Hearts Under Siege Read Online Free PDF Page A

over. They should be here—oh. They just pulled in.” She sounded calmer already.
    “Did anyone call Brady?” Molly’s voice broke on his name. She closed her eyes, sucking in air to combat nausea.
    “I can’t reach him. His voice mail says he’s out of touch for a few days, and his secretary said she didn’t know where he was.” Anger strengthened Jess’s voice, and Molly knew she would be all right, for now. “How the hell can his secretary not know where he is?”
    Because she wasn’t his secretary. But Molly couldn’t tell her that.
    “I told her it was an emergency! She told me to leave a message. As if I could relay something like this that way.” She started to cry again, but not as hysterically.
    Molly had to sit down. There were no stools or chairs behind the counter, so she sank to the floor, her back to the shelves under the register, and tried not to fall apart. “I’ll find him,” she assured Jessica. “Are Rick and Donna there?” Jessica’s mother had died of breast cancer a few years ago. An only child, she only had her in-laws now.
    “Yes, the…whoever he is just let them in. He’s talking to them, but I can’t hear what he’s saying. I have to go.” She hung up abruptly.
    Molly slowly closed her phone and rested her head on her knees. They shook, and so did her hands. It was the adrenaline. She had to sit here for a minute, let it dissipate. Let her body recover.
    Then she had to find Brady and tell him his brother was dead. She pressed a fist to her mouth to hold back her own sobs. It was somehow vital that she hold together better than Jessica. Grief surged now, as if it had been waiting its turn, and she couldn’t keep it back. Tears burst from her eyes and she let go, burying her face in her voluminous skirt, crying for the loss, for the hole it would leave in the Fitzpatrick family—for what it would do to Brady.
    It was going to kill him. He’d blame himself, even though he had no clue that Chris wasn’t the business consultant he’d always presented himself to be. He’d blame himself because he hadn’t been there. Hadn’t seen his brother for years, except for the occasional lunch or dinner when they were both “on business” in the same town. Brady refused to go to Chris and Jessica’s home, refused to attend any family gatherings…had even missed his aunt’s funeral three years ago. His parents went down to DC every once in a while, his mother totally baffled by his distance from the family, his father stoic about it. Molly had told them why he did it, when Brady refused to and she couldn’t stand to watch his parents suffer in confusion. Of the two of them, Rick seemed to understand best, maybe because Brady had described his first reaction to Jessica as being just like Rick’s to Donna. But Donna didn’t know why Brady couldn’t put it aside, couldn’t stifle the love he felt for his brother’s wife, so that he didn’t lose them all. So they didn’t lose him.
    The worst part, for Molly, was Brady pulling away from her, too. She’d known, that day in the kitchen, that he would do it. It had been slow and painful because she fought it, and they’d had ingrained habits and routines at college. But once they graduated and he moved to DC, it had become a lot easier. She’d stayed in Massachusetts to get her master’s before spending a few years traveling the world with various orchestras, rock bands, and opera companies—and hated every minute away. She’d been preparing to open the store here in Boston when SIEGE—Strategic Infiltration of Enemy Group Enterprise, a government-sanctioned, privately owned information broker—had recruited her.
    They weren’t close anymore, she and Brady, and she’d never stopped regretting it. Most of their communication was via e-mail. Once in a while, he took or made a phone call, and their connection was still there, tenuous but strong enough that she knew it would never be lost completely.
    And knowing how