The Secret Son. Tara Taylor Quinn

      It was their favorite of Maggie’s munchies. They’d tried them all.

      Erica forced a grin and determined that she’d make the next hours the absolute best they could be.

      By the time the pizza arrived, she’d just about managed to pretend that this was like any other night that week—a beginning, instead of the end.

      Except for the underlying desperation. Now when they talked, they didn’t hesitate before they jumped into any topic. If they only had this one night, they didn’t have time for deliberation, for careful phrasing or circumspect questions.

      Erica couldn’t take her gaze off him, even for a second, frightened of losing the chance to store up one more memory. He seemed to be having the same problem, his eyes more intent—though she wouldn’t have believed that possible—than they’d been all those other nights.

      They were drinking faster.

      Eating faster.

      They were doing everything faster, speeding through years of their lives, trying to squeeze in every single memory.

      And then, suddenly, they stopped. The noise in the pub continued around them—the murmur of conversation, intermittent laughter, the clinking of glasses—but Erica and Jack were surrounded by silence.

      Emotions engulfed her. Confused her. There was so much, so many feelings. And yet not nearly enough.

      “Why do you have to be a hostage negotiator?” she blurted out, terrified for his safety, although it wasn’t her business to be.

      Shaking his head, he took a protracted swig of beer. And then he said, “I was married once. A long time ago.”

      Erica’s stomach tensed. “You didn’t tell me that.”

      “I know.” Both hands grasped the cold mug, and he didn’t meet her eyes, gazing someplace over her shoulder, instead.

      “I’d just joined the agency,” he finally began. “Completed my training. She was a flight attendant. We’d met in college.”

      “She went to college to be a flight attendant?”

      “Melissa had a degree in education. Loved kids, hated teaching.” Jack’s tone of voice, the faraway look in his eyes, testified that he’d loved his wife.

      “She liked flying?”

      “She liked traveling, and I was gone a lot.”

      “So what happened?”

      He glanced back at Erica and some of his tension—the stiffness in his shoulders, the whiteness of his knuckles around that mug—dissipated. “She got pregnant. We’d been married a little over three years and were both ready….”

      Pregnant. Jack had a child.

      Erica was finding it difficult to breathe, but she listened anyway, feeling his love for his family—sensing his pain.

      When he reached across and took her hand, holding it with both of his, it was the most natural thing in the world. His palms felt cold from the mug of beer.

      “We had a girl, Courtney Marie….”

      Jack swallowed with apparent difficulty. His eyes had a definite sheen.

      “When she was a couple of months old, Melissa took Courtney to see her mother out in California. My mother-in-law taught at a high school in Malibu, and Melissa went to meet her for lunch one day.”

      He paused again. Erica squeezed his hand, holding on.

      “A couple of kids went crazy, pulled guns out of their backpacks, started yelling.”

      “Oh, my God,” Erica whispered. “Jack, don’t. You don’t have to do this.”

      “According to the reports, it was all pretty chaotic after that. Some random shots were fired, but apparently no one was hurt. Officials started closing in on the kids. They got scared. And around the corner walked Melissa with Courtney in a carrier on her chest….”

      Erica, seeing the story’s end, swallowed back tears.

      “One of the kids grabbed her, held her in front of him while he made his way out of the school. They were holed up in his van for more than three hours before gunshots were heard again. When the authorities got inside the van, Melissa and Courtney had been killed by a single shot. I was working here in New York and they couldn’t reach me.”

      “What happened to the kid?” It didn’t matter. Erica didn’t give a damn about the kid. She just had to get her mind off that young woman and her baby.

      Jack’s baby.

      “He was dead, too.”

      Jack’s eyes were bleak. Vacant. And completely dry.

      Erica had to fight not to cry for him.

      “Jack,” she said, attempting to bring him back to her if she could. “I’m sorry. So incredibly sorry.”

      As he refocused on her, Erica could see the raging emotions he was struggling to control. “I know,” he said.

      There was nothing she could do for him, nothing she could say that was going to make any difference at all to the despair he was fighting. She could only sit there. Give him her love. And hope that there really was some healing power in a human heart.

      “She was only two months old. Not even rolling over yet.” His voice was low. “That’s when I joined the Crisis Negotiation team.”

      Erica ached to hold him in her arms.

      She ached for a lot of things she couldn’t have.

      CHAPTER TWO

      HOURS PASSED. Erica drank four more glasses of wine, well past her limit. But without the numbness it brought, she’d never be able to walk away from Jack and go home to the man she’d married.

      Maggie’s was closing within the hour. There were only a few late-night stragglers left.

      “I’m glad Jefferson is good to you.”

      “I don’t deserve his goodness,” Erica said. She’d always felt that way, but never more so than she did at this moment, sitting here with Jack, clutching his hand, afraid that she’d fallen in love with him.

      “How can you say that?” Jack argued. “You spend your life presenting him in the best possible light, giving everything you have to the building of his reputation.”

      “He’s in love with me.”

      “I sure as hell hope so.” The words were sharp.

      “I love him, too, but I’m not in love with him.”

      “You said he knew that going in.”

      She nodded. “I’d been working in his office for several years, and I’d recently received the promotion to communications director.” Erica, remembering back three years before, could hardly make sense of decisions that had seemed so logical and clear-cut. “The Republican senatorial race in Massachusetts was going to be brutal that year. While Jefferson’s reputation was good, so was the reputation of the state prosecutor hoping to win his seat. No matter how much we pumped the issues, the campaign was going to come down to the fact that the prosecutor had a beautiful wife and three honor-student kids, and Jefferson was childless and had been divorced for several years.”

      She didn’t want to waste precious time talking about this. And yet, it was important to know he understood.

      She stared at their hands. His tanned skin was in stark contrast to her paleness. She loved the back of his hand, covered with a sprinkling of the same sandy hair that fell across his forehead.

      His touch was bittersweet, promising things she’d stopped believing in.

      “One night, late, after