Flirting With Disaster

by Ruthie Knox

  “Fine. Like I said, it’s not impossible. Just hard. In the meantime, she’s going to want to talk to you again about who knows you’re in Buffalo.”

  “Okay.”

  “And we’re taking off right after the show. I have an idea, but I need to work on my own equipment back in Camelot to get it done. We’ll catch up with you next weekend.”

  “Fine.”

  Sean stood and started to turn away, then stopped. “If she ends up hurt because of you, I don’t c-care who you are,” he said. “I’ll k-kick your ass.”

  Judah laughed. “Right back at you.”

  “I’m no threat to her.”

  “If you’re not even smart enough to know that’s bullshit, I’m more likely to owe you an ass-whipping than the other way around.”

  For a long moment, they took each other’s measure. Sean guarded his expression carefully, and Judah couldn’t get much of a read off him. The man didn’t like him; that much was obvious. No doubt it was payback for Judah’s attempt to get Katie into bed. Given the nature of his failure, he figured Sean would warm up to him eventually.

  He didn’t know why he wanted him to, except that he trusted him. Not with Katie—though if Sean screwed that up it would be the result of self-destructive stupidity, not of meanness. But with the rest of this mess. With his life, he supposed, if it came to that.

  Maybe it was because the guy reminded him of Ben. He had the take-no-prisoners confidence of someone who’d come out the other side of an ugly childhood.

  “You know, I think you and I are going to be friends,” Judah said with a smile.

  Sean shook his head and walked out. Grinning, Judah watched him go. He was as easy to rile as Ben, too. Men like that looked tough, but they kept their emotions right under their skin. All you had to do was scratch them in the right place, and you found out how deeply they felt everything.

  He spun the marker in a slow circle on the card table, wondering for the thousandth time if Ben was the one sending him the threats. If it had to be Ben, or if someone else had found out what happened that summer.

  How hard could it be to track his movements and discover he was in Buffalo? Everywhere Judah went, he got noticed. The woman at the front desk had taken his picture with her phone. He couldn’t slip through the world in secrecy. Hadn’t been able to do that in fifteen years.

  It wasn’t necessarily Ben, but it could be him. And a nagging voice in Judah’s head kept saying, Find out. Hurry up.

  Katie would find out for him. Katie or Sean, or both of them working together. And if it took them too long, he had another plan in motion that would speed things along to the inevitable conclusion.

  He had to know, soon. But he wasn’t ready to face the past. Not quite yet.

  Chapter Twenty

  “Are you sure it’s a good idea to drive in this?” Katie asked. The thumping and whining of the wipers going full speed made her edgy. Fat snowflakes hurtled out of the blackness to commit suicide against the windshield.

  Sean drove like he was in no hurry, which was comforting, but also kind of absurd. His haste to get back home so he could work on his own equipment was the whole reason he’d decided to drive back to Camelot tonight, rather than in the morning.

  Not that she wanted him to rush—not with all this snow. The storm had blown up after they were already in the car, surprising them. The weather app on her cell phone said it wasn’t supposed to get any worse than this, and the driving conditions really weren’t all that bad, but Katie wasn’t a snow girl.

  Ridiculous, considering she’d spent a good chunk of her adult life based out of Anchorage, but there it was. Freezing rain she could handle. She’d always thought she’d make an excellent getaway car driver, particularly if the bank robbers struck Camelot in the middle of a March ice storm. Put her in the passenger seat in heavy snowfall, though, and she lost her Bond Girl cool.

  Sean didn’t answer her question. He’d reverted to rock again, and she hadn’t figured out how to soften him up.

  Not that she’d had an opportunity. They hadn’t been alone together all day. After breakfast, he kept busy doing whatever-the-hell, and she’d been interviewing anyone and everyone she could pin down.

  Sean had asked her to keep talking to Judah and also to try to speak with as many of the staff as possible. The idea was to try to determine whether any of them held a grudge that might make them likely stalkers.

  She’d tried to take the whole thing seriously, even though it seemed much more likely that the messages were coming from outside Judah’s payroll than from somebody on it. But she continually got sidetracked by people’s interestingness, realizing too late that she’d begun chatting with Judah about his mad origami skills instead of the potential threat to his life, and that basically she sucked at being a hard-ass.

  Resolved to do better, she’d found herself keeping Ginny company in the bar while the girl knocked back shots of Jägermeister. All it had taken was a question about how she’d met Judah, and the former Pella High cheerleader had begun spilling the long, sad story of her unrequited love for her boss. Ginny had written an essay about her “hometown hero” for the high school newspaper and won an opportunity to interview Judah in Chicago. He’d taken to her, groomed her, and put her on his staff after graduation. She’d assumed it meant something.

  Rather than tell her it didn’t, Katie had ordered them both a round. It seemed like the thing to do at the time.

  Now, though, she had to admit she had no idea what she was doing. What coaching she’d managed to coax out of Caleb over the past year had covered everyday security agenting—assessing the protection needs of a business, acting as bodyguard for someone with a public profile, that sort of thing. He’d never taught her how to deal with a situation like this. Probably because there had never been a situation like this.

  It would have been nice to talk it over with Sean, but Sean hadn’t been available. Over the course of the day, she’d exchanged texts and a few emails with him, but he’d put off meeting one-on-one, saying they could compare notes later on.

  It was later on. It was, in fact, midnight, and they should have been sleeping, but Sean’s haste meant they had six or seven hours to kill together—maybe longer, if the snow really slowed them down. Katie didn’t want all that time in the car with Sean. The weather made her restless, her feeling of incompetence was getting heavy, and the awkwardness between her and her chauffeur sat between them, a bulky, unwelcome stranger she’d like to push out the passenger door and leave to freeze to death by the side of the road.

  “The snow’s pretty bad. We could check back in and hole up for the night,” she suggested. “Try again tomorrow.”

  Sean’s jaw tightened. He didn’t look over at her.

  “No, huh?”

  Silence from the peanut gallery. But had the steering wheel been alive, it would be gasping its last.

  “Didn’t you live in California for most of your adulthood? I’m concerned about your snow-driving credentials. I’m thinking probably I should drive.”

  “I’m d-driving.”

  “But the roads are—”

  “N-not as b-b-bad as they look.”

  Stuttering a lot tonight. She’d heard him slip a few times earlier today, too, when he was talking to other people. He’d said the stutter was getting worse, but it seemed he still spoke almost flawlessly to everyone but her.

  They hugged Lake Erie for several miles before Sean cut east to I-90 and they stopped at a booth to pick up a toll card. As they merged onto the highway, he pulled his wallet from his back pocket and handed it to her. “C-can you g-get the m-money out for the toll ffor later?”

  “Sure.”

  Bathed in the glow of the on-ramp floodlights, she figured out what it would cost them when they eventually got off the tollway and found a ten to cover it. He carried a chunk of hundred-dollar bills worthy of a heist movie. “Sure you have enough cash?” she asked, before remembering Bond Girls were supposed to be blasé ab
out money.

  “I l-like cash. It’s sssimple.”

  “That it is.” She poked around in his wallet. Caleb said she was supposed to gather information from her environment. Plus, she enjoyed going through guys’ wallets. They were so often capsule versions of the men who carried them.

  Sean’s was next to empty. He carried cash, a couple of credit cards, his driver’s license, and a handful of identical business cards. No photos, no gift cards or frequent-coffee-drinker cards or grocery-store-discount key fobs, no emergency condom.

  In the headlights of a passing car, she read his driver’s license. Sean Jason Owens. Height: six foot one. Weight: 185. Address in San Jose, California.

  No Ohio license. No Ohio anything. He hadn’t been kidding last night about leaving, or just brushing her off. He really didn’t live in Camelot.

  At least, not in his head.

  “You’re supposed to have an Ohio license by now,” she told him. “If you don’t, they fine you when they pull you over for speeding. Happened to me after I moved home from Alaska.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  They passed a brightly lit factory, and she was able to make out the print on the business card. Anderson Owens, Inc. Sean Owens, President. Corporate address in San Jose.

  “Anderson Owens is your company?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you do online security?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you, like, on the lam?” she asked. “Are you hiding out in Camelot from, I don’t know, tax fraud or something?”

  “No.”

  That was it. Just no.

  “Can you at least make an effort at conversation? I don’t want to spend the whole night talking to myself.”

  Sean’s silence only served to fuel her irritation. He was such a mystery to her, and she didn’t know why she cared, but she did. She wanted him to talk to her, to tell her everything. Last night he’d opened up to her, and now he was giving her monosyllables. It was frustrating.

  “Sorry if it’s inconvenient for you, having a partner and all,” she said. “I know you probably figured if we drove at night, I’d fall asleep like I did last time and you wouldn’t have to deal with me, but it’s not going to happen, Buster. I’m not coming off a tequila bender this time. I hate driving in the snow, I’m hungry, and I want to talk to you about the case. Not to mention that I think we probably need to come to some kind of terms with the fact that I still want to screw you senseless.”

  She caught her breath. That wasn’t what she’d meant to say. It was her runaway mouth again, blurting out the worst possible words when she was under pressure. What was it about Sean that put her under so much pressure? How did he keep turning her into a snowflake, determined to fling herself against his slick, unforgiving surface?

  The strained whine of the wipers made her want to put her fist through the windshield.

  “Ffeel better?” he asked.

  “No.” She felt sick, full of hot shame and thick resentment.

  “I th-think there’s a bag of p-pretzels in the armrest.”

  “Pretzels?” The word came out sounding like Go to hell.

  She could hear the smile in his voice when he answered. “Yuh-you said you were hungry.”

  “Did I?”

  “Eat the p-pretzels, sweetheart.”

  Somewhat mollified by being called “sweetheart,” and rather ashamed to admit she’d needed that tiny scrap of evidence of Sean’s affection, Katie shut up and ate the pretzels. She offered the bag to him, but he passed. When it was empty, she flattened the shiny plastic out on her knee and tried to fold it into an origami frog the way Judah had taught her this afternoon.

  “Do you really think someone wants to kill him?”

  There it was. The worry that had been nagging at her all day.

  “I d-don’t know. It’s sstarting to look that way.”

  “I don’t know what he expects me to do about it. He needs the police. I want to help him, but I’m useless at this. I keep thinking he’s going to end up with an ice pick in his chest, and it’ll be all my fault.”

  The frog fell apart on her lap, the plastic too slippery to hold a shape. She crumpled the bag up and shoved it back in the armrest. Sean’s hand found her knee and warmed it up.

  They weren’t going to be friends. No woman alive could be friends with a man who put his hand on her knee. Not when the weight of it made her respond with heat and achy longing entirely out of proportion to the compassionate intention behind the touch.

  Katie didn’t need another friend. She already had friends, both male and female, and none of them touched her knees. None of them inspired the kind of intense interest that Sean did.

  An interest that she had to admit was considerably older than their assignment to the case.

  He’d always put her on edge, from the moment Caleb hired him. She simply hadn’t realized that the reason he got her hackles up wasn’t discomfort, it was attraction. She’d wanted Sean to like her because she’d liked him.

  Classic Katie syndrome. She was such a puppy. Like me! Want me! I’ll love you!

  She tipped her knees to one side to dislodge Sean’s hand. Tonight, she lacked the energy to generate the shield of bulletproof awesomeness she needed to be Agent Katie, or Parisian Katie, or any Katie other than the real one. Maybe in the morning she’d relocate her means of self-protection, but in the meantime she couldn’t handle Sean’s hand on her knee. She’d end up on the floor, begging him to fall in love with her and weeping herself into a soft pile of pathetic neediness.

  Ugh. What she needed to do was keep her mouth shut and let exhaustion carry her off to sleep.

  No more outbursts, and no more sharing.

  She looked out the windshield at the wedge of brightness created by the onrushing SUV, the snow swirling in the headlights.

  “What is it?” Sean asked.

  “I feel useless.”

  “You’re n-not useless.” After a beat, he put his hand back on her knee and squeezed it. She let him, because there was no point in trying to keep herself from being the way she was. Lonely and wanting and cruelly attracted. “Judah’s got round-the-clock ssecurity. N-nobody’s going to k-kill him. Now t-tell me what you ffound out t-today.”

  “Nothing,” she admitted, brushing her fingers over the hair on the back of his hand. “I talked to Paul, to Judah three different times, to Ginny for, like, two hours, and to a few random fans and the bartender. Nobody told me where the bodies are buried or anything. My notes are full of pointless facts, like that Ginny is a Pisces.”

  “I bet yuh-you know more than you th-think. Why is Judah in the c-closet?”

  Katie traced the outline of Sean’s hand with her index finger, plunging into the valley between each digit and back out again. “I think it’s kind of habit at this point. He grew up in this perfectly ordinary, perfectly lovely Christian family in a conservative town in Iowa. He told me he didn’t even know he was gay for sure until this camp counselor kissed him when he was sixteen.

  “So suddenly he understands, but he doesn’t know what to do about it when he goes home. He’s having all these feelings about his best friend, Ben, and now he finally gets what the feelings are all about. So he makes a move, completely terrified that Ben’s going to punch him in the face, but instead he kisses him back, and they spend the whole last year of high school secretly fooling around and worrying somebody’s going to find out.

  “They moved to Louisville together the summer after graduation. Judah wanted them both to come out then, but Ben wouldn’t, and if he didn’t, Judah couldn’t, either. Ben was supposed to go to West Point in the fall. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, right?”

  She tested the blunt edge of Sean’s short thumbnail against her pinky finger. The heavy weight of his hand on her knee soothed a hundred different pieces of her.

  “That was the summer he p-played the High Hat,” Sean said.

  “Yeah. He used to play a couple nights a week.”

&nb
sp; “What was this g-guy’s name? Ben who?”

  “Ben Abrams.”

  “Did you check him out?”

  “No. You think I should have?”

  “I think we sh-should check everybody out. Run background checks on all the staff this week, and on anybody Judah m-mentioned when he was talking to you. Google them, too, and sssee what you can find out. Email me whatever you get that looks interesting.”

  “Okay.”

  “What else can you t-tell me about Judah?”

  “They lived with Ben’s sister, Melissa, and the three of them were at the High Hat almost every night. But then Paul showed up at one of the shows and convinced Judah to move out to L.A. with him, and Paul was adamant that Judah couldn’t be gay. This was when Jonathan Knight and Ricky Martin were still in the closet. Paul wanted every woman in America to fall for Judah Pratt. Judah didn’t care, because he and Ben had broken up, and he didn’t think he’d ever want to be with another guy. He just wanted to record his album.”

  “So why doesn’t he out himself now? He could ssell his story to The Advocate, and that would be the end of it.”

  Sean’s stutter had eased up when they started talking about the job. If she pointed it out to him, he would start again, though. She was beginning to understand how it worked.

  Katie flipped his hand over and interlaced their fingers. “I’m not sure. I think he would if someone pushed him a little. He’s just kind of at a drifting place in his life, you know? He’s not happy with where he is, but he has no momentum to do anything about it, and nobody is looking out for him and telling him what to do except Paul, who’s responsible for him being in the closet to begin with.”

  She rubbed her thumb along the edge of Sean’s, wondering if she should tell him the rest of it. It wasn’t legitimate detective information. It was just an ordinary Katie hunch based on half a dozen years spent in service professions, paying attention to people.

  Sean clued in to her hesitation. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Katie took a deep breath. It couldn’t hurt anything to say it out loud, could it? “I’m not sure his being gay is actually the secret that the threats are about.”