It had been like dumping a crippled guppy with a BEAT ME UP sign pinned to its fin into a tank of piranhas. Five minutes after arriving, Jake was bleeding.

Nick had been outside shooting hoops when he saw the biggest bullies in the orphanage kicking something small and white on the ground. A minute later, he was pulling the fuckers off, breaking an arm and a nose and was carrying an unconscious Jake to the dispensary. He’d weighed nothing.

The dispensary, necessary by law, was staffed by an indifferent nurse Nick suspected was dealing pain-killers. She had no desire to look Jake over and did so only when Nick got right up into her face.

She patched Jake up and Nick made sure he was around Jake most of the time and that everyone knew messing with Jake meant messing with him. Jake was prey but Nick wasn’t. Nobody fucked with him or with those he protected.

For the next few years, Nick had a pale, silent shadow. Jake never spoke, hardly ate, and could sleep only if Nick was in the same room.

They bounced from foster home to foster home. The first time Nick was dumped in a foster home, the social worker refused to place Jake in the same home. The social worker, an obese lady with a honeyed southern accent and mean eyes, raked in 10 percent of the take from the foster homes she placed kids in.

She wanted to split them up. Jake was to go to a home that specialized in mentally and physically handicapped children. There was a 50 percent bonus for those kids. Nick had heard tales about that home that made his skin prickle. Two kids had died there over the past couple of years.

Nick pushed the social worker against a wall with a knife to her side and told her he’d cut out her kidney if Jake didn’t go with him. They were never separated after that.

When Nick was seventeen and Jake fifteen, some sociology students came to the foster home they were in at the time. The students were conducting a survey of children in foster homes who had spent time in an orphanage. The survey consisted of an IQ test, a Rorschach, and interviews. Jake refused to answer the questions and was silent when administered the Rorschach.

The IQ test was another story.

The survey team refused to believe the initial results and had Jake take the test again. And again. And again.

Each time, the survey group grew, until finally, a professor from MIT came and took Jake away.

Jake’s results were off the charts, particularly in math. Genius didn’t begin to describe it. From then on, foundations vied for the privilege of educating him. He had a masters in economics and in math by the time he was eighteen; a PhD in economics by twenty-one. By that time, too, he knew what he wanted. Money, and lots of it.

He had it, too, Nick thought in satisfaction. Piles of it. Tons. Boatloads of the stuff. Good for him. He’d earned every penny.

“You’re rich, now, buddy,” Jake said quietly. “So what are you going to do about it? No sense dying young when you’re rich, is there? Rich guys die of old age. In their beds. With a couple of hotties.”

Nick winced. Once, between missions, he’d gotten shit faced with Jake. Four men under his command had died and he saw their faces nightly in his dreams. Nightmares.

Jake had sat and listened quietly to him, nursing one drink to Nick’s ten until Nick had been rendered down to rock bottom. There had been nothing left in him, an exhausted, heartbroken mess of a man. And that was when he confessed to Jake that he was convinced he would die young.

After that, Jake refused to let it go, like a dog with a bone. He said he would make it his life’s work to get Nick out of the military. When Nick was wounded and resigned his commission, Jake bought a whole vineyard in Champagne to celebrate…and then got angry as hell when Nick joined the Unit and went undercover.

Suddenly, Jake’s voice roughened. “I’m not going to let you die young, Nick. I simply won’t allow it. You’re going die in your bed a rich old man and that’s that. Get used to it.”

He hung up.

Nick drove, concentrated on watching Charity in front of him and on what Jake had said.

Not dying young. Wow. Now there was a thought. Though come to think of it, he was thirty-two. Maybe he was too old to die young.

For the very first time in his life, Nick thought of the future. Not the immediate future, like making Delta or joining the Unit. No, the long term. Being forty and fifty and sixty. Christ, maybe seventy and eighty. The thought that he was going to die young was so ingrained in him that he had never given a thought to becoming middle-aged and then old. Wasn’t going to happen.

But—just suppose it did? Just suppose he lived. And he had money, to boot. Well, that changed things.

Suppose, like Jake insisted, he quit doing dangerous jobs and got married and settled down with a family?

Of course, it was easy for Jake to talk. He had the most beautiful wife in the world and three great kids. Marja was a stunning beauty. A platinum blonde, a head taller than Jake, a great mother, and a fantastic wife. Everyone assumed that with his billions, Jake had bought himself a trophy wife, but the truth was he had met Marja, a Swedish exchange student, while still studying and trying to survive on a grant at MIT. He and Marja were a love match.

It never even occurred to Nick that he could have that. Good thing, too, because he’d never met anyone he could feel about the way Jake felt about Marja.

But just suppose…he eyed the car in front of him, which Charity was driving just a little too fast for her ability and her tires. It was just like her—flares of unexpected fire under a soft, unassuming exterior.

Suppose he settled down? And just suppose he settled down with Charity? Living with that beautiful woman in that beautiful house in a pretty, peaceful town.

Nick waited for the feeling of constriction, of claustrophobia that always took him when he thought of settling down. It wasn’t coming.

Charity zipped down her street and pulled too fast into her driveway. Nick gritted his teeth and parked right on her back fender. If she wanted to get out again, she was going to have to ask him. And as far as he was concerned, she wasn’t getting her hands on another steering wheel until the weather cleared.

He was at her door before she could get out, hand outstretched. “You drive way too fast,” he complained. Damn, that sounded like a whine in his voice.

She laughed up in his face and poked him in the ribs. “And you drive way too slow. Boring. You might as well be driving a Fairlane instead of that beautiful car.”

Nick had worked as a development test driver for a car manufacturer one summer. Once he’d gotten a racing car up to 175 miles an hour on the straightaway.

He smiled down at her. “I guess I’ll just have to work on my driving skills.”