He said nothing in return, as usual. But what was new, and different, was that he wanted to respond. He really, really wanted to talk to her.
***
The next day, after a long, trying day at work, Naomi’s phone rang as she stepped off the elevator and into the hallway of her building.
It wasn’t her business ringtone and it wasn’t her everybody else ringtone. It was a series of cascading chimes that somehow both raised tension and relieved it at the same time. The perfect noise to indicate that her mother was calling.
“Hey, Mom,” Naomi said as she held the phone between her ear and shoulder and dragged her grocery bags down the hall to her door.
“Hi, Pickle.” Her mother had called her by that nickname since she was born and Naomi had to admit she loved it. It was just so random, like her mother.
“What’s up?”
“I wanted to hear how your last few days at work are going.”
“Oh, you know,” Naomi said evasively as she shuffled grocery bags to scroll through her phone for the password that she had to put in the outside of her front door now. Luckily the second her thumb came into contact with the keypad, it beeped through and accepted her thumbprint. Naomi stumbled through her door and rushed at the interior keypad that had begun blinking upon entry.
A small thrill raced through her when she wondered if Sequence was going to be on the other end of that camera again. She wasn’t sure why the quiet, grumpy man interested her but… yeah, that was a lie. She knew exactly why his stark features and light green eyes and chiseled jaw and deep voice and built body and tattoos on the backs of his hands were interesting to her. He was hot. Super hot. Jalapeño hot. And in a different world, where he wasn’t her bodyguard and she wasn’t in danger from a mob boss, she wouldn’t mind seeing his jalapeño.
She cleared her throat. It wasn’t a different world. It was this one. The same old one where her mother was chirping in her ear, the keypad was beeping at her, and she’d just dropped a whole shopping bag filled with fruits and vegetables on her floor.
“Dang!”
“Naomi? Are you okay?” her mother asked.
“Yeah, I just have to remember… ralph8864#?” She bit her lip and plugged in the code. The light flashed red.
“What? Ralph who?” her mother asked.
Naomi pressed the blue button and tried again. “Nothing, Mom.”
She clicked the code in again and sure enough, the keypad blinked red and started beeping really angrily at her.
“Naomi? I think I hear my smoke alarm going off. I’m going to have to call you back.”
“Mom? No. The beeping is coming from my end. Don’t hang up. Mom? Mom?”
Naomi heard the phone call click off and groaned. Now, her very zany mother was going to drive herself nuts searching down the source of a beeping sound that wasn’t even coming from her borough. As soon as Naomi got this damn code plugged in, she’d have to call her mom and get it sorted out or else her mother would start to get all paranoid again.
“Dang it, Mom,” Naomi muttered to herself as she plugged in the code again.
The light blinked red.
“First time a woman’s ever called me Mom.” Sequence’s deep voice reverberated out from the keypad and, forgetting that he could see her even though she couldn’t see him, Naomi let herself grin hard at the welcome sound of his voice.
“Really? You strike me as pretty maternal.”
There was silence on his end, but something in her gut told her he was smiling. Not that she could even picture what that might look like, considering how serious he’d looked the only time she’d actually met him.
The beeping stopped abruptly and Naomi sagged in relief against the wall, accidentally smashing her face up against the camera.
“Thanks for keeping the cops from arresting me for coming home from work,” she told Sequence.
“Any chance you’re gonna remember your code tomorrow?”
Naomi waved her hand through the air. “Sure, I’ll write it on the back of my hand.”
“Please tell me you’re joking.”
She rolled her eyes. “Duh. I work in the diamond industry, I know how to use security systems, I just have to get used to this one. Shoot!” She cursed as she took a step backward and crushed half of the grapes she’d just bought under her Louboutins.
“What is it?” Something in Sequence’s tone had her snapping to attention. He wanted to know what had made her curse and he wanted to know now.
Suddenly remembering that he could see her, Naomi knelt and picked up the crushed bag of grapes. She held it up to the camera. “I hate wasting produce.”
“Why were the grapes on the floor?”
“I dropped the bag when I came in. I was attempting to wrangle my mother, my groceries, and the new security system all at once.”
“All while walking on those stilts of yours, I assume.”
So, he’d noticed her shoes the other day. “I’m training for the circus,” she told him.
Again there was that pregnant silence that Naomi was positive was defined by smiles.
But the silence stretched on and he didn’t respond. Naomi’s brow furrowed as she put her hands on the hips. She couldn’t hold up all the flirting by herself! “Sequence?”
“Yeah.”
She waited and he still didn’t say anything more. “Well, I guess—”
“Rook’s about to call you,” he told her.
Her phone rang in her hand and scared the bejeezus out of her. “How did you do that?” Getting very close to the camera in a way that she knew would make her look like an actor in the Blair Witch Project, she spoke in a low tone. “Are you psychic?”
This time she swore she could hear the smile in his tone. “Maybe. Answer that phone call.”
“Bye, Sequence.”
“Bye, Fancy.”
Fancy? She just had time to register the nickname before she answered the phone call.
Rook was requesting that she come by their headquarters sometime in the next few days to choose which kind of surveillance equipment would be best for her to wear into the lion’s den. Aka, Frank Bastone’s home, which was where her final meeting with him would take place.
She made a plan to show up at their Red Hook location after work the next day and set about putting her groceries away. By the time she’d made herself some dinner and talked her mom into believing that the beeping sound had been coming from Naomi’s house, she was utterly exhausted.
Naomi drew a bath, something she generally only reserved for emergencies. On a whim, she threw in some special bath salts that she’d gotten for Christmas last year and splashed in some essential oils.
She slid into the tub, her hair mermaiding all around her, and let herself revel in the pampered feeling. It was then that Sequence’s nickname came back to her. Fancy.
She’d had a lot of nicknames in her life. Something about being a redhead inspired them.
Red.
Ginger.
Firecrotch. She made a face.
But Fancy? She actually kind of liked that. She wondered what it was about her that had inspired him to call her that. She thought about it for a few more seconds before she let herself sink below the surface of the bath.
Her world went warm and muted. Simpler. This could be simple and here she was making it complicated again. She did not need to go crushing on one of her bodyguards.
Naomi had always been the kind to crush fast and hard. Never to very much success. Sure, she’d had some boyfriends here and there, but at this point, she wasn’t sure she was a stellar judge of character. She saw the best in people and never picked up on any of the other signals they sent her way.
Hell, she’d thought Frank Bastone was a really nice guy for a long time. It wasn’t until a year or so ago that he’d started giving her such creep-o vibes.
She came above water and sighed. Sequence was yummy. And flirting with him gave her a little electric charge that she hadn’t fel
t in a long time. But she wasn’t going to push.
CHAPTER THREE
Naomi nearly broke her neck swinging her head around to see everything as Rook led her through the bunker.
“Thanks for meeting us here, Naomi. It made more sense than packing up all our tech and dragging it uptown.”
“No problem at all. Is this, like, one of those apocalypse bunkers or something? I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
“Apocalypse bunkers?” Rook asked, trying to keep up with whatever path her mind was taking them down. He liked Naomi Cutler. A lot, actually. He thought she was smart and funny and kind. It was also clear that she was bit of an odd duck.
“You know, on those reality channels? Where people have whole rooms filled with canned goods and night vision goggles and handmade maces to fight off the zombies?”
Rook cleared his throat but couldn’t help the surprised chuckle that echoed out of him. “I can’t say that I had zombies in mind when I designed the bunker. Mostly, we’ve just tried to keep the security state-of-the-art. We want our clients to be as secure as possible when we house them here.”
“You house clients here?”
“When it’s necessary.” He held open the main doors from the atrium and they filed into the hallway with its cement flooring and swinging doors. “My daughter loves those zombie apocalypse shows. Gives me the heebie jeebies.”
“Me too. But sometimes I can’t help but watch. I love stuff like that. You have a daughter? What age?”
“She’s thirteen now.”
“You don’t look old enough for that.”
“Prom night baby.”
“Hey! So was I!”
Rook looked down at the utterly ecstatic expression on Naomi’s face. Why the hell had he just divulged to a client that he’d gotten his ex-wife pregnant on prom night? That was not professional in the least. But it didn’t seem like Naomi minded much. She was looking up at him like they were old friends.
In a way, it felt nice to casually mention May, his ex-wife, and Ricky, his daughter. That was one of the things that Rook missed the most about being married, just being able to casually drop his wife into conversation. He loved talking about May. But now, whenever he did, he inevitably had to explain that she was his ex-wife. So, for the last five years since their split, he’d mostly just limited himself to thinking about May, instead of talking about her. But thinking about her was driving him insane these days. He put her out of his head and looked back down at Naomi, who was still smiling up at him.
“Here we are,” he said gruffly, and pushed through the door to their tech lab, aka Sequence’s office.
The man in question was standing over a large table with gadgets of all kinds smattered over it. A view of the East River and the Manhattan skyline spread out in front of him, the bright late-summer sun harsh through the window.
He turned when he heard them come in and Naomi felt her breath catch in her chest. He really was some kind of beautiful. He wore that same get-up of a white button down, black slacks, and shiny black shoes.
But, to her, he looked like a street fighter dressed as a stockbroker for Halloween. She knew that they had a dress code with their group, but putting Sequence in these clothes seemed a little ridiculous to Naomi. It would be like putting her in a biker jacket and a spiked collar and sending her to meet a client. It just didn’t quite work. Sequence wasn’t fooling anyone into thinking he was civilized. Not when he constantly exuded that strange, leashed wildness.
He stood at the table, leaning one hip against it, and nodded to her as she came in. “Ms. Cutler.”
He was so still. Like a caged animal. Although Naomi got the impression that he was the only one with the keys to the cage.
“Naomi,” she said, waving her hand through the air and giving him a duh look. I mean, she’d been flirting with the man through a little box on the wall in her house, he could at least call her by her first name. Or he could call her Fancy. But there was something about requesting a nickname that took the magic out of it. She’d just have to wait and see if he’d call her that on his own.
“Sequence is going to run you through all your surveillance options for your meeting with Bastone. Obviously it’ll only antagonize him if you walk in there with personal security. And at this point we want you as far under his radar as you can possibly get.”
“Agreed.” When she’d first come to Rook, she’d pictured meeting up with Bastone with a penguin-suited bruiser on either of her arms. She’d imagined her bodyguards would frog-march her in and out of the meeting and she’d be snug as a bug in a rug.
Rook had quickly altered her expectations. Her team would be very close by, and keeping tabs on her every movement and Bastone’s every movement. But it would be much better if Bastone didn’t know that they were there. Otherwise he might get his panties in a twist. As it was, Naomi didn’t think that he had any idea just how scared of him she was. And she wanted it to stay that way. He seemed like the kind of guy who’d get off on scaring her.
Seeing as he wasn’t likely to shoot her the way he might with an enemy, they all figured that if danger arose, her team would have time to get to her. And with the right surveillance equipment, they’d be able to assess Bastone’s reactions to her goodbye to him.
Their collective hope was that she’d tell him she was leaving Ellsworth’s, she’d say farewell, and he’d let her ride off into the sunset.
Naomi strolled up to the table and her eyes went wide as scarab beetles. In addition to all the cables and wires and screens and keyboards strewn across the table, there was a collection of very pretty things.
“Wowzers.”
“What?” Sequence asked, over her shoulder. She turned and they were standing just a touch closer than she’d expected.
“I didn’t expect all your tech to be quite so pretty.”
He shrugged. “A bug isn’t a bug if you can’t hide it in plain sight. We don’t want you wearing a wire, so we need to hide it in some jewelry. You can pick whatever you want.” He waved his hand at the sparkly table, like he didn’t give a shit.
“I’ve got to take this,” Rook said, holding up his vibrating phone and slipping out of the room.
Naomi bit her lip and raised her eyebrows at Sequence as she looked back and forth at the jewelry.
“What?” he asked, trying to interpret her expression. He wanted to tug her lip out from between her teeth and test its plumpness with his own teeth. “None of this shit is your style?”
He should have known she’d be picky. She was so damn fancy after all. Right now, she stood there in all black again, her ruby hair in some elegant twist, the lines of her clothes perfectly tailored. She looked like a literal million bucks. She looked cool and calm. He had the urge to mess her hair up, smudge her lipstick, smear something lickable on her body.
“No! It’s not that! Some of this jewelry is very lovely.” She held up a brooch in the stylized shape of a tiger. Her fingers danced over some of the larger gems. It was all costume jewelry, but Sequence had given the seller explicit instructions that he’d wanted good fake stuff. It had felt a little strange actually, to buy it all. He was often in charge of buying the things they’d hide surveillance equipment inside of for their clients. For some reason though, this had felt disorienting, like he was just buying jewelry for Naomi. Lots of it.
“What’s the problem then?”
She turned to Sequence. “It’s just that if I show up to that meeting wearing jewelry of any kind, Bastone will definitely notice.”
Sequence scanned his eyes down her person and felt like a total fucking idiot. With her ruby hair and sapphire eyes and pearly teeth, Sequence had just mentally added sparkly jewelry to her look. In his head she wore diamonds in her ears and gems on each finger. She had a choker of emeralds. Jewelry for a queen.
But looking at her now, with a more discerning eye, he saw that she wore no jewelry at all. Actually, her body was completely unadorned. The woman didn’t even ha
ve her ears pierced. Shit.
He couldn’t ever remember a time he’d been this unobservant on the job. This woman was like looking into a bright light. She was discombobulating him, throwing off his vision for hours afterward.
“You’re a jeweler who doesn’t wear jewelry.”
“Gemologist,” she corrected him with a little shrug. “But yeah. It’s something that Bastone happens to find interesting about me. He teases me about it. If I showed up with a brooch or necklace or something, he’d definitely take notice. Immediately.”
Sequence frowned. “All right. So, jewelry is out.”
“Knock knock.”
Sequence frowned harder when Naomi turned her attention from him and onto the three people standing in the door.
“Atlas!” she chirped, striding across the floor on those long legs toward his brother.
Sequence’s frown turned into a scowl.
She shook Atlas’s hand and turned to the other two people.
“Cedric Swift.” Swift held out his hand.
“Just call me Geo.” They shook hands next.
“Will you all be with me next week?”
“You got the whole team, sis,” Geo said, nodding. She squinted her eyes at the table behind Sequence. “You rob a jewelry store, Sequence?”
He grunted but didn’t respond more than that.
Naomi turned to say something, but her words stopped up in her throat as she realized that Sequence was picking up her gemologist bag that she’d set carefully in a corner when she’d entered the room earlier. “Hey!”
He lifted an eyebrow at her as she strode over to him.
“Why do I feel like she’s about to tell you to get your mitts off her stuff?” Atlas called. Sequence ignored him.
Naomi held her hands out for her bag and when Sequence didn’t hand it over, she shook her hands in an impatient gesture. “My bag, please.”
“I want to look at it.”
“Why?”
“Because you nixed the jewelry so I need to find something else to hide the surveillance equipment in.” Sequence felt like a tool for making it sound like she’d been too picky over the jewelry when really, it was his fault for not noticing that it wasn’t her style. “You’re going to bring this bag to your meet-up with Bastone, right?”
Rook Security Complete Series Page 28