by Jen Doyle
No. She didn’t want to go there. She was far too prone to second-guessing to think too hard about the future. She and Ian had had a great few days together; he hadn’t done anything to make her think otherwise. But given Morgan’s take on the last time things fell apart, she wasn’t Lyndsey’s first choice of a confidant.
There was silence for a moment. Then Morgan said, “Be happy, Lyndsey. I think Fate likes you. Maybe it really is a second chance.”
One could only hope. Lyndsey wasn’t sure enough about it, however, to do anything but look around for some wood to knock on.
“Okay. See you tonight,” Morgan said. “Text me the info. And I’m gonna want full disclosure at some point very soon. All the yummy details.”
Lyndsey smiled. “I promise.”
After saying her good-bye, she looked down at her phone one more time to confirm the address. With a deep breath, she took a chance and rang the bell at the not-in-great-shape front door, hoping it wouldn’t electrocute her or some other such not-so-fun thing.
“Yes?” came a clipped voice through what sounded like an ancient intercom system.
“Um… Lyndsey Daniels?” she answered, not sure how much information she should be giving. “I have an appointment. With Ian Fox?”
“Yes, ma’am. Please hold on.”
Well, the ma’am part sounded military-ish, and he didn’t tell her he had no idea who she was, so Lyndsey took that as a good sign. Or, at least, she took it as a good sign until one minute passed, and then another, and then the thinking part of her brain kicked in.
Had it really only been a week ago that she’d run into Ian?
Or, more specifically, that she’d run into the man who, once upon a time she thought she'd marry but then they had a colossal fight and she’d avoided him for three weeks effectively enough that he went a little crazy looking for her. And by crazy, she meant tracking down her ex-boyfriend—who happened to be a vampire—found her ex’s skanky vampiress friend instead, and ended up offering up his blood as a snack if she led him to Lyndsey.
Like you do.
Lyndsey jumped as the intercom crackled to life. “Thank you for waiting, Ms. Daniels. Please come in. The elevator will take you to the right floor.”
Okay, then. Given the state of this building, she was just going to have to trust that to be true.
The door in front of her clicked open and she went inside, the elevator doors opening as she came to a stop in front of them. Though it looked as run-down as everything else, it ran quietly and smoothly up to the sixth floor quickly enough that she didn’t have time to dwell on the aftermath of that long ago night, the misunderstandings that had led to Lyndsey turning her back on Ian when he finally found her, his being deployed two days later, and then her not seeing him again for an entire year until the day he came back with Abby.
Lyndsey hadn’t spoken to him that day. She hadn’t expected to ever see or speak to him again and had lived with that fact for nearly half her life. Had been haunted by it, in fact, when she’d heard through the grapevine he'd been killed in a helicopter crash.
Except he wasn’t the one who had died, as evidenced by the fact that she was in an elevator on her way up to see him. It was his wife who had died, yet another misunderstanding as Lyndsey had very recently learned.
Heat rose in her cheeks as she thought about the things he'd done to her in the week since—after all the misunderstandings had been cleared, of course. It turned out that post-misunderstanding-clearing sex was better than make-up sex. Who knew?
The elevator came to a stop and the door slid open. Her jaw nearly dropped when she saw the sleek black and gray reception area. Not at all what she’d expected considering the building’s exterior. In complete contrast to these upscale surroundings, however, the man at the reception desk wore a t-shirt and sweats. He was sitting down as she approached, a phone to his ear. “Yes, sir. I understand.” He hung up and smiled. “Welcome, Ms. Daniels. Please have a seat.”
“Thank you.” Taking a seat in the corner, she picked up a magazine and paged through it as she waited. It wasn’t very long until a door opened on the far side of the room.
A very tall, very dark-skinned, very drop dead gorgeous woman walked through. “Ms. Daniels? I’m Wendy, Colonel Fox’s assistant. He asked me to come meet you.”
Getting to her feet, Lyndsey grabbed her bag off the seat next to her. She shook Wendy’s hand and followed her down the hall, thinking what an odd picture they must make: Wendy being almost as tall as Ian, her dark skin set off by the silver beads in her jet black hair, and Lyndsey being, well, short. And, thanks to a hair disaster this morning, frizzy.
Hoping to make a little conversation, Lyndsey asked. “Have you worked with Ian long?”
Wendy held her i.d. badge up to a panel in the wall and opened the door in front of her. “Nine years.” She didn’t say anything further, instead leading Lyndsey past cubicles and desks in silence. Talkative, this Wendy person.
“I expected to see more people in uniform. This is an Army thing, isn’t it?”
“Not just Army,” Wendy answered. “All branches of the military are represented as are various other government agencies.” Then she actually smiled. “We get to do things differently around here—it was part of the arrangement when Colonel Fox agreed to officially establish the division here in Boston.”
The special demon-fighting, vampire-hunting, super-soldier led, shady-government-agency-run division, Lyndsey presumed Wendy meant. Although she was no longer a target, Lyndsey’s intimate experience with the precursor to this division kept her from saying anything. And knowing Ian was in charge meant a lot to her—enough for her to stake her life on it, apparently, since she'd be spending the next several weeks with his team, most of that in the remote Canadian woods. But yes, he’d clearly shed the persona non grata thing by the time he’d moved to Boston a decade ago, in a good enough position to dictate his own terms. With the timeline Lyndsey was beginning to put together, that meant that between leaving her in Sausalito and then coming back to California with Abby one year later, he’d either already been back on an upward path or was about to be.
“What’s he like as a boss?” Lyndsey asked.
“He has a very loyal staff.” Though Wendy said the words casually, there was an unmistakable warning in the tone.
Great. So Wendy obviously wasn’t about to be her brand new bestie.
Sigh. So many minefields, so little time to step on all of them.
They reached a small reception area where Wendy gestured to one of the chairs. “Please have a seat. He’ll be out shortly.”
Sitting down, Lyndsey watched as Wendy did the same, turning her attention to her computer. Not rudely, but it was clear there would be no more conversation. Well, fine. Lyndsey was perfectly capable of entertaining herself. Which she did by counting the number of beads in Wendy’s hair until a few minutes later, when the office door opened and Ian stepped out a couple of steps behind another man.
“Thanks, Drew,” he was saying. When he saw her, he smiled. “Drew—Lyndsey, Lyndsey—Drew. Our resident computer whiz; best in the business.”
Tessa and Tobias, ZSJ’s own tech gurus, would probably have something to say about that. Lyndsey wasn’t going to quibble, however. She stood up. “Nice to meet you.”
“Ma’am,” Drew replied, nodding and walking away.
Ian smiled and held the door open for Lyndsey; closed it behind them once they were inside the office. He didn’t come towards her, though; just stood back while she looked around and took everything in. The man himself was breathtaking—all six feet plus, two hundred solidly packed muscled pounds of him. The scar down his jaw, the touch of gray in his otherwise sandy brown hair, and that hint of a smile in his eyes and at his mouth were only the tip of a very large iceberg she’d spent the past week rediscovering in glorious detail. With a smile coming to her own lips, she surveyed the room he’d brought her in to.
His office was definitely mor
e along the sleek and gray lines than the rundown warehouse ones. It was bigger than a normal size office—enough so to hold a small rectangular table with seating for six and a large wooden desk with two chairs for visitors. The desk itself was covered with the usual assortment of papers and supplies, as well as prominent pictures of Abby and their four kids. The walls held even more photos, mostly framed, gorgeous vistas from all over the world it seemed. Abby was in some of them; Matt—his best friend and demon-hunter division co-leader—together with Ian in others.
Lyndsey tried not to linger on any one piece. She walked over to the bank of windows framing a picture-perfect view of Boston Harbor. “Nice.” Turning around, her eyes were drawn to the computer screen on his desk. Or, rather, the three-dimensional image of her that was displayed on it and almost did a double take.
“Are you TSA’ing me?” she asked, not even trying to hide how unhappy she was about it.
It took him a second to understand what she meant, although the 3-D scan made it pretty clear as far as Lyndsey was concerned.
“Uh, sorry.” He crossed to the desk. “It’s what Drew was working on. The elevator automatically does a full-body scan of everyone who comes in the building. I wanted to make sure it didn’t flag you.”
So much for creaky old building with a run-down elevator. Ha! She should have known.
For as much as that bothered her however, it also sparked her curiosity, she had to admit. She grabbed his hand before he could close out the program. “Wait—what does it say about me?”
He glanced at the computer screen and then at her. “You shouldn’t really be seeing this.” And yet he didn’t appear overly concerned.
She took it as a sign there was leeway to ask more questions. “What exactly is ‘this’?” Other than tampering with the files, of course. At least she assumed that’s what had been going on
Ian was done putting up his token resistance. Okay, whatever. His obligated resistance. He sat down in his chair and angled the screen towards her, explaining, “The files automatically go into a central database. There’s a fifteen-minute buffer where we can…” He paused as if to consider his words carefully. “…Review the files. Add in any incidental data.”
“Incidental data,” she repeated. “Such as?”
He hit a few keys on the keyboard. The image was replaced by a page containing basic information about her: full name, date of birth, some family stuff, and a series of terse sentences describing her association with the U.S. government, presumably taken from the Sausalito Study—the so-shady-it-bordered-on-evil government-run study that had brought her and Ian together all those years ago. But, as they both soon learned to colossal-misunderstanding-leading effect, the whole point of it had been to study people like Lyndsey—people who had some kind of unexplained strength or power—extract their DNA, and then use it to build an army of super soldiers. Super soldiers who would then go out and eradicate their counterparts, incidentally.
That had been fun. If you defined fun as being hunted by your boyfriend's highly trained paramilitary force, that was.
Status initiated September 2000. Terminated November 2001. Subject in Sausalito Study. See also Ian Fox, Matthew Lee, the description said.
Well, yes. That was pretty much the quick and dirty. “That’s it?”
An innocent look came over Ian’s face. “Oddly enough, some files got corrupted during the conversion to the new system a few years back. Had to recreate them from memory.”
Lyndsey smiled. She assumed that was his doing. Or, rather, Drew’s doing on his behalf.
“I’d appreciate your taking a look at what we have,” he continued, oddly formal, “and letting us know if there’s anything we can fill in.”
Hadn’t she just reviewed it? Before she could say that, however, he picked up the phone. “Wendy—hold my calls? Except Washington. Ten minutes should be fine. Thanks.”
As she opened her mouth to ask her next question, he shook his head slightly, waiting a full minute before he leaned back and, much more like himself, smiled. “Okay. You’ve got ten minutes to ask whatever you’d like.” And it suddenly occurred to her that his call to Wendy hadn’t been about ‘holding his calls,’ but instead about ‘activating our anti-bugging-interference-software.’ Because that was the kind of thing you might have to do in office building with elevators that did full body scans.
Ten minutes weren’t nearly enough. “Are you kidding?”
Ian shrugged. “There’s a research branch down in D.C. I’m higher in rank than just about anyone else in this division and yet they still won’t tell me what goes on there. I’m never sure who’s listening or to what so we’ve put some safeguards in over the years. Since you’ve always been of particular interest to them, I’d rather be safe than sorry.” He pushed back from the desk. “I’m not sure if they still care about what you’re up to, but it’s probably better not to find out.”
He seemed to close up as he spoke and, though Lyndsey was sure he was sincere about protecting her, she also wouldn’t have been surprised if part of it was a reluctance to share any more than he had to with her about the agency he worked for. “But you still trust the guys on the squad?”
He nodded. “Most of these guys have been with me for more than five years—them I trust.” His eyes went back to the computer. “All they care about is if you can hold your own; they don’t give a damn about how your body works.”
So that’s what the elevator scan thingy did. “It tells you how my body works?”
Another nod. “Internal and external scans. Focuses on the abnormalities. If it sees something it doesn’t like, the file gets tagged and sent to our security team for review.”
She wasn’t going to ask what happened to tagged files after that. Whatever it was, she figured it wasn’t something she wanted happening to her. “What did it say about me?”
“Possible vampire. Not quite registering as human.” As he’d done throughout this conversation, he gave his answer with strict professionalism, not at all acknowledging that the body they were talking about was one with which he was on intimate terms. Except then he gave her a sweet, knowing smile. “Breathtakingly beautiful.”
Unable to ignore the sudden tingle up her spine that made her insides hot and melty, she smiled. “Possible vampire?”
He shrugged. “It pegs me, too. I think it’s something about the bites.”
The bites that both Lyndsey and Ian also had intimate knowledge of given their choice of bed partners over the last sixteen years. It wasn’t exactly a favorite topic of conversation but that was neither here nor there at the moment. “Then I was lucky no one staked me when I got off the elevator.”
“I can override the call to Security; erasing that stuff from the file is another story.” He held his hand out to her and pulled her onto his lap when she took it.
She put her arms around his neck. “So what’s considered a proper thank you?”
He tilted his head back enough to look up into her eyes. “I can certainly think of a few things.”
Mmm. She could get on board with that. She leaned forward and nuzzled his neck. “How much of that ten minutes is left?”
Not nearly enough to do much more than whet the appetite, as it turned out. When the phone rang again, she gave him a final, much more chaste kiss than the others she’d been giving him before pulling away and letting him answer. It was Wendy, of course, calling to say the fun part was over. Not wanting to make things difficult, Lyndsey stood up and went back over to the window.
“No,” he was saying. “No changes to the file are necessary.” With a hint of amusement in his voice, he added, “Yes, I’m sure,” and, “No, I do not need any additional assistance.”
So someone was clearly concerned about Ian’s well-being in here. Lyndsey folded her arms across her chest as he hung up. “Does she know about us?”
“What do you mean?” he asked, watching her carefully.
Keeping some distance between them, Lyndse
y went over to the other side of his desk and started rearranging the pens. “Nothing really. Just that, well…she seemed kind of protective.” And by ‘kind of,’ Lyndsey meant ‘over-’ but she still wasn’t entirely sure of her place here so she figured erring on the side of caution wouldn’t be the worst thing.
Ian sat back and smiled. “Wendy tends to know more about me than I do, so I’m not surprised if she figured it out. She also tends to bear the brunt when people don’t like me so she’s usually on the guilty until proven innocent side.”
That was all fine and good, Lyndsey supposed. Begrudgingly. “And the rest of the team? Do they know?”
“About us?” He shook his head as he stood up. “No. Not that they won’t figure it out—Matt said there’s been some, uh, speculation as to why I’ve been in such a good mood over the last week.”
He had been? Well, now. That put a smile on her face, too. “Because of me?”
With a laugh, he said, “No, it’s because Matt has seemed especially fresh and dewy lately.” He reached out for her and pulled her up against him. His one hand going to her hair and the other to her jaw, he tilted her head up until their eyes connected. “Of course it’s because of you.”
She let him kiss her, closing her eyes as much to savor the feeling as to shut out the sudden rush of tears. Tears that had been threatening and, occasionally, breaking through, all week. No matter how much she’d tried to slow herself down, she’d finally had to admit her feelings for him hadn’t changed one bit. She was in love with him; she always had been. And now that he was back in her life she couldn’t stop herself from falling even deeper, despite not quite knowing if he felt the same.
Sure, this past week had been…amazing. A honeymoon of sorts. They'd even had some seriously life-changing conversations that boded well for the future, she hoped. But those were things they should have talked about the first time around and they'd each lived a lot of years since. They hadn’t even begun to unpack the rest of their baggage.
She kept her eyes closed as he pulled away, this time focusing on the savoring. The man was good at the kissing thing; that was for damn sure. She was biting the tingly-ness out of her lip when he said, “We’re still on for dinner tonight, right?”
