Just what we need. She returned to the laptop, all business as she flipped it open and turned it on, clearing a little extra space for the open padfolio and unearthing the phone book from beneath his papers. Awkward moment there, not sure if she should politely pretend not to see the contents of those papers, or if she should grab the moment to learn what she could of him.
“Just wrapping up loose ends from the sale of the business,” he said, and damned if he wasn’t suddenly behind her. “The new owners come to me now and then…consulting, you might call it. Wondering how we used to handle similar situations.” He reached past her, brushing against her as if she might not find that contact remarkable at all, and plucked out a sheet of paper. “Right. This one, for instance. They had a bad feeling about it. Wondered if I did, too.”
“Did you?” She didn’t glance at the paper. She didn’t lean into his presence. She watched her laptop boot up.
“In fact, I advised them to decline the job.”
Okay, that made her curious. She risked a glance not at the paper, but at him. “What was it? Surely people don’t come to you asking for anything illegal.”
He laughed, a quiet sound. “You wouldn’t think so, would you? But they do. Sometimes it’s income tax dodging stuff, sometimes it’s, say, the sale of a property tangled up in divorce, with one party wanting to make sure the other doesn’t get anything from it. But sometimes it just doesn’t feel right. This guy…he wanted a bomb shelter.”
She frowned, turning to prop herself against the desk. “What’s wrong with that?”
He shrugged. “His presentation was a little eager. A little intense. My gut instinct says he wasn’t going to use it for a bomb shelter.”
She worked on that one, not quite getting it, and finally shook her head.
Gently, he added, “I suggested that they drop his name with the police and look into any unsolved disappearances from his previous locations.”
She got it then. “You’re kidding. You don’t really think…Would he really come to a service for a bomb shelter if he meant to…?”
He flashed her a quick grin. “You’d be surprised. Arrogant, some of these guys. He had money, he was in a hurry, and he was trying to work it long-distance. Those three factors were common to a lot of our jobs.”
“Except the pro bono work,” she noted. She shook her head; her arms settled across her stomach in spite of herself, looking as confrontational as she felt. “Why didn’t you mention—?”
The lingering hint of that grin disappeared as quickly as it had ever flashed her way. “Why didn’t you find out for yourself? Why were you—are you—so willing to pass judgment when you know so little?”
“If it was important, it would be in the file,” she said, and when her arms tightened across her stomach she knew it for defensiveness now.
“Then why ask me now?” He wasn’t going to make it easy, that was clear enough. Wasn’t just going to let it go.
Fighting the impulse to squirm, Lyn said, “Mrs. Rosado made me curious. It doesn’t have anything to do with what’s happening here.”
“Or it might,” he said. “It might have to do with who I am. But if you ever truly learned who I am, it might interfere with this vendetta thing you’ve got going.”
“Hey!” she said sharply. “That’s not fair.”
He snorted. “Tell me about it.” And then he cocked his head and looked at her, something sparking in his expression. “Tell you what. Prove me wrong on that, and I’ll take it back. I’ll accept whatever action you recommend.”
“Prove you wrong,” she repeated, and oh, yeah, she felt trapped now.
His smile was predatory. “Do the job right. Do the whole job. Check me out. Figure out who I am. And then see if I still fit into that guilty spot you’ve got picked out for me.” He raised an eyebrow, shifting just a little bit closer. In the distant background, thunder rumbled. The first storm of the day, trying hard to work up into rain. “Or is that just a little too threatening to your vendetta?”
“It’s not a vendetta,” she snapped. “How could it be? I don’t even know you.”
“Exactly the point,” he said, satisfaction flashing as sharp as teeth.
Walked right into that one.
Only because it was there to walk into.
Damn. She didn’t want to be that person. The one who lost sight of the trees for the forest.
But his focus on her, so intent in these past moments, abruptly wavered. He took a step back; he faltered. He lost himself in some brief inward struggle, and still…if Lyn hadn’t gone looking for it, she never would have felt that tiny susurrus of power, that infinitesimal taste of his trace in the air. When she turned her attention outward again, she found him watching, fully attentive again—but some of his color was gone, something of his presence muted. She said abruptly, “It shouldn’t be affecting you like this. These power surges. Riding them is what you do. And that…that was nothing. Just like the one up on the top of the ski lift yesterday was barely more than nothing. They all taste like you, and they’re damned well messing with you. Why haven’t you said something? Why haven’t you reported to brevis?”
He scrubbed one hand through his hair and brought it to rest at the back of his neck, kneading slightly. “Wouldn’t you just find a way to turn it into evidence that I’m involved?”
She recoiled, stung. “That’s not—” Fair. Right. They’d been through that. Issue, opposite sides of.
“Look,” he said. “I had a cold. I may have mentioned it.” He had, and they both knew it. “Not a big deal. But it slowed me down.” He watched her, taking in her expression—and she was well aware of the twitch of her own frown, the narrowed eyes of her skepticism; she didn’t try to hide them. “You don’t get it, do you? I’m just now figuring this stuff out. I’m not ahead of the curve, doling out little tidbits of inside information. Because I don’t have any inside information.” He dropped his hand from the back of his neck, looked at her in what she could only call disgusted resignation. “I’m not in on this. I didn’t start it, and I don’t have a clue what the Core hopes to gain here. Until you believe that, you’re not going to find me of much help at all…because you’re going to look at everything I do and say from the wrong perspective.”
“Okay,” she said. She turned, scooped up the yellow pages and the padfolio, and held them out to him. “You want to help? I’d like to have the names and numbers of the hotels written out, with enough space beneath each for notes.”
“Okay?” he repeated, failing to reach for the phone book and pad.
She shrugged. “It’s a good argument.”
He squinted at her in patent skepticism. “Yeah?”
“I’m not convinced, but it’s a good argument.” She gestured with the phone book, which was getting heavy. “Now, are you going to help with this?”
Exasperated, he crossed his arms, very distinctly not taking the offered items. “And if I don’t? Do I get demerits?” He looked at her straight on, gaze dark and direct. “I’m not going to play the game where everything I do is weighed and measured and judged. I have no doubt you’re going to play that game, but…” He stopped, shook his head. “I’m not.” And he walked away, past the heavy offered phone book, past Lyn…through the door. His final trailing comment came in the form of short, deep rolling R’s—a quick baritone purr, one he was so at home with that he clearly didn’t think about using it now. A call to his cat.
The cat in question—the tortie girl, who had been again eyeing the chair with interest—gave her an assessing look, dismissed her and followed Ryan out of the room, exiting with her tail smartly in the air.
Lyn returned the phone book to the desk and shook out her hand. Huh. And that didn’t seem to be quite enough, so she said it out loud. “Huh.” And though she frowned and maybe she even gave the chair a little kick, deep inside she felt an admiration for what he’d just done.
And a little bit of shame for what she was putting him through.
<
br /> Even if she had no intention of backing off. Not with the stakes this high.
The rich smell of brewing coffee filtered back to her—oh yeah, home-ground. Lyn had never been a coffee slave, but she had a sudden image of herself curled up in a chair in her own seldom-seen apartment in the very northern part of California, lap quilt pooled around her feet, night closing in around her. And then she blinked, and realized her mind’s image hadn’t really been her apartment after all, but the briefly glimpsed loft of this very house, and that she hadn’t even really been alone as night closed around her. That—oh my God—she’d been wearing one of his shirts, half-buttoned at that.
She squeezed her eyes closed, covering her face with her hands. “That is so wrong,” she muttered. She smoothed down her shirtfront; she lifted her chin to expose her flushing neck to the slight breeze from the window, and she stared down the muddy brown tabby who came to sit in the half-open door and observe her as it might watch a bug.
The ringing doorbell was a mercy—especially as she had no trouble discerning the ensuing conversation. Two children, neither of whom carried any special trace, and Ryan, his voice soothing against their shrill and urgently blurted words. “…lost track,” one was saying, and “…can’t find him,” said the other, and “…going to rain!”
Right on cue, thunder rumbled overhead.
“Come,” said the voices, suddenly overlapping one another. “Joe, come help us, Joe, come find him, Joe, please!”
And the next thing she knew, Ryan was calling to the back of the house. “I’ll be back in a while!”
She wanted to shout back for him to be careful—of the impending storm, of the potential power surges, of the Core in the area—but instead she closed her mouth and she returned to the desk, where she finally brought up her e-mail program and logged in. As it downloaded, she flipped the heavy phone book open to the hotel listings and began to write.
A cat sauntered into the room—the tortie again—pausing before the chair to eye it with a proprietary air.
“Sorry, cat,” Lyn told it, barely glancing away from her notes. Did they even have names? And then she squeaked with surprise as the cat leaped into the chair anyway, landing in the small space behind her. It kneaded her lower back a few times and curled up in that tiny space, quite obviously determined to pretend she wasn’t there. She informed it, “Two can play that game,” and turned to her e-mail.
Nick’s e-mail update was short and full of not-yets. Still checking on who’d been responsible for getting requests and information to Ryan, although that name should have been clear and simple to pin down. That it wasn’t made Lyn think there might just be something to Ryan’s allegations. “If you’d gotten the report in on time,” she muttered, “there wouldn’t have been any problem.”
Unless someone made sure it got lost.
Wow, where had that thought come from? Almost as if some part of her actually believed him…believed that there was someone within the Sentinels working to make things look bad for him. Someone within brevis.
Right. Just because he’d touched something within her that hadn’t ever made that connection before. Because he’d opened the way for feelings she’d never had before. Get over it, self.
Except it wasn’t just that, was it?
It was the way he never bothered to hide what he was thinking, even when she wished he wasn’t thinking it. It was the way he’d put his heart into these mountains. The way he kept constant watch on this place…and had expanded those responsibilities to include that stranger on the ski lift and his widowed neighbor and whoever those kids had been. They’d come to him; they’d expected help.
They’d gotten it.
It was the look on his face as he took in the high desert far below, listening for problems in the flow of power. Dammit.
Before she knew it, she’d pulled the folder from the padfolio pocket, smoothed its crimped edges and flipped it open to that photo. The one she didn’t really need to look at. The one she’d first seen as a target, and now, in spite of herself, saw as the person behind the target.
“You are in way, way over your head,” she whispered…and didn’t know if she spoke to the photo or herself.
Ryan returned nearly two hours later, with the thunder rumbling constantly overhead and fat drops of rain hitting the office windows, steady and building fast. Lyn had gotten her permissions, navigated the Sentinel servers and connected with one of the brevis consultants to delve through Ryan’s financial records—where she discovered he was, in fact, on the high end of financially comfortable. The business, now sold, had been doing very well at the time of his partner’s death.
In fact, his credit record showed he’d been hunting a business equity loan as a down payment on his half sister’s medical bills around the time of Dean Seacrest’s death. What sense did it make, to kill the partner who made such a loan possible?
Because a better deal came along?
None of the mystery money remained…none of it had actually ever been deposited in his account. His partner had died; the medical bills had been paid. That money had been traced back to the Vegas crime consortium.
You’d think a criminal organization in Vegas would know how to hide their tracks.
Huh. You kind of would, wouldn’t you?
And so she’d made notes, and she’d sent an e-mail to Nick summarizing the events since her arrival, and she’d said to him, “I need more time on Ryan.”
Best to concentrate on finding the Core presence here, and following the trail from that end. Especially since she wasn’t quite ready to say out loud—not to Nick Carter, not to herself—that she had doubts about Ryan’s involvement. That she thought…if he was involved at all, he’d tumbled into it stupidly, in some foolish trying-to-do-the-right-thing way that turned out to be totally the wrong thing.
She looked up to find he’d done it again—that in spite of his size, he stood in the office doorway without triggering her awareness. For all the young Sentinels practiced such tricks in their massively annoying teenaged years—trying to be more ninja than thou—Ryan did it effortlessly. Lyn had come to suspect it was about more than just quality of movement and deliberate stealth…it was the way he fit in here. A man who could ride the mountain’s power was pretty much just part of the place.
But now he very much had her attention. A bit bedraggled—half-wet with rain, and no more comfortable in that state than any cat…and yet more than that. The fatigue shadowing his features, the set of his shoulders…the sense that when he leaned on the door frame, it truly was the only thing holding him up. But with all of that, he said, “I see you’ve made a friend.”
“I’m not sure I’d call her that,” Lyn said, peering over her shoulder to glimpse striking tortie fur. “More like she’s tolerating my existence because she has no choice.” She straightened, suddenly aware that she now had a vibrator at her back; the tortie had decided to celebrate Ryan’s return. “Do you need something? You look…”
“Like something the cat dragged in?” he said.
“Like the cat who got dragged in,” she corrected him. She saved her work and shut down the laptop, gathering her hotel notes, maps and planned routes and stuffing them into the padfolio pocket along with his file. “Come on. I want to try some of that coffee you had out earlier, anyway. Kona?”
“Smooth stuff,” he said, but he didn’t perk up noticeably. “It’s got a nutty edge. Too much for me in the morning, but right now I’ll take it.”
She stopped gathering her things to look at him again. Still leaning there. And his color…decidedly off. “What was that all about?” she asked. “With the kids?”
“Ah, the Martins.” He grinned—half a grin, anyway, and it looked as tired as the rest of him. His hair, darkened by the rain, highlighted his unruly state. “Latchkey kids, just past Mrs. Rosado. Their youngest has recently become an escape artist. Headed for the woods…the other two lost him.”
“In this weather?” Lyn glanced outside
, where the day had darkened under the storm and rain thumped steadily against the house and grounds, splatting up a misty ground cover of bounce droplets. She didn’t need a thermometer to know the temperature had dropped a good twenty degrees, with the breeze blowing up goose bumps on her arms. A young child out in this could chill to hypothermia in no time.
“Hey, I found him.” Ryan grinned again, a little more convincing this time. “Sent the other kids in the wrong direction, took the cougar…tracked him right down. Backtracked, took the human, and ‘found’ him again. Not the first time, as you might guess.”
She frowned at him. “No offense, but it looks as though it took more out of you than that.”
His grin faded; he glanced away. “You probably didn’t feel it. We’ve had power ripples since I left. Whatever’s in them…” He shook his head.
“You’re in them,” she said, and immediately regretted it. He hadn’t come to this doorway looking for trouble. “I’m sorry. But I think that’s part of the problem.”
“They’re corrupt and angry,” he said, and anger touched his own voice—but not aimed at her. He looked beyond her, out the window to the woods he worked so hard to nurture. “It’s the lifeblood of this area, bleeding out of a giant wound somewhere. That’s the problem.”
“You didn’t shield?” She kept her voice neutral…careful.
He rested the side of his head against the door frame. “Couldn’t. Not and keep an eye on things, with Jakey out there. Looks like I’m like you…I need someone to watch my back when I work in an environment gone this sour.”
For once, she didn’t feel that surge of defensiveness at her inability to divide her attention between tracking and…well, anything else. Maybe it was the complete lack of judgment in his voice as he spoke…maybe it was the understanding in his eyes. “Is it bad?” she asked. “The surges? Are you—”
“I’m shielded now,” he said, abruptly, as if he could tell she’d been about to reach out and check—and indeed, he gave his head a quick shake, lifting it from the door frame to fasten his gaze on her, that weariness mixed with an odd combination of wistfulness and warning. “Don’t. I couldn’t, if you—”
Sentinels: Lion Heart Page 9
