Midnight Kiss
Page 2
“Don’t say another word.” He put command in his voice and saw her blink, startled. He wanted to stop this right now. “Money is definitely not an issue here. You are a friend of Felicity’s and she’s asked us to do her a favor. Felicity has done endless favors for everyone in the company, she’s gone out of her way countless times. Everybody is dying to do something for her. As a matter of fact, the guys envy me because I happened to be available when you called her. A lot of our operatives are on missions and several are OUTCONUS. That’s —”
“Outside the continental United States,” she said. “Yeah. I worked for the NSA for two unpleasant years.”
Luke clutched the steering wheel so hard his knuckles turned white so he wouldn’t slap himself upside the head. What was he thinking? She sat there, looking so vulnerable, looking like a frightened twelve-year-old, and he’d just assumed that he could talk to her as if she were one.
This was an accomplished professional, one of the best in a hard field, and she’d worked on issues of national security all her professional life. Her security clearance had probably been higher than his when she worked at the NSA.
“Sorry.”
She nodded.
“Anyway, doing a favor for Felicity is something all of us want to do. Desperately. So you’ve got me and you’ve got a company of pretty competent guys on your side.” He gave a half smile. “Even if most of them are squids.”
“Navy.” She smiled back, the smile shaky but there. He nodded, pleased.
“Okay.” He gave a light pat to the steering wheel and unlocked the doors. “Now that we’ve got that out of the way and now that you’ve understood that you have a lot of people who want to help and we wouldn’t take a penny of your money no matter what, let’s get up into the room and have a debrief.”
She nodded and opened her door. Luke wanted to get around the car to help her down from the vehicle but before he could, she hopped out gracefully and went around to the back of the car and waited for him to open the trunk.
There were two small wheelie bags in the back. He’d packed for a mission of about four days. If it got extended, he’d either order new clothes online or use the hotel’s laundry service. Someone else had packed Hope’s bag and he just hoped she had everything she needed, because they were going to stay put until they figured out what was going on.
He didn’t want them to go out unless necessary.
He rolled both of the bags toward an elevator against the back wall. There were security cameras, but his cell had an app to turn the cameras off. There’d be no record of their arrival. At the elevator, he rolled his eyes at the ‘Out of Order’ placard taped to the doors and pushed a button. The doors opened and he punched ten.
They stood, staring at the elevator doors. “Neat trick,” she said after a moment. “With the Out of Order sign.”
He nodded. Yeah, his company — his future company — was full of neat tricks.
There were only four suites on this floor. He already had the electronic key out and ushered her into the west corner suite, smiling as the door whooshed slowly closed behind them. It was made of reinforced. The mild paranoia that always gripped him when on a mission slowly abated. They were as safe as he could make them. He knew only the bare bones of her situation but he imagined that she’d spent the past 24 hours in a state of high anxiety and dread.
She could relax now.
He watched her as she walked into the living room area. The room was designed to be relaxing and it did its job. Her shoulders dropped a little, her fists unclenched. She noted the two bedrooms, shot a glance at him, was reassured and let out a soft breath.
“Would you like some tea?” he asked and her face lit up.
“Oh God, yes! Thank you!”
Chicks and tea. You’d think it was crack cocaine and oxytocin rolled into one. He left their bags and walked over to the refreshments table against the wall. A water boiler, a billion types of black and herbal teas, an espresso machine with every flavor of coffee capsule, and in the fridge would be a selection of fruit juices. Luke would help himself to a finger of the excellent whiskey at the wet bar.
There was some kind of ritual to tea but he just boiled the water, stuck a tea bag in a cup and poured the hot water over it, figuring she needed the tea fast, not perfect.
“Sit and I’ll bring you your tea. Would you like a cookie or something with it?”
She looked down, consulting her stomach, and shook her head. “Later, maybe,” she said softly. “But thanks.”
He nodded at the couch and she sat at one end. When she was sipping her tea, he sat in the comfortable armchair perpendicular to it and sipped his own equivalent of tea. A very nice single malt. Ah, that went down well. Trust ASI to have only the finest whiskey on tap. There’d be some local brews in the small fridge too. They’d have been chosen by ASI operatives and they’d be good.
He sat, sipped and waited. She was settling her nerves, gathering her thoughts, and he let her. Getting intel was always tricky when the source was unsettled. He didn’t know much about her situation, but he understood that she’d had a brush with violence. Violence would unsettle anyone who wasn’t a battle-hardened former soldier and soon-to-be ex-cop. Violence didn’t unsettle him, it pissed him off.
And it pissed him off doubly as he watched her.
Everything about her spelled delicacy, from the fine collarbones, to the slender graceful hands, with that small knob at the wrists. She would have looked like a child dressed in an adult’s clothes if it weren’t for the intelligence blazing out of those green eyes. Someone wanted to hurt this smart and pretty young woman and that really pissed him off.
She’d been bone white when she sat down but the hot tea was putting a little color in her cheeks. Good. She was beginning to realize it was time to fight back and that she had people on her side. He didn’t know much about her background, except for the fact that Felicity had said she was alone in the world. No family and no boyfriend. Which was odd, considering how incredibly pretty she was.
She was so attractive it was a distraction. When Luke was in work mode nothing distracted him, ever. He was intensely focused when on the job. He was here to protect an innocent young woman and that kind of thing was what he was born to do. There was a long line of Reynolds men behind him who had been cops and firefighters and warriors and it was in his DNA to fight to protect.
How could someone so smart and so pretty be so freaking alone?
Never mind. She had him now and behind him was a solid wall of good guy badasses with resources up the wazoo.
Now she not only had some color in her cheeks, but instead of sitting ramrod straight, she was relaxing back into the cushions. When she put the teacup back in its saucer on the coffee table and sat back, he knew it was time.
“So, do you want to talk about it?”
“The trouble I’m in? Yeah.” She sketched a smile. “But I think I’m going to have to start from way way back. Is that ok?”
Luke took another sip of the Talisker, watching her carefully. “We have all the time in the world. Start anywhere you want. Actually, the more intel I have the better. So you can start from the Pleistocene as far as I’m concerned.”
He wasn’t taking notes on this first run through. It would stop her flow. They’d go over it again and again. Later, he’d take meticulous notes and pass them on to Felicity, who’d intercept them anyhow if he didn’t send them to her, and then on to the ASI operators. But he was team leader on this and he’d be the one to judge who and how many to call in. Some problems were single-operator problems. Some required a lot of heavy hitters.
Whatever Hope needed, she’d get.
Luke was prepared for anything. She’d worked for the NSA. She was a female computer nerd and he knew they ruled the world. Felicity even had a sign above her workplace computer stating Who run the world? Girls!
It was clear to Luke that he and the guys back in the office were essentially muscle. Well-trained and lethal,
sure, but muscle. The smarts were with people like Felicity and Hope, who were the ones who really ran things.
He was ready to hear about any kind of far-reaching conspiracy, massive fraud or theft in the upper reaches of government, treason, a possible EMP device coming to America’s shores, killer viruses, the zombie apocalypse … anything.
But he was taken completely by surprise by the next thing she said.
“I never got on with my parents.”
At any other time, Hope might have broken out in laughter at the look on Luke’s face. She wasn’t in a laughing mood but oh, boy. He was doing his very best to keep a perfectly bland expression on his face but it was as if he’d reached for a stick and picked up a rattlesnake instead.
Not what he was expecting.
Still, it all started from there — from her family. From what she thought had been her family.
She’d always felt something was wrong.
In her mid teens, she realized that she was scary good with computers. When she also realized she felt absolutely nothing for her parents, it occurred to her that it could mean she was somewhere on the spectrum. She wasn’t — she knew that now. But for a while she made it a point to read social cues and facial expressions to convince herself she could.
Her self-directed course on human behavior led her to hack into the FBI’s course on body language and she’d studied it thoroughly, paying particular attention to microexpressions, which meant that she could read Luke Reynold’s expression pretty well.
The wheels were almost visibly turning in that incredibly handsome head of his. Was he being shanghaied into being a shrink? Had she mobilized vast resources — that private plane ride across the continental US alone probably cost $50,000 — for a family squabble?
“Not what you think,” she said.
“Not thinking anything,” he replied, which was a lie.
“This isn’t a therapy session,” she said.
“Good thing, because I’m no therapist,” he said. Instead of taking a small sip of his whiskey, he gulped the rest of it down.
Yeah, Luke Reynolds didn’t look like a shrink. He looked exactly like what Felicity said he was. A former soldier and a cop. Totally reality-based guys who didn’t speculate and didn’t do feelings. Certainly not the touchy-feely kind that came with discussions of family. Every inch of that lean and muscled body was meant for action, not reflection.
Which was great. Because reflection was her field and action was his.
Hope was in big trouble, had no idea why, and needed a Luke.
“Hear me out.” Hope leaned forward a little, body language for hear me out to go with the words.
He nodded his head soberly.
None of this was going to be easy. She gathered her thoughts and resolved to be as clear and as concise as possible.
Here goes nothing, she thought, and began.
“My parents weren’t good parents. They weren’t bad parents, either, really. They were just indifferent, wrapped up in themselves, so they farmed out the parenting. We always had money, though I’m not too sure where it came from because I never saw them work. I’m investigating that right now. My parents hired nannies to look after me and they hired really good ones. At the age of ten I was sent to a boarding school that by sheer chance happened to be exactly what I needed. It had an excellent academic program, gifted teachers and a student body of kids like me — with parents who had more money than parental instincts. I had a good time, made good friends, got a superb education. At first, until I was about fourteen or so, I’d go home for Christmas and Easter and summer vacations, but then I stayed over at the school for extra courses in the summer, which is why I graduated at sixteen. I ended up staying with friends for Christmas and Easter after that. My parents … didn’t mind.”
He was listening carefully, to his credit. There was a reason she was telling him this and he understood that.
“The only time my parents showed any strong feelings about me was when I said I wanted to study at Stanford. For some reason, that agitated them no end. My father put his foot down and said he wouldn’t pay for it. I was pretty sure I could get a scholarship and anyway I was already writing code for pretty good money so I knew I could pay my own way. But one evening both of them begged me to stay in Boston. Cried, even. Begged and cried so much I … gave in. I have absolutely no idea why they were so set against Stanford. But it was the first thing they’d ever asked of me, so …” she shrugged. “I went to MIT. About six months ago, they retired, though for the life of me I don’t know what they were retiring from. Neither of them worked a day in their lives, that I could see. They bought a condo in Clearwater, Florida and spent the winter there.”
She stopped, sipped more tea. It was lukewarm, but that was okay. It gave her a moment to gather her thoughts. She’d never really laid her family life out like this. Hadn’t even thought about it much, really, until very recently. When the past reached out and tried to take a big bite out of her.
She met Luke’s eyes. They were a light blue, a beautiful color, but bloodshot. Either the man had been on a bender or he wasn’t sleeping. She didn’t think Felicity would have entrusted her to an alcoholic. Felicity had mentioned that he’d been having problems.
Welcome to the club.
She drew in a deep breath. “Spoken out loud like this, I’m wondering why I wasn’t more curious about them. But — your family is like the ocean for a fish, I guess. Just there. What you swim in. Do you know a lot about your parents’ past?”
“Everything,” he said. “I was close to my parents and I knew most everything about their lives.”
“Knew? Are they gone?”
A spasm of pain crossed his face, uncontrollable. “My mom died when I was eighteen. I lost my dad a couple of months ago.”
He still felt that loss, it was clear. It made her even more aware of how strange her family was, how cold and uncaring. “I’m so sorry.”
“Thanks.” He bowed his head briefly. “Go on.”
“Well, like I said, I never questioned my family much. I had nannies, then boarding school and then I discovered computers and the hacker community and my parents were like this background noise that never interfered with anything. They paid for my schooling, weren’t mean to me, made sure I didn’t want for anything. But that’s about it. They never took any kind of interest in me, in what I was doing.”
For the first time it occurred to her what she was really saying. She wasn’t describing parents. She was describing guardians.
“Then — then they died suddenly. In an accident. They hired a plane to get to Kingston and it went down over the Cayman Islands. I didn’t know for a week. It was the bank that notified me.”
His eyes narrowed until only the pale glow of his irises showed. “This is a shrink question but — how did you feel about it?”
“I was appalled. I was appalled that I didn’t find out sooner, that I didn’t feel more than some sadness. Thinking about it, though, I also realized they hadn’t tried to make me love them. They — they just went through the motions. There was a memorial service I organized and which only a few people attended. They hadn’t made many friends. I blew up a photograph of them I had and put it on an easel. Some friends of mine came. One had studied genetics at MIT and was a buddy of mine. Kyle Ackerman. He spent the memorial service studying their photographs and afterward came up to me and asked me if I’d been adopted.”
Luke’s eyes narrowed even further. “Isn’t that a big assumption to make?”
In answer, she handed over a photo she kept in her backpack. It was a glossy hi-def copy of the photo at the memorial. Luke studied the photo carefully, flicked a glance at her, then continued studying it.
She knew what he was seeing. Two people who looked nothing like her. Not one trait in common. Both Neil and Sandra Ellis were ruddy-faced, with sandy brown hair, brown eyes, high broad cheekbones, round faces. She had pale skin, inky black hair, green eyes, a long narrow face.
She watched Luke watching her. His expression was neutral but there was no doubt she had all his attention.
He had hers, too. He was so distracting. He had a male model’s good looks — fine, chiseled features, blond stubble softening a hard jaw, amazing light blue eyes — but it was as if his looks didn’t belong to him. Most good looking people went through life with an air of privilege, preening. Nature’s aristocrats. But Luke didn’t, he didn’t even seem to be aware of what he looked like. Maybe because he also looked exhausted, like he’d run a marathon through a forest fire. Backwards.
“And?” he asked.
Hope shook herself. Damn. She must be really exhausted to get caught up in the good looks of a man sent here exclusively to protect her and try to help her get to the bottom of what was happening. Getting lost staring at him wasn’t cool.
She sat up straight. This was serious business and she couldn’t lose track drooling over a handsome man. Even though he was — whoo — really good-looking. Very hot. What guys called eye candy when talking about women. In her line of work, there weren’t many good looking guys. None, actually. She would have sworn she was immune to handsome faces, only turns out she wasn’t, not at all. She just hadn’t been exposed to many. Not in real life anyway. Most handsome men she’d seen were up on a screen.