry and Gus, with decades of experience, were routinely flummoxed by Spencer's antics.

Donovan took their silence as agreement. "It was lax of me and my team to lose track of your movements, Ms. O'Hara, but we keep up with his, and although I've never met him, damn. He's a menace. An annoying menace. If I never told you before," he said with a nod to John, "props for not killing him when you had the chance."

"Thanks." He'd wanted hazard pay more than once.

"So you know where I'm going with this. If he ever sees you together—and he might, if he ever randomly decides to drop in on her—he'll dig and prod and prod and dig until he either figures it out or you have to shoot him. It's messy. It's risky."

"Well, it's not like he's going to walk into the same room and divine anything," John snapped. "He's not psychic."

"Hell, I know that. We've got that on tape."

Juliet asked at once, "What? What do you mean?"

"Tape. It's a euphemism. It means we have proof—"

"I know what it means, you condescending jerk. I'm asking what proof you have."

John froze, but Donovan, surprisingly, was unfazed by the insult.

"After the explosion, we had him under surveillance long enough to hear him discuss it with his partner. Full admission. Total fraud."

Dammit, he'd known it. All along. He couldn't look at Juliet. But she squeezed his hand and only said quietly, "I'm not really surprised."

When had she turned the corner, he wondered? When had she finally begun to look at Spencer with clearer eyes?

"But," she asked, "Why were you surveilling him?"

"Because the nosy little bastard was trying to conduct his own investigation," he scoffed.

"Why?" John asked, puzzled, despite knowing that quite often there was no explanation for Spencer's nonsensical actions.

Donovan tilted his head, a bit bemused. "He couldn't believe you were dead. He was looking for a way to make things right again. Not just for her—" he jerked his head toward Juliet, "but also for himself."

He had no words. Nothing he could say. He was moved, and uncertain. Spencer was driven to look into his death?

Juliet's fingers tightened around his. She whispered, "I told you how much you mattered. It wasn't just me grieving."

Meeting her lovely dark blue gaze, he wished Donovan wasn't there; he wished he could put his arms around her and just hold on and properly absorb… everything. Everything. Her expression said she was wishing the same thing.

After a few moments, Donovan cleared his throat. "Moving on. If you don't mind."

John forced his attention back to the main topic. "Did you tell Chief Vick he was a fake?"

A lazy smile—the first one since he'd arrived—briefly appeared. "Of course. I stepped into her path one night, identified myself and said she might find it interesting to know her problematic consultant had been conning her for years and that if it got out before she handled it, a lot of successfully—and correctly—closed cases might be challenged."

"How'd she take it?"

"She stomped on my foot; how do you think she took it? Please. She's a professional who knows how to control herself," he said with a pointed glance at Juliet. "She thanked me for the information and we went our separate ways."

Sometimes the lightbulb comes on years later, but Juliet finally understood. "This explains why he opened the shop and started getting cases from his customers. I noticed Karen wasn't calling him in to consult, and since in those first few months I wasn't in the mood for him at work, I didn't ask why. He never said anything."

"World needs more churros, fewer frauds," Donovan said. "Now let's get back to business. He's still a loose cannon. It's not impossible that he'll randomly decide to visit you, out of the blue."

Truth, John thought, not for the first time. Spencer had always been the ultimate wild card.

"Your family, okay, maybe you can keep them at bay, never let them visit you here, whatever. But no social media ever. No pictures together, ever. No getting married."

Her fingers clenched around his again. "Why not?"

Marriage. He felt flushed.

Donovan, his tone overly, almost insultingly, patient, said, "Fine. Get married, by a justice of the peace, courthouse witness only, no photos. But then you can never tell anyone you got married. Because once you do, you'll be asked about your husband. You think Dolly Parton doesn't get tired of being asked whether her husband's imaginary?"

"Pretty sure my life's a lot less high-profile than hers," she shot back.

"Good. And just so we're clear, love birds, none of this explanatory crap means I'm green-lighting your little dreams. I still have to run this debacle past my superiors for their vote."

She muttered, "As if anyone could be superior to you."

John wished he'd said it himself, and Donovan actually grinned for a second.

"True. Maybe we'll get along after all, Ms. O'Hara. Just understand me. Your reunion is a no-no. A big-ass, holy Mother of God not-supposed-to-happen no-no. I don't like it. They won't like it."

"I'm not exactly high-profile myself," John protested. "Why would they care if we just maintained a quiet—"

"You know the answer, John. If Lassiter turns up alive, the questions'll come faster than a sneeze through a screen door. Why are you alive, how did you escape—oh, you had help? Who helped you, and why? Oh so that wasn't a gas main explosion, it was a cover-up? Cover-ups are always bad, so let's take a closer look at the feds—and that's why you can't always have what you want, and you're too damned old for me to have to explain that to you!"

Quiet in the room.

He knew it, of course. None of that really needed explanation.

Juliet said resolutely, "Then tell your superiors we won't be separated again. If you relocate him, I'll spend my life looking for him, and I'm pretty sure he'll help me out. The only way to stop us—and we know we're insignificant—is to kill us both."

John added firmly, "If you think that's necessary, you can use my weapon. It's in the bedroom."

"Oh, for the love of God," Donovan protested. "Spare me this... this..." He covered his eyes, sighing.

She whispered in John's ear. "Bad divorce?"

"No," he said wonderingly. "He speaks well of a wife and I think he has four kids."

Donovan growled, "Stop talking."

They were quiet.

"And it's five."

John withheld his laughter, but Juliet couldn't prevent one tiny snicker from escaping.

Donovan raised his head and glared again. "For the record, we don't just willy-nilly kill people who inconvenience us."

"But you're tempted," John suggested.

"Damn straight I am, every day." He stood up. "Are there any other chapters to this horror story? Plot twists, surprise endings, Easter eggs, what?"

Her expression bland, Juliet asked, "Would you like to stomp on my foot?"

"Yes, actually I would. But your Prince-y Poo here would probably beat me with his cane."

"Wouldn't have to," John countered, getting up and eyeing said cane. "She'd already have you down and crying for your mama."

Shaking his head, Donovan headed for the door. "Seriously. I'm gonna hurl before this day is over. I'll be in touch ASAP. Keep your stupid-ass heads down."

But then he cast his dark disapproving gaze at Juliet.

"You. Escort me to my car. No violence."

He went out without waiting for her to agree.

. . . . .

. . . .

. . .