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Jake could say.
    “I’m not leaving until I see him.” Chris’s dad, Kenny, had called to let her know that Chris had been hurt and she’d gotten a private jet in the middle of the night to take her from L.A. to Virginia, back to where she’d grown up. Where she’d fallen in love with Chris Waldron, where she’d left him to pursue first a modeling and then an acting career.
    She was twenty-nine years old, rapidly on her way to becoming one of the highest paid actresses—she had her pick of movie roles and of men, and she still couldn’t shake Chris from her mind. “I’m very sorry about your teammate.”
    “Thanks, Jules,” Nick said, and Jake just nodded in her direction.
    “I have to be here. You don’t understand, when I heard …”
    She didn’t say anything further. They did understand. Whether she and Chris were together or not, he was—they all were—too big a part of her life to ever forget.
    And being here in this house again, forgetting was next to impossible. It was different inside now though, Maggie’s touch fading through the years as new furniture replaced old, dark paneling a startling contrast to the lighter paint, the leather furniture, pictures of Chris and his brothers from younger days littering the walls.
    This was a home for men, not boys, and yet when she’d walked through the front door, she was sixteen years old again on a hot summer night, her skin warm and tan from a day at the beach, her lips bruised from kissing Chris in the backseat of his car.
    Even then, his hands held magic. He’d never really been a boy, and he’d been the best thing to walk into the high school cafeteria.
    “Jules …”
    Nick’s rough voice broke through her reverie. She’d been tracing a picture of Chris and Maggie with her finger—a black-and-white photo, hastily snapped and slightly off center, with a four-year-old Chris running half-naked through the bayou, Maggie standing in the background, watching and smiling. “Please, Nick, I just need to see him.”
    “Tomorrow. Give him a day. There’s a lot coming down on him.”
    Nick’s green eyes were so serious, had always been so even when he’d been young and carefree. But that had been her own illusion—none of these men had ever been truly carefree. “Please tell him I’m here. For him.”

    After nearly sixty hours of straight traveling, Jamie was tired and grimy and tense, her shoulders aching from holding herself so tightly together. There’d been tension ten feet deep on the plane even though Chris had slept—or pretended to—for the majority of the flight time, in between checking out fine in Germany and proceeding onward back home.
    She’d stayed with Chris and Saint until the military transport landed in Virginia just after five P.M., and then he was officially turned over to the Navy’s custody. And she’d left him there, watched him get into his CO’s car and drive away before she’d wearily climbed into her own black SUV and driven home.
    She’d go to the office in the morning. Now she needed a shower, needed to regroup and figure out if she should bow out of this investigation based on the fact that she’d slept with the witness.
    But when she pulled in her driveway, she stopped the car dead, jerked it hard into park and sat staring at her front steps.
    Sophie was sitting there in the early spring chill. She wore some kind of shawl and ripped-up jeans, looked like a cross between a rock star and a model. At thirty-four, she was prettier than she’d been when she was younger. Haughtier too.
    She’d chopped off all her hair, so it fell in a gaminelike fringe around her face, the dark color a strong contrast to her smooth ivory skin and big brown eyes, which looked dark and haunted, even from Jamie’s view through her windshield.
    “I was going to call,” Sophie told her as soon as Jamie forced herself out of the car, but Jamie stopped her.
    “I can’t do this—not now, Sophie. I’m tired. And you can’t