by Julie Rowe
He was? That put a picture in her head of what the two of them could do together at her house.
Nope, not going there. There was also no refusing him. He’d just badger her until he got what he wanted, so she swallowed the refusal.
“Okay.”
…
Henry studied Ruby’s face, certain she’d been about to argue with him, but she dropped her gaze and simply waited after her one-word agreement.
Her patience made him want to shake her a little. Or kiss her.
Then he saw her hands shaking. It hit him upside the head—she was holding it together, but she was scared. The last thing she needed was some asshole barking at her.
“Come on,” he managed to say in an even tone. “I don’t know about you, but I need more than coffee.”
The flash of relief that flickered across her face told him he’d read her correctly. For once. How many times had he looked for the wrong things? Disgust for his missing leg. Dread for the moment he walked into the room, because he was too grumpy or too distant or too something. Or disapproval for his sideways thinking, which he’d learned on the battlefield in self-defense. Find the unexpected move, attack, or tactic, or die.
He’d never seen any of those expressions on her face. Not once.
He glanced at her. Tense shoulders, eyes on the floor, rapid breathing. She was rattled more than she wanted to let on, but she was also toughing it out. That took balls. Sexy as hell, too.
He walked straight to the coffee shop on the main floor of the building. Between staff and visitors, it did a brisk business.
“Sit here,” he ordered, pointing at a small table away from the busy cash register.
“But—”
“I’ve got it,” he continued, not wanting to hear any kind of refusal from her.
Her eyes flickered up to his face and down again, and he realized he probably sounded like a hibernating grizzly bear who woke up too early. “Just…” Yup, asshole, she’s not the only one rattled. “…sit…” Then he said a word he didn’t use often, because it implied he needed something from someone else. “Please.”
Her gaze rose to meet his, and she nodded. No hesitation, no argument.
Huh. Who’d have thought one word could be so powerful?
He continued on into the shop, picked up two coffees and two muffins, then brought them back to the table.
He handed Ruby her coffee.
She stared at it for a moment then took a cautious sip. She looked at him in surprise. “You know how I take my coffee?”
“Why is that a shock?”
“Because I’m new.”
“You’ve been working here for two months already.”
“But there are a lot of new people.”
“I don’t ca—” Holy shit, he’d almost said the C word. “Work with them.”
“Yes, you do.”
He glared at her, and she burst out laughing.
Okay, he’d wanted to get that gut-punched look off her face, but this wasn’t how he’d expected to do it.
She met his gaze, still laughing, and her joy kicked him in the chest. Hard.
It lit up her eyes, her face, the whole fucking room. Other people turned to look at her, and there was a sudden outbreak of grins in every direction.
He had to fight to keep his from making an appearance.
She pointed at him and leaned forward. “Your eyes are smiling.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He took a sip of his coffee as if nothing had happened. As if she hadn’t brought sunshine into his life for the first time in what felt like years. “Eat your muffin.”
Still smiling, she took a bite, then washed it down with some coffee.
“You’re my responsibility,” he said. She needed to understand the situation.
“Responsibility?” Her echo held a note of confusion.
“I was assigned as your mentor the day you started here.”
“I know, but…” She tilted her head to one side. “Um, I still haven’t figured out what it is you do, exactly. You work for and with several departments, so it’s hard to know what your scope of work is.”
“I’m a microbiologist. Have been for ten years. A couple of years ago, I finished my degree in virology, and I transferred into the Outbreak Task Force. I coordinate lab work for all emerging outbreaks.”
“All?” Again that baffled edge to her voice.
He nodded. About this, she was right to question. “Yeah, it’s a lot of work, but I like the mental exercise and focus it takes to run down an unfamiliar pathogen.”
“I get that,” she said with another small smile. “It’s what I like about this job, too.”
He flashed his teeth, but it wasn’t a grin. “I don’t like it when assholes try to snatch, hurt, or kill my people. You are an asset to me and the organization.”
Her smile faded to nothing. “Why do I get the impression I’m not going to like what you’re going to say next?”
“You’ll be escorted to and from work until further notice.”
She paused for a moment. “What about going to the grocery store?”
“We’ll have to schedule it.”
“That’s a lot of extra work for someone.”
“Like I said, you’re my responsibility.”
She sat up straight. “You don’t have time to babysit me. There must be someone else, someone in law enforcement, maybe, you could ask—”
“No.” He cut her off and leaned forward again, lowering his voice. “The threat is real. The attempted suicide bombing yesterday and your attempted kidnapping today tells me they’re getting desperate.”
She froze in place, her mouth sagging open and her eyes wide. “They’re not going to stop, are they?” Her voice was small and shallow.
“Not unless we stop them or they succeed.”
Her hands were shaking again.
“Shit,” he muttered, halfway out of his chair. Instead of helping her find some calm, he’d made things worse.
“No,” she said, putting a hand up to stop him. “Thank you, but I’m fine. You’re giving me the information I need to make the right decisions, to make myself safe.”
“As I said, you’re my responsibility,” he growled, sitting down again. “I don’t like seeing fear on the face of someone who is mine.”
Okay, and that didn’t sound like a goddamned Neanderthal at all, did it?
One of her eyebrows rose, and she just stared at him.
Something hard, sharp, and hurting deep in his chest lost some of its edge, softened, and unwound a bit. Her defiance and pushback told him something important.
She might be scared and a little shaken, but she wasn’t going to let it stop her from doing her job. Or let anyone else run roughshod over her.
He flashed his teeth at her again then took another bite of his muffin. He could work with her a lot better than 99 percent of the people who worked here. She didn’t bitch, didn’t whine, and she didn’t want anyone doing something she wouldn’t do.
They finished their food and coffee without saying another word, but her hands weren’t shaking anymore, and she watched him with a speculative gaze she hadn’t turned on him before. As if she were seeing something different in him, but she wasn’t sure what.
If she figured out how badly he wanted to touch her bare skin with his scarred, callused, bloody hands, she might run away. So, she wouldn’t find out.
Just as they were leaving the table, a couple of other techs from the lab came over to ask if it was true that someone had tried to run her off the road.
Henry automatically looked for body language cues that might tell him something was off, but they demonstrated the appropriate concern and asked the right questions.
Damn it, now he was looking at everyone he didn’t know personally as
a potential threat.
“You ready to go?” he asked her, cutting through the repeat of a question she’d already been asked. “Rodrigues is expecting us.”
“Yes, of course.” She smiled at the two techs, who backed away after glancing at Henry like he was some kind of boogeyman.
He let her go first, so he saw the worried looks on the techs’ faces.
It was needless. He wasn’t going to let anything get close to hurting her again; he didn’t care if he pissed her off. He meant it when he said she was his to protect.
Chapter Three
Monday, May 6, 3:43 p.m.
Nathan Toth stared hard at his cell phone screen, watching the security camera feed for the back door of the house he and his sister shared.
A man dressed as a utility worker knelt in front of the door, examining the lock. Another man, dressed the same way, stood a few feet away with his back to the house. He scanned the backyard, fence, and houses with a line of sight to the asshole trying to break in.
Nate switched to the doorbell camera and took a picture of the lock picker’s face. The dude looked irritated, probably at the lock, since it was keyless. It only opened for a very short list of people with their thumbprint.
Nate minimized the security app, called 911, and reported the ongoing break-and-enter attempt to the police. He switched back to the camera feeds. The lock picker had given up on the lock and was trying to pop open the door with a crowbar. That wasn’t going to work, either. The door and frame were all built to prevent just this kind of brute-force attack.
They had the unfortunate luck to try to B and E the wrong home. Having parents in the NSA meant fortified home security was as necessary as four walls and a roof.
Both men froze for an entire second then exploded into movement. The lock picker put his crowbar into the tool case then followed his partner over the backyard fence.
Must have heard sirens. A few seconds later, uniformed officers entered the backyard, looked around, then left.
The lock picker and his buddy hadn’t been amateurs, but neither had they acted like experienced thieves. They were smart enough to dress like someone who might be expected to be working around a house not theirs, but they hadn’t been prepared for the advanced security features of the house.
Someone had also tried to run his sister off the road in his Jeep after she’d dropped him off at work at Mars Mission Labs Inc.
They wouldn’t have been after him. He was working on the spacecraft propulsion system needed for the trip to Mars, which hadn’t even made it to the testing phase yet. Plus, he’d cultivated a reputation as an absentminded professor who caused more chaos than a room full of two-year-olds, so very few people took a second glance at him. Which was how he liked it. It enabled him to travel all over the world for his job and remain under the radar of anyone looking for a smart, savvy spy.
He’d never liked the spy label and preferred to think of himself as one of many under resourced idiots trying to keep humanity from killing itself.
While he mainly worked with the CIA to gather intelligence abroad, his parents worked for the NSA. They’d all worked hard to convince Ruby to join the CDC specifically to help stop the FAFO and the future possibility of other terrorists seeking to use bioweapons on the world’s population. Thankfully, she’d been all in on that idea.
The FAFO was getting a lot of media coverage. Almost as if they wanted their name and what they were doing at the forefront of everyone’s mind. Which made no sense.
Terrorist groups wanted to stay out of sight (and out of mind) until the very last moment, when they staged their attack. The FAFO had been parading in front of the public and media for months with a nonstop series of bombings, shootings, and the release of a weaponized measles strain across the country.
The situation felt wrong somehow. Like they were missing something obvious, only Nate and everyone else had no idea what.
He sent the pictures he’d taken from the doorbell camera to his father to see if it matched with any known felons or terrorists.
What were the two men after and would they try again?
After sending the pics to his dad, he dived into the orbital mechanics of getting a manned vehicle to Mars and back again.
The next time he looked up from his work, it was three o’clock in the morning and he was alone. Rolling his eyes at what Ruby would say when she found out he’d lost track of time…again…he logged out of his computer, called for a ride share, and went outside to wait for it.
He got into the car that showed up a couple of minutes later to find himself at gunpoint and face-to-face with the man whose picture he’d taken on the doorbell camera at his house.
Shit.
…
Tuesday, May 7, 7:24 a.m.
Ruby exited the women’s change room in the CDC’s main Atlanta lab and was nearly bowled over by her least favorite coworker, Raymond Goldings.
She was already in a bad mood since her brother, Nate, hadn’t come home last night and wasn’t answering his cell phone. He’d probably forgotten to charge it, or had left it sitting under a pile of papers on his desk, or had dropped it in the toilet. Her brother was brilliant, but he had no common sense. If he got caught up in an intellectual puzzle, he would even forget to eat or sleep.
Raymond’s body shoved her backward into the door. The man was of average height and build, with a plain face and a limp grip when he shook hands. Ick.
Today, those hands were shaking.
“He’s lost it.” Raymond’s voice shook, too. “He’s got—” He paused, his mouth working as if trying out words, only to discover none of them fit. “—crazy eyes.”
Well, you would know. She managed not to say that out loud, but it was a close call. He was a microbiologist who thought walking through an empty room was cause enough to wash his hands. Repeatedly. He also took twice as long to do a job as anyone else, liked to gossip, and treated any female coworkers like they were there to pick up after him.
The he who Raymond was referring to could only be one person—his current supervisor, Henry. And because she worked with Henry, too, Raymond thought he could whine and complain to her about their short-tempered boss. A man who’d followed her this morning from her house to work in his black SUV.
Ruby checked her watch. “It’s only seven twenty-five in the morning.” She stepped around her coworker. “It’s too early for anyone to have crazy eyes.”
He grabbed her arm. “He threatened to cut my balls off and feed them to me.” By the time Raymond finished the sentence, his voice was high enough to make her suspect someone had already gotten to his balls.
She looked at his hand on her arm, then aimed her glare at his eyes.
He dropped her arm like it was on fire and stepped back until he bumped into the wall.
“At least he didn’t threaten to eat them,” she said with as much patience as she could muster, which wasn’t much. Raymond was getting on her last nerve, too.
He never stopped whining.
When he didn’t respond to her comment, she asked, “Did he assign you a task yesterday, but since it was after lunch you decided you’d do a better job, and be more focused, if you saved it for this morning?”
Raymond closed his mouth and frowned. “H-how did you know?”
“I’ve heard several versions of that excuse, and I’ve only been working here a couple of months.” She leaned toward him and whispered loudly, “If you ask me, he was quite restrained.”
“But…but…” he sputtered.
“You’re lazy, spoiled, and complain too much. People would be nicer to you if you’d close your mouth and do your job.”
His jaw dropped open and stayed there.
Ruby walked around him and toward the elevators. Her shift started in two minutes. If Raymond made her late, she might just hold him down so Henry could do
a little amputation. Emphasis on little.
She entered the lab three minutes after leaving Raymond and expected Henry to be a barely contained storm inside the sterile space, but the lab was quiet. There were other people there, staff who were settling in to do their work at microscopes and analyzers, but they fit. There was nothing remarkable about scientists working in a lab wearing white lab coats over scrub uniforms and cloth booties over their shoes.
Some people were typing information in on computers, some were running an analyzer with its attendant beeps, and some were having barely audible conversations with coworkers.
She went to her desk, logged in to her computer, and began checking lab results that had come in overnight. She was tracking the measles outbreak across the country. It had already peaked, the number of cases dropping, but it was still spreading into smaller towns. Henry was attempting to understand the virus, figure out why it behaved the way it did. Children infected with it fared worse than adults. Much worse.
They were trying to get ahead of the virus, but it was so easily spread that it was the commonly held opinion that it was going to take months, if not years, to eradicate the virus a second time.
The automatic doors opened, and a towering thunderhead blew into the lab with enough force that a couple of people backed up a step or two.
Henry strode as far as his desk, which was parked next to hers, and sat in his rolling chair. It creaked, and she was sure he was growling under his breath.
She watched him, fascinated by the fury on his face and in his posture. He was tall, six two or three with wide shoulders and powerful arms that strained the fabric of the lab coats he wore. He walked with a slight limp, but it only made him seem stronger. Dangerous.
People had told her he’d been in the army, seen some bad shit, and lost a leg to an IED. A couple of people had warned her about his bad temper and gruff attitude, but she didn’t mind it. It was honest.
He reminded her of a bear. He had a beard he kept neatly trimmed, but it gave him an air of mystery. His hands were large and strong, but she’d seen him handle fragile samples with grace. Would he touch a woman with the same confident poise?