The Protected tfp-4

by Shiloh Walker

  It had happened before, back when they were in Oklahoma. Alex didn’t like to think of that day. The man who had broken in hadn’t been trying to hurt them—he’d been looking for cash and drugs, but he’d hit the wrong house.

  No, Alex didn’t like to think about that. Instead, he focused on what he had to do here. Check the stupid windows, make sure nothing felt off. That wasn’t hard.

  Everything felt fine. Tape there. Tape here. Tape everywhere. Coins where they needed to be.

  His heart jumped into his chest, though, as he found the tape in the kitchen. That piece by the door. It wasn’t sealed . . . well. It was. But it wasn’t pressed down tight the way it usually was.

  Swallowing, he glanced around.

  Everything looked fine. He dropped the mental wall he kept around his mind and looked . . . harder. It wasn’t easy to explain the difference, but he felt the difference. His heart was racing by the time he finished, but everything felt fine.

  It was all fine, damn it. He didn’t want to run again, didn’t want to leave again. He was so tired of having to run . . .

  Hands sweating, he reached out and smoothed his finger down the strip of tape, flattening it into place as he heard the solid, sturdy sound of Gus’s boots.

  “Everything clear in here?” he asked from the doorway.

  Alex turned around and stared at him. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  And his stomach twisted inside, guilt rising and making him feel more than a little sick. But nobody had been in there. If they had, he’d know, right? He’d feel it. He was so tired of running. He probably hadn’t smoothed the tape down when he put it on last night right before bed. That was all.

  No big deal.

  Feeling Gus’s eyes on him, he looked up.

  The man was watching him solemnly, quietly.

  And the guilt just got worse.

  A big hand came out and hooked him over the back of the neck, tugged him close. As Gus wrapped an arm around his shoulders, Alex sniffled and blinked back the tears that suddenly decided to choke him. “I know this is not easy,” Gus said quietly. “I know this is not what your mother had planned for you. It is not the life I would have wanted for you, either. It’s not the life I want for you. But you’re alive . . . and you’re safe.”

  Alex pulled away and stormed over to the fridge. “I’ve heard this before. It’s not what we planned. But it’s a life. Right?” He pulled out the pitcher of water and poured himself a glass. “Yeah. It’s a life. A shitty one.”

  “Watch how you speak,” Gus warned him.

  Jerking his chin up, Alex said, “Or what? You going to spank me?”

  Gus stroked his chin, studying him. “I think you can go to your room now. You want to act like a petulant child, then do it elsewhere.”

  * * *

  AS Alex disappeared down the hall, Gus dumped the bag on the table and dropped down into the chair. With a sigh, he covered his face with his hands.

  There were days when he swore that this was some hell that had been dropped on him because of the life he’d led. The lives he’d taken, the lies he’d told. He hadn’t intended to go down that road, but it had just . . . fit. And some roads, once you started that walk, you couldn’t turn back.

  Too bad Gus hadn’t realized it until it was too late. By the time he had, his hands were bloody, his soul was gone, and the life he’d thought would be his was just . . . a dream. So he distanced himself from his family. The world saw a scheming, womanizing bastard who’d had a few runs of good luck and he’d used it all to his advantage. His pretty face got him in doors and he played with the rich and famous, made connections—and while they weren’t looking, he slid a stiletto into the heart of a man who’d been planning to kill el presidente.

  A few years later, he’d been some rich woman’s man-whore—that was the story she told everybody, including her husband. When she whispered to him one night about a ménage à trois at a pretty, private little villa, he agreed. And then he arrived thirty minutes sooner than planned, slit her throat, broke the husband’s neck, and set the stage to make it look like a robbery. He wasn’t even questioned and they were mourned by many at their funeral. He often wondered how the world would react if they knew the husband and wife had been in control of a child slavery ring, selling runaways or indigent children they found on the streets of Mexico into the sex trade.

  Deeper and deeper into that life he fell.

  And now, he was out of it and all he could do was hope he was fast enough, strong enough to keep Alex alive if trouble found them.

  Because it would.

  Whether it was karma or just shitty luck, he didn’t know, but they wouldn’t be able to run forever.

  Sometimes he wondered if this was God’s way of punishing him. He’d taken lives . . . but if this was a punishment, then he would have been the one who had died that night.

  Not Consuelo. She’d been the one who had made that ultimate sacrifice, and here he was, trying to make sure he honored her wishes.

  Please . . . you must promise . . .

  “I’m trying, love.” He tried every single day, and every single day, he was so very certain he was screwing this up. Keeping one step ahead of people who had endless resources, the money to buy and sell more than a few small countries, people who would just as soon kill you as argue with you.

  And the boy was angry.

  So very angry.

  Sighing, he stood up and tugged off his cap, leaving it on a peg near the door before he retreated into his bedroom. He’d give Alex a while to calm down, then they could tackle his schoolwork. They’d eaten over at Mrs. Werner’s after he’d repaired the fill valve on her toilet, while she ogled his ass . . . again.

  Inside his room, he stripped out of his dirty, sweaty clothes and pulled on a pair of worn cotton pants before dropping to the floor. Sit-ups. Push-ups. He had a few weights that he kept with him and he did the most thorough workout he could with them. He moved on to conditioning, although he was limited in how much he could train there. Without a partner, again he was limited.

  He was working on teaching Alex. Alex was still a child, though, and his sessions with the boy were all about training Alex to defend himself more than anything else.

  More than an hour passed before he was done and he was dripping with sweat, tired and sore.

  And still frustrated. Still angry.

  Judging by the silence of the house, Alex was still unhappy with him as well.

  He moved out into the hall, passed by the boy’s narrow, small room, and saw the kid lying on his cot, staring up at the ceiling with no expression on his face.

  Gus turned away.

  There was nothing, he knew, that could be said or done.

  Nothing.

  * * *

  “WELL . . . THE cameras work.” Vaughnne stared at Gus’s naked, muscled back.

  His very nice naked, muscled back.

  As the bathroom door shut behind him, she groaned and leaned back in her seat, covering her face with her hands.

  The cameras worked. The audio feed worked.

  The motion sensors she’d placed at the doors and windows worked. The cameras were tucked snug inside the smoke alarms, and she’d been watching him through the tiny little slats and feeling like a pervert.

  She’d also had a front row seat to what the boy had done.

  He’d seen the tape. Her mistake. That fatal little flaw.

  Her heart had dropped like a stone when he moved over to it, but then she’d realized what he was doing.

  Fixing it.

  And then he lied.

  When Gus asked him if everything was okay, he’d turned around, looked the man in the eye, and lied.

  She didn’t know what was up with that. Part of her wanted to continue with her own little lies, insisting to herself that she didn’t care. But she couldn’t. She needed to know everything about these two males and she needed to know it now. And it was already for reasons that went beyond the job. It had been
from the very beginning. For Alex, it was because she understood that fear in his eyes. With Gus . . . hell. She couldn’t even explain that mess, although it might have something to do with the way her heart skipped up a few beats when he looked at her and it might have something to do with the way he watched over that kid.

  It got to her. She couldn’t deny that. Her father had tossed her out like she was nothing more than trash. But this guy . . . there was no denying that he would tear down mountains to protect that kid. It got her, right square in the heart.

  Maybe that’s all it was. Admiration for him. A little bit of lust.

  “Yeah, right,” she muttered.

  Swearing, she skimmed her hands back over her hair and tried to focus her brain on the job. The job. These two males were the job. That was what they were and what they had to be. She couldn’t do her job if she kept letting other things get in the way.

  “Just the job.” She shoved back from the computer and rose to pace.

  She’d done the main thing she needed to do—she had eyes inside the house now, and so far, they hadn’t been discovered. The first few minutes, she knew, were critical. That was when somebody was going to sense something was off. That was when their instincts would scream the loudest, if it was going to happen, and at this point, nothing had happened.

  Between the eyes she had inside the house and the motion detectors she’d set up on the perimeter, hopefully she’d done enough to catch anybody before they could move in on the two.

  There were times when she wished she had something other than a psychic’s banshee wail. Being able to talk to anybody she needed to talk to was nice enough, she guessed, although she couldn’t hear anything unless the person was also a telepath. This was flying blind, though. She had no ability to sense anything more than what her instincts were able to tell her, and while those instincts were pretty damn sharp, she hated relying on just those and her wits.

  Something caught her eye and she glanced down at her monitor.

  “Damn.”

  The word gusted out of her in a rush as she stopped to stare.

  It was Gus.

  He’d come out of the bathroom, a towel slung around his hips and water rolling down his chest in tiny little drops. One bead rolled down the midline of his torso, arrowing down over the flat plane of his belly before it caught up on the towel. Her heart slammed once, hard, against her ribs, and she licked her lips. She was pretty damn certain she’d never been so thirsty in her life.

  He glanced down the hall before heading toward his room, and she groaned as she found herself treated to another view of that fine, muscled back. And his ass. Nice, nice ass.

  She needed to quit ogling. She needed to—

  She wheezed out a breath as he dropped the towel just inside the door and grabbed a pair of faded jeans off the foot of the bed. “Oh, hell, he’s going commando.” She passed a hand in front of her eyes and tried not to drool.

  She dropped her hand, fast, though, leaning forward and staring at him before he dragged those jeans up over his hips, hiding that perfect butt from her view. And it really was a perfect butt. Hard and muscled, it made her just want to bite him.

  “You need to get laid. Or buy a vibrator. Something.”

  SIX

  PSYCHIC skill, in Bruce Watkins’s opinion, really wasn’t as uncommon as people thought. Not everybody was going to be able to read minds, that was certain, and he knew the average Joe wasn’t going to be able to float candlesticks across the room, either.

  But if more people listened to their instincts, if more people paid attention to what that still, quiet voice in the back of their head tried to tell them . . . well, people would be amazed at what they could accomplish.

  Refined instincts and psychic skill weren’t the same, by any means. Psychic ability was the next step up. But there were some people out there who thought they just had really good intuition, and what they had was a rudimentary psychic skill they just never bothered to improve upon.

  He wasn’t a particularly strong psychic, but he knew how to listen to those instincts, and he’d worked to improve his skills. He made his living listening to those instincts, selling his skills in an odd sort of manner.

  It wasn’t always easy to come by work, but when he did, he tended to hit a windfall.

  His skill wasn’t anything special. He could feel the abilities of others. Basically they just exerted a pull on him—their rampant energy tugged at him and drew him in.

  That was why the ad on the site that operated on the dark web was so appealing to him. He read between the lines pretty damn well, although the initial posting hadn’t given him much to go on. But then somebody had asked for more information just a few hours ago.

  The response:

  This item is something that should appeal to certain people here. It’s very valuable to me.

  There was a wealth of unspoken information in those cryptic words.

  The question was . . . just how much money were they offering?

  So that was the question he had to ask. If he liked the answer, he’d offer his very valuable services.

  If not?

  Too bad. Their package could swelter and rot in Orlando for all he cared.

  He typed out a reply, keeping it every bit as vague and obscure as the initial message was, asking for more information, hinting as his experience, his special skills.

  The final few words danced around the issue of money, and he hated to be so crass, but it was an issue that had to be addressed.

  * * *

  LOCATING such an item can come with expenses.

  He smirked as he read the final few words and then he rose, pacing around the office as he pondered his own response. It had been three days since he’d put the ad out there on the web, and this was the first time anybody had shown any real response.

  There had been more than a few fishing expeditions, which he had expected, and somebody had asked for more information. But nobody had shown promise. A couple of quacks had suggested they meet so they could show how they could use his aura to help locate his missing item. Others had told him they could use divination.

  All nonsense and he knew it. He’d been prepared for some nonsense, though, so that was fine.

  Three days.

  It had taken three days to get a serious inquiry.

  Nervous tension ripped through him, but he finally got it under control and started to figure out just the right way to answer.

  * * *

  AN item.

  “You’re sure they are talking about a person?” Tucker asked as he climbed into the car. He had the phone on speaker, which was annoying as hell, but it was easier to talk to Nalini that way than to try and juggle the phone and drive. Plus, his first stop was going to be Starbucks. He needed coffee like he needed to breathe.

  It had been raining all damned day and that was a good thing. Rain altered the current in the air, which made him steadier, and he needed to be just then.

  Talking to Nalini, even if it was just on the phone, left him damned off balance. He’d been so unsteady last night, he’d ended up jacking off in the shower. Normally, that wasn’t a problem. Thanks to his issues with touching people, he had a good relationship with his hands, sad to say. But this time, he had actually let himself think about having somebody else involved.

  Nalini.

  That hadn’t been wise. It was like everything inside him had exploded, including the raw, chaotic energy that he absorbed and it had surged out of control. That led to him frying the electrical shit in the house and tripping the circuit breaker.

  So rain was good.

  He didn’t have to deal with the wild electricity rippling through the air, and he didn’t have to worry about toning things down.

  “If he’d lost his address book or his car keys, I doubt I’d be this worked up over things, Tucker. I was drawn to this for a reason and I don’t get pulled in on things. It’s people . . . always people,” Nalini murmured, her voice distracted.
“There hasn’t been an answer to the reply yet.”

  “If they are seriously looking for somebody to grab, they’ll probably be extra cautious, especially after the shit that went down here recently.” Tucker jammed the key into the ignition and turned it. It didn’t start. Sighing, he glared at the engine. The damn car was old.

  Tucker loved his car. Flat-out loved her. It was the first thing that had ever been his, and he planned to keep her going as long as he could, but she was contrary at the best of times.

  Today wasn’t the ideal time.

  Closing his eyes, he let himself check things out and then he tried again, using his own energy to trigger the dead battery.

  “Are you okay?”

  He grunted as the engine rolled over. “Yeah. Dead battery. It’s good now.” If only the rest of the car’s problems were that easy to fix.

  Nalini was quiet a moment and then said, “Well, if you’ve dealt with the car problems, can we discuss how we’re going to locate this item?”

  He shot the phone a dark look. “We, sugar? I hate to tell you this, Nalini, but we aren’t doing anything. I’m looking for this item. You’re wherever you are, doing whatever you are doing, and jumping when those FBI boys tell you to jump. I’m only doing this because I hate to think about somebody being hurt in my neck of the woods.”

  “Your neck of the woods . . . where are you from, Tucker?”

  He clenched his jaw. “Originally? Georgia. And what does that matter?”

  “Oh, nothing. That drawl of yours just gets to me. Right down in my lady bits.”

  He dragged a hand down his face and shoved the car into reverse. “Your lady bits. Nalini . . . do you want me to do this job or not?”

  She chuckled. “Of course I do. I just want you getting used to the fact that, at some point, I plan on testing that theory of yours on you and bare skin. I bet you can handle it better than you think.”

  He handled bare skin contact just fine as long as no stress was involved. But looking at her did something bad to the way his brain functioned—something he’d figured out already—and he suspected he’d go on overload if he spent too much time touching her. One slipup and she’d pay the price. He already knew for a fact what happened when he lost control. That wasn’t happening. Not with her.