Remember Jamie Baker (Jamie Baker #3)(20)

He’d come back, carrying a small teacup on a saucer. It was odd to see such a masculine guy holding a delicate cup with tiny little rosebuds painted on it. As he offered me the cup, I couldn’t help giving him a hard time instead of thanking him properly, as I should have. I’m capable of being polite, but it’s not very high up on my personalities list in my notebook. “Do you bust out the good china for all your tea parties, or am I just special?”

I don’t know what it was about my comment that changed Ryan’s countenance, but he suddenly got that head-over-heels lovesick look in his eyes again. “It’s your cup, funny girl,” he said, “and Magic Tea is your favorite. I was lucky I found some stashed away in your cupboards. Drink it. It should help soothe your nerves.”

The dark-gold liquid smelled wonderful. I tentatively took a sip and was pleasantly surprised. Ryan was right; I did like it. He let me sip the tea in silence, and after a few minutes the bitter liquid warmed me from the inside out, relaxing every part of me. Even the pounding in my head faded into a dull ache.

“I bought us a little time,” Ryan said.

“I heard. Thank you.”

Ryan was momentarily startled, but he quickly pulled the corner of his mouth up into a half smile. “I keep forgetting. It’s been a while since I had to deal with the queen of eavesdropping. Sorry about the emotional girl comments.”

My injured pride wanted me to defend myself. Impossible to do with my face wet, eyes swollen, and nose running. I shrugged. “It seems to be true.”

“Yes, but you hardly like to admit it.”

I cracked a smile and took another sip of my tea.

Ryan watched me with his intense gaze, as if he simply couldn’t tear his eyes off of me, so I asked a question in order to break the tension. “How did you join up with the ACEs? There’s no way you were a part of the team before the explosion, if we were together. Superman was an idiot for dating Lois Lane, you know. I don’t think I’d be dumb enough to date a soldier and play superhero at the same time, especially not if I had a problem with authority.”

A small smile played across Ryan’s lips. “You’re right. I had nothing to do with the ACEs before the explosion. I was just a regular guy—a college football player with an undecided major. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life besides spend it with you.”

Ignoring that last statement, I re-asked my original question. “So how’d you end up with the ACEs?”

I’m not sure what made him smirk, but he obviously found something amusing. His voice was dry when he answered. “Carter wrote a story about you.”

There was that name again: Carter. “He was the reporter who’d written that story about Chelsea’s Angel and Visticorp, right?”

Ryan nodded. “The two of you have a strange relationship, but somehow it works. He blew the whistle on Visticorp’s human testing and explained how you died trying to free him. After his story broke, a couple of things happened. First, you’d freed four other Visticorp test subjects that day, and told them that you had a friend who could help them. When you didn’t find them after the explosion, they saw the story and assumed Carter was the friend you meant.”

“Was he?”

Ryan shrugged. “You could have meant him, but most likely you meant me or Teddy. It was the two of us who could have helped them hide from Visticorp. Carter didn’t really know what to do with them, so he called me. I let them stay at my stepdad’s cabin for a few days and was planning on helping them get new identities and all that, but then the ACEs showed up on my doorstep.”

“Why? How did they connect you with the explosion?”

Ryan smirked again. “I told you, you and Carter have a history. He wrote that story about Chelsea’s Angel rescuing him, but he’d also written quite a few other stories about you as Jamie Baker over the years. The ACEs put two and two together that you were Chelsea’s Angel. After getting all the info they could out of Carter, they came to question your parents and me. I joined up the second they told me what they were about. When they left my house that day, I left with them.”

“Why?”

“Because Carter didn’t know for sure that you were dead. He assumed you were, but he didn’t actually see you die. He didn’t know. You could have gotten away, or Visticorp could have still had you. The ACEs were my only chance at finding you.”

I blushed. Everything he said or did came back as a compliment to me, or a declaration of his feelings for me. He was either determined to show me how much he loved me, or he simply did love me that much and acted subconsciously. I honestly couldn’t tell if he was aware of what he was doing or not.

Unsure how to react to him, I cleared my throat and wiped at the salty crust on my cheeks left behind by my sob fest. “You mean you walked away from your family, friends, home, and a college football career so that you could run off to look for a girl who was probably dead?”

I didn’t mean to sound skeptical, but come on. Ryan shrugged, as if the answer were a given. “What if I had been dead?” I asked. “What if you never found me?”

“But you weren’t dead, and I did find you.”

And he was grinning again. Ugh. He was impossible. “But if I was?” I insisted. “If you never found me? That thought had to have crossed your mind.”