“We work together, so we were keeping it quiet,” I explained. “We didn’t want to put our boss in an awkward position or anything.”
“You mean you have a non-fraternization clause?”
“Not exactly.” Skylar glanced at me again, a little panic in her eyes. “We just didn’t want to ruffle any feathers.”
“You know how it is. Our firm is pretty tight-knit, almost like a family. We didn’t want to hurt anyone unintentionally.”
“You mean like a secretary who had a crush on you?” Miranda asked.
“I was thinking more along the lines of our boss, Ox Winn.” I kissed the tip of Skylar’s nose when she shot me another cautious look. “He’s a hardworking man, always putting everyone else’s needs in front of his own. Learning his right-hand lady was off the market might have broken his heart beyond repair!”
Skylar blushed, once again giving me that look that suggested she thought I’d gone too far. But I didn’t think so. There were times when I’d wondered just what her relationship with Ox really was, and times when I was pretty convinced there was more there than just a working relationship. Hell, I’d been a bit concerned that she wouldn’t agree to this little arrangement in the first place because of her feelings for Ox. I was pleasantly surprised when she did agree.
“But surely the people you work with could figure it out! That ring she’s got on is quite a scene-stealer!”
Skylar held up her hand and I took it, rolling the ring between my fingers. It was a beautiful ring. I almost wished I’d picked it out for her.
“I don’t wear it at work.”
Miranda shook her head. “If I had a man who looked like that, I’d show him off every opportunity I got!”
A murmur of agreement rose around the table. I shook my head.
“To be honest, all the secrecy has been an issue. I can’t stand to sit calmly while the guys at work flirt with her. They all think she’s the cat’s meow—you know what I mean? All these big, strong guys—most of them are ex-military, mostly special ops and SEAL types—who melt at the sight of her. They’d do just about anything just to get a smile out of her.”
Jaws loosened, and mouths fell open. It was quite clear to me that the people at this table saw Skylar as nothing more than an awkward nerd. The truth was, however, that there had been times when I’d seen some of the other operatives—Akker and Max most notably—flirt uncontrollably with Skylar in order to get something they wanted. She was the den mother, the backbone of the organization. She was more than someone to be dismissed as these people clearly seemed to think.
“A security firm is a unique business in that each of the operatives puts themselves in danger every single case. For that reason, we tend to be closer to our coworkers than most people in the workforce. Skylar is the center of all that, the one we all know we can turn to for support or anything else we might need, whether it be work related or personal.”
“You clearly learned that,” Amy commented.
“Skylar changed my life just by existing within it.” I looked at her for a second, realizing how true that statement was. “I don’t think you can say that about just anyone in your life.”
“Isn’t that sweet?” Zander asked, pushing away from the table to stand. “I think you’ve given me a mouthful of cavities.”
He stormed off, disappearing down the hallway marked Restrooms. The others didn’t seem to notice his little display of temper. Instead, they began pulling Skylar into their conversations, including her in a way they hadn’t been doing before. She came alive as they did, smiling and laughing at little inside jokes she’d never been allowed to participate in before. It was lovely, watching that glow come into her eyes.
Food came. Food went. Gossip swirled around the table. I sat back and watched, content to see the way Skylar blossomed like a flower in the spring, but after a couple of mugs of root beer, it was time to escape to the loo. I caught sight of myself in the mirror and winked.
“You did a good thing,” I told myself.
Miranda was waiting for me as I stepped out into the narrow corridor.
“Tell me that’s all just an act. You aren’t really with that chubby little freak.”
She pressed her body up against mine, trapping me between the door and her perfect Cs. I touched her shoulder to move her, but she wrapped her hand around my wrist and pulled my hand down to her waist.
“What’s the game? Are you after her grandmother’s money?”
“Her great-grandmother—and, no, I’m not. I didn’t even know the woman was wealthy until we arrived.”
“Then what is it? Some other scam? After your green card or something?”
“Is it so hard to believe that someone could find Skylar irresistible?”
“Did you know she once spent a whole day walking around the beach with a split in the back of her jeans? Or that she vomited red nastiness on the shoes of the one boy who asked her out when we were all in high school? Or that she threw a sweet-sixteen birthday party for herself once and no one planned on going until her great-grandmother called all our parents and threatened to take her support out of various local charities we all benefit from if we didn’t show up?”
“What’s your problem with her? Was it your boyfriend she threw up on?”
A cloud brushed over Miranda’s face. “It was my brother.”
“What does it matter to you what Skylar does now? You’re all grown-up now.”
“The girl has had the whole world handed to her. What did she do to deserve to get you, too?”
I pushed her gently away, moving her back against the wall beside us, and stepped around her. “Some people have to work for every inch they get. Some people suffer for what they want. And others just get it handed to them.” I looked Miranda over. “My guess is you’re used to what you want just dropping in your lap. Sorry to disappoint you this time.”
I patted her cheek lightly and turned just in time to see Skylar spin on her heel. How much had she seen? What had she heard? I rushed after her, catching up just as she stepped through the front door into the parking lot.
“Skylar!”
“What are you doing? Why are you here? Why do you keep doing those things?”
“What do you mean?”
She pushed at my chest until I grabbed her wrists and pulled her hard up against me. She hid her face from me for a moment, the top of her head resting against the center of my chest. She sighed, the heat of her breath burning through the thin fabric of my shirt.
“You were right when you said I owed you,” I told her softly. “I’m just trying to repay that debt. Besides…”
“Besides what?”
“I don’t like the way these people look at you. I wasn’t lying about all those things I said. You are the backbone of Caballo and I do feel a little frustrated when I sit back and watch Akker flirt with you.”
She shook her head. “No, you don’t.”
“Sure, I do. And when you talk to Ox with that look on your face, the one where your eyes are wide, and you chew on your cheek—”
“I don’t do that!”
“You do.”
She looked up at me, a twinkle of amusement in her eyes. “You’re full of crap, you know?”
“Yeah, well, this crap bucket thinks you are too beautiful and too gentle to be treated the way these people are treating you. You deserve more.”
She sighed softly. “I think that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
“Someone should be saying nice things to you every day. Maybe when we get back home I should have a little talk with Ox.”
“Why?”
I brushed a hand over her cheek. “He should be kinder to you.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly with puzzlement. Her lips parted, and she started to speak, but the insistent jingle of the ringtone from her phone distracted her. She pulled it out of a back pocket of that tight skirt and blushed as she registered the picture staring up at her.
Ox.
“I should probably…”
“I’ll wait in the Hummer.”
I walked away, but not before taking the opportunity to brush another curl from her pretty cheek. She smiled, the pleasure in that simple gesture burning through me like her breath on my shirt had done.
One day, she would make some man a very happy fellow.
Chapter 7
Skylar
I punched the pillow, trying to fluff it up to a comfortable position, but nothing was working. But in truth, it wasn’t the pillow; it was the head lying on it. I couldn’t shut it off! I couldn’t stop thinking about my great-gran, couldn’t stop seeing her frail body lying in the hospital bed they’d had brought in for her, couldn’t stop thinking that the last time I’d stopped in to see her might be the last time I saw her alive.
We’d been here three days now, three full days of watching her lie in that bed, barely waking, barely able to speak. And when she was awake, there was this desperation in her eyes that cut through me, this need that I didn’t understand and couldn’t help her with. She wanted me to do something, but I had no idea what it was.
I gave up on the idea of sleep, sliding out from under the luxurious down comforter. I shivered as the cold air hit my skin. I was wearing a long T-shirt and not much else, enough that I shouldn’t have been cold, but the air conditioning in this place was amazingly efficient. I took the little crocheted afghan off the end of the bed and wrapped it over my shoulders before moving to sit by the window. I liked to look down on the garden, though it was nearly impossible to see anything now. But I could close my eyes and imagine what it looked like.
I’d spent a lot of mornings in that garden, walking side by side with my great-grandmother, but I’d also spent a few nights there, too. There was one summer when I came to stay for a whole month, when Miranda’s brother was working for Johnny as a gardener’s helper. He was two years older than us, this brother. His name was Shawn and he was tall and slender, with this head of dark hair that just begged to have fingers running through it. I remember sitting at a similar window to this one, dreaming of sitting beside him on one of the many benches in the garden, combing my fingers through his hair while he talked about a band we both enjoyed.
Silly fantasy, but it was about as erotic as my adolescent dreams got!
I’d thought at the time that Shawn might actually return my feelings of infatuation. He would let me sit near him while he worked, and we’d talk about all kinds of things, not just music. He would tell me about the movies he watched, the games he liked to play. We even discussed the merits of some of the popular cartoons at the time, quoting lines from SpongeBob to each other. When he asked me to the Fourth of July dance, I thought I might actually get my first kiss. Instead, I ate too much strawberry pie and got sick all over his shoes.
What a nightmare that was!
I hid in my room for the remainder of my visit that summer and never saw him again. I heard he went to college back East and fell in love with some professor’s daughter. He never looked back, which I supposed was a good thing. But Miranda—you’d think it had been her shoes I vomited on that day! She’d tortured me the following Christmas when I returned, making fun of me in front of everyone at the Christmas party and every opportunity she had after that.
Miranda. All the boys had always thought she was the hottest thing in town, and I suppose—if you’re into bitch—she is. I knew Zander had a crush on her in high school. And I saw the way she looked at Prescott… the way Prescott looked at her.
Would anyone ever look at me that way?
I pulled the blanket tighter around me, wondering—not for the first time—if Miranda was a bigger part of the reason I hadn’t moved to Washington after I graduated from high school than Ox was. As little a town as Spring Branch was, as petty as high school girls could be, the teasing and bullying I experienced down there was no comparison to what it had been like here after that fateful Fourth of July dance. I could still feel it whenever I walked into a room. People stared at me and saw that awkward girl in a pretty pink dress that didn’t quite fit, vomiting red slime all over the shoes of the hottest boy in town. I was never going to outgrow that image no matter what I did or whom I brought back here with me.
I’d never felt at home in this town. I’d never felt at home in Spring Branch, either. But when I’d walked into Caballo’s offices and met Ox for the first time… Prescott had been right about that. Caballo was a family.
But had I abandoned my great-gran in favor of a family that wasn’t really mine? For a lie that I allowed to perpetuate simply because I had this little bit of hope that I might actually fit in somewhere for the first time in my life?
Here I was, playing a game with Prescott, pretending to be something I wasn’t. Again. In reality, a man like Prescott never would have looked twice at a girl like me. The only reason he was doing this was because he felt like he owed me something. Or maybe… there was still that lingering idea that he might be pushing the whole marriage game because he now understood that my great-gran was rich. The thing was, I’d never thought about my great-gran that way, never wondered where the money would go when she died, never thought of myself as an heiress of any kind. I supposed I was in line to inherit all this, but I guess I always assumed it would go to the many, many charities my great-gran had supported all her adult life. It wasn’t like I needed it. Ox paid me generously for my work at Caballo. And I wasn’t even sure I wanted it, except for the connection it all had to my dad.
I felt like I’d come to this place where it was time to reassess and decide what was important to me and my life. Did I really want to continue working as a glorified secretary? Did I want to go back to school, finish my degree, and pursue a quiet career working in some museum somewhere? Did I want to give it all up and come here to care for my great-gran? Did I want to wash my hands of everything and run away, disappear into the night and pretend I had no responsibilities anywhere?
Every option had its merits. But I had no idea which I really wanted.
Actually, I did know what I wanted. I wanted to belong. I wanted a man who looked at me the way men looked at Miranda. I wanted a family, children I could devote my time and energy to, wanted to be the kind of wife and mother I always wanted my mother to be. I wanted to give love and receive love, to be for someone else what my great-gran was to me. I wanted to complete someone else’s dream, to allow someone to complete mine. I wanted love.
Where do you find something like that?
I sighed, tugging the blanket tighter around my shoulders. A sound behind me made me turn and catch Prescott stumbling into the bathroom. He didn’t turn on the light, the sound of something turning over and his voice cursing softly suggesting he probably should have. I turned back to the window as he used the toilet and then flushed, the sound covering any noise he might have made as he stumbled back to bed. My thoughts remained dark, drifting to places I didn’t even know existed.
How lonely does a woman have to be to marry a guy she barely knows in order to lie to the government—a woman who’s never broken the law, not even with a speeding ticket? How desperate does she have to be to—
“Hey, what are you doing? Can’t sleep?”
I jumped a little. I hadn’t realized Prescott had come to kneel beside my chair the way he’d done a few times before. I looked at him, at the way his hair was sticking up on the left side of his face where he’d clearly been lying against the pillows. I touched it, smoothing it back down, taking a liberty I might not have done under other circumstances.
“You okay?” he asked, genuine concern in his voice.
“I can’t stop thinking about my great-gran.”
“She’s not doing well, huh?”
I shook my head, turning my attention to the window again as tears rose in my throat.
“I’m sorry, kid,” he said, resting a hand on my knee. “Is there anything I can do? I could go see if I can find that bottle of sherry.”
I grun
ted with a slight bit of amusement. “It doesn’t really work the way she said it would. Besides, it tastes kind of nasty.”
“I believe it.”
“You should go back to bed. No point in both of us being up.”
He squeezed my knee, his hand sliding upward slightly as he pushed himself up to his feet. Instead of leaving, however, he pulled the other chair closer to the window and took a seat across from me. “I’ll keep you company,” he said, crossing one ankle over the other as he made himself comfortable. He was wearing a pair of boxers and nothing else, his wide chest bare in the moonlight coming in through the tall window. I couldn’t help but study him, admiring the shape of his arms, the definition of his abs. He didn’t have any tattoos despite the fact that most of the operatives at Caballo did. No military insignia, no special dates, no names or important images. Apparently, there was nothing in Prescott’s life that he felt the need to immortalize on his body.
“Can I ask you something?”
He made a sort of waving motion with his hands. “Anything.”
“Why didn’t you want to go back to England?”
He frowned in the dim light, his full bottom lip growing thicker as he moved his gaze from me to the window for a moment. “The truth?” he asked after a few minutes’ quiet contemplation.
“Yes, please.”
His eyes came back to my face. “When I was sixteen, I met a girl I thought the moon and the stars belonged to. She was beautiful—blonde and blue-eyed with a figure that wouldn’t quit!—and the center of everyone’s attention. She was in the year ahead of me in school, about to take her A levels. Everyone tried to get her to go out with them, including my two older brothers, but she wouldn’t give any of them the time of day.” He paused, his eyes moving over my face for a brief moment before he turned his gaze back to the window. “The day she came up to me and asked why I’d never asked her out was probably the highlight of my life up until then.”
Prescott ran his fingers through his hair, making it stand up higher than it was already doing on its own. “Things got intense immediately. Turned out her father was… he wasn’t the greatest guy and she was looking for a way out. We got married without telling anyone, and moved to London. She was convinced we could make a life of our own without help from a soul. Turned out she was wrong. We were just kids, you know? Naïve and downright stupid.”
Caballo Security Box Set Page 52