by Anne Calhoun
“Anyone got dibs on that hot piece of ass?” the door-holder said.
Sean shot him a narrow-eyed look as John said, quite mildly, “That hot piece of ass is my fiancée.”
The kid all but came to attention. “Sorry, sir.”
“You don’t need to apologize to me,” John said, still deceptively bland as he focused on his e-mail. “You need to apologize to her, but I don’t want your death on my conscience, so I’ll accept your apology on her behalf.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
“Knock off the sir. I’m a civilian.”
“Still working for you. For the moment. Sir.”
Not bad, Ty thought. John must have agreed because he nodded. Sean crossed the room to give Ty a handshake and a quick, hard hug. He was Ty’s height, with blue eyes unusually brilliant against his tanned skin and close-cropped blond hair bleached nearly white by a year in Afghanistan’s relentless sun.
“You out?” he asked Sean. Ty’d chosen not to reenlist after the last tour, but last he heard Sean still had a year to serve. Had he really gone that long without talking to him?
“On leave,” Sean replied. “Just finished a deployment in Afghanistan. Not sure what’s next.”
“You’ve got options?”
“Resign my commission, continue with the platoon, or take a reassignment to Quantico.”
Where the Marine Corps Officer Candidate School was, along with the command center that developed strategies for combat, among other things. Quantico was a plum assignment for a young officer moving up the chain of command, and Sean had the brains and education to go with the combat experience…
Ty gave himself a hard mental shake. Used to be personnel assignments were his specialty, but this wasn’t his company, or his op, and that’s the way he liked it. “So yeah, you got options,” Ty said, and left it at that.
“Chase Duvall,” Sean said with a nod at the runaway mouth. Ty shook his hand and waited until after he’d seen him in action to pass judgment.
“Huddle up,” John said, stepping over to the large table that occupied most of his office. A whiteboard hung beside the table, and the four men clustered around a computer screen displaying a satellite image of a business park, three-story brick buildings clustered around the inlets and curves of a man-made lake with a fountain in the center. A blacktop path encircled the lake. Park benches sat under flowering trees, among bushes and annuals, landscaping that far outstripped the sickly shrubs outside his hotel.
“Standard surveillance operation,” John said, then brought up photographs of two men and a woman. “These individuals work for Reynolds Freeman, the pharmaceutical firm, and are suspected of selling information to a competitor. The company did some basic e-mail tracking and turned up enough dirt to justify digging deeper. I’ve got a team watching homes and the most likely contacts at the competitor. I need to know when they get to work, when they have lunch, who with, when they leave. We’re compiling evidence for a possible court case here.”
The specifics were for the new guys. Ty had done this before, knew the drill, could do it in his sleep. Chase and Sean nodded, Chase chewing away at his thumbnail as John pointed out the front door, loading dock, cafeteria door leading to the lake. Sean had his arms folded across his chest and was studying the images. “If we see them leave during the day, do we follow or just note it?”
“For now, note it, and call in. I’ll take it from there,” John said. “Ty’s lead on this one, so you’ll work with him to organize schedules.”
Ty shot John a look John returned with the same calm, level gaze. After a moment, Ty spoke. “There are about a dozen companies working out of that business park,” Ty said without breaking eye contact. “Pay attention. Lots of coming and going, lots of entrances and exits. Don’t get distracted.”
“When do we start?” Sean asked.
“Right now,” John said.
“Equipment’s in the closet in the reception area,” Ty said with a jerk of his head. Sean and Chase filed out.
Ty closed the door behind them. “What the fuck? You know I don’t do lead. I’m back on the T-22 in four weeks and this will go on longer than that.”
“Good thing it’s not a hundred degrees out like it was last month, because you’re going to be sitting outside for those four weeks,” John said, then got serious. “I need you on this. It’s a big subcontract for me, a foot in the door. If this goes well, I’ve got more work than I can handle. Hell, if you’d just buy in we’d take this operation to the next level. The game’s getting bigger. More complex. I could use you.”
He used to get a big charge out of teaming up with John to put together personnel, intelligence, equipment, and terrain to pull off risky, complicated operations. During their time in the Corps they’d talked frequently about going into the rapidly growing industrial security business together, but shit happened, and when the time came, Ty backed out. John went ahead without Ty on board as personnel specialist, dragging Ty into operations when he wasn’t working. Ty kept waiting for John to quit on him. So far he hadn’t.
“Not gonna happen.” He tilted his head toward the front room. “Ask Winthrop. He’s thinking about getting out, and you know he’s good.”
“He’s not out yet, you stubborn motherfucker,” John said, but without any heat. “You can’t keep ignoring life.”
“Watch me,” he said, then opened the door to find Sean and Chase back-to-back in John’s meticulously organized, ultrasecure room containing the high-tech surveillance gear. He watched them dig through the toys and mulled over the way fate liked to bitch slap him.
Gulf Independent was headquartered in that business park. He’d spend the next four weeks watching Lauren Kincaid come and go from work.
Chapter Five
The normally crisp edges of numbers and letters had begun to blur half an hour earlier. When Lauren’s eyes slid involuntarily to soft focus, she sat back and pulled off her glasses, then opened her drawer and retrieved her soft-sided lunch box. “I’m going to go sit outside,” she said to her coworker, Danelle, over the low wall separating their cubicles. “Want to come?”
Danelle was slumped down in her chair, gazing fixedly at the monitor as she alt-tabbed between two chat sessions and an Excel spreadsheet full of formulas and complex macros. “You don’t have to go down to the courthouse again?”
Thanks to a screwup with the bank and the title, it had taken Lauren three trips to get her car plated. Inefficiency brought out the cranky bitch in her, and so the conversations with the county clerks became regular break room fodder.
“Sorry to disappoint you, but no. The car’s finally plated.”
“I’m in the middle of this, so I’ll pass. It’s cooler than it was, but find a bench in the shade. You got too much sun on the rig.”
Lunch box in hand and moving on autopilot, Lauren walked down the hallway, rubbing the grit from her eyes. She took the stairs to the first floor, cut through the cafeteria’s seating space, and headed out into the midday heat, intending to space off into the distance and think about a puzzle of a different sort than locating, logging, and casing off a productive well.
The night with Ty.
The sex had gone exactly as she’d hoped, but nothing else had. Everything—his entire demeanor, the bottle of whiskey, the sight of him in that dismal hotel room—felt wrong. But he was a grown man, a seasoned Marine, perfectly capable of taking care of himself.
Except he wasn’t taking care of himself. But Ty and his rootless life were none of her business. He wouldn’t thank her for meddling, even if she could think of a good reason to go back to his room. Worse, odds were good if she knocked on the door she’d overhear someone else’s good time. The memory of the interruption still made her blush. Eventually, her curiosity would fade.
The benches farthest away from the door were all occupied, so she settled for a spot in the curve of the man-made lake, the edges of the growing tree barely shading it. The shaded benches nearby were
more desirable, and therefore full, with two women gossiping on one, and a man and woman on the other, sharing food. A single man dressed in lightweight cargo pants, a pale blue button-down shirt, and lace-up boots occupied the last bench, a Texas Longhorns cap shading his eyes from the late September sun.
Ty. The hat covered his slicked back hair and obscured his forehead and eyes, but she’d seen the line of his jaw and the Oakley shades under a hard hat too often to mistake him. “Hey there,” she said. “Can I join you?”
At the sound of her voice his head jerked up, his eyes completely unreadable behind the shades. “Sure,” he said, gathering the newspaper and brown paper bag strewn over the ends of the bench.
“What are you doing here?” Roughnecks rarely had a reason to come to the company’s headquarters.
“Lunch break.”
“I meant, did you have a meeting about the driller job?”
He shook his head, not even bothering to look at her as he did, and his demeanor settled the question of whether or not she’d made the right decision to turn down his offer of a drink. She sat down, opened her lunch box, withdrew the Tupperware container holding her turkey sandwich, and took a bite, all the while relaxing her eyes by focusing on the horizon and making her mind go blank. She could play the ice princess when the situation called for it, and was dressed for it in a sleeveless sheath dress and summer-weight cardigan, her hair restrained in an intricate knot by two polished mahogany sticks.
When she was halfway through the sandwich he sighed and pulled a pen from the pocket of his cargo pants, then wrote on the newspaper and held it out to her.
Look in my right ear.
Surprised, she swallowed the mouthful of sandwich then peered behind him and saw the tiny, clear earpiece, the type the security detail for the president wore. She pulled back and looked at him, brows lifted. He pulled out a touchscreen phone with a keypad that slid out from under the phone and looked at her until she gave him her phone number. He thumbed away at the little keypad. A moment later her phone buzzed with an incoming text.
I’m working.
“Doing what?” she said, then thought the better of it and texted him back.
Will your mic pick up my voice?
Not if you’re quiet.
She glanced at him, saw a dark teasing little smile lifting the corners of his mouth. “Very funny,” she said, her voice low.
Your volume is appropriate.
The man picked a fine time to get a sense of humor. “How do you know?”
His big thumbs shifted deftly over the tiny keyboard. My partner would ask me who I was talking to if he could hear you.
“Okay,” she said, but she was putting pieces together. Former Marine, earpiece, a business park housing technology and oil industry firms. “And your work has nothing to do with committing industrial espionage related to Gulf Independent, right?”
The answer was short and came without hesitation. No.
She looked at him for a long minute. Behind the mirrored shades he could have been looking back at her, or at the lake or a person or a doorway into the building. If pressed she wouldn’t have been able to say why she believed him, but believe him she did. “I trust you,” she said.
The words seemed to hang in the air, then he turned away from her to scan the lake, then the door leading from the building. Several minutes passed before he picked up his phone again.
You shouldn’t.
“Because in addition to working in industrial espionage, you’re an old-fashioned Southern bad boy?” she asked. “Hard-drinking, hard-partying, looking for the next score?”
You like bad boys. The text neither confirmed nor denied her assessment and came with a single dark blond eyebrow arched over the sunglasses.
She shrugged, went with it. “On occasion,” she said. “They certainly have their uses.”
A muscle in his jaw jumped, as if the idea of being a one-night stand in her life didn’t sit well. Be careful. We break hearts.
Real bad boys didn’t worry about hearts getting broken, but maybe he was just protective. Except it didn’t fit. Nothing about this fit, right down to the tension in his shoulders. “I went to high school in Texas and college in Virginia. I know the type.” And despite his best efforts, she had a hunch he wasn’t that type at all. “You can trust me. I’m not going to get my heart broken.”
She finished the healthy portion of her lunch and brushed the crumbs from her sandwich onto the pavement. Three tiny, dusty birds hopped over to squabble over the bits of bread. She’d run eight miles that morning, earning her treat for the day, a chocolate chip cookie. Chocolate and sugar blended on her tongue, and the sensation of sweat trickling down her back sent her body back into his hotel room. She remembered taking his weight, the slow lick of flame under her skin as he moved inside her, the breadth of his shoulders, the way he used hands and hips to control her. The way he’d waited when she cried out, then taken her body’s resistance and molded it into a dark, seething ache, used that beautiful, hard body to satiate her.
The way he disappeared into himself a split second after it ended. Being with Ty was like drinking salt water. Every sip stirred the need for more, and more. “You make me curious, Ty,” she said.
Don’t waste the energy.
She smiled because she liked complex things. Puzzles. Projects. People. “That’s too bad, because if I were curious, I’d invite you over tonight.”
She didn’t need to see his eyes to tell they’d sharpened. His whole demeanor ratcheted up a notch, muscles tightening, breathing shallow. His hips shifted on the bench, and she reflected on the simple pleasure of teasing a man, watching him get hard for her, knowing she’d pay for it later.
“I thought we were pretty hot,” she continued. Incineratingly hot. “Worth a second round. If I were curious. If I’m not…Gretchen needs a bath. Oh, and there’s a Toddlers and Tiaras marathon on tonight.” She gave him a smile. “Help me out?”
He brushed his thumb absently over his phone’s keypad before replying. Address?
Without a word she entered her home address in her phone and texted it back to him. “Any time after seven,” she said, then stuffed her containers in her lunch cooler and zipped it shut. He wasn’t looking at her when she walked away.
* * *
She’d said any time after seven. It was nine thirty when he rang her doorbell. Flowering pots of geraniums stood on either side of the old oak door, and dog bones decorated the welcome mat. After a moment Lauren appeared, her slender figure distorted by the lead glass panes in the window, and the moment she opened the door, he knew he shouldn’t have come to her home. She wore a thin gray T-shirt and a pair of shorts made from a thick cotton material. No bra. The length of her smoothly muscled legs drew his attention to her bare feet, the toenails painted a brilliant blue.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey yourself,” he replied and lifted a six-pack of bottled beer.
She opened her mouth, probably to automatically thank him, but at the sound of nails skittering against the tile she turned and shifted her weight. Ty braced for the big guard dog, then looked further down to the wriggling, barrel-chested tube of a dog, with a black face and ears and a dark brown body. Using her ankle, Lauren kept the dog from escaping. “Come in and shut the door,” she said.
“That’s your dog?” Ty asked as he closed the door behind him.
“This is my dog,” she said. “You sound surprised.”
“I was expecting one of those gray dogs. A Weimaraner. Not a wiener dog.”
“She prefers dachshund,” Lauren said, putting a German guttural into the pronunciation as the dog peered at Ty from behind her ankles. “Or doxie if she’s feeling flirtatious. Come here, sweet girl,” she said fondly as she slid one hand under the little dog’s butt and the other behind her forelegs and lifted her into her arms. “Why did you think I’d have an eighty-pound gun dog?”
He wasn’t sure if he’d offended her, so he tried to explain.
“It’s what came to mind when you said you had a dog. I pictured big, useful. Something you went running with, or played Frisbee with. Silvery, kind of like your hair.”
“Gretchen is very useful. She makes me feel better after a bad day, and my hair is a dull ash brown,” she said.
“It catches the sunlight like polished steel does.”
The uncensored words were almost poetic, and when they eddied into the tiled foyer, he felt his face heat. This wasn’t about romance, and based on their previous encounter, he wouldn’t have to sweet-talk her into anything. She shifted her dog a little higher in her arms and kissed the top of her head. “Ty, meet Gretchen, my non-Weimaraner.”
Obligingly Ty lifted his hand to scratch her head, but Gretchen cowered back in Lauren’s arms. He blinked, then said, “What did I do?”
“She doesn’t respond well to men, especially big men. The humane society caregiver said she had a sprained back when she was left in the overnight drop box, and she preferred female attendants. Best guess is that a man or maybe some teenage boys abused her,” she said, stroking Gretchen’s back. “I thought maybe if I was holding her…well, we’re working on it. Come on in.”
In the kitchen she set Gretchen on the floor. Ty followed, the six-pack in hand, and while he’d taken off his boots in the foyer, Gretchen still hid behind Lauren. “Bottle opener’s on the fridge,” she said. “She’ll feel safest if I put her in the laundry room,” she said.
The dog scurried as fast as she could down the hall. Lauren cajoled her into her kennel, then the click of the metal latch slid home as he popped the tops off two bottles of beer. When she returned, he offered her one, they clinked the bottles together, and she tipped the bottle back.
