“Half brother.” There was a tinge of bitterness in his tone. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m here looking for Fiona.” She straightened her shoulders. “I got a postcard from her—”
“When?” Clay’s eyes suddenly became more intense, and he took a half step toward her.
He wasn’t a large man, but something about the strength simmering beneath his wide shoulders gave Joslyn a flash of memory of her abusive ex-boyfriend, and her heartbeat went into red alert for a second. It must have showed on her face, because he looked conscientious and quickly stepped back.
She took a long breath before answering him. “Fiona sent it three weeks ago, but I only got it a few days ago. It was sent to my old address in LA.”
“Three weeks? I got a phone call from her three weeks ago.”
“What did she say? Is she all right?”
“She said, ‘Clay, help me,’ and then she hung up.” A muscle flexed in his jaw.
“Did she sound frightened? Stressed?”
“Her voice shook.” Worry was etched in his face, in the lines between his brows and alongside his mouth. “I hadn’t heard from her in...” He stopped himself and looked away.
Joslyn knew, from what Fiona had mentioned back in LA, that Fiona and Clay had been close as children, but had drifted apart. “Before I got the postcard, I hadn’t spoken to Fiona in the two years since she left LA.” Why would she reach out to him now?
“What did she say?”
“She said she was in trouble and needed my help. But she didn’t say where she was.” The handwriting had been messy, as if written in a hurry, but she’d recognized it as Fiona’s.
“Where was the postmark from?”
“Phoenix. The card was a touristy Grand Canyon design, prestamped.”
Clay frowned. “That’s strange. Why would she call me and send you a postcard?”
And why wouldn’t she say anything more than that she needed help? The knot at the base of her skull tightened even more. “It’s why I came here. I had to do some digging to find her address—after she left LA, it looks like she didn’t want to be found.”
“I had to hire a private investigator to find this address for me.” But there was uncertainty in his face as he glanced at the house. The house’s large front bay window had white curtains pulled across it, and there was no way to know if anyone was inside. “Did you ring the doorbell?”
“No, I just got here.”
Clay’s mouth was grim. “Maybe it was just a bad joke.”
On two people Fiona hadn’t spoken to in years? Joslyn didn’t think it was likely, but the alternative was that Fiona was in serious trouble.
Clay strode up the concrete walkway that wound through the stone garden in the front yard to the door. “Let’s hope she doesn’t run away screaming when she sees me,” he muttered.
“Fiona always talked about what a great big brother you were,” Joslyn said. Protective. Someone she’d trust. Fiona had loved him dearly, but had simply shaken her head sadly when Joslyn asked why she didn’t try to get in touch with Clay again after all these years.
He looked at Joslyn in surprise, his eyes lightening to blue. It transformed his serious face into that of a man from whom a great burden had been lifted. But then pain flickered across his gaze and he turned away.
Joslyn followed him to the front door, trying to wrap her head around everything that had come out in the past few minutes. This was too much thrown at her at once—not just Fiona’s postcard, but her phone call to Clay, equally as vague. And then meeting Clay here, seeing firsthand the strength in his body and the fearless way he carried himself, fitting the stories Fiona had told Joslyn about Clay being a mob strong-arm in Chicago, before he went to prison.
Her first reaction had been attraction, but her second had been wariness. She’d suffered physically and emotionally at the hands of her ex-boyfriend. She knew that not all strong men would hurt her, but she had become extra cautious about making herself vulnerable again.
Clay rang the doorbell, and they could faintly hear it ding-dong inside the house. He stood with his hands in his jeans pockets, but there was a tension across his wide shoulders that belied his casual pose. He rang the doorbell again. Still no answer.
Joslyn checked her watch. It was eight o’clock on Monday morning. “Maybe she went to work already.”
“Do you know where she works?”
“She’s IT support at a manufacturing company.” It was a rather low-paying job for Fiona, assuming she’d ended up finally getting her degree, but maybe she couldn’t get anything on a higher pay scale, or maybe she preferred the hours there.
Clay’s eyes narrowed to a stormy gray. “You said you haven’t talked to her in two years. How do you know all this?”
“It’s my job to find out stuff like this. I’m training to be a skip tracer.”
“A skip tracer?”
“I find people. I also help people disappear.” Joslyn had been especially grateful to her friend Elisabeth, who had originally helped her escape her abusive ex, a Filipino gang captain in Los Angeles. Elisabeth had gotten Joslyn a job in the O’Neill Agency while she finished her last few quarters of school. Joslyn found she enjoyed helping people, especially other women who wanted to get away from dangerous relationships. She understood their situations only too well and only hoped that Fiona wasn’t suffering at the hands of a man.
Clay went to the front window to try to peer through the crack in the curtains. Joslyn noticed an envelope sticking out of the mail box next to the door and opened the lid. It was full of mail. It didn’t look as though Fiona got a lot of junk mail, but some envelopes she did get were postmarked several weeks ago. “I don’t think Fiona’s been home for a while.” A chill crept over her skin.
Clay frowned. “I don’t like this.”
“I know where Fiona usually kept a spare key,” Joslyn said. “In the back, under—”
“The ugliest gnome,” Clay finished for her, flashing a smile. His eyes crinkled and turned a glittering aquamarine, and Joslyn’s heartbeat blipped. While Fiona was beautiful, her brother was incredibly handsome.
“How do you know that?” she asked.
“She got that from me. It’s where I hid the spare key at my house back in Chicago, years ago.”
They headed around the side of the house, through the wooden latch gate, which was unlocked. The shade from the building made the temperature drop a few degrees, but it was still oppressively hot.
The backyard was small and bricked over, with plant beds along the walls containing a few orange and lemon trees. However, there was also a line of little gnome statues next to the glass back door, and the ugliest one was clearly the largest, a hideous creature with a long nose and a grinning mouth full of grimy teeth. Clay tipped it over and found a key underneath.
Joslyn tried to peer through the wooden slats of the blinds covering the glass door, but couldn’t see anything in the darkened room beyond except for a glimpse of a television set and a leather couch. The space seemed unusually dark considering the number of windows the house had.
Clay inserted the key and it turned smoothly. He swung the handle and eased the door open.
Then suddenly he was grabbing her and leaping aside just as an explosion shattered the morning.
* * *
The noise of the blast boomed in