The Last Letter(99)

“I’ll wait here. I think I see her car pulling in,” Ella said, her face almost against the door’s glass pane.

“What the hell are you doing?” Donahue asked as I made him a cup of coffee.

“What Mac asked.”

“And she doesn’t know?”

“Nope. And it needs to stay that way.” After the machine stopped hissing, I handed him the cup. I knew he liked his coffee like he liked his women, black and strong.

“You adopted her kids, and if my spidey senses are right, you’re sleeping with her, and she doesn’t—”

“The minute she knows, we’re done. You know what happened. She’ll kick me out of here so fast I’ll get whiplash. How the hell am I going to help her then? I hate it. But this is the way it is. The longer I waited to tell her, the deeper it got, and now we’re here.”

The door opened and shut, followed by the sound of two pairs of feminine steps headed our way.

“Damn it, Cha—” He shook his head. “Gentry.”

“Well, gentlemen. It’s nice to see you’re here and ready to start. I’m Danielle Wilson, and you must be Samuel Donahue and Beckett Gentry.” She looked to be in her midforties, with a sensible suit and minimal makeup. Her brown hair was pulled into a severe French twist, and a pair of glasses hung from her necklace.

My instincts told me she was out for blood. My blood.

“Coffee?” I offered.

“No, thank you. Shall we get started?”

We all gathered around the dining room table. Danielle sat at the head, spreading out folders and notebooks like she was prepping to study for finals. Ella sat next to me on one side, her hand firmly tucked in mine, and Donahue took the other side, leaning back in his chair and sipping his coffee.

Guy had always had a hell of a poker face.

But why would she have summoned him?

“Let’s get started. Mr. Gentry, would you please tell me how it is that you came to adopt Ms. MacKenzie’s children?” She put her glasses on, took out her pen, and braced it above a yellow steno pad.

Old school.

“I served in a unit with her brother, Ryan. He asked in his last letter that I come to Telluride and take care of his sister, Ella.”

She nodded, writing quickly. “May I see the letter?”

“No,” Ella answered. “That’s private and none of your business.”

Danielle leaned forward, locking her hawklike eyes onto Ella. “Your daughter was adopted in July and has since cost our company over a million dollars in care for a condition that was previously known—and immediately treated with a therapy that wasn’t approved by your previous provider. Unless you’d like to pay those bills, I suggest you get me the letter.”

Oh, this woman was a piece of work.

I arched my hips and took the letter out of my back pocket, sliding it across the table to her. “You can’t keep it.”

“You keep it on you?” she asked, looking over her glasses at me.

“I do. When your best friend asks you something like that, you tend to keep it close.”

She opened the letter and read it over, then snapped a picture with her phone.

I felt violated, like she’d just taken a picture of Ryan’s naked soul without his permission. It’s what he would want. He wants his family protected.

And so did I.

“Interesting. So did the unit sanction this mission?” she asked Donahue.

“I’m not sure what unit you’re referring to,” he answered with a shrug.

“I’m well aware of what you do, Captain Donahue. I followed your paper trail, and the deal you made with Mr. Gentry to keep him in that little disability loophole. Did you plan this all out? Keep him on temporary disability so he could pony up the insurance for the little sister here?”

Donahue took a sip of his coffee, and I was shocked it didn’t ice over, he was that cool. “No, but if that was a benefit of my offer, I’m happy to have helped. Gentry was offered temp disability because I have the power to offer it, and he was unfit to return to duty.”

“And those reasons were…” She looked up at him.

“Above your pay grade. Look, I agreed to come here for the benefit of Ella and Beckett, and I have no problem clearing up whatever issue you think there is. But you don’t have the clearance to know…well, almost anything. All that you get to know is that I was authorized to offer him temporary disability in the hopes that he would heal enough to return to active service any time in the next five years. Proper paperwork was filed, and he remains eligible for healthcare. That’s it. That’s all you get from me.”

She adjusted her glasses and set her sights on Ella and me. “So you randomly show up in Telluride to fulfill your dead buddy’s letter request and adopt her kids.”

“Not random, but yes. I fell in love with the kids, just like I did with Ella. When you love someone, you want to protect them. They didn’t have a dad in their lives, and I wanted to be that for them.”

“But you could have simply married Ms. MacKenzie and achieved the same thing, right?” Her gaze flickered between us.

“Then that would have been fraud,” I said as Ella’s hand tightened in mine. “That would have given you a case, though if you went after every young girl who tag-chased GI’s for benefits, you’d be too busy to show up here.”