A decade fighting the sexism in the Navy was more than enough for me.
“Okay. How do we do that?”
Aidan immediately jumped out of bed and went to the small desk in the corner where an expensive laptop waited. McKelty sauntered over, slipping the machine from her sister’s hands before she could drop it. Together they came back to the bed and settled against the headboard together, booting the machine up and turning on the appropriate app.
“Hi, Mommy!”
Aidan practically screamed when she saw her mother’s face broadcast from the rural Wyoming ranch she was visiting. It was a beautiful place—I knew because I’d gone out there for training when I joined Gray Wolf.
“Hello, darling,” Joss said, joy filling her tone. “McKelty, how was your day?”
The teenager shrugged. “Okay. Not that you care.”
“Of course I care.”
“McKelty!”
Her face suddenly lit up with delight as the new voice broke in. I recognized it as Kirkland Parish, the man who’d directed my training out there. I could understand the joy that lit her up. Kirkland was probably one of the most handsome men I’d ever met. When combined with his easy southern charm, he was unbeatable.
I might have lit up like that, too, if he said my name with that much enthusiasm.
“Uncle Kirkland! How are you? How’s the baby?”
“Perfect. How are you? Your mom tells me you’re a cheerleader now.”
“I am. I have been. And we have a football game tomorrow.”
“That’s great. You’ll have to send us pictures.”
“Daddy said he would.”
“I can’t wait.”
McKelty literally glowed. But then the smile disappeared from her face and the surly expression she’d worn all evening was back. I realized why a second later when Joss’s voice filled the room again.
“What book do you want to read, Aidan?”
I remembered having a similar love/hate relationship with my mother, too.
McKelty wordlessly got up and stormed out of the room while Aidan happily listed the name of the book she wanted to read, causing her mother to tease her for reading it much too often. I followed McKelty down the hall to make sure she made it to her bedroom and not out the front door or some other mode of escape.
“Go away,” she called when I tapped on her door.
“Just making sure you’re settled in.”
“You’re not my nanny. You don’t have to make sure I get to bed on time or brush my teeth.”
“No. But your mom is my boss and I’d rather not lose my job.”
“She wouldn’t fire you if I didn’t brush my teeth. She probably wouldn’t notice if I didn’t brush them for a month. She doesn’t notice me at all anymore.”
“I’m sure that’s not true.”
“You don’t know my mom.”
She was sitting in the center of her bed, a cellphone in her hands. But even as she spoke, she tossed the phone onto the mattress, clearly annoyed with whatever it showed, or didn’t show. Someone had mentioned to me that the phone had parental controls on it. Perhaps they’d just kicked in, shutting off her access to whatever it was a fourteen year old did on a cellphone these days.
“I just need to make sure you’re settled before I head off to bed myself.”
“Again, you’re not my nanny. You’re not even the first bodyguard I’ve had following me around. So you can go jump out a window for all I care.”
What a sweetheart.
“Sleep well, McKelty. I’ll be by in a few hours to check on you.”
She didn’t acknowledge me. She simply threw herself back against her pillows and sighed. So much drama for such a pretty young girl.
I returned to tuck Aidan in just as Joss finished reading something about a pouty fish to her, getting a kiss on the cheek from this Matthews child. I think she was asleep before I even turned off the light and closed the door.
The Matthews’ had a beautiful home, including the red and green guest bedroom they’d allowed me to use for the night. It reminded me of Christmas, but not in a gaudy way. In a tasteful, the mother-in-law had something to do with it sort of way.
There were pictures of the kids on nearly every surface and little bowls of what my mother once called sachet, sweet smelling dried pieces of bark and leaves that reminded me of visits to my grandparent’s house. But it was nice.
I took a quick shower, dressing quickly. I learned early in the Navy how to avoid being naked longer than necessary, a habit I couldn’t quite break. Not that I would want to. Catching sight of the scars that marked my body only brought to mind memories I didn’t want to revisit.
Instead, I thought about McKelty and the clearly strained relationship she had with her mother. It almost made me want to call my own much put upon mother. She didn’t deserve the teenage angst I heaped on her. After all, it wasn’t her fault what had happened all those years ago. I was the idiot who thought it would be fun to sneak out of the house in the middle of the night. I was the one who trusted the wrong people. I was the one who got myself into a situation I couldn’t control. My mom, God bless her, tried to teach me how to avoid those sorts of things and she was the one who stood beside me at the hospital during the long weeks of recovery that I fought every inch of the way.
My mom was a saint.
I was definitely not a saint. I’d always thought I would be a terrible mother. Who wanted to deal with a sulky teenager like McKelty on a daily basis? But then there was Aidan. If all little girls were that sweet, I could almost see what the appeal was.
I crawled into bed, tucking my legs under the thin sheet. I set my alarm for three in the morning, intent on getting up to check on the girls and the house despite the fact that there was a state of the art security system on the house that was set to alert me to anything that might trigger the motion detectors. There were also three other operatives stationed at various points around the house. It made me feel better to see that things were okay with my own eyes.
I curled up on my side, a shiver running down my spine as I closed my eyes. I didn’t like being in a strange place, didn’t like having a familiarity with the sounds of the house—the settling noises and the movement of others who share the space with me. Feeling safe in boot camp and then on the battleships where I was assigned during my years in the Navy was difficult. I got used to performing efficiently on little to no sleep. A psychologist once taught me these exercises meant to soothe my anxiety, but they never seemed to work for me. I just had to find a way to deal with it.
I had a little house in the middle of nowhere, which helped. But this wasn’t my house.
I lay awake until the alarm sounded several hours later. I crawled out of bed and pulled on the jeans and sweater I’d discarded for my shower, moving slowly and silently down the hall as I checked on each of the girls and the windows at either end of the long upstairs hall. I knew there was a balcony inside the master bedroom and so wanted to check the doors to be sure they were locked, but couldn’t make myself invade Joss’s personal space. But I checked the windows in each of the rooms downstairs and the other guest room upstairs. All the windows were locked up tight and I could see one of the other operatives outside the front windows. He waved. I didn’t.
Back in the guest room where I was staying, I didn’t bother getting back into bed. I curled my body into one of the club chairs by the windows and slid an earbud into one ear, leaving the other open to listen for trouble in the house. I turned on Spotify, listening to a playlist that consisted mostly of George Strait and Alan Jackson, music from when country was still country for the best part, anyway. It soothed my fears so that they became more of an annoying whisper at the back of my mind instead of a screaming yell.
It was one way to get through the night.
***
“Jules wants you at the office,” Tony said in way of greeting when he walked into the house the next morning. “Said something about having a quick job
for you.”
“For me? I thought I was on house duty again tonight.”
He shrugged his broad shoulders, snatching a strawberry off the fruit platter I was preparing for McKelty’s breakfast. She was picky, asking that she have only strawberries and watermelon on her plate rather than the assortment their father had bought and left for their morning meal before he left for a meeting in San Francisco. I’d spent the last fifteen minutes picking out honeydew, cantaloupe, and peach slices, which seemed like a huge waste of time to me.
“Where’s Audra? Does she have Aidan this morning?”
“Yeah. She’s outside getting the night’s report from Josh. She’ll be in in a few minutes.”
I nodded. “Okay. I better go, then.”
“I would. Jules is taking her temporary assignment as boss very seriously.”
I hadn’t been at Gray Wolf long enough to understand the complete hierarchy of the staff, but I knew that Jules had the direct ear of Joss and I wasn’t looking to get myself fired anytime soon. I’d only been with the firm for a few months, so it felt like I was still in a probationary period. Whenever Joss said jump, I would ask how high. And Jules was as close to Joss as anyone was going to get.
I didn’t stop to change on the way to the office. Jules was at her desk when I walked through the door, a long desk with a high counter that was the sole piece of furniture in the lobby of the building Gray Wolf occupied in Santa Monica. I’d assumed she would have moved into Joss’s office, or at least into one of the empty offices down the hall. But she was still spread out at the reception desk like nothing had changed.
“Morning, Jules,” I said as I walked up to the tall counter, resting my arms on it. “How’s it going?”
“Hectic,” she said with a heavy sigh. “I knew Joss worked too hard, but I never truly realized why until this morning. There was a stack of paperwork on my desk a mile high when I walked in and the phone hasn’t stopped ringing and the reports from the overnight operations still need to be gone over…” She sighed heavily. “This job requires an army to keep up with. My respect for Joss has just gone up a million fold.”
I tilted my head, my eyes moving over the stacks of files she was nearly hidden behind. “Do you need help?”
“Yes. But that’s not why I called you in.”
“What’s up?”
“I have a little case I need you to take care of for me, if you would be so kind.” She searched through a pile and came up with a thin file. “A woman who works for this law firm we use from time to time called this morning and asked if we could handle a domestic issue for her.”
“Her husband stalking her?”
“No. She thinks he’s cheating and she needs proof for the divorce proceedings.”
I rolled my eyes and Jules sighed again, sitting back in her chair to survey her day’s work. When her eyes met mine, they were begging me not to give her a hard time over this.
“I know this isn’t the sort of thing we normally do, but this law firm’s been good to us and it wouldn’t hurt for us to scratch their backs, you know? Besides, a couple of hours of work aren’t bad on any case, are they?”
She held the file out to me. I took it, flipping it open to find myself looking into the reproduced eyes of a very handsome man. He had a narrow jaw and a thin nose, but wide eyes that were the most intense green I’d ever seen. His hair was dark, long, and wavy, the kind of hair that was completely effortless for him, but on a woman would require long hours with a whole host of beauty products to look that perfect. I could see why a woman would worry about this man straying.
“She gave me the name of a bar he hangs out in most evenings. All you have to do is go there and wait for him to come on to you. If he does, you record it with this.” She held up a case that contained a miniature camera that looked like a button. “If he doesn’t, then the wife has to find another way to keep the house and cars.”
I nodded, my thoughts moving to a place I didn’t want them to go.
“Do I have to allow him to touch me?”
Jules tilted her head slightly. “Just enough to make it clear he’s not just being a nice guy. A hand on the knee. Maybe a couple of kisses. Nothing serious.”
Nothing serious.
She had no idea.
“What about Audra? Or Shaw? Isn’t there someone better suited to this case than me?”
Jules studied me a second. “Everyone’s busy. Audra has Aidan for the day and Shaw’s on an operation in Los Angeles. There is no one else.”
I chewed on my bottom lip, the idea of this man touching me sending shivers of fear up and down my spine. I’d spent ten years in the Navy fighting off randy sailors. She expected me to not only welcome this man’s advances, but to encourage them? I wasn’t sure I would know how.
“I’m just…I’m awkward in social settings.”
Jules smiled. “You’re beautiful, Erin. All you have to do is sit there and he’ll come to you. I almost guarantee it.”
I shook my head, the fear now a cold ball in the center of my chest. I chewed my lip some more, trying to think of a good excuse not to take the case, but I couldn’t think of one.
“This law firm is a friend to our business. Joss would be very grateful to you for doing this, Erin. Really.”
“Okay,” I said softly, aware I had no other choice. I wanted this job. I wanted to impress Joss Matthews. I wanted the security of a steady job at a career I understood in a place where I felt safe. I needed this more than anyone could possibly understand. If this was what it took to guarantee that, this was what I would do.
“Okay,” I repeated.
Chapter 3
Boone
I watched her walk around the room, agitated.
“It’s not that big of a deal.”
“It is a big deal. I need this to go perfectly.”
“It will.”
She stopped pacing and turned to look at me, her expression stoic but her eyes appreciative as they moved over my face and body. I was used to women looking at me in that way, used to the naked desire that was almost always revealed behind their perfected expressions of boredom. But there was something more to the need that filled her eyes, something I wasn’t used to seeing.
Absolute, undeniable fear.
I got up and strolled casually to her, resting my hands on her thin shoulders.
“Everything is going to be all right, Elizabeth. I don’t know why you’re panicking, but I assure you there is no way we can fuck this up. It’s a simple thing.”
“If we let him down—”
“Do you think I don’t know what’s at risk here? Do you think I don’t understand what he’s got on us? I will make this right, I promise.”
She nodded, her eyes falling to the floor. I tugged her closer to me, holding her lightly against my chest. She sighed, her breath hot as it permeated through the thin material of my shirt. I kissed the top of her head, fear slowly twirling around the thin fibrous nerves of my spine. I didn’t like this set up. I had my own code and this violated everything about it.
But what choice did I have?
Chapter 4
Erin
I stood in front of the mirror, looking at myself for the third time. I hated looking at myself in a mirror, but I had to make sure the illusion had been achieved.
My hair was short, but I’d curled it giving it a little bit of a sophisticated fullness that flattered my narrow jaw and full lips. My blue eyes seemed almost lighter with the dark liner that emphasized their shape. And the dress…
I tugged at the bodice, trying in vain to pull it a little higher to hide the deep cleavage it revealed. I’d spent ten years in uniforms that buttoned all the way to the throat. Wearing this dress, I felt exposed and almost naked. The sheer material, though, was so soft and luxurious that I had to admit I loved it. I just didn’t like the way it clung to my curves so tightly.
Who knew there were so many curves under the straight cut of my Navy dress whites?
&
nbsp; But, if I were to look at the woman in the mirror through neutral eyes, I would have to admit she was quite attractive. It just didn’t feel like me.
How do you feel comfortable in your own skin when you’ve spent more time than not trying to avoid it? Trying to avoid all sexuality, all forms of attraction, all men? I wasn’t a sexual person—I definitely wasn’t the right sort of bait for this case. This guy was likely to sense that from the beginning. If he fell for this trap, I’d be very surprised.
I took a deep breath and sighed. Time to get this show on the road.
I left my home, careful as always to make sure everything was locked. I checked my phone to be sure the alarms were being sent to it. That was one of the perks of working for a security firm: they set up their alarm system in my house free of charge. I guess it was routine after an operative was taken from her own house some months ago.
Whatever the reason, I was grateful for it. You couldn’t put a price on peace of mind.
The drive to the bar wasn’t quite long enough to suit my troubled mind. It was eased slightly, however, when I recognized a Gray Wolf van parked out in front on the busy street. I knew there would be at least one operative inside, monitoring the security feeds from the bar’s cameras. The back-up was good, but I wasn’t terribly worried about this turning into a fight—which was the only reason my back-up would interfere. I was more concerned with the flirtation part of the night’s events.
I didn’t see the target when I first walked in, but knew from the file Jules gave me that he didn’t normally arrive until later in the evening. I’d wanted to arrive before him so that I’d have time to get a feel for the place and the people occupying the space. There was always the small possibility of interference from some unrelated, potentially drunk, party and I wanted to avoid that.
The bar was fairly quiet even for a Monday evening. There were a handful of men in business suits at a table in the back, talking loudly about some person they clearly disliked in their office. A few couples sat scattered around the room, most of them sitting intimately close. At the bar were a couple of professional looking folks drowning their sorrows in hard liquor. No one seemed too interested in me as I crossed the room.
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