Cait watched Aiden glance casually around the lobby, and it hit her. Nothing about this man was truly relaxed, and what looked like a glance was actually a visual sweep, checking for threats.
She’d recognized his alert, detail-oriented precision, but hadn’t put it together with the watchfulness. He was right when he said their jobs were the same in many ways.
He was what she was, just like he’d said in one of the notes. A guardian. Something about that settled into her middle and did a little tap dance. Everything female and sensual in her noticed him, just like it had that day on the canal.
It made her antsy.
He looked at her then and smiled suddenly, as if knew exactly what she was thinking. That smile sizzled all the way to her toes. It was sexy. Strong, still a little bit dangerous and primal, and part of Cait wanted to run.
And yet she wasn’t afraid.
That was bad.
“Good luck,” she said, damning the huskiness that roughened her voice.
“Thanks,” he said, tilting his head, humor lurking in his eyes. “See you at seven, Cait?”
“Yeah,” she said. Then more strongly, “Yes, I’ll be ready.”
The way he said her name. It was like a caress. How the hell had he managed to make her feel that, that fast? She’d gotten out of bed this morning wanting to get as far away from him as possible.
That was before the bagels, her treacherous mind insisted. And the flowers. And the olives.
Feeling odd and off-balance, she returned to her condo. She filled a plate and sat down to work. The data stream was immense.
The good news? She was now covered with background, deep enough in Turkey and throughout her resume, that she could pass pretty much any search the FBI could make. They’d also put markers in her background that would trigger further coverage if anyone probed.
The bad news? They couldn’t tell her a damn thing about either of the hits. The Kith were puzzled, upset, and offended, not necessarily in that order. Puzzled that the killings seemed so violent and neither Senator Hathaway nor Senator O’Reilly had been in contact with any foreign groups, nor had they offended anyone in any way that showed.
Hathaway was a domestically oriented politico. He supported farm bills, agricultural initiatives and pork barrel projects to bring jobs to his district in South Dakota.
South Dakota. What had she seen about South Dakota? There was something on the tip of her brain, but she couldn’t bring it into focus.
Distracted, she perused the additional data on Hathaway. He owned a ranch, four thousand acres’ worth, and ran cattle for beef. Beef, hides, hooves, horns, cover crops for livestock, he had a hand in all of it.
The Kith had neatly hacked his systems and checked his books. And wouldn’t the FBI like to do that so easily?
She snickered at the thought, and continued slogging through the financials. By his books, Hathaway was doing well. His cattle sold, his farm prospered. His farmhands stayed in his employ. The only questionable item in the whole deal, if she was reading it right, was the line item for loss to accident and wildlife, necessitating two full columns in his QuickBooks ledgers. According to the Kith, this was a red flag. These losses were higher than for most operations of equal size.
“Wolves and coyotes and growlies.” She set aside her empty plate aside.
She moved onto the flagged items in his voting record. There were only four, maybe five. The more she read, the more frustrated she got. He was clean, boring, and unspectacular.
Obviously, he had a mistress, the oh-so-married, and now equally dead, Mrs. Paxton. She’d been his chief of staff. Their affair seemed to be the only aberration in an otherwise bombastic, but stolid, career.
She dug into Delia Paxton, but the woman was equally banal. Junior League sustaining member, churchgoer and Brownie troop leader. The late Mrs. Paxton hadn’t seemed the type to cheat. Then again, did it take a type?
Uncovering nothing with the mistress, Cait went on to check the previous tenants of the condo, as well as those from her own condo. She found absolutely zip.
“This sucks. Totally. Where’s the smoking gun?” she complained, as irked as the Kith. The Kith had a tracking drone focused on Earth politics. They wanted first-in rights when Earth finally got its mess together, and admitted the existence of so-called aliens. From there, naturally, the Kith would lead the way in developing Earth’s trading with other planets in the Alliance.
Always the profit motive for the Kith.
They were sure it would be only a decade or two until the break came. Hence their constant tracking of events.
Given that, the Kith determined they should have known about any issues concerning Hathaway. He sat on a NASA committee, although he was not a ranking member. He’d voted for disclosure of certain documents regarding alien sightings. Those were still held in secrecy in the US, the former Soviet Union, Canada, and China.
For that he’d been on the Kith radar, but only as a minor blip. There were others the Kith watched far more closely.
Cait snapped her fingers.
“Michael Constantina,” she said, remembering. “The New Jersey debacle.”
She’d been warned not to interfere with a certain local politician in his home state. She hadn’t wanted to be in Jersey anyway, much less hanging out around the politicos. It had been two missions back.
Her photography permit had come after wheedling and bribing the mayoral delegation, but she’d kept well away from the capital. The permit had garnered her entrée into the still-ruined parts of the boardwalk, the beaches, and the ruins of Coney Island following Hurricane Sandy. She’d been a photographer on that drop.
It was an unfortunate truth that rogues of all ilk’s—planetary and non-planetary—took advantage of disasters, and the people caught in them, to run scams, cheat and steal.
Added to that, the violently turbulent weather had attracted thrill-seekers. Superstorm Sandy, while still a Category Five, had provided some of the best Outer Rim entertainment ever for a group of adolescent Perbadts and their arrogant chaperone.
The teenie-bopper riders hadn’t been the problem, or not the main one. The chaperone decided to stay on and stir around in the hurricane-ravaged areas for delicacies. For a Perbadt, dead cows, sheep and other waterlogged carcasses were the height of desirable delectation. If he’d left it at that, Cait might have let him get away with it, even considered it a disgusting blessing.
Instead, he’d stepped over the line and wandered up into the Hudson Valley, where he’d disguised himself and offered several farmers a way to get the mess off their hands.
The price he’d asked—five pounds of stainless steel per carcass—was far in excess of what the cows were worth, had the farmers only known it. But that hadn’t seemed like much to a farmer with fifteen dead cows or pigs scattered over his property. Especially when the Perbadt offered to harvest the price himself.
The Kith objected, as did Cait. First, the Perbadt broke the law and contacted humans. Even with a disguise and a voice shifter, that was illegal.
Second, the amount of steel he took was highway robbery. He had more than two tons already crushed and condensed—gurneys, pails, trays, countertops and tables he’d stripped from a barely damaged clinic, a flooded but salvageable nursing home, and a nearby diner—when Cait caught him. Like the Grinch, he’d stripped everything he could find, including shower grab bars, and bathroom stall partitions.
The Kith weren’t going to let trade go on without their approval. They were going to make sure the recipient got paid fairly, and that they, the Kith, got their cut.
It was convoluted but honorable. One of the main reasons she’d agreed to work for the Kith and the Sh’Aitan. Sure, they had the market advantage and would get their cuts when Earth joined the Alliance. In the meantime, she got to be sure her planet wasn’t totally ripped off.
“Get a grip, girl,” she finally said, standing to stretch. “This isn’t a storm, other than a shit-storm, and Perba
dts are…” she let the words trail off. “No. It couldn’t be.”
Hathaway.
Missing cows. Lots of missing cows.
Perbadts liked cows. A lot.
No way.
Sure she was wrong, Cait started pacing. When she realized there was very little room to pace in the office, she went to the living room. Another Coke in hand, she walked and talked it out. She’d set her screens so no one would be listening, by means fair or foul.
“Okay, talk this through. Cons. It’s pretty far-fetched to think that pompous, cigar-munching Hathaway is…was…in contact with anyone in the Alliance, or aliens not in the Alliance.” The Others, planet pirates or resource stealers, didn’t negotiate, they just took.
“Pros. Trading livestock off-planet could be covered by huge livestock losses to weather and wolves.”
It ran like a mantra in her mind. Perbadts liked cows. Perbadts could make cows go missing.
Hathaway had missing cows.
“Crap. Now I have to check it out. Is it improbable? Yes. Is it a tangent and most likely an irritating distraction? Yes.” She stomped back to her office. “But it’s there. How’s he being paid? Where’s he putting the money that it’s not been noticed?”
If her mind had put those pieces in that order, it bore looking into because she had a knack for putting the improbable into the probable and coming up with the solution.
“I just don’t want this to be that solution,” she groused, dropping back into her chair.
She opened a file, set up a spreadsheet. Into it she dumped the ledger entries from Hathaway’s books. She noted the info she recalled about the Perbadt’s predations in New York and New Jersey. Lastly, she dropped in the data about Hathaway’s committees, agricultural leanings, voting record on land use, fracking, farming, and banning GMO foods.
“I’m going to be so fucking pissed at him if he was smuggling. Dammit.” She hated the thought of smuggling on her watch. She didn’t want to have to police her own people for interacting with the aliens. “Stupid idiotic jerkweed.
“Hard enough to keep people from getting dead and my work off the radar without you doing stupid shit. I do not want to be a domestic trade expert, dammit.”
Closing the spreadsheet and the senator’s files, she opened a file on her condo building. She’d set up a review of the changes of ownership in various levels for the past five years. It was eye-crossingly slow. She’d just finished that and opened O’Reilly’s files when the beeper on her PDA sounded.
“Yippee,” she joked, “Time for a break.”
Then she realized the beep was to warn her it was time to get ready for her date. Shit. She hadn’t even started on O’Reilly. There had to be a connection to Hathaway.
Chapter Seventeen
She put all the data in lockdown and her computer on Earth Safe Mode. She stretched and grimaced at the stiffness in her muscles. She’d been sitting for nearly three hours.
Cait thought about everything except facing Aiden again as she got ready. But by the appointed meeting time, she was dressed and ready to go.
“Please let him have a lead for me that works,” she said, tucking her PDA into her purse and sliding on bracelet-weapons that matched the new dress. “And please let him agree to keep my secrets.” If the Sh’Aitan didn’t know she’d talked about the Alliance, maybe there was a chance she could salvage the situation.
Cait locked her door, and when she turned, she found Aiden outside his, watching her.
More than watching, she realized. He masked it quickly, but she caught a hunger in his gaze. Her whole system went into woman mode, and she just about melted.
Shit.
She watched him as he came toward her, and she had to admit he wore a suit with serious style. It was custom-tailored and very GQ without being over the top.
Sexy as hell.
“You look lovely,” he said. There was a rough edge to his voice that she hadn’t heard before. Her hormones heard it, though, and they liked it.
Double shit.
“Thank you, you’re pretty well turned out yourself.”
“Let me get that for you,” he said. He held a hand out for her coat, but he maintained a distance, allowing her to come to him. Not overstepping.
Sensitive to the moment. To her.
Hell. That was going to be her undoing.
She felt a deep thrum of heat when he slid a finger along the nape of her neck to gently tug strands of her hair out of her collar. The contact started a serious fire in her belly.
Stop that. It’s dinner. Dinner, and a potential lead, nothing more. You’re a Slip Traveler. Your life belongs to the Sh’Aitan.
And a bit more desperately, He tried to kill you.
In the garage, he held the door and she climbed into his car. “I hope you like American food with a nice twist,” he said.
“I like food of all kinds, and I looked up the menu. It looks fabulous. Besides, I feel like we’re staging a prison break.” But when they drove outside, there was no visible press.
“What the heck?” she said, when they found no media vultures loitering at the garage entrance.
“They’re too busy trying to connect O’Reilly and Hathaway to the mob.”
“The mob?”
He pulled into traffic and cruised through the city. “Yeah, evidently they’re now saying the brutality is mob-like—Russian or Asian Mafia. As for the rest, they’re not all back from Chicago yet.”
Energy crackled between them as Aiden drove through the city. It couldn’t be all physical attraction, could it? The hair on her arm was stirring, and she was as far across the seat as she could get—at least ten inches away, with the console between them. He felt it too, because he shot her a glance as they stopped at a light.
“You seem pensive,” he said, touching a fingertip lightly to the back of her hand.
She jumped in her seat and yanked her hand away. The current between them was definitely—and literally—electric. She’d felt that jolt all the way to her toes.
“Sorry,” he said, and she watched the misery settle back around him like a cloak. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“Did you do that on purpose?” Eyes narrowed, she assessed him, wondering now if dinner was a set up. Was it really an apology? “That electric thing?”
“Did I shock you on purpose? No, I didn’t,” he said, frowning. He thought for a moment, then said, “I’m just having a difficult time wrapping my mind around you.”
He ran a hand through his hair. “And for what it’s worth, it shocked me too.”
* * *
“Okay,” Cait said as he pulled into valet parking. “That goes for me too. The wrapping your mind around things part.”
He nodded and smiled. He seemed sincere. Honest.
She could do this. She looked up at the building, glad for the distraction. “This is Georgia Brown’s?”
The valet opened her door and offered a hand to help her out. After Aiden’s shocking touch, the valet’s hand felt flat, like a Claymation character. She shook her head at the fancy. She hadn’t even had a drink and she was already getting weird.
Just get through the evening, find out what he knows, get his agreement to stay quiet, and get out.
In the dusky restaurant, with its moody lighting, Aiden gave his name at the hostess stand.
Their corner table was secluded from other diners by large plants. Nearby, a wall fountain burbled, further screening conversation. Perfect. She’d lay odds Aiden had planned it that way. The dark-haired, multi-pierced, but Armani-clad maître d’ handed them wine lists and menus and slipped away.
“This is lovely,” Cait said, looking around. “Atmospheric.” Even as she said it, Aiden was doing a visual check of the room. Was he checking it with more than his eyes? With what she’d seen him do, she’d bet he had the ability to, so why not?
“And small enough to notice it if anyone has followed us,” he said, confirming her suspicions.
“You think
they will.” She made it a statement, not a question.
“I do.”
“Then I guess we better not talk too much about our jobs.”
“Except that, circumstances aside, I’d actually like to get to know you, and that includes knowing about your very unusual job.”
Shit, shit, shit. He wasn’t even beating around the bush about it. That hunger she’d seen in his eyes. It was back, and he wasn’t trying to hide that, either. Fine. She could play the game. She just had to pull up her big girl panties and do her job. That meant not letting him get to her.
Truth time. This was weird. She was sitting here, actually talking with a man, he was asking about her work, and he knew what it was. And he was taking it in stride.
Yeah. Weird.
“I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours,” Cait offered. “I’ve told you a little.” Enough to get me killed. “You’ve shown me a lot.” She saw him wince, but he held her gaze. “But you’ve told me almost nothing.”
The waiter appeared, took their orders, poured wine and left.
“So, Aiden Bayliss,” she said, leaning her chin on her hand. “What are you?”
“I’m a computer nerd with a specialty in major damage control. A troubleshooter.”
“Uh-huh. I read your website bio. Impressive client list,” she said, studying him over the rim of her wine glass. “And that wasn’t what I meant.”
“I know. The magical Adept Enforcer part. Technically, one of the good guys, despite the way it seemed last night.”
“Hmmm. What does that entail, exactly?”
“Protecting people.” He watched her as the waiter delivered salads. “I’m guessing you do something similar.”
“Yes,” she admitted. “I do.”
“Mine is an interesting, relatively routine job, some of the time,” he continued, watching her intently. “Other days, it’s terrifying.”
The yawning maw of the sea creature on Meena Pal flashed into her mind. She couldn’t stop the shiver that raced up her back. God help her, she never, ever wanted to go back to Meena Pal.
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