DAVID: A Standalone Romance (Gray Wolf Security)

by Glenna Sinclair

“You probably guessed right. That’s why I need to go.”

  He was quiet as he watched me dress. His eyes on me made me feel self-conscious. Part of me wanted to grab my clothes and go get dressed behind the closed door of the bathroom. The other part wanted to climb back into the bed and make him do what he’d done to me before all over again.

  Instead, I dressed slowly, almost methodically, not taking my time, but not rushing either.

  “Will you come back?”

  His question was simple, but there was so much behind it that I stopped and looked at him.

  Don’t do that. Don’t count on me. I’ll just break your heart.

  “Here,” he said, scribbling something on the back of a business card he took from his bedside table. “It’s the code to the gate, so you don’t have to sweet talk Bobby next time.”

  I hesitated, but in the end, I took it.

  I think maybe I knew—from the moment I set eyes on him—that this wouldn’t be something I could easily walk away from.

  Chapter 13

  David

  It started at lunchtime.

  I saw the man slip into the office belonging to Joss’ target, but I didn’t think anything of it at first. The man had more people walking in and out of his office than any target I’d ever seen before. Secretaries. Assistants. Researchers. Other executives. The place was literally busier than Grand Central Station. But there was something different about this guy.

  Potential problem, I wrote in a text via a program on my computer to Joss’ phone with an attached picture of the guy’s face.

  Unknown identification, Joss came back with a few minutes later.

  I blew the guy’s face up and emailed it to Ash with a quick description of the situation. He was upstairs doing who knew what, but he came right down, his feet pounding the stairs as he took them two at a time.

  “What was he doing in the office?”

  “Looked like he was searching for something,” I said, pulling up the video recording and playing it for him. “Joss says her guy couldn’t identify him.”

  “What about the house cameras? Any activity there?”

  I shook my head even as I pulled those cameras up. We ran through the whole series and watched them for several minutes, but nothing happened. Just as I was about to minimize the feeds and turn back to the office cameras, I caught something out of the corner of my eye.

  “There,” I said, leaning forward to tap the screen.

  Ash leaned forward, too, watching closely for a minute.

  “Kirkland,” he said, gesturing to the other operative without removing his eyes from the screen.

  Kirkland wandered over, curiosity on his handsome face.

  “What’s up?”

  “We have activity outside a client’s house.”

  “Joss’ target?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “He was in the target’s office, too.” I printed off a copy of the close up of the guy’s face and handed it to Kirkland. Then I used the texting box to call out one of our teams to the house. We have three teams that rotate shifts, each on duty for twelve hours at a time. Under normal circumstances, they installed the cameras and checked out any alarms that might go off over my system. Today, though, they’d be going in as a sort of SWAT team to assess the situation and apprehend the threat. Then we’d call Detective Emily Warren, our liaison with the police department.

  “Go to the target’s office and help Joss keep an eye on him,” Ash told Kirkland. “Let us know if anything happens.”

  “Of course.”

  Kirkland headed for the door. That was the thing about Kirkland. He was something of a playboy, a child in an adult’s body, but when it came down to a life or death situation, he was always the consummate professional.

  Ash would say that that was what military training did for a man. It taught him the difference between leisure time and business. But I suspected there was more to it than that. I didn’t know much about Kirkland’s background because the guy had this way of evading personal questions no matter how much you badgered him. And the thing was, you didn’t really realize he was evading the questions until long afterward.

  I was watching Kirkland when one of the minimized screens on my computer suddenly burst into static.

  “What’s that?” Ash asked, tension already filling his voice.

  “I don’t know.”

  I maximized the screen and identified the static as the target’s office.

  Something was wrong.

  “Donovan’s closer, isn’t he?” Ash said before I could say anything.

  I nodded, pulling up the texting box to reach out to Joss again. She didn’t immediately answer, confirming what I’d been afraid of. She was compromised.

  I texted the team and rerouted them to Joss’ location, then sent a text to Emily. It wouldn’t hurt to have her on location if the whole thing went sour.

  “Try Joss again,” Ash said.

  I did, but there was still no answer. I pulled up the phone app and dialed her cell phone. I didn’t need her to answer for my program to access the microphone on her cellphone so we could listen to what was happening around her. At first there was nothing. But then we heard heavy breathing and a man whisper, “Where now?”

  Of course, Joss didn’t answer so that we could hear. The woman hasn’t spoken a word in a year and a half ago, not even in moments of extreme duress. There was no reason to believe she would start now.

  “Come on, Joselyn,” Ash mumbled under his breath, “tell us what’s going on!”

  We listened another few minutes, only the sound of footsteps on what could have been cement steps, or maybe asphalt, to tell us that they were on the move, which had to mean they were safe.

  And then Donovan’s voice. “Joss, this way,” he said.

  Ash closed his eyes, relief clear in the lines of his face.

  Then the text box lit up.

  Target secured.

  I immediately texted back.

  Team on the way with Detective Warren in tow.

  Destination?

  I glanced at Ash. “Should she bring him here?”

  Ash nodded. “Just until we can find out what happened.”

  I gave the order and sat back, watching the other camera feeds at the target’s office as our team arrived and discretely cleared the building. At the same time, a couple of uniformed cops Detective Warren dispatched to the target’s house caught the suspect as he attempted to get in through a side window.

  At the office, our team, with Kirkland’s assistance, found another man in a storage room on the third floor. He was cowering behind a shelf of industrial cleaner, clearly aware that the alarm had gone up. He must have realized that Joss was more than just another secretary when she secured the target and got him out of the building. Emily had him in cuffs before the poor man realized what was happening.

  ***

  “They were working for my competitor,” James Griffith announced.

  Emily nodded. “That’s what they said. That they were there to do whatever they could to sabotage the launch of your new product, even if it meant kidnapping you. They only wanted to buy a few days’ time. They swore they weren’t going to hurt you.”

  “Like that makes a difference,” Griffith scoffed.

  I rolled my chair away from the conference table, not really interested in the aftermath. Everyone else got something out of slapping each other on the back and celebrating. But I didn’t. Something had gone wrong on my watch, and I didn’t like it. Joss could have been injured or the client lost. That wasn’t something to celebrate.

  I sat in front of my workstation and ran a diagnostic on my security program. The team had gone and taken down the cameras in the client’s house, and I’d disconnected the hack into his company’s security system. The camera in his office was a standard closed circuit that fed into his building’s mainframe. They’d have to repair the damage the second assailant had done to it, but that was their problem, not ours. My job was to
identify threats before they became threats. I hadn’t done that this time.

  Laughter floated to me from across the room. Ash had broken out a couple of bottles of his highly expensive and, supposedly, exquisite wine. The party would probably continue for quite a while. I wished they’d all leave. I had work to do, and it was easier to do it in peace.

  A hand touched my shoulder sometime later. I turned and found Joss’ sweet, almost angelic face smiling down into mine.

  She held up a small iPad she often used to communicate with the people around her.

  Thank you, it read.

  “Don’t thank me. I didn’t see the second threat. I should have.”

  She shook her head. He knew how to avoid the cameras, she wrote.

  “Doesn’t matter. I should have seen him coming.”

  She shook her head again, her expressive eyes filled with a deep-set concern. She touched my shoulder, the gesture as affectionate as Joss ever allowed herself to get. Since the loss of her husband and child, she didn’t like people to stand too close to her; she didn’t like people to touch her unless it was unavoidable. And she rarely touched people unless it was to get their attention. Therefore, for her to touch me the way she was doing now, I knew she was desperate to get her point across to me.

  You aren’t God, David, she wrote into her iPad. You aren’t omniscient.

  “I’m as close as you’re going to get.” I touched her hand and felt her stiffen just slightly, but she didn’t pull away. “I couldn’t see you on the stairs. If I could have, I would have been able to tell you how to get out of there safely. You were in danger and you were blind, two things that never should have happened.”

  Always so hard on yourself. Must be a terrible burden to bear.

  She smiled sadly, patted my shoulder again, and then walked away.

  I watched her go, remembering the sound of silence on the other end of her phone as she rushed to get her target out of harm’s way. It could have gone badly. The second assailant could have had a gun. He could have shot her if he’d found them before Donovan did. Things could have gone much differently than they did.

  I couldn’t let that happen again.

  I turned back to the computer screen and focused on the alerts programmed into my system. I could tweak them, make them alert me to even the slightest anomalies…

  I worked late into the night, completely oblivious to what was going on around me until I couldn’t keep my eyes open any more.

  I’d forgotten I’d given Ricki the code to the gate until I rolled up to my cottage and found her waiting on the porch. I’d never been so grateful to see anyone in all my life.

  Chapter 14

  Ricki

  I sat with my legs tucked under me on the couch, wondering, not for the first time, why a guy in a wheelchair needed a couch in his house that he readily confessed he rarely invited anyone into…but I was glad it was there. It was one of the most comfortable couches I’d ever sat on. It reminded me of the small castoff in my first apartment.

  “I’m starving!” I called to David, even though he’d already told me twice already to be patient.

  “Ten more minutes.”

  I groaned. “I don’t know if I can wait that long. It smells heavenly!”

  “Thank you,” he said, pride dripping from his words.

  I thought he was joking when he announced at four o’clock in the morning that he was going to make me dinner. But he was apparently quite serious because he quickly slipped out of bed and disappeared into the kitchen. When I followed, I found him pulling things out of the refrigerator and yanking pans from the low cupboards, completely naked in his chair as he rolled all around the room. It was quite a sight and I wanted to stick around to watch, but he sent me away, claiming he was using an old family recipe and no one, not even I, could know what all was in it.

  That was over an hour ago and the smells coming from that kitchen were beginning to make me feel like Pavlov’s dog.

  “Does it always take this long?”

  “It’s done,” he said, rolling himself around the corner of the couch, a glass pan of something that looked suspiciously like lasagna in his lap.

  “It smells so good.”

  “I hope it is. It’s been a long time since I’ve made it.”

  He held up two forks, and I took one without hesitation as I stuck it into the tomato-ey concoction and took a big bite of the steaming hunk of pasta and meat and Lord knew what else.

  OMG!

  “Oh, David,” I moaned, sticking my fork into the pan a second time and taking an even bigger bite. “That has to be the best thing I’ve ever tasted,” I mumbled around my mouthful.

  “Yeah?” he dug his fork in it and took a small bite. Then he nodded. “Just like Mother used to make.”

  “If I’d known you could cook,” I said, taking a third bite, “I might have rethought the whole no-commitment thing.”

  “Oh?” he asked, dropping his fork and rolling his chair backward. “Well, it’s too late. That’s all you get.”

  “Hey, wait!”

  But he was already gone, rolling his chair back into the kitchen. I got up to follow, my fork poised for another dip in that lovely concoction. He’d placed the hot pan on the counter, the thick plastic pads he’d had under it still resting on his thighs. I tried to reach over him to grab another bite, but he rolled backward, nearly crushing my toes in the process.

  “Tease!” I accused him, as I backed up, keeping my toes out of his way.

  “I’m the tease? Who showed up on my doorstep calling me a broken person? Do you really think you can play with my emotions that way?” he asked, making a pouty face that was so exaggerated that there was no mistaking the fact that he was teasing me.

  “What do I have to do to get more then?”

  His eyebrows rose. “I can think of a thing or two.”

  “I’m sure you can.”

  I let my eyes move over his body slowly, pretending to be annoyed. But the truth was, the man had an awesome body. I could stare at him for hours on end…between those broad shoulders, his six-pack, and that impressive cock. There was even a tattoo on his ankle that I’d been dying to ask him about, but I was simply afraid I’d learn something about his past I was no longer interested in pursuing.

  Amazing how your thoughts can change in such a short time. We’d been seeing each other for six days and already I was trying to forget why I sought out Gray Wolf Security in the first place.

  He rolled closer to me, sliding his hands over my outer thighs before grabbing my hips and tugging me down onto his lap. I fell kind of awkwardly but managed to keep from hurting either of us. And then he was kissing me, his lips soft as cashmere against mine. I was pretty sure I’d never get enough of his kisses, even if we did nothing all day but kiss. There was just something about the way he touched me that made me ache for more.

  “Tell me what you want,” I said when I came up for air.

  He studied my face, his hand moving over my shoulder. “It’s not about what I want.”

  “Why not?”

  His eyes dropped to my breasts where they were barely hidden under his t-shirt. But I’m not sure he was really looking at them. He was lost somewhere that I couldn’t follow. It wasn’t the first time, but it hurt like it was.

  I cupped my hand around his jaw and forced him to look up at me.

  “Why aren’t you allowed to want things like the rest of humanity? What makes you different?”

  “I’ve hurt people, Ricki.”

  “Haven’t we all?”

  “Not like what I did.”

  “What about your friends? The ones who were soldiers? Are you telling me they never killed anyone, never looked down the scopes of their rifles and shot someone who had a wife, a child, parents?”

  “That’s different. They were trained soldiers.”

  “But they’re still allowed to want things? Donovan’s still allowed to want his girlfriend? And Ash is still allowed to grieve
for his fiancée? But you aren’t?”

  He pulled his face out of my grip and pushed my hip, trying to dislodge me from his chair. However, I wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Is this about your parents?”

  “You don’t know anything about that,” he said, his voice more intentionally cruel than I’d have thought him capable until that moment.

  “Then tell me.”

  He shook his head, pushing at my hip again.

  “You can’t punish yourself forever,” I said, anger suddenly bursting through my chest. “You blaming yourself for something that was so clearly an accident is like me blaming myself for what my stepfather did to me! It’s ridiculous!”

  “You don’t know shit about it,” he growled.

  “Obviously. Because you won’t talk about it.” I climbed off his lap and stormed to the bedroom, yelling over my shoulder, “I think you like being a damn martyr. That way you won’t ever have to live down here in the gutter with the rest of us humans, where we all accept that we can’t control everything.”

  I grabbed my slacks and yanked them over my hips, remembering only as I was buttoning them that I’d forgotten my panties. Fuck! I just left them there, lying in a pathetic puddle on the floor as I tore his t-shirt off and replaced it with my silk blouse, my nipples instantly hardening as the cold material touched them. I shoved my bra into my pocket and shoved my feet into my shoes as David rolled his chair up to the door.

  “Ricki…”

  I shook my head. “I thought I could do this,” I said. “I thought I could pretend that I was as cold as most of my employees think I am. The Ice Queen, they call me just because I saved a dozen jobs by cutting their employee compensation. But that’s not me. Not anymore.”

  I moved around his chair, grateful for the extra wide doorway, ignoring the hand that snagged the back of my slacks.

  “Call me when this whole ordeal is over. Or, better yet, lose my number.”

  I slammed the front door and felt it vibrate under my feet.

  I wanted to go back in there and rewind time, go back to sitting in his lap, back to teasing each other. But I couldn’t.