by Tawny Weber
Unlike the rush of questions when she'd answered the phone, this question came out far more subdued, like she suspected the worst. Just what he needed, some overly protective big sister with a worst-case-scenario mindset. Make that motherly sister. She'd said she'd practically raised him.
"Look," he said, instilling in his voice a confidence he didn't feel. "I've got my men keeping an eye on his place and watching for him."
"Why?" she asked, a dubious note to her voice.
"Because the team watches out for its own."
"In the limo, you said you wouldn't 'exactly describe him as part of the team'."
Damn, but the woman had a long memory. "I was mad about the book business," he hedged. "Of course Rob is a team member, just not in the way he was pretending to be."
"Just not all that important a team member, huh?"
He hadn't thought so five days ago. But he was fast finding out how important he was to Saint Security as a missing person. Not that he was going to reveal that fact to Bliss.
"Look. He's part of the team. He's missing. We're looking for him. We will find him."
She expelled a long breath that traveled through the airways into his ear, warning him this conversation wasn't over.
"How much do you know about Robbie's past?" she asked.
Not anywhere near as much as I should know, thanks to someone's sloppy background check.
"Your reaction in the limo," she continued, "suggests you didn't do as thorough a security check on Robbie as you should have."
Jake rubbed the back of his neck, dreading the thought of revealing how little he knew about her brother.
"So, let me fill you in on a few facts. A little over two years ago, Robbie told me he and a friend pitched an interactive online game idea to some big gaming company. He claimed the company was sending them to Mexico to do onsite research."
"They do onsite research for computer games?" Jake asked, genuinely surprised.
"When they want realism, they do."
"What's real about those games?" he asked.
"Sometimes it's just about the game builder getting a real sense of the environment in which he's building his game. Diehard gamers love real-life details in Massive Multiple Online games."
"And you know this how?"
"Robbie was—is a diehard gamer."
Jake thought about the simulators he'd been trained on, how realistic their environments were. How those simulations had been designed by government contracted companies, companies that could well use the same technology in game production for the public sector. Still, he questioned, "And companies actually pay travel expenses for game designers?"
"Gaming is big business."
Combining her confirmation of what he'd just been considering with something that'd come to light among the security world of late, he grimaced. Terrorist groups were using on-line gaming chat rooms to recruit members. What if the kid had been recruited by some terrorist cell? What if they turned the kid so they could get the inner workings of Saint Security?
He swore under his breath. Definitely stick to the need-to-know tactic and this she didn't need to know.
"Jake," she said. "You still there?"
"Yeah. Just taking it all in."
"Too bad you didn't do a proper background check on him," she said, sounding anything but the overwrought mother-sister she had when their conversation began. "Bet you'd have dug up some useful facts on him."
He grimaced. "Look, I didn't do the check on him myself or I would have caught everything."
"Passing the buck?"
"No. My company still did the check. My team will be re-educated."
"Meanwhile, you don't know anything more about him than I do, do you?"
"I know where he was living before his place was trashed. That's more than you know."
"Trashed?" Her voice went up half an octave, which was easily half an octave less than he expected. "Trashed as in he was a slob? Or trashed like someone broke in and searched the place? Or trashed as in there was a fight?"
This was not a woman who was going to settle for need-to-know status. No histrionics like he expected, either.
With a sigh, he answered her question. "Trashed like someone was looking for something."
"Okay, then," she said, expelling an unsteady breath. "You know where to start looking for him. I know his background and how he operates. You ready to share?"
In this single phone call, he'd learned how very much he'd underestimated Bliss O'Hara's ability to hold things together. But, did she really have useful info about Rob?
Of course she did. She was his sister. She knew his past. And the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.
"Sure," he said. "I'll come by your place before I catch a flight back to Command and we can go over everything you know about Rob's life? In our business, we tend not to get too personal, but maybe there's some personal information you could provide that might help us locate him."
"And when would that be?"
He looked at his watch. "I should be able to arrange a private flight out of Chicago yet this evening."
Dead silence filled his ear for several seconds before she summarized his position.
"Let me get this straight. After barely five days of vacationing with family, you're hopping a private flight, on short notice, back to your command center, out of country of course, to help your team search for a computer geek you barely knew existed five days ago."
"Ah, yeah," he said, wincing that he'd also underestimated Bliss O'Hara's ability to read between the lines. "A few days of family goes a long with me," he added on the outside chance she'd buy the lie.
"Right," she said, sounding not the least bit convinced.
Add dubious to her skillset.
"I'll text you my Chicago address," she said. "When should I expect you?"
"Depends on when I can catch a flight out of Green Bay."
There was the slightest of hesitations on her end, enough to make him realize he'd just told her where he was. How did she do that, get him to slip up?
"What? No private planes for you to commandeer in Wisconsin?"
That'd been the last thing she'd said to him before he hung up. What rankled him was, no matter how hard Jake tried to focus on the task ahead as the commercial flight jetted him toward Chicago, Bliss' cheekiness kept invading his consciousness. Worried about her missing brother, yet she still had it in her to needle him. What was with this woman?
Then again, she'd shown some of that resilience in the back of the limo. More than the humor of it, though, what most struck him was how tough the slightly built Bliss O'Hara could be in the face of trouble. She'd offered to meet him at the airport to save time.
But he'd decided there might be clues to Rob in the way the kid and Bliss lived or in something her brother might have sent her that she had laying around, something she might not think important. She'd also said she'd pretty much left his room intact since he left. Though Jake was beginning to doubt much escaped the woman's notice.
He took a taxi to the address she'd provided, the narrow street of brownstones lined end to end with parked cars. Everyone home from work and settled in for the night.
He paid the driver to wait until he came back, then stood a moment on the cracked sidewalk looking up at the aged building where Bliss O'Hara lived. No ostentatious digs for this best-selling author.
Oh yeah, he'd checked her out and she'd made that list as both Bliss O'Hara and J.B. Cooper.
But, even in a city with high rent, this place struck him as well below the standards a best-selling author who commanded enough attention to become a national talk show topic could afford. He stepped up to a solid wood door and pushed the button under her name. She buzzed him in, beckoning him from the top of the stairs to her second floor flat.
"Where do you want to start?" she asked, closing the door behind him.
He spotted a suitcase by the door. Of course Bliss O'Hara would want to be hands-on in the search for
her brother.
"To start with, you aren't coming with me," he stated even though she wore nothing as delicate as the silk and linen she'd worn the day they met. Tonight she was all sturdy cotton tee and denim jeans.
"You're not leaving without me," she said, leading him further into the apartment as though her going with him was settled. "Now, is there anything here you think will be useful for you to look at?"
He glanced around the living area. Boxy. The furniture too big for the small space. The walls crowded with pictures. He took a quick look at what were clearly old family photos and noted the large flat screen TV dominating the wall opposite the couch. The only evidence of extravagance.
An opening on the far end of the living room led to a small, neat kitchen where cinnamon rolls cooled on a wire rack. Her brother is missing in a foreign country and she'd baked buns?
She must have caught the scowl of disapproval on his face as she explained, "My friend Claire from next door is going to look after my place while I'm gone. Thought I'd leave her a treat. Besides, baking keeps me occupied when I'm worried."
He should remind her that Claire from next door wouldn't need any treats as she wouldn't need to look after her apartment, and that Bliss O'Hara should prepare to bake a lot more in the next few days as she wasn't coming with him. But, he'd argue that point later.
An archway off the kitchen in living room's back wall led into a hall.
"Show me Rob's room," he said.
She stepped around him into the hall, the scent of cinnamon seeming to trail off her rather than the rolls in the kitchen. Damn but the aroma made his mouth water—made him want to lean closer to her and inhale all that sweet spice clinging to her.
Focus on the mission, his training rumbled inside his head.
Three doors opened off the hall, the center one, the one facing the living side of the house was the only one open. The bathroom was fitted with a contractor grade vanity where a white bar of soap, a bottle of hand lotion, and a toothbrush holder containing two brushes sat, the blue one looking worn and dry, the pink one damp. Hers.
She cleared her throat, drawing his attention to the door she'd opened to the front bedroom. "This is Robbie's room."
Is not was.
Jake noted another small, blocky space. Took in the four walls covered with posters of comic book-like action heroes. A teenager's room…which the kid had been when he went to Mexico.
A couple years ago.
He filed away the timeline and the evidence of arrested development as he completed his scan of the room. Single bed neatly made up. The work of the kid's sister, no doubt. A computer with a gamer quality keyboard, its desktop littered with gaming controls, dominated the space.
"That's serious gaming equipment," Jake said.
"You didn't know he was big into gaming, did you?" she accused more than asked.
He scowled, glad she was behind him and couldn't see his face, and offered by way of explanation, "Falls under personal."
"And you guys don't do personal."
Personal. There was a heap of history in that word for anyone. He drew a deep breath, as if filling his chest with air wouldn't leave room for the pain of anything personal.
She brushed past him to the computer, touched it with her fingertips as lightly as if she were stroking her brother's cheek, yet her tone held an annoyed note when she spoke. "He was obsessed. Played day and night."
And the kid had left the states without his gaming equipment. That didn't bode well to his way of thinking. "Why would he leave all his equipment behind if he was going somewhere to build a game?"
"He wasn't building the game in Mexico. He and his friend went there to do research."
"For a setting in Mexico?" he asked, trying to digest the necessity of that for a game.
She shrugged. "Like I said earlier, realism is a big selling point to serious gamers, and companies know it."
"Is game building what he did for a profession?" Jake asked, moving on, fingering the stack of gaming books on the back of the desk.
She huffed. "He wished. This was his first venture that caught the attention of a big company, and that likely because his friend was an established game builder."
"What else did your brother do?"
"Odd jobs. Mostly computer repair, cleaning out viruses and such."
He was beginning to understand why she still lived in a dump. She had to support a deadbeat brother as well as herself.
He tapped on the computer. She said nothing, but her body stiffened.
He should have asked permission first. But that's the sort of thing civilized people did. He wasn't civilized. That's why he lived in a command center full of ex-military.
"Maybe you can find something on it that might help," she said, the tension easing from her stance. "Nothing I looked at made sense beyond the gaming world."
So she'd gone through his computer. Smart girl.
"What about his friend? Did you ever talk to him?"
"Munch was—is one of his gamer friends. I tracked his name through one of Robbie's games, texted with other clan members."
"Clan?" he asked.
"Gamers that play a lot together form guilds or clans, and meet up in chat rooms."
Chat rooms where terrorist groups liked to troll for recruits. Jake filed away the information.
"What'd you find out about this Munch guy?"
"Only that Munch was his screen name and that's all any of the other players knew about him…aside from his signature moves."
"Gamers not much into personal stuff, either, huh?"
"Guess not," she said. "Though they had noticed he'd been absent from his usual games for some time."
Jake frowned. It was likely her brother's gaming buddies knew more about him than Jake did, and he ran a security company.
Ten minutes of searching through files and the computer's history, and nothing out of the ordinary jumped out at Jake. "Does he have a laptop or tablet? A cell phone that he might have left behind?"
"He took his laptop and cell with him," she said.
He popped the hard drive out of the tower and stood. "I'll have one of my more computer savvy team members go over the hard drive for anything hidden or encrypted. Anything that might help us track down Rob. Time I get going."
"You mean we."
"You aren't coming with, Sweetheart," he said heading out of the bedroom, down the hall, and toward the front room and door.
"The hell I'm not," she said tailing him. "And don't call me Sweetheart."
He added touchy about being patronized to what he already knew about Ms. O'Hara.
"Where I go is no place for a lady," he said.
"I'm not the lady you seem to think I am," she said, stepping between him and the door.
He hovered over her. "I'm twice your size. I'm a former Navy SEAL. Do you really believe you standing in front of that door is going to stop me from leaving without you?"
She blinked up at him. "If you don't take me with you, I'll follow."
"I'm taking a private jet, remember?"
"Even a private plane has to file flight plans," she said, the slightest of tremors to her voice giving away her anxiousness. "I already called the airport and got it."
Though impressed with her foresight, he laced his response with sarcasm. "How resourceful of you."
"I know how to do my research. It's part of the job of being a writer, even a romance writer," she shot back at him, her eyes flashing with the same fight he'd seen in them on the talk show set when he'd insulted her romance genre.
"If you try to leave without me," she said, "I'll scream and Claire will call the cops. Then you can explain to them why I screamed."
"I have a cab waiting out front. I'll be boarding my plane before the cops even get here."
"Then I'll call the airport and have you held there," she said, pulling a cell phone from her pocket and waving it in his face. "I have the number in the memory."
He snatched the phone o
ut of her hand.
She grabbed for it, bumping against his chest. Her breasts were compact, firm. Just the way he liked them. Too bad he wasn't here for pleasure.
He held the cell out of her reach.
She settled back on her feet, folded her arms across her chest, and glared at him. "I can look up the number and call airport security before you get to the end of the block."
"I could tie you up, gag you, and believe me, you won't get yourself free until I'm high in the sky."
"If you don't take me with you, I'll follow," she said again, this time through tight lips.
"And then what? One of my guys picks me up at the airport and you follow me to my command center?"
"If that's how it has to be."
He braced his hands against the door to either side of her head and leaned in close, making her flatten against the door. "Even if your commercial flight lands the same time as my private flight, by the time you get through all the check points and pick up your luggage I'll be long gone."
She nodded toward the small suitcase on the floor. "I travel light. Carry-on only. And I have a knack for getting through any security checks fast."
She was lying about that last point. He saw it in the flare of her pupils.
He shook his head more out of wonder at this woman's tenacity than to counter her. "Nobody follows us, not far anyway. We're very good at losing tails."
She stared up at him, eyes no longer tentative but determined in spite of what her body language was telling him. Then there was that spicy scent of hers weaving its tendrils up his nose and captivating his senses…and those firm, little breasts a hairs-breath from his chest. It'd been a long time since he'd last been this close to a woman.
She drew a breath so deep the peaks of those enticing breasts brushed his chest. His mind took him to a place he hadn't intended to go, a place where he wondered what she wore under her tee or if she wore anything at all.
"If you leave me on my own," she said, her tone strident, "then you'll be responsible for two missing O'Haras."
He could tell her he wasn't responsible for either her or her brother. But it was in his best interest to find Rob, and his conscience wouldn't let him leave her to her own devices in a place where trouble stalked pretty women.