Bounty Hunter Honor

by Kara Lennox

  “Popolov,” Nadia said suddenly, snapping her fingers. “That’s the name—Peter’s friend from the gun club. I hadn’t realized they were the same person.”

  “Lori,” Rex said, “see what you can dig up on this guy.”

  Ace had struck out at the church. “I found one guy sweeping up the place. He pretended not to speak English, and when I tried Russian, he pretended not to speak that, either.”

  “They’re just naturally suspicious of outsiders,” Nadia said as she finished up with gauze and tape. “There, I think you’ll live, Rex. Does it still hurt?”

  Yes, but he shook his head. Lori rolled her eyes. She’d been giving him looks over the top of her monitor ever since he and Nadia had walked in together. Lori had always been able to tell when he had a crush on a girl, even when she’d been a little kid.

  “So what do we do next?” Nadia asked as Rex found a clean T-shirt in his desk drawer and put it on.

  “You told Peter to deliver the video to your house,” he said. “So we should wait there. Are you uncomfortable with my staying at your house?”

  “I… No. I don’t want to be alone.”

  Lori came up to Nadia, threw a casual arm around her shoulders and whispered something. Nadia offered a shy smile. Rex could only guess what sort of baloney his sister was dishing, but hopefully she was reassuring Nadia she had nothing to fear from him, despite his size and his rough bearing—and the fact that he’d developed an itch for his client, something only he and Lori knew.

  Rex always kept a duffel bag at the office filled with essential toiletries, a couple of days’ worth of clothes and some extra firepower, so it was never any trouble to take off on short notice.

  He grabbed the duffel now and looked expectantly at Nadia. “I’ll follow you. I’ll be driving a black Subaru Outback until I can get the Blazer back from the gun club parking lot.” It was Ace’s spare he kept at the office, since the bounty hunters tended to lose or damage their cars on a regular basis. “Try not to lose me.”

  Lori snorted. “As if.”

  Beau’s Rottweiler, Sophie, pushed to her feet, ears perked. She watched Rex expectantly, which gave him an idea. “Beau, can I borrow Sophie?”

  “Sure.”

  “Sophie?” Nadia asked, instantly alert again. “Oh, the dog. You’re going to bring that horse to my house?”

  Beau pointed at Nadia. “Sophie? Friend.”

  Sophie lumbered closer, wagging the stump of her tail.

  Nadia inched closer to the dog, which watched her carefully. “You’re sure she won’t bite me?”

  “Now that she knows you’re one of the good guys, she’ll be harmless as a puppy to you.”

  “A big puppy,” Nadia said.

  Rex gave the dog a hearty slap on the rump, which didn’t faze her. “But she would bite Peter if he showed up at your house unannounced. She’s the extra pair of eyes and ears we need.”

  Nadia got close enough to pet the dog. Sophie seemed to enjoy the attention. She leaned against Nadia’s leg and nearly knocked her over. “Whoa. Nice doggy.”

  “Let’s move,” Rex said.

  Nadia nodded. He was grateful she didn’t ask any questions or second-guess the plan. He realized he’d been a little hard on her yesterday, when he’d lit into her for leaving the mall food court. He hoped she understood now how important it was not to deviate from a plan once he’d established one.

  He could understand, though, how her intense need to see her daughter had overridden her common sense. He didn’t have any kids—at least, he hoped not—so he couldn’t truly empathize with parental instincts. But he knew about wanting to protect someone. He’d been watching out for Lori since she was born. If something happened to her—if she were threatened in any way—he might not be so rational.

  He watched as Nadia climbed into her efficient little station wagon with calm, capable movements. All things considered, she was holding it together pretty well. He checked the street for any cars that didn’t belong, any people who looked out of place. In this neighborhood, with its scraggly inhabitants, anyone who was too well-groomed or who drove a clean car was suspect. But he saw only the usual—Ozzie the wino; Millie the panhan dler, who carried a sign saying she needed money to feed her children when she didn’t have any children; a couple of punks with a truck full of stuff to sell at the pawnshop, probably stolen.

  Nothing unusual.

  Chapter Five

  Rex followed Nadia’s car at a safe distance, surprised when she turned into Skylark Meadows, the same upscale community Beau lived in. Beau had scored a million-dollar reward for bringing a teenage heiress home safe, and he’d invested most of it in a luxurious minifortress. Nadia was apparently one of his neighbors.

  The Volvo pulled into the driveway of an ultracontemporary, white-stucco home built on a hilly lot and surrounded by trees—the way most of the Skylark homes were. She obviously made a pretty decent living as a scientist, Rex thought. He wondered if she had a Ph.D. Probably. Dr. Nadia Penn.

  Though he saw no cars on the street at all, he drove past Nadia’s house just to be sure he wasn’t being tailed. Then he turned around and pulled into her driveway and around the back. She was waiting in her car near the closed garage door, exactly as he’d instructed. Maybe he was being paranoid, but better paranoid than dead. He hadn’t wanted to take on the responsibility of protecting a woman from danger. But now that he had, he was going to do it right.

  He got out of his SUV, and Nadia rolled her window down, awaiting instructions. “You can open it now,” he said. She punched a remote control on her visor and the double-garage door rolled open. “Sophie, check it out.”

  The Rottweiler jumped out of Rex’s SUV and streaked into the garage, running from corner to corner and sniffing wildly. But there wasn’t much to sniff. Inside, the garage was fastidiously clean and almost empty, save for a couple of ladders, an extension cord and a plastic garbage can. No chance anyone could hide in here. Perhaps that was why she kept the space so neat. He motioned her inside, then drove his own car in.

  He and Sophie went into the house ahead of Nadia and checked out every space large enough for a person to hide in, noting as he made his way through the roomy house that Nadia had to be the neatest person he’d ever met. Most of the time, if you entered someone’s house when they weren’t prepared for visitors, you were likely to find piles of laundry, dirty dishes, or toys scattered about. Nadia’s home looked as if it was ready for a magazine spread. Only Lily’s bedroom showed any signs of clutter, and then it was only a few toys on the rug and a wrinkled bedspread.

  When he was sure all was safe, he returned to the garage and escorted Nadia inside. “Sorry for all the cloak-and-dagger,” he said. “But I believe in erring on the side of caution.”

  She nodded her understanding. “You’re not being too cautious. That’s not possible where Peter is concerned. I’m glad you aren’t underestimating him.” As she walked inside, she hung her purse and jacket on hooks inside a vestibule, then continued into the kitchen, switching on lights as she went. “Would you like something to drink? Maybe a sandwich?”

  “You don’t have to wait on me,” Rex said. “I’ll take care of myself. Unless you’d rather I stay out of your kitchen.” Some women were funny that way.

  “No, please, whatever you need…” She gestured vaguely, then looked down, obviously embarrassed. “This is awkward.”

  “It doesn’t have to be,” Rex said, trying to put her at ease. “You can just ignore me unless the phone rings or someone comes to the door.”

  “You’re a little hard to ignore.” Their eyes met and held for an instant longer than was comfortable. Rex wondered if he imagined the spark of awareness, the significant pause that lingered in the air like the tantalizing whiff of a rare scent. Probably all in his mind, he decided.

  “You know, a sandwich sounds good.” He started opening cabinets until he found some canned soup. Maybe they would both relax a little if they had something t
o keep them busy. “I’ll make us some clam chowder.”

  Nadia seemed pleased by his suggestion. Utterly comfortable in her large, functional kitchen, she gathered cold cuts from the stainless-steel refrigerator and piled them on the granite-topped island. From a maple bread box she pulled a loaf of some whole-grain bread and cut thick, soft slices from it. Rex, meanwhile, rummaged until he found a saucepan and dumped the canned soup into it. They worked in companionable silence.

  “I’m not used to having guests,” she said after a while. “After the divorce, I sold or gave away almost everything that held any memories of Peter. I painted the walls, took out the old carpeting, started clean—new furniture, new dishes, everything. This home has been my haven, the one place I felt safe from him. I’ve never invited anyone over. Not ever.”

  “I must seem like an invader, then.”

  “Actually, you make me feel safe.”

  Her answer pleased him. He wanted to help her, not cause her yet more stress.

  They ate thick ham-and-Swiss-cheese sandwiches at a breakfast nook that overlooked a walled patio where a waterfall fountain sparkled in the winter sun. A lonely sparrow was filling up at one of the finch feeders.

  Nadia made a valiant effort to eat, but she managed only about half of what was on her plate. Her stomach was probably tied in knots. Rex, on the other hand, was ravenous. Like an athlete preparing for a peak performance, he always ate a lot when in the middle of any operation. The thinking, the planning, the constant alertness burned as much fuel as if he were running a marathon.

  Rex searched for some neutral topic of conversation. “You have a lot of bird feeders in your yard.”

  “I feed the birds all winter. Lily loves them. She sits at this table and shrieks with pure delight when they come to the feeders. That scares them away, of course, but they come back.” She paused, shredding a crust of bread. “You didn’t want to take my case. Why?”

  He shrugged, as if her observation were of little consequence. “I was about to take a vacation,” he said, because it was partly the truth. “Tahiti.”

  “I’m sorry I messed that up for you.”

  “I could have said no.” Maybe he should have.

  “I wouldn’t have let you do that without a fight. I knew you were the right man for this job.”

  “I haven’t produced stellar results so far.”

  “But you will.”

  Rex debated dashing her hopes. But in the end, he decided Nadia had a right to know the truth. It was her daughter’s life at stake, after all, and maybe hers, as well. “Nadia, there’s something you should know about me.”

  She looked at him with avid curiosity. “I think I know what I need to know. Unless the magazine article was wrong?”

  “No, they got the facts right. But they didn’t include the whole story, only the parts I wanted the reporter to know. I was intentionally vague about my past.”

  “You were Special Forces,” she said. “I imagine much of what you did was classified. Or unpleasant. Or both. I don’t blame you for not elaborating.”

  Unpleasant didn’t begin to cover it. “I was a marine sniper.” He watched her face, gauging her reaction, but she gave away little. At least she didn’t look disgusted. “I killed people,” he added, just to be sure she understood.

  “They probably needed killing.”

  Her reaction so surprised him, he laughed, then quickly sobered. “Yeah, they did.” He’d never killed anyone without a pretty damn good reason. Terrorism, child murder, genocide—the men he’d killed had résumés that could freeze camel spit. He’d believed, at least at the time, that his work could be justified because he was serving the higher good.

  After his last assignment, though, he was never sure. The intelligence report had left out one crucial fact, which made him wonder what information had been left out of previous reports—or added in—to provide him with the proper motivation to kill.

  “It doesn’t bother me, the fact you’ve killed,” Nadia said. “It may come down to that. If Peter forces my hand, I want someone at my back who knows how to pull a trigger.”

  And with that statement, she’d arrived neatly at the crux of the problem. He did not know if he could pull the trigger. But he would come back to that in a minute. “You seem rather matter-of-fact about a subject that makes most women—most men, too—squeamish.”

  Now she was the one to laugh, quick and harsh. “I’m not squeamish about much of anything.”

  “Because of Peter?”

  “Partly. Once you’ve experienced getting your jaw broken, you don’t fear pain as much because you know you can survive it. But you can give my grandmother credit for how I look at things. She raised me while my mother worked. And while other kids’ grandmothers read them Winnie the Pooh and The Cat in the Hat, mine told me spy stories. Real spy stories. Not the sanitized James Bond version.”

  It took him a moment, but Rex put it together. “Your granny was KGB?”

  Nadia nodded. “But Nana Tania played both sides of the iron curtain. She came to despise the ugly reality of the Soviet Union and began selling secrets to the Americans and British. She got caught, then escaped two days before her execution date. Her friends smuggled her and my mother out of the country, and they wound up here.”

  Rex could only imagine what such a journey had entailed. “Sounds like she was one tough broad.”

  “She was scary. She killed her first man when she was twelve. A German soldier who tried to rape her. Killing isn’t something I admire, but I understand the necessity of it in certain circumstances.”

  Rex nearly fell out of his chair.

  Nadia smiled faintly. “You thought you were going to shock me, and now I’ve shocked you.”

  He couldn’t deny it. But beyond his surprise was a grudging respect for this woman who was such a study in contradictions. So feminine and fragile looking, like a ballet dancer, but a Ph.D. superscientist who worked on top secret projects. A woman who obviously was afraid of her abusive ex-husband, but who faced that fear and was doing her best to conquer it. A young mother dedicated to her daughter, yet familiar with the depravities of the human mind and not uncomfortable with them.

  He’d never met anyone like her.

  “So if your history as a sniper is the skeleton in your closet, don’t worry. I consider it an advantage.”

  “Only because you still don’t know the whole story.” He took a deep breath, needed to get it all out in the open. “I had a meltdown, a mission that went bad. People died because of my mistake. One day I just couldn’t do my job. The Marines cut me loose.”

  “I don’t think that’s so uncommon. Did you get help?”

  He knew she meant counseling. “Three months in the psych ward at Bethesda.”

  “It must have helped. You seem perfectly healthy to me. You’re carrying on.”

  He shrugged. “I was lucky I had a job waiting for me at First Strike. A lot of guys in my position don’t have any support waiting for them when they come home. But ‘perfectly healthy’ might be stretching it.”

  “So what is the problem?” she said, cutting to the heart of the matter. He admired her directness.

  He returned the favor. “I don’t know if I could kill again, no matter what the circumstances.”

  She looked at him sharply. “Then you’re in an odd profession.”

  “I’m particular about the cases I take on,” he explained. “Usually I don’t do kidnappings or any kind of hostage situation. Going up against a bad guy, risking my own life, that’s one thing. But I don’t want to be responsible for anyone else getting killed because I hesitate or wig out or whatever.”

  “So you couldn’t shoot someone, even to save an innocent life?”

  “I don’t know. I’d like to think I could, but I just don’t know.” It was something he’d never admitted to another living soul, not even Ace or his sister. But Nadia deserved to know what she’d gotten herself into by choosing him. “I’ll completely understa
nd if you’d like to hire someone else for this job. Beau and Gavin, both ex-cops—totally competent. Either one would be a good choice. Ace, too.”

  “And Lori?”

  He rolled his eyes. “You don’t want to hire Lori.”

  “I saw her in action. Pretty impressive.” She started to smile, then sobered. It was easy, Rex knew, to forget for a second or two when you were in the middle of a crisis. A moment of humor, a smile. Then you remembered that you were caught behind enemy lines getting shot at, or in a field hospital waiting for a buddy in surgery, and the smile died and you felt guilty as hell for forgetting, even for a moment.

  “I don’t want to hire anyone else,” she said. “For whatever reason, I trust you. I believe you’ll do what needs to be done when the time comes.”

  Her belief in him was surprising, to say the least. She had no evidence to support that confidence—but he supposed that was what defined faith.

  “If you’re sure…”

  She put a hand on his arm, and it felt abnormally hot to him, as if she’d had her hands warming near a fireplace. “I’m sure.”

  He felt the light physical contact all the way down to his toes—and points in-between. Not the time for that nonsense, he told himself sternly. “I’ll try not to disappoint you.”

  She pulled her hand away and the moment passed. A few minutes later they were clearing the table, rinsing dishes, loading the dishwasher. Nadia pulled a clean cloth wipe from a dispenser and attacked the laminate top of the table with a vengeance, then did the same with all the countertops and the sink.

  “I can’t help but notice you’re very…tidy,” Rex observed.

  “What, because of this?” She held the wipe up, then tossed it into the trash compactor. “I’m a biochemist. All day long I look at viruses and bacteria. I know what lurks on dirty countertops, and I can’t stand it.”