._ ._.. ._ _ ._ _._ _ ... ._.. _ _ _ ..._ . (Always Love) Ch. 7/?

[inanna7]

Title: ._ ._.. ._ _ ._ _._ _ ... ._.. _ _ _ ..._ . (Always Love)
Characters: Beck, Heather, OCs
Rating: PG
Chapters: 7/?
Unbetaed, all mistakes are my own.

I know Beck is absent for a couple of chapters or so here, but don't fear Beck fans, he will return. :) And again, thank you for your comments, they really do mean a lot to me.

I found Robert Hawkins waiting in my office after lunch that day.

“Robert, what are you doing here?”

“I’m fine, so are Darcy and the kids. And Lily, and Gray, and Jake, and Emily, and Beck.”

I flushed.

“I’m sorry, Robert. I’m just a little surprised to see you.”

“You said you needed a favor. Or were you mistaken?”

I didn’t think I particularly cared for the way he was asking if I still needed a favor. I could hear the other boot swooshing through the air, just waiting to drop.

“No, I still need the favor.”

“Good, because I need you to do something for me, too. I figure I do this for you, you do my favor for me and we’ll call it even.”

My stomach sank.

“Is this favor of yours going to get me thrown in jail again?” I asked, remembering my last “favor” for him.

“No, you won’t get thrown back in jail.”

I knew there was something he wasn’t telling me, but I didn’t press the subject figuring he would walk away from the whole thing and calling my favor off.

“What do you need me to do?”

“Travis thinks there’s a mole in the department. I need you to get close to enough to the guy I suspect it is and let me know if he’s passing on information to the ASA.”

My shoulders slumped as I walked around my desk. I slapped my purse down onto my back desk with a thunk. I did not like the prospect of being Ambassador Travis and Hawkins’ guinea pig at all.

“Who is it?”

“Carlos Mazzello.”

I rounded on him.

“You have got to be kidding me.”

“I wish I was, Heather.”

“Carlos Mazzello is a good man.”

I couldn’t believe this was happening, all over again.

“You said the same thing about Beck just before you stole that page from his office.”

“And if I recall correctly, I was right.”

I bit out the words.

“Yeah, but how sure were you about that when you were sitting in jail?”

Robert Hawkins was currently going down for the least favorite person I knew right about now.

“What do you need me to do?”

“Just do what you were doing last night.”

I gave him a hard look.

“You were watching me?”

“Strictly business, Heather. And if I’m right, stopping him will save thousands of lives, both soldiers and civilians. Will you do it?”

What I really wanted to do was shove Hawkins out the door and curl up into a big ball in my chair.

“I’ll do it.”

I stared at the screen. Even looking at Lisa Beck’s credit cards purchases yielded very little information. The only odd thing that stood out was a purchase of a child’s sleeping bag on September 9th. It could be a simple an explanation as Angel being invited to a sleep over by one of her classmates. The other odd purchase was for a winter coat, again for Angel, two weeks before the attacks. The weather in Santa Fe at the end of August was still quite temperate. She wouldn’t really need a coat until mid to late October. So why purchase one in August? Early Christmas shopping? I had my doubts.

“You’re too busy looking at him.”

“What?” I asked, looking up at Robert.

“I didn’t say anything.”

I pulled out my slim file on Lisa and Jenna.

Too busy looking at him.

I looked at the wedding announcement. Read the article again. Edward Beck wed Elisabeth Danser Ortiz at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church on March 30, 1996.

Elisabeth Danser Ortiz.

Ortiz.

“It can’t be that simple,” I breathed out.

Could it?

I set the database to do an in depth search and typed in her name.

I studied the completed search. My shoulders slumped a bit when I realized it wasn’t as detailed as I had hoped. But it was a start.

I was right. They hadn’t been in Santa Fe when the attacks happened. There had been sporadic activity on a checking account in Lisa’s maiden name for four months after the attacks. The account had been abruptly cleaned out at that point. All of the activity had been at bank branches on the southern and eastern limits of Albuquerque. One early transaction was as far away as Grants, New Mexico.

What had she been doing out there? What was out there for that matter? Most of the land west of Albuquerque was sparsely populated. The only land out there was the Indian reservation.

I switched over to the federal database and did a query on her social security. She was a member of the Acoma tribe. Since the federal government recognized the tribe as a sovereign state within its borders, her records were sealed and inaccessible to any non-tribal members.

Well, I had my work cut out for me. Now at least I had an idea of where they were, but there were several settlements within the reservation. Trying to whittle it down to the right one when their whereabouts were sealed was going to be an adventure unto itself.

“Find what you needed?”

I chuckled mirthlessly.

“I can tell you that the haystack I’m looking in got smaller, but it’s still a needle I’m looking for.”

Hawkins peered at the data over my shoulder. He grabbed a pen and began jotting a name and email address onto my notepad. He tore the sheet off and handed it to me.

“Melissa Bonville?” I looked up at him, wondering how this woman was going to help me.

“She use to work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the southwest. If you need information on a tribe, she’ll get it for you.”

“Right,” I said. I took a breath and switched subjects.

“About Carlos. . .”

“You backing out on me?” he injected. There was a warning tone in his voice.

“No,” I said angrily. “But you’ve got to promise me one thing.

“That sounds like a condition. I don’t think I like where this is going.”

I clenched my fists in frustration, then forced them open again, trying to calm myself before I continued on.

“You’ve got to trust me. I’ll let you know if I find out anything about him. But I can’t do this if I’m being watched. It will just make me paranoid and jumpy. And then Carlos won’t tell me anything because he’ll think I’ve lost my mind.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I wasn’t planning on it. Last night was just confirming a hunch.”

“A hunch,” I said.

“When you’ve has been spying for as long as I have, you start to pick up on nuances, quirks, in people pretty quickly. Like how you tend to bite the inside of your cheek when you think you’re getting too emotional or upset.”

I raised my eyebrows in surprise. He grinned like the Cheshire cat.

“Didn’t think anyone noticed that, huh? Just like Carlos Mazzello thinks that no one notices that when you’re in the room, he knows where you are at all times.”

“What? Like he has a sixth sense? Or that he’s a stalker?”

“It’s a guy thing, a guy that’s infatuated with a girl,” he said, “So I guess a sixth sense thing for him. I noticed it pretty much right after I introduced you to him.”

The greater part of me was flattered. The lesser part of me was struggling not to be creeped out by his automatic awareness of me. It made me feel a bit more like a piece of meat and less like a person. It made me think a male’s animal side wasn’t as far off as I wanted to believe.

Hawkins sensed my qualms.

“You know, Heather, if you think that sense is just about physical aspects, you still have something to learn about men.”

I looked away, embarrassed. When I turned back, he was writing on my notepad again. The crisp sound of paper tearing echoed against the walls as he handed the slip to me.

“This is my number and email if you need to reach me. I’ll be in touch,” he said. I looked at his handwriting. It was small and neat. When I looked up again, he was gone.

Over the next several weeks, I learned a lot about Carlos Mazzello. He was born in San Diego and that his parents had still been living there at the time of the attacks. He would talk about them in passing when we went for our evening walks, which were becoming a nightly thing. He had a married older sister in Springfield, Illinois. She and her family survived the attacks and chose to stay where they were.

“Springfield is their home, she told me,” he explained to me one night when I asked about her.

He heard from her more often now that Texas had sided with the U.S. He worried about them having enough to get by, but was relieved that they had little worry of the war coming to them any time soon.

Today, we were outside, having eaten lunch in Travis Park. At this point, it was more like playing hooky, considering how we should have returned to the office at least 30 minutes ago. Instead, we lay in the shade of an oak tree, shoes kicked off, enjoying the unusually pleasant May afternoon.

I flung my arm over my eyes. My body and mind were relaxed and I was slowly drifting off.

I heard the bend and sweep of the grass as Carlos rolled over to look at me. I could feel his eyes on me, but I was feeling far too comfortable to change my position. He inched closer.

A smile tugged at my lips. I felt the warmth of his chest against my arm. I rolled over, pressing my forehead against the solid mass. He pillowed my head against his shoulder. His lips ghosted against the top of my head and I snuggled closer. I let out an almost inaudible sign as he began to rub random patterns over my back.

He was still regarding me, I could tell. I suppose I had picked up a bit of that sixth sense when it came to him too.

“What?” I asked into his chest.

“Tell me about Jericho,” he said.

My drowsiness left me then. A sudden uncontrollable panic made me stiffen in his arms. The random circles he was drawing out over my shoulders ceased. I reined in my fear as I looked up at him a moment later, feigning confusion.

“Why?” I asked, trying to make seem like a boring subject considering I had been in “the big city” for so long. Fortunately, he fell for the ruse. That didn’t mean he would let go of the subject.

“It was your home. I want to know where you come from.”

I sat up, wrapping my arms around my knees. A lock of hair brushed against my cheek and I tucked it behind my ear.

“Hmmm,” I said, not really sure where to begin. “Well, this time of year you can still smell the tilled soil on the breeze. The wildflowers would be in full bloom along the roadside. There are warm, muggy mornings that turn into stormy, windy afternoons.”

I paused, remembering one particular storm.

“One May it hailed so much, it looked like an ice storm came through.”

I didn’t tell him that the storm was the beginning of Stanley’s troubles. He had lost his entire crop in that storm. Or how he had scrambled to plant new crop. The other farmers and even the Greens had spent long hours out on the Richmond farm helping. Even after all that, the harvest was nothing near what it should have been.

I shook my head, pushing the memory away.

“Sometimes I’d set out on the porch and watch the sunset and then do a little stargazing. It’s still nice in the evenings this time of year. The crickets would be coming out about now.”

I blushed a bit at the next part.

“When it wasn’t stormy, I’d practice dancing out on the back porch after school.”

“Dancing? What kind?”

“Mostly jazz,” I said, then mumbled, “And a little belly dancing.”

I was waiting for him to toss out some line about how he would like to see some of my “moves”.

“I need to take you latin dancing some time. I bet you could dance a mean cha-cha if I showed you the steps.”

I didn’t expect that.

“And here I was thinking that you were going to make a crack about seeing my moves. I didn’t know you danced too.”

He chuckled and said, “Heather, I hate to tell you this, but I’m a guy. Of course I’m going to want to see your moves, but you might as well being having fun yourself while you’re doing it, don’t you think? As for dancing, yeah, I dance a little. It was my dad’s idea actually. He thought it would give me more opportunities to meet girls.”

I grinned and asked, “Was he right?”

“Oh, definitely,” he replied. “Helped teach me a thing or two about women that I would have been too embarrassed asking my parents about.”

“Like what?”

“That in many ways women are more transparent than men usually give them credit for. A lot of times a long, caressing hug is just that and not a sign of foreplay or that tears are just releasing stress and not an aim to manipulate the people around them.”

“You make women sound a bit devious.”

“To a teenaged boy with raging hormones and no previous experience, they sort of were. That’s what I thought until I met Helen.”

“Your first girlfriend?”

“No, but I guess you could call her my first case of puppy love. She was my dance instructor. She taught me a bit about dancing and a lot about women. How women have a tendency to talk a lot about their problems because it relieves the stress and helps them to find a resolution on their own and not an opportunity on giving them pointers on how they need to change their lives.

“Sound piece of advice, what else did she tell you?”

“Don’t talk down to intelligent women, because it just ticks them off. Treat a woman with the same respect you expect to be treated with. Don’t be inflexible - the “my way or the highway” attitude kills relationships because it doesn’t allow for compromise. And if a woman says she’s insatiable when it comes to you, get a headboard for your bed because you’re going to need it for leverage.”

I burst out laughing at the last part.

“What?” he asked, looking a little perplexed.

“Oh, don’t get me wrong. I think what she told you was common sense. I guess I’m just a little shocked that a woman would be so bold in stating her bedroom preferences.”

He shrugged.

“Helen wasn’t known for mincing words. And you might think what she said was common sense, but you might be surprised at the number of guys that are clueless about how to treat women.”

I rolled onto my stomach, my face inches from his.

“But you know how to treat a woman right, huh?” I asked, giving my head a flirtatious tilt to the side. His lips were so close.

He regarded me with a soft smile that I had come to realize he reserved only for me.

“I’d like to think so,” he whispered. I looked down at his lips, only an inch away now and so very inviting.

“I think I’ll have to judge that for myself,” I replied. I brushed my lips against his. He tasted of cinnamon. He nipped lightly at my bottom lip and I felt a thrum rush down my body, turning into a swirl low in my belly.

I think he knew I turned to mush when he did that. I think that’s why he did it.

I darted my tongue along his top lip. He let out a soft groan, almost inaudible. I took that small advantage and slipped into his mouth, tentatively brushing the tip of my tongue along his.

Suddenly I found myself draped over his chest, my lips crushed to his. His hand tangled in my hair, his fingertips caressing the back of my neck. The swirl in my belly vibrated out along my body, down to my fingertips and toes, curling in pleasure, before racing back again. I gasped and I felt him smile through the kiss.

A muffled tune floated up from his pocket. After a moment, it sang out again, this time louder and more persistent

Carlos broke the kiss with a reluctant sigh, digging out his cell phone.

“Mazzello,” he said into the phone. I moved away so he could sit up. He smiled as he leaned forward, giving the tip of my nose a playful tweak. It was obvious to both of us that he was only half listening to the speaker on the other end.

His smile quickly transformed into a frown, then a grimace. The voice on the other end of the phone was tinny and frantic.

Lucky whoever he’s talking to is on the phone and not here, I thought as his reaction darkened.

“No, Maggie, I did not leave the report in my office. I left it with Hodgkins to be signed off. I told you that before I left for lunch. I even left you a note.”

He paused. His fingertips rubbed at his temple, as if he was trying to ward off a developing headache.

“Yes. A note. On your desk.”

There was another brief pause. The voice on the other end took an apologetic tone.

“Yes, that yellow post-it note right by your phone. That’s it.”

He placed his head in his hand. The voice on the other end rapidly accelerated. Carlos did his best to respond.

“Yeah. Ok. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah, I’ll see you in a few.”

He clicked off his cell in disgust.

“So much for playing hooky,” I said, venturing a smile.

He looked up at me apologetically.

“I’m sorry. I guess we’ll have to give it a go another day.”

“I’m guessing that was your secretary?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Sounds like she’d be lost without you.”

He scoffed.

“What?” I asked, frowning.

“Don’t get me wrong. Maggie is a very nice lady. I just don’t think she’s cut out for secretarial work.”

“How so?”

“She forgets stuff. A lot. She tries to compensate by putting post-it notes everywhere. And when I say everywhere, I mean everywhere. She even has notes for her notes. The problem is she still forgets. Which means most of the time I’m doing he job as well as mine.”

“Can’t you dismiss her?”

“Nope. Apparently, right after she got hired, she produced all of this ADA documentation to HR. Which is kind of odd that she remembered it since she can’t seem to remember where the break room is half the time.”

He got to his feet and offered me a hand up, dusting off a few errant leaves clinging to the back of my blouse as I stood.

Probably because he’s reluctant to break contact with me, I thought.

I was feeling rather reluctant about it myself. I kept my arm linked in his as we walked through the park.

We slowly drifted apart and by the time we reached the federal building, I had to quicken my pace a bit to keep up with him.

He held the door open for me, whispering as I passed through,“See you later. Don’t work too late.”

I couldn’t help but smile.

“Thank you,” I said. People would think I was only stating my gratitude for him holding the door for me. His eyes were sparkling when I glanced up at him. He knew what I meant.