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Disclaimer: The Pretender and its related characters don’t belong to me. There is no money involved here and no copyright infringement is intended. Actually it is intended but I’m not making any profit so there’s really no point in suing me over it.

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Veil of Contentment By Phenyx 12/21/03

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The phone was ringing. Jarod could hear the incessant trill coming from the device next to the bed. But he was not inclined to answer it. As a matter of fact, he was exactly the opposite. Wild horses couldn’t drag him away from his mattress right now. He was exhausted and could barely move. With a moan, Jarod buried his head under his pillow and conjured up the most vile of curses for whomever was disturbing his slumber.

When the noise stopped, Jarod sighed with relief and snuggled back under the covers. He was nearly asleep again a moment later when his cell phone started beeping on top of the dresser where Jarod had abandoned it last night next to his keys and some change. Jarod gritted his teeth and did his best to ignore the summons.

“Jarod,” a barely feminine voice hissed beside him. “Answer the damn phone.”

Groaning sleepily, Jarod did a fair job of ignoring her as well. The cell beeped enough times to roll into voicemail, plunging the room back into silence. The caller evidently didn’t bother to leave a message because less than a heartbeat later, the phone on the nightstand began to ring again.

With a long-suffering sigh, the lump of warmth sharing Jarod’s bed rolled into a sitting position and grabbed up the telephone. “What?” she grumbled angrily. After a pause she answered, “He’s here. He’s trying to sleep.” Another pause ensued, “I will not! Tell him yourself. I’m his wife not his answering service.” Nearly growling in irritation, she viciously tossed the handset at Jarod, striking him in the abdomen. “Your girlfriend’s on the phone,” she snarled.

Jarod sighed without opening his eyes. He knew that his wife was baiting him but Jarod simply didn’t have the energy for a fight this morning. They had spent too many mornings snipping at each other in the last year. Jarod was tired of it. He knew that anything he said at this moment would be the beginnings of another row. Or perhaps it would be the continuation of last night’s battle. Either way, Jarod wasn’t in the mood so he kept quiet.

The mattress shifted as his pretty wife got out of bed. Jarod could hear her movements as she pulled on her robe. In his mind Jarod could picture her running her hands through the tangle of red curls on her head as she walked toward the bathroom.

Only after the door had closed with a firm slam, did Jarod pick up the phone. “Morning, Sue,” Jarod said into the phone.

“The little woman sounds a tad testy,” the kind soft voice said. “Did you have another fight?”

“Do you need to ask?” Jarod snorted.

“I’m sorry, Jarod,” was the reply.

“It isn’t your fault, Susan,” Jarod said sternly. “You have no reason to be sorry.”

“She hates your job,” Susan said.

“Yes,” Jarod agreed, closing his eyes wearily.

“I’m your boss,” the gentle voice went on.

Jarod smiled slightly at that comment. “I thought we were going to discuss a partnership,” he teased.

Soft laughter floated across the phone line. “Have you talked to Zoë about it?” Susan asked. “Your wife hates me enough as it is. Giving you more of the agency to run is going to send her over the edge.”

Jarod sobered. Heaving his weary body into a sitting position, he leaned against the headboard and stared thoughtfully at the ceiling. “Zoë doesn’t hate you, Sue,” he said carefully. “She hates the lifestyle. She hates that I disappear for days at a time. She hates the guns and the morgues and the disturbing photographs that make up such a large part of what you and I do for a living.”

“Are you going to quit, Jarod?” Susan asked uncertainly.

“We’ve had this discussion before, Susan,” Jarod grumped. “I realize that Zoë wants me to find more conventional employment. But you know that I can’t walk away from the agency. I can’t walk away from those kids.”

“You can’t save them all, Jarod,” was the gentle reply. “We will always find too many of our lost lambs in the coroner’s office.”

“You’re a lousy devil’s advocate, boss-lady,” Jarod grinned. “You could never walk away either. You care too much. That’s why the Granger Detective Agency is so good.”

“Don’t bother sucking up, smart-ass,” Susan replied. “Good work with the Michaelson boy by the way. I hear bringing him home wasn’t easy.”

“He’ll be in detox for a while,” Jarod shrugged. “But if we can get him sober, I think we can keep him from running away again.”

“His folks are in counseling now as well,” Susan explained. “They’re getting professional help on the best ways to help their son stay off the drugs.”

Jarod smiled to himself. Susan Granger was an incredible woman. Funny and smart, she could be tender and loving one minute and tough as nails the next. In the last three years, not only had Susan become Jarod’s boss but she’d also become his best friend.

Jarod had come to Florida after escaping the Island of Carthis. He’d been frustrated at missing his mother and wounded by Miss Parker’s callous rejection. Completely baffled as to where to continue his search for his family, Jarod had returned to Susan Granger’s office in Miami. To his wonder, the private eye had been waiting for Jarod to contact her again because she had information about Jarod’s sister Emily.

Once Jarod had reunited with his baby sister, things had happened very quickly. Within six months, he and his family were living together in a large home in southern Florida. Jarod’s mother had indeed held evidence that was detrimental to the Centre. Calling in another favor, Jarod had sought the help of a federal agent he had worked with in the past. Bailey Malone had taken the information about the Centre and used it.

The Centre’s collapse and the disintegration of the Triumvirate power base had been incredibly swift. Raines and Lyle had been indicted on multiple charges the same week that Jarod and Zoë had gotten married.

For a while, Jarod’s life had been nearly perfect. He and Zoë had spent six months renovating the sprawling old Victorian house they shared with Jarod’s parents. The extended family had lived together quite peacefully at first. Jarod’s mother and Major Charles both got along well with Zoë. The youngest among them, Jarod’s teenaged twin Jack, simply adored his perky little sister-in-law.

Ethan lived in a loft apartment that the brothers had built above the garage. Though he was still a skittish and easily frightened young man, Ethan’s confidence and security were growing each day. He had a job working as a gardener on a nearby college campus and had built a small circle of close friends there.

Emily had also lived with the family in the beginning. But just after Jarod and Zoë’s first anniversary, Emily had announced her intent to move to the city in order to take up residence with the newest love in her life. A botany professor at the same campus where Ethan was employed, Paul was a kind, soft-spoken man two years older than Jarod. Though the pretender hadn’t been thrilled to learn his little sister was sleeping with a man so many years her senior, Jarod could find no other reason to fault the relationship. Paul obviously adored his sweetheart. He treated Emily like a queen.

Jarod had been happy. At least, that was what he told himself. He had ignored the nightmares and buried his insecurities. For a time, it had worked. The pretender’s contact with his old life dwindled to little more than the occasional phone call to Sydney. He sent Parker Christmas cards and never denied Ethan’s right to visit Delaware. But after Carthis, the sad, weary phone conversation with Miss Parker had seemed so final that to Jarod, it had felt like goodbye.

The pretender hadn’t quite understood how to incorporate the two lives. Fearing that his parents would continue to feel threatened by the Centre, Jarod had severed his ties to the place and the people connected to it. He had locked away his DSA player and never mentioned the pain filled years of his childhood. Even his calls to Sydney, few and far between, were made in secrecy.

It had taken eighteen months for Jarod’s delicate façade of normalcy to crack. The collapse began on the day that a child disappeared. Miami had been thrown into a frenzy of media coverage. The little girl, daughter of two highly respected lawyers, had vanished from her home. Jarod had watched on television as police and federal agents scurried frantically to find the missing child. When the Granger Detective Agency had become involved, Jarod had immediately called his old friend Susan and had offered his help.

From the moment the pretender had stepped into the child’s home, he knew that something was horribly wrong with the official version of the disappearance. Jarod had done an excellent job. He had done it quickly and better than anyone else could have expected. But he hadn’t been fast enough.

Jarod had found the girl two days later in a less desirable part of town in an apartment leased to her father. The facts proved that the man had taken the girl there on more than one occasion and molested her. The mother had been suspicious of her husband, but had never dreamed that the affair he had been having was with his own child.

When Jarod located her, the dark-haired child in her neatly pressed school uniform was hanging from the ceiling with an electrical cord wrapped around her neck. She’d been eleven years old when she died. Her parents had been devastated by their child’s suicide. A public outcry had risen around the girl’s father. Jarod’s nightmares increased exponentially.

When Jarod asked Sue Granger for another case to work on, the blonde investigator thought he’d been trying to atone for his failure to save Cindy Miltner. As the months passed and the pretender became part of the staff at the agency, Susan tried to talk to the pretender about that first horrible case. But Jarod insisted upon taking the worse cases, the most hopeless files. The pretty little girl hanging in her father’s love nest had not been the last dead child the pretender had located.

For each missing child the pretender brought home safely, there was one to bury and two still lost. The depths of cruelty toward one’s own offspring never failed to shock Jarod. Even Susan admitted to being traumatized by some of the things they discovered together. “When it no longer affects us,” she’d told Jarod once. “That is when we stop being human.”

Jarod saved as many as he could, bitterly mourning those he could not. His own parents began to worry about him as he worked longer and longer hours. When his relationship with Zoë began to crumble, Jarod seemed unwilling, perhaps unable, to do anything to stop it.

Zoë and his parents thought that Jarod continued to be driven by his failure to save that first little girl, as though rescuing another child could redeem him for losing Cindy. Jarod couldn’t find a way to explain the real problem to them. How was he to describe the guilt he felt over that sweet child? How could he justify the life he now led? Why had he survived the horrors of his childhood while Cindy Miltner had not?

The pestering complaints from his wife took on a trivial aspect to Jarod. As he spent more time away from home, Zoë became convinced that Jarod and Susan were sleeping together. Jarod, hurt and a little perplexed at her suspicions, reacted by throwing himself even further into his work. Zoë couldn’t understand. She didn’t see the darkness in the world. Jarod knew it only too well.

The disintegration of Jarod’s marriage took on an insidious subtlety. It hadn’t been until six months ago that the pretender even realized what was happening and by then, it had been too late. In burying the agony of his past, Jarod had buried a part of himself. He had hidden much of who he was from the very people who claimed to love him most. The result had been an emotional separation between himself and Zoë that had existed from the moment they’d met. Now the distance between them was a chasm and he had no clue how to bridge the gap.

“Are you listening to me?” Susan’s voice floated from the phone indulgently.

Shaking his head to clear his thoughts, Jarod returned his attention to what his boss was saying. “No,” he admitted. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re tired,” Susan said compassionately. “I’ll tell him that you just aren’t available right now.”

Jarod frowned. “Him?” he asked. “Who are you talking about?”

“You haven’t heard a word have you?” Susan sighed heavily. “The man standing in my office. He insists upon talking only to you. He says he was sent to fetch you.”

Jarod sat up and ran one hand through his hair. “Sue, I just can’t,” Jarod groaned. “You know I missed Zoë’s birthday last week. I promised to make it up to her. I can’t take another case right now.”

“I know, Jarod,” Susan replied. “But he seems so emphatic.”

Jarod glanced up warily as the bathroom door opened and Zoë appeared. Crossing her arms, she leaned against the wall and glared angrily at her husband. “I’m spending the next few days with my wife,” Jarod said firmly.

“It’s okay, Jarod. Lord knows you’ve earned it.” Susan’s smile was apparent in her voice. “I’ll try to talk Mr. Broots into accepting an alternative.”

“What?” Jarod snapped to attention at the name Susan mentioned. Jarod swallowed and wet his lips before demanding, “Sue, put him on the phone. Now.”

“All right,” Susan answered warily.

There was a moment’s hesitation before a familiar voice wavered, “Hello?”

“Has something happened to Debbie?” Jarod asked without preamble.

“No,” Broots replied. “Miss Parker sent me. She needs your help.”

“I’ll meet you at the airport in an hour,” Jarod said in a firm, flat voice. Immediately disconnecting the call, Jarod tossed aside the blankets and began getting dressed.

Zoë stared at him, fury etched in every line of her face.

With a sigh, Jarod shrugged. “This is really important, Zoë.”

“It always is,” she whispered in frustration. “When will I be important, Jarod?”

Stepping close to his wife, Jarod tenderly tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “You are important,” he insisted.

“But not more so than this, right?” she sighed wryly. “Am I second in your life Jarod? Third perhaps?” She shook her head sadly. “Do I even make the top ten list anymore?”

“Of course you do,” Jarod argued.

“Then stay,” she insisted.

“I have to go,” Jarod shrugged again.

“She calls and you run to her side.” Angry tears began to run down Zoë’s cheeks.

“Yes,” Jarod admitted. It wasn’t until after his wife had slammed out of the room that Jarod realized Zoë had been talking about Susan. But then Zoë had never met Miss Parker. Come to think of it, Jarod couldn’t recall ever talking to Zoë about the Centre’s beautiful huntress.

With a weary sigh of resignation, Jarod admitted to himself that there was nothing he could tell his wife about Miss Parker that would ease the strain in their marriage. If anything, having Parker back in his life could only serve to complicate matters even further. Tossing a few items into a travel case, Jarod hauled the bag onto one shoulder and rushed out the door.

He would have to worry about Zoë’s misconceptions later. Parker was waiting.









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