Page 4 of Honor ’N’ Duty

The elevator could have dropped out from beneath Kade, sending him crashing into the basement, and he wouldn’t have felt a thing. Laia blinked rapidly, as if she were about to cry.

Gut-sinking confusion rolled through him, pounding at him like a battering ram. This wasn’t possible. The woman he’d stupidly envisioned taking to dinner, eating tres leches cake with, and, hell, even traveling to Puerto Rico with, and one day…

He couldn’t even think it. Because she was engaged. To his brother.

Kade took in the pained, apologetic expression on her face, and his heart plummeted straight into his now-twisted guts.

He fisted his hands so hard his nails dug into his palms. Shut it down. Whatever emotional connection he had to his brother’s fiancé had to end here, now, and…

Forever.

Chapter One

Nearly six years later

Kade gunned the SUV off Route 35 into the heart of Asbury Park. He and his new Belgian sheepdog K-9, Smoke, had been on the road for nearly four hours. Behind him on the bench seat of the mobile kennel, his dog sighed in his sleep.

Late June sunlight blared through the window as he serpentined in and out of shore traffic. Even with the AC blasting, his tuxedo jacket off, and his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, he was sweating his balls off.

He’d gotten Laia’s call minutes before Cassidy Morgan had walked down the aisle and said “I do” to one of his best friends, Markus York. He’d let the call go to voicemail, listening to her frantic message an hour later at the reception. Her house had been broken into and ransacked. In an angry voice, she’d demanded to know if the Feds had served another search warrant.

Making his apologies to Markus and Cassidy, he and Smoke had raced north. Being stand-up people, his friends had understood the need for exigency.

At the next red light, he scrolled through his emails, double-checking in case he’d missed anything. During the drive from Maryland to Jersey, Kade had peppered his colleagues in the DHS and every contact he had in the DEA, IRS, FBI, and local police to verify there’d been no warrant. He already knew there hadn’t been.

In Laia’s message, there’d been no mention of a warrant left behind. Any federal or state agency or police department would have left a copy inside the house. Which meant this was either a random burglary…or something else. It was the something else that had a bucketful of agita roiling like bad sushi in his gut. Not once in the last few hours had Laia returned any of his calls.

When the light changed, he rolled through, then turned off Route 35 onto the local streets, heading unerringly for Laia’s house. He knew exactly where she lived, had known it since the day she’d moved into the small rented duplex.

Long before his parents notified him of her new address, he’d checked up on her and his niece, Rosa. In fact, he’d been checking up on them since the moment Josh had been arrested. He’d seen Rosa at his parents’ many times, but he hadn’t seen Laia in two years. Since Josh’s funeral. And before that, the last time he’d seen her had been three years earlier. At another wedding.

Hers.

Upholding his family’s military legacy of bone-deep honor and duty, Kade had stood beside his brother that day as his best man. On the outside, he’d been the visual epitome of brotherly support, while on the inside, he’d been gut-punched and confused. He hadn’t understood why Josh and Laia were getting married, hadn’t glimpsed so much as a whisper of a real, honest-to-goodness connection between them.

That day still haunted him. The same lack of excitement—no, misery—he’d been struggling with since Josh had announced his and Laia’s engagement had been mirrored on Laia’s face. At first, some part of him wondered if maybe it was because of him, because of their conversation that day.

As Josh had slid the ring on Laia’s finger, she’d looked up at Kade, and for one brief moment her eyes shimmered but not from joy. When the officiant had pronounced them husband and wife, Kade could barely contain his frustration. His brother seemed content, but there was no spark between Josh and Laia, and she didn’t seem remotely happy.

He braked for another red light, gripping the wheel tighter as he recalled their last conversation, so clear in his mind, as if it had happened an hour ago. He’d pulled her aside at the reception, guiding her to an isolated deck overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.

“Laia,” he’d said, his heart squeezing at how beautiful she looked. And how sad. “Are you okay?”

“Of course.” She held up her chin and mustered a patently false smile, the kind he’d been faking for the last two hours. “It’s my wedding day. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You tell me.” Gently, he cupped her face, and when she leaned into his hand, he nearly whisked her away on the spot because something about the whole wedding was totally off. Her hair was artfully arranged on the top of her head, with softly swirling curls framing her face. A light breeze blew one of them across her cheek, and he brushed it away. “I can tell something’s wrong. Did I do something? Did I say something to you that—”

“No! Oh, God, no.” She clasped his hand, the first time they’d touched since being stuck in the elevator three weeks earlier. “Don’t ever think that.”

“I don’t know what to think. Didn’t you feel something between us in that elevator?” When she didn’t respond, he stared at their linked hands, completely at a loss. “I know you did because I felt it, too. Help me to understand what’s happening here. Because it sure as hell looks like there’s nothing between you and Josh.”

She jerked her hand from his, the wall she’d been hiding behind slamming back up between them. “You’re wrong. You might be his brother, but our relationship is none of your business, and you don’t know anything about me. Whatever you think happened between us in that elevator didn’t.”

The absolute conviction in her eyes hit him harder than a baton strike to the stomach.

He’d been wrong. Kade didn’t know how, but he’d made a horrible mistake in assuming there’d been something between them, something potentially amazing and—

In less time than it took for his heart to beat twice, that muscle froze into a solid block of ice. Accepting the truth went against every instinct he had, but there it was. No matter how much he hated it, Laia had something with Josh. For whatever the reason, she didn’t want him.