The coming-back-from-the-dead stuff was bigger, and less urgent. It should wait. “With Kemmerling.”
“You know him, then.”
“I know who he is.” Anger put an edge in her voice. “He was an excellent agent who got too big for his britches and has been gunning for you guys ever since. I figure he wants to use the aftermath of the Kolanko job to tear down Hummingbird. Coming after me seems more personal, though. Unless…” She raised an eyebrow. “The RT-24?”
“Smart girl.”
“Call me a girl again, you’ll feel it.” She brandished her bottle at him. “I’m not that much younger than you, you know.”
He held up a hand. “Sorry. Figure of speech. But yeah, that’s the start of it. We think he still has connections inside, because he somehow got wind of my miraculous recovery and figured out how it happened. Any ideas?”
Lark considered, picking at the label on her bottle. “I don’t know much about the medical team. What do you have so far?”
Jason blew a small breath through his nose, not quite a snort. “I didn’t even know there was a medical team before I woke up rebuilt. And I just found out about all this today. Matt didn’t have time to give me a rundown. You were the priority, and I’m the only one he trusted to get you out of harm’s way.”
They sat in silence a moment while Lark let her mind whir back over years of interactions with the Hummingbird staff. There hadn’t been much in the last few years, just the occasional holiday party and company picnic. Not that they were typical of corporate America. They’d had stealth and weapons competitions, and hand-to-hand—
“Nils!” she half yelled as a memory burst into her brain. “I bet you anything it’s him.”
“I don’t know a Nils.”
“You wouldn’t. I mean, you should, but he’s one of those guys people don’t notice. The ones who get all resentful about it and go dark side.”
“What does he do for Hummingbird? He can’t be an agent.”
“No, he was support. But he wanted to be in protection. He was really pissed when I beat him hand-to-hand at the company picnic one year.”
Something dawned on Jason’s face. “I remember hearing about that. I wasn’t there, I was on a job. Redhead, right? More orange. Lots of freckles.”
“That’s him. Caitlyn told me he was a jack-of-all-trades at Hummingbird, efficient at whatever was asked of him.” More came back to her the longer she thought about that particular picnic. “I think he hung out a lot with Isaac. They were the same age. And it’s possible he was assigned to the lab at some point.”
Jason frowned. “Probably not likely, but possible, sure. If he had a spotless background and was good at grunt work.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket. “How long ago did you sell them your patent?”
“Nearly two years now. Right before I started working at BotMed. I never dreamed things would happen this fast. But they were probably working on the other stuff even before that, right? Dad said you had a lot of bone breaks, and the regeneration therapy wouldn’t help those. Nils could have been assigned to the team before Isaac was censured. What are you doing?”
“I’m texting Matt to find and question Nils. Do you know his last name?”
“Fredlund.”
He tapped at the keypad for a minute, waited for the phone to beep, and put it away. “Anyway, Kemmerling thought I was alive and thought he knew how. He sent a threatening photo to your father, who sent me to get you.”
Lark grimaced. “I’m sorry.”
He looked at her. “What? Why?”
“For dragging you away to babysit.”
He barked a laugh. “You have no idea. Lark, this was my first day out of the basement.”
“Oh!” She stared at him. “Really? You’ve been holed up the entire time?”
He shrugged. “Well, yeah. I haven’t actually been conscious that long, and was rehabbing, and had to be under constant observation and all that. I just got released—reluctantly, I might add, on the doctor’s part—and Matt sent me up here immediately. If I hadn’t had a mission, I’d have stood in the parking lot all day, basking in the sun.”
He grinned, but Lark could hear the underlying truth beneath the casualness. Still, “He should have sent someone else. Or just called me, for cripes sake. I mean, I can take care of myself.”
Jason shook his head. “I’m sure you can, under routine circumstances. But he doesn’t need another thing to worry about.”
“You’re right,” she said, feeling guilty. She’d spent weeks wallowing in worry about him, and now this discovery had wiped it away as if it had never existed. “Still, he needs you. Has needed you.” Except, he’d had him. The world tilted with the realization. All this time she’d thought her father was deep in despair over his loss, but it was a lie. Okay, granted, he didn’t know if Jason would survive, and the company stresses were the same, and Jason couldn’t work. But he’d been there to talk to, which maybe explained why he hadn’t needed to talk to her. She looked down, blinking fast against the sudden, stupid burn of tears under her eyelids.
“Sure,” Jason said, and out of the corner of her eye, she saw him swig from his bottle. “He needed me.”
The sarcasm in his words banished her self-pity. There was definitely more there than she understood, more than she had a right to understand. She cleared her throat. “Um, anyway, I don’t…quite…” She pressed her lips together and gave her head a quick shake of annoyance. “I don’t know why Kemmerling has targeted me. I’m hardly involved with the technology at all. I can’t help anyone recreate the compounds or anything.”
“That’s not the only reason you’re a target,” Jason pointed out.
“I guess.” It had been a long time since she’d considered herself leverage, with the possibility growing more remote as she got older. But being an adult didn’t make her less of a target, as Isaac and his goon had shown today. “How did you know I was in danger? Your timing today was awfully convenient.”
Jason lifted his body to pull a folded piece of paper out of his back pocket. His abs tightened under the revealing shirt, and the muscles in his arms and legs flexed, making Lark hum way back in her throat. Then Jason handed her the paper, and she forgot all about muscles.
“What the hell? How did they do this?” She narrowed her eyes at the red dot in the middle of her forehead, the strange sensation from the other day in the shower again prickling over her, when she felt like she was being watched. “This is impossible. No one was there. And I don’t have a window in the bathroom.” She squinted at the printout. “Is it doctored?”
“No. Someone planted a camera in the vent over the tub. I found it when I searched the place, before you went in this afternoon. The camera had a light, not a real laser sight, but you can’t tell from that.” He flicked a finger at the paper. “They probably took a constant stream of images and picked the one that worked.”
She shuddered. “If they could get that close, why not just attack me there? Why wait until I’m at work, where people would be around?”
Jason plucked the paper out of her hand and refolded it. She raised her eyebrows as he tucked it back into his pocket.
“Because the immediate goal wasn’t to get to you, it was to threaten your father.”
“Okay, I get that.” Hated every part of it, but understood it. “But they came after me anyway. The first guy, Donald or whatever, he was on the phone, presumably with Kemmerling, and he said he was there to get the girl, the papers and the plants.”
Lark took a deep breath, sensing herself getting shrill and probably annoying. But Jason answered with patience and not a hint of frustration.
“Something obviously changed between then and now. Or maybe we’re wrong, and the threat wasn’t the end goal. Maybe they wanted to flush me out.”
“Oh, no.” She stared at him. “If so, it worked. Isaac knows you’re alive.” Jason nodded, and she closed her eyes, fury turning metallic in her throat. That Isaac had won anything,
even something as preliminary as this, made her want to take his head off. That Jason was now at risk, in more ways than one, turned fury into a protectiveness she’d never felt for anyone but her father.
“What’s the plan?” she asked, hoping neither emotion had branded her voice.
He shrugged. “Just what I told you. Get your stuff and get back to Hummingbird where you can be safe until Kemmerling is brought in.”
“Wait.” She frowned. “When we left BotMed he was out cold. With security surrounding him. And police coming. Shouldn’t we be safe?”
Jason’s face went granite. “Did you see any police on our way out?”
She hadn’t been paying attention, shaken as she was by everything. But now that he mentioned it, she didn’t remember seeing the police. Only the security people leaving the door wide open. “No. Dammit. Those incompetent… He got away, didn’t he? Dad told you that?”
“Yep. Donald’s in the hospital, though. No word on his vision.”
She nodded absently and returned to her original train of thought. “I assume this safe house was established post Kemmerling.”
“Of course.”
She watched dark shapes—bats, probably, out for their dinner—soar across the sky above the yard. They could barely be seen against the final remnants of reflected sunshine on the horizon. “Anything else I need to know about this problem at the moment?”
“Not that I have to tell. You have other questions?”
She turned sideways in the chair and pulled her legs up. “Boy, do I.”
He laughed, his teeth flashing in the meager light. His shaggy hair flopped back as he lifted his face. Lark shivered.
“Stop doing that,” she demanded.
He stopped laughing, but his eyes still gleamed. “Stop doing what?”
“Um.” She couldn’t tear her eyes from his, yet she was one hundred percent aware of the softness of his mouth. Guh. “Stop—never mind.”
They looked at each other, silent, for a long moment. Then Lark shook off the sensual tension and stared past him into the dark. You can’t have this. So focus.
“Okay. Questions.” They surged back, as did her professional excitement. “Tell me about your recovery. How long did they suspend you? I mean, all that damage, you had to be suspended for the bones to knit. What did they use? A bone glue?”
“Yes, among other things.” He shrugged. “I was out of it for about three months. I assume that’s how long they had me in the chamber. I’m just glad I wasn’t aware of it.” His voice tightened.
“You’re claustrophobic?”
“Not really.”
“Just don’t like being trapped.”
He shook his head at her. “How do you figure a person out so easily? You didn’t minor in psych, did you?” His tone made it clear what he thought of such a thing, and she laughed.
“No. It just made sense.”
Jason cleared his throat. “I think they did most of the repair work while I was under. Once I was awake and weight bearing and could start rehab, they injected me with your stuff.”
Again, she could read his voice. Her heart sank, tanking the excitement. Of course, the compound was still experimental. She couldn’t expect it to work perfectly. That it had worked at all was still a miracle, even if… “You don’t like it,” she said.
“What?”
“The RT-24. The regeneration therapy. You don’t like it.”
“It’s fine. I’m grateful for it.” He paused, not looking at her. “Not the side effects so much.”
“Did the regrowth hurt?”
He smiled a little. “Like a sonofabitch.”
“I’m sorry.” There was probably little to be done. Nerves were the pain centers, after all.
He shrugged. “Being dead would have hurt more, I suppose. Anyway, it wasn’t constant.”
But she knew how horrible it must have been. Pictured him screaming in the night, bowing upward on his bed, naked…
Jesus Christ on a stick.
“Does it hurt now?” She took a swig of warm water to ease away the huskiness in her voice.
“Occasionally.”
She winced in sympathy. “When did they stop the therapy?”
“A few weeks ago.”
Her mouth fell open. “And it’s still working?”
“Apparently. We don’t know what that means, besides ‘don’t touch me.’”
She remembered, remorsefully, grabbing his arm in the car. “I’m sorry I hurt you.”
“No—it’s—never mind. It’s fine.”
She didn’t believe him, but he clearly didn’t want to dwell on it. “You said they used bone glue and what else?”
“Something that bonds with muscle cells, helps them knit together stronger.”
That was so cool. “Does it make you stronger?”
He grinned briefly and rose. “Watch.” He went over to a large planter on the corner of the deck. It was about three feet across, round, and filled with dirt, maybe stones on the bottom for drainage. The plants were typical houseplants—geraniums, petunias, philodendron.
Jason not only lifted the pot with one hand, he lifted it above his head, not even requiring the use of his other hand to steady it. And he stood there, holding it at an angle, so the weight was not over the pole of his upraised arm, but to the side.
“Holy crap.”
He set the planter down with a light thump. “They don’t know.”
“Why the hell not?”
Jason sat back in his chair and picked up his water. “I found out accidentally. And I already hated being studied and poked and prodded. I didn’t want to become a show pony, too.”
“Yet you performed for me. You told me.”
“Imagine that.” He drank.
As she watched his throat working, her own dried out. She sipped her water, but it didn’t help.
Her gaze dropped to the curves of his biceps, clear through the snug shirt, and the flat plane of his abdomen. Her heart pounded, and she didn’t know if it was because of the implications of their breakthroughs, or how incredibly hot his strength was. She tightened her grip on the bottle to keep herself from fanning her face or plucking at her shirt.
“Umm…” She struggled to remember what he’d just said. “You can also run faster, according to Dad.”
He shrugged.
“You move so smoothly,” she marveled. “Like there’s nothing wrong with you. Like nothing has been wrong.”
“Rehab. Keeps the joints oiled, the muscles supple.” He rotated a shoulder.
“But it’s more than that,” she pressed. “Normally you’d be sore—”
“I’m not normal,” he cut her off.
“No,” she agreed after a moment. She didn’t say he’d never been normal. Even though he wasn’t actively part of her life, his presence, his influence on her father, had been. When she was young, her father had told her stories of Jason’s honor and skill and bravery. Her minor hero worship faded as she matured and then built her own life, but she still recognized one thing.
Very few people could have accomplished what Jason Templeton had after he died. Someday, maybe he’d understand it wasn’t what had been done to him that made his recovery a success, but what he’d done with it.
Acceptable Risks Page 8
