by Cassie Miles
Though Blake had never served under General Hamilton, he was familiar with the reputation of this man who had been an important part of the command structure in Afghanistan. He was known for his dedication to his troops, and his ability to make quick decisions.
The general avoided his gaze by tasting his coffee. “Jeremy tells me that you’re planning to retire.”
“I am.”
“You’re kind of young to opt out.”
“It’s time,” Blake said. “I liked being a ranger. The work suited me, and I felt like I was making a difference. But I’m tired of war, ready for a change.”
“With your background, you could get a decent military job in the States. I’d give you a recommendation.”
“Thank you, sir. But I want to explore my options.”
“Riding a desk isn’t for everyone.” The general rubbed at his forehead. “Sometimes, I wonder if coming back to D.C. was the right decision for me. Every morning when I wake up in my king-size bed and get suited up in my uniform, I wish I was wearing fatigues and stepping out of a tent.”
Blake glanced over at the two aides, who were on the edges of their chairs, listening intently. He looked back at the general and said, “You’re an important presence in Washington. They need to hear from somebody who’s been there.”
“That’s why I do it. To protect my troops. Some of these bureaucratic snafus are more dangerous than IEDs.” He leveraged himself out of the chair. “Let’s go over to the dining room table and Alvardo can show us what he’s got.”
In minutes, Alvardo had spread an organized array of color-coded folders. “I have this intelligence narrowed down to a single flash drive, but it helps to see the originals.”
“What do the colors mean?” Blake asked.
“Green represents survivalists and cults. Yellow stands for antiwar groups. We can pretty much disregard blue because those threats are corporate and legal. The largest group of threats—which are in the purple folder—come from workers who are losing their jobs or livelihoods.”
That left the red folder.
“What’s that one?” Blake asked.
“Old news from the field,” Alvardo said. “Those threats are at least three years old, which is before the general was stationed at the Pentagon.”
“From the field,” Blake repeated, “from people whose lives were affected by military action.”
“Afghani politicians, tribal chiefs, merchants who lost their businesses, grieving mothers.” Alvardo rattled off the list with the casual disregard of someone who had never seen action.
“Terrorists,” Blake said. He hoped they would never have to see the names in the red folder.
Chapter Eight
After an excellent spaghetti dinner, the guests at Bentley’s Bed-and-Breakfast—which now included Kovak, the Pitkin County sheriff and the Reuben twins—left the dining room table and moved into the great room with the fireplace. Blake watched as they separated into factions. Jeremy and Emily were, of course, lost in their own little world. The twins and Maddox had taken responsibility for guard duty and were cheerfully synchronizing their watches, studying the infrared camera feed and parceling out weapons. Kovak and the sheriff fell deep into conversation with the general and Alvardo. Sarah was cleaning up.
Blake knew exactly where he belonged.
In the kitchen, he snatched a dish towel from the rack and approached the strawberry-blonde woman rinsing dishes at the sink. “Reporting for duty,” he said.
“You should go with the others,” she said. “Everything in here is under control.”
“I’m staying.” He wanted to be with her. Nothing else seemed to make sense. “If you don’t give me a job, I’ll sit on this stool and watch you work.”
“Fine.” She glanced at him over her shoulder. “There’s a broom and dustpan in the mudroom. The floors in here could use a swipe.”
Dutifully, he went to the mudroom. “That was a good rule you made for dinner. No talking about the investigation.”
“My family is big on civilized conversation. My grandma used to have a sign. ‘For good digestion, no talk of politics or religion will be tolerated at the dinner table.’”
“Old-fashioned values,” he said as he returned with the broom.
“But practical,” she said. “Bentley’s started as a boardinghouse, and there needed to be rules so those miners wouldn’t tear each other apart.”
He could easily imagine her as a pioneer innkeeper keeping order in her house, but he was glad she dressed like a modern woman. For her kitchen chores, she’d taken off her long sweater and wore a pin-striped apron over her blouse and the leggings that outlined her shapely calves and thighs.
When they were first introduced, he’d noticed that she was an attractive woman. The more time he spent with her, the more appealing she became.
“Tonight, you were the queen, sitting at the head of the table and directing your adoring subjects.”
She scoffed. “Adoring subjects?”
“Oh, yeah. The general thinks you’re a pistol. Kovak trusts you with his life. Even Alvardo asked me about you.”
“And what did you tell him?”
Even though Blake had gotten his nose honked, he couldn’t resist teasing her. “I told him we were sleeping together.”
She pivoted away from the sink and glared. “Liar.”
“I saved you from being pestered by Alvardo.”
“And how do you know he’s not my type?” she asked. “I might be looking for an uptight guy who has a briefcase attached to his wrist.”
“I didn’t know you were into boredom.”
She turned off the water in the sink. “I have a question for you. You said I was a queen. Why not a princess? I’ve always wanted to be a princess.”
“Being a queen is better.” He swept his way across the kitchen floor until he was standing beside her. “Princesses are silly and helpless, always needing to be rescued from dragons. That’s not you.”
“I guess not.” She returned to her task of loading the dishwasher. “Before dinner, I heard you guys talking about suspects. Did you get the list narrowed down?”
“Not much.”
So far, they hadn’t found a match with people who had threatened the general and clients of the local rental car services and major hotels. The lack of solid evidence left them discussing profiles, motives and possibilities.
Blake preferred a clear-cut mission. “There’s too much speculation. With nothing to go on but badly worded threats, we’re starting to think of the suspects as players in a parlor game, giving them cute nicknames like Kenny the Contractor and Stevie the Survivalist. I don’t like it. It’s not smart to underestimate your enemies.”
“I agree.” She closed the dishwasher. “Jeremy and Emily aren’t taking this seriously at all.”
“Did you get a list of names from them?”
She nodded. “As long as the sheriff is here, we might want to run those names through a criminal database.”
“Consider it done.”
They were close enough that he could see the rim of dark, rich chocolate-brown surrounding her irises. Her wide, beautiful eyes, framed by upswept brows and thick lashes, softened her angular features. In their depths, he saw the warmth and vulnerability that she kept hidden.
“If you’re finished with the floor,” she said, “you could put the wine bottles in the recycle bin in the mudroom.”
“Why do you think Jeremy and Emily aren’t concerned about the threat?”
“I don’t know Jeremy all that well,” she said, “but Emily doesn’t like to go negative. She wants to pretend that the whole world is sweetness and light.”
“You don’t agree.”
“If the kidnap attempt had been successful,” she s
aid, “I think Emily would have been hurt. How could the kidnapper let her go free when she could identify him?”
“In the Middle East, kidnappings aren’t uncommon. Family members are taken for ransom or as a threat, and they’re often released unharmed.”
“We’re in Colorado,” she reminded him. “Aspen might not have a military presence, but our police are pretty good at finding people when there’s a witness.”
He thought of the red folder. The general had enemies outside the borders of the United States. “Why Emily? Why would they go after her?”
“Well, she is kind of a princess.”
“Prone to attack by dragons and other nefarious beings.”
“Absolutely.”
Looking up at him, she flashed a bright smile and the lightness of it reflected in her eyes. Though tempted, he didn’t move any closer to her. Having his nose honked once was enough.
She stepped away from him and reached behind her back to untie her long apron. When she cast aside the pin-striped apron and adjusted the collar on her blouse, he was struck by the contrast between the rich teal fabric and her milky skin. A tiny, heart-shaped gold locket nestled in the hollow of her throat.
His fingers itched to caress her, and he actually stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jeans to keep from reaching out and tracing the path of the delicate gold chain that encircled her neck. As she crossed the kitchen to hang her apron on a peg near the door, he watched her athletic stride and unconsciously graceful gestures. Being alone with her might be a mistake. If so, it was an error in judgment he intended to make repeatedly.
Unaware of the effect she was having on him, she said, “You had a theory that made a lot of sense.”
“What was that?”
“The wedding could be the trigger.”
He focused on her lips as she spoke. “Explain.”
“One of Emily’s former boyfriends could have been fantasizing about her for years. When he hears about the wedding, something snaps.” She snapped her fingers to illustrate. “And he turns into a total crazy person.”
“Crazy person?”
“That’s probably not an FBI profiler term, but you know what I mean.”
“Does anybody on Jeremy and Emily’s list fit that description?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged inside her long sweater that covered up way too much of her body. “Let’s get started on researching that criminal database and see what we can find.”
He didn’t want to share his time with Sarah, but the investigation demanded their attention. It was all a balancing act. Caution versus paranoia. Desire weighed against practical concerns.
* * *
IN HER OFFICE, Kovak and Alvardo had stationed themselves at the two desks and flipped open their laptops. They were the officials who had access to the restricted criminal databases, and neither wanted to share. As they explained, Sarah was impressed and kind of creeped out by the depth and scope of their records. According to Kovak and Alvardo, almost anyone with an arrest record or a court action was fair game.
“That doesn’t seem right,” she said.
“Computers,” said Alvardo, “are the best thing that ever happened to law enforcement.”
“What about the right to privacy?”
“When you get arrested, you lose that right.”
Outside the windows of the B and B, the wind kicked up, bringing the snow that had been forecast closer. Inside the office, bits and bytes of information danced across the computer screens to form photographs and data.
An embarrassing mug shot of Sarah’s face—with haystack hair and unfocused eyes—appeared on the screen of Kovak’s computer. She would have liked to say it was her evil twin. No such luck.
Kovak looked up at her. “Malicious mischief?”
“It was over ten years ago,” she explained. “I was in college in Boulder and I set off some illegal fireworks.”
“Most of the time,” the deputy said, “the officer wouldn’t bother booking somebody for such a minor offense.”
She winced. “I might have made a smart-aleck comment.”
“Yeah, that would do it.”
Emily leaned over Kovak’s shoulder. “Do me.”
Her fiancé chuckled as he placed his hand on her slender waist. “I can’t believe you have a criminal record.”
Sarah remembered her conversation in the forest with Emily when she’d said that she and Jeremy agreed to disagree on some issues. Poor Jeremy was in for some big surprises.
Emily’s mug shot was perky and adorable. She could have been posing for a magazine cover. There were two charges of disturbing the peace. “Protests,” she said. “Let’s not tell your father.”
He nodded agreement. “Let’s not.”
“I think it’s admirable,” Blake said. “Somebody’s got to stand up and save the endangered ferrets.”
“And the wolverines,” Sarah added as she plopped down on the plaid sofa beside him.
His long legs stretched out in front of him as he slouched against the sofa cushions and rested a blue-and-yellow-striped coffee mug on his lap. His eyelids drooped at half-mast. “Who’s the number one person on your list, Jeremy?”
“That would be Teresa Bonanno. Actually, her father—Carl Bonanno—is the problem. After we broke up, he came to see me and ask me to give her another chance.”
“Of course he did,” Emily purred. “You’re a catch.”
“He said he wanted an army man for his little girl. It was four years ago, and he still sends me a Christmas card.”
A search for Teresa turned up nothing. Her father was a different story. Papa Bonanno owned a pawn shop in Cicero, had served a term in prison as a young man and had a list of arrests for fraud and robbery. “Nothing violent,” Kovak noted.
“Which doesn’t mean he couldn’t hire somebody if he really wanted to stop the wedding,” Blake said. “Can we check his whereabouts?”
Kovak jotted a note. “I’ll do it tomorrow.”
“Here’s a live one,” Alvardo said. “A contractor who stands to lose millions if his government-funded projects are shut down. He has a temper. His criminal record includes two assault charges. He got off on both of them.”
“Which means he also has a good lawyer,” Kovak said.
Sarah didn’t see the connection. “Why would this contractor care if Jeremy and Emily get married?”
Alvardo shrugged. “He wouldn’t.”
“Then why come after Emily?”
“Because he mistakenly thought he could grab her and get away with it.” Alvardo gave her a grin. “He wasn’t counting on your quick thinking in making an escape.”
“Sliding down the mountain on my butt?”
“An ace maneuver,” Blake said.
As they went through several other names, her interest waned. The tracking down of criminals was nowhere near as exciting as it appeared in detective shows. The process seemed to be a lot of digging through information that would yield more areas to dig through. They could spend the whole night here and not get any closer to a solution.
“Time for me to go to sleep,” she said as she rose to her feet. “Breakfast tomorrow is whenever you wake up. Just come down to the kitchen, and I’ll fix you something.”
Blake set down his coffee mug and stood. “I’ll walk you down the hall.”
Though she didn’t need an escort in her own house, she didn’t object to his gentlemanly offer. In the living room, she noticed that someone had put another log on the fireplace. They didn’t need the heat, and she was a little concerned about leaving the flames burning so high. The general and the sheriff appeared to be deep in conversation, both men sipping single malt whiskey from heavy-bottomed tumblers. The general started to get out of his chair when she entered, but sh
e gestured for him to stay seated.
“Have a good night’s sleep,” she said.
“I appreciate your hospitality, Sarah.”
“Thank you, Charles.”
Outside the door to her room, Blake hesitated. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll make sure the fire is okay before I go to bed.”
“How did you know I was worried?”
“I can read you like a book.”
“And I thought I was a woman of mystery.”
“Afraid not.” He leaned against the wall beside her door with his arms folded across his chest. “I can tell what’s going on inside that pretty little head.”
“Yeah?” She stared into his face. “What am I thinking right now?”
He widened his eyes, pretending to see into her thoughts. Then he gave a slow nod. “The answer is yes.”
Once again, he was teasing her. She didn’t want to like these games he played, but she couldn’t help smiling nor could she stop the warm blush she felt spreading from her throat to her cheeks. “If the answer is yes, what was the question?”
“Should we kiss?”
He unfolded one arm and rested it on her shoulder, guiding her closer to him. She had plenty of time to slip from his grasp or honk his nose or walk away. Consciously, she hadn’t been thinking about a kiss, but as soon as he spoke, she knew the idea had been playing in the back of her mind all night. Should they kiss? Would they?
“Yes,” she whispered.
His mouth pressed firmly against hers, taking control. With one hand, he held her shoulder. The other rested at her waist inside her sweater. His fingertips slid up her rib cage to the curve of her breast. A gush of liquid heat flooded her senses. Her heart jumped as her pulse went into high gear.
Her lips slipped against his, tasting and demanding. She caught his full lower lip in her teeth and pulled, teasing him. And he responded forcefully, kissing her hard and using his tongue to push inside.
