He had to admit the office hadn’t changed much since then. It was still comfortably unpretentious, almost spare, Ian was sure, compared to other executive offices. The furnishings were of high quality, with the rich sheen of oak and the soft gleam of leather, but they were chosen for function rather than show.
Josh leaned back in his chair, and Ian heard the faint sound of leather creaking.
“I’m sorry, Ian. I appear to have misjudged things,” Josh said.
“So you agree I don’t need a bodyguard?” A little late, he added silently.
“No. You do, more now than ever. I won’t have my people at risk. But I misjudged how to go about it. I see now that I should simply have told you what I was going to do.”
And there, Ian thought, was the essence of Joshua Redstone. He cared, deeply, about his people. He would go to extremes to help or protect, and he wasn’t above apologizing. But when it came down to the bottom line, he made the decision and he stood his ground.
Ian closed his eyes for a moment, dreading the answer before he even asked the question.
“I gather that means this will continue?”
“Until I’m certain you’re safe.”
“Josh—”
He stopped when his boss held up a hand. “No, Ian. I have to ask you to put up with this. I’ll instruct Sam to keep her distance, if that will help, but she stays.”
Keep her distance…
No more days spent in his garden, working side by side. No more evening meals amid the litter of Chinese takeout cartons or pizza boxes. No more companionable chats on the rides to and from work. No more—
It hit him suddenly. He nearly groaned aloud. “My car. I should have realized right away.”
“That’s the time you’re most vulnerable. We had to do something.”
“And I suppose you’re behind the delay in repairing it?”
“I pulled a string,” Josh admitted, but he didn’t sound particularly guilt-ridden about it.
“Great,” Ian muttered.
“I’ve apologized for how it was done, but I will not apologize for doing it. If it makes you feel any better, my first instinct was to slap you in a safe house somewhere until we found out exactly who’s behind all this.”
Ian drew back slightly, his eyes widening at that grim prospect. “I could never work like that.”
“Your work isn’t the priority here. As important as it is, it isn’t nearly as important as you are.”
For the kid who’d never felt quite right about himself, those words from a man like Josh would have been balm to the soul. For the man who was feeling like the largest kind of lamebrain just now, they bounced off the shell of his anger. And, he admitted reluctantly, his hurt feelings.
He thought of asking Josh to assign someone else. But he quickly realized the first choice would probably be Rand, who obviously was in on this whole thing, and that wasn’t going to help much. The man who looked enough like Samantha to be her twin wasn’t going to help him forget what had happened.
So maybe he shouldn’t forget. Maybe he should remember, as insurance that he never be so stupid again.
Or maybe he should remember because nothing like it would ever happen again, no woman would ever make him feel as Samantha had.
But it had all been lies.
“You like her, don’t you?”
Josh’s soft question snapped him out of his reverie. “Liked,” he answered, emphasizing the past tense.
“She’s the same person she was before you found out she was working for me.”
“She’s a little too good a liar for me.”
“And motive doesn’t count? It doesn’t matter that your welfare was her only goal?”
It should matter, shouldn’t it? Ian thought. How many times had he read about somebody doing something that made no sense to him—until he found out why they’d done it.
“She did what she had to, Ian. If you blame anyone, blame me. I’m the one who put her in the position of having to lie to you.”
But I wanted it to be real!
God, you’re whining, Ian thought in disgust. For distraction he asked the first thing that popped into his head. “How did she end up on the security team?”
“She was working at the resort in Alaska. She’d turned in her notice, and I didn’t want to lose her, so I went to talk to her.”
Only Josh would fly halfway up the world to try to talk a single hotel employee out of quitting, Ian thought.
“Why was she leaving?”
“The main reason was she wanted to bring her brother back to California.”
“I suppose there are more resources here than in Alaska for children like Billy.”
Josh’s brows rose. “She told you about him?” He nodded. “Well, well. She doesn’t usually talk about him much. If she told you, she trusted you.”
The irony of that bit deep, and he wondered if Josh had meant it to.
“The other reason,” Josh went on, “was that she was feeling stifled. The security job there was pretty much a nine-to-five, paper-pushing situation, and she’s not that type of person.”
“I noticed.”
“She’s turned out to be one of our best operatives. She was the linchpin for the Colombian situation, and probably saved a dozen lives in the process.”
“I thought Draven was behind that one.” He hadn’t really heard that, just assumed it, as most people did; Draven’s reputation, if not his face, was known throughout Redstone.
Josh shook his head. “Draven planned it, but Sam carried it out.” He leaned forward abruptly. “Cut her some slack, Ian. She’s good people. She’s got guts, smarts and a streak of integrity a mile wide.”
“Integrity,” Ian repeated. Odd thing to say about a woman who probably spent a lot of her on-duty time lying to people.
“Yes,” Josh said firmly, as if he knew exactly what Ian had been thinking. “You think about what she’s done for her brother and tell me if the kind of woman you’ve got yourself convinced she is would do that.”
Josh let him go then, but Ian pondered his words for the rest of the day. On the surface he appeared to be working busily. He dealt with finding Stan sitting in his office waiting for him, and Stan’s anger at not having been informed Ian was with Josh. He handled two phone messages from suppliers. He input some data, but he was only giving it half his attention. Rebecca was hovering again, but for once what irritated him about it was not her constant presence but the fact that thanks to the warning he’d gotten about her, she reminded him of the supposed threat to him, which reminded him of Samantha.
At last he gave up and left the lab. He walked toward the window alcove that looked out on the courtyard. He plopped down in one of the comfortable chairs, then wondered if he should have; he felt as if he could fall asleep at any moment.
“Where was this sleepiness when I needed it last night?” he muttered to himself. Last night, when he’d spent the hours staring into the darkness, thinking not of the burglary to his home but of the unmasking of the woman next door.
The gardeners were at work on the plants around the pond below. That made him think of Samantha, which made this a doubly bad idea. He was leaning forward, preparing to leave when one of the men started coiling a long, flat hose. He wondered if it was one of her soaker hoses, or if they even had to worry about such things with the pond right there. The image of Samantha laying out that hose in an even, snakelike pattern for full coverage came back to him vividly.
It waters out both sides, so if you space it right, it will cover the whole bed.
Space it right…cover the whole…
His mind suddenly kicked into high gear.
“Of course!”
He leaped up and headed back to the lab at a run.
“You okay? You look pretty grim,” Rand said.
“I’m not happy, but yes, I’m okay,” Sam answered honestly.
“It happens. At least he’s not a bad guy who made you.”
Tha
t, Samantha decided, didn’t help much.
They were in the security team’s office, which took up the back upstairs section of one of Redstone Aviation’s hangars at the county airport. The layout included a communications center, a bunk room and a sizable, securely locked room they called the equipment locker, that contained everything from makeup to explosives. It was not only private, with low traffic even from Redstone personnel, who came through the other end of the hangar nearer the airfield, it was easily securable and regularly patrolled by the airport police. And with all their gear stowed there, it was convenient for quick departures when necessary.
“We got Hollings’s cell phone records,” Rand said. “She made a call the day Gamble was almost grabbed, but it was well before he left the building. According to the time in Gamble’s statement, it was before he’d even decided to leave.”
“Who did she call?”
“A restaurant on Pacific Street. Or rather, a pay phone there.”
“A pay phone?” Suspicious, she thought.
“Yeah. But from what I was able to find out, it’s used a lot for overflow orders around lunchtime.”
“So it’s suspicious, with an innocent explanation.”
“Something like that, yeah.”
“What about her computer?”
“The techies didn’t turn up any unauthorized files,” he said. “But there are signs that several files were recently deleted. It’ll take a while for them to retrieve what they can.”
“She doesn’t know she’s under observation, right?”
He shook his head. “Nobody’s approached her for explanations yet, and they’re working on the computer at night. She hasn’t been back to his house, has she?”
“Not while I’ve been there.”
“And her time here is accounted for.”
“I still don’t like it.”
“Neither do I.” He pulled another piece of paper out of his pile of notes. “You still want that info on Gamble?”
In her funk, she didn’t remember what he was talking about. Figuring the safest answer was yes, she told him to go ahead.
“Seems that childhood friend of his vanished, along with his father.”
Ian’s words came back to her then, along with the feeling she’d had that he was hiding something. My best friend… Instead of giving him to his dad, who wanted him but didn’t make much money, they put him in foster care.
“Vanished?” she asked.
“Blair and his father just dropped off the planet, as far as the cops could see. Not a trace of them anywhere. And I wasn’t able to find anything, either. Of course, as a case it’s a bit cold after eighteen years.”
“I wonder if Ian knows where they went? If that’s what he’s hiding?” It didn’t seem like enough to make him so uneasy about the topic, Sam thought, but maybe it had seemed like a big deal when he’d been a kid.
“I don’t think so,” Rand said. “At least, that’s not all.”
“What do you mean?”
“The night they disappeared, the father’s house blew up. Completely. There wasn’t a shred left to give the cops any clue to where they might be headed.”
Rand waited silently for her reaction. It only took her a moment. “You think Ian did it?”
“He’d gotten suspended from school a month before for nearly blowing up the chem lab. Although that was pretty clearly an accident. Another kid messed with some experiment he was running, and pow.”
“Was he a suspect in the house incident?”
“Formally? No. But I’m not sure the cops knew about the friendship.”
She eyed her friend. “Do they now?”
He grinned. “No. I didn’t burn him. Didn’t seem to be any point at this late date. And I got my info from several different sources, anyway.”
“Thanks,” she said, before she realized how odd it sounded, for her to be thanking him for not causing trouble for Ian.
But Rand, if he noticed, was mindful enough of her mood not to mention it.
“Seems he was quite the odd one out in school,” Rand said. “He tested nearly off the charts on IQ but got lousy grades.”
“Josh says he thinks outside the box,” Samantha said. “Kids like that don’t always do well trying to fit in standardized school formats.”
“Didn’t Einstein flunk algebra?”
“Something like that,” Samantha said. “Maybe it’s the same for Ian.”
Rand looked at her consideringly. “It’s going to be tougher now, isn’t it?” he said.
She didn’t bother to deny it. “Yes.”
“Want me to take over?”
“No,” she said, so quickly she startled herself.
For a long moment Rand just looked at her. Finally, softly, he said, “Keep your head on straight, kiddo. I’ve got a nasty feeling about this.”
So did she, she thought as she headed back to her car and made her way out of the airport. The problem was, she wasn’t sure how much of it was that gut instinct she’d developed since coming to the team and how much of it was simply that gut still churning after what had happened with Ian.
By the time she got back to Redstone to pick Ian up, she had steadied herself. She had no choice but to continue, and if keeping him safe had become a personal thing, that was her problem and she’d deal with it. She stopped in her usual place, and as she waited, worked on steeling herself for a silent, tense ride home.
When he didn’t come out by six-thirty, she wondered if he’d decided to avoid her completely. But she didn’t think he would. Josh had told her he’d grudgingly accepted that nothing was going to change until this was over.
When her watch hit a quarter to seven, she gave in and called.
“St. John.”
She didn’t bother identifying herself, she knew he’d know the instant she spoke. “Is he still in the lab?”
“Wait.”
She heard a click, silence, and then in less than ten seconds he was back. “Yes. Hollings, as well.”
“All right.” She wanted to ask if he was working or simply avoiding leaving and facing her, but St. John would have no way of knowing that.
“He appears to have had one of his brainstorms,” St. John said, as if he’d read her mind. Which wouldn’t surprise her.
“So it could be a while.”
“Yes. I’ll call you when he appears to be leaving.”
“I’ll be close.”
But the time rolled by and Ian still didn’t come. At eight o’clock, her stomach growling, she moved a block farther away and went through a fast-food drive-through. She barely tasted the burger, but it quieted her stomach, so she settled for that.
At nine her phone rang.
“Beckett.”
“He’s showing no sign of stopping,” St. John’s voice said. “From past patterns, he may stay the night.”
“What about Hollings?” She hadn’t seen the girl leave, but there were parking lots she couldn’t see.
“He finally sent her home. She stalled around for a while, but finally left. She went straight home.”
She didn’t bother to ask if he was sure or how he knew. You simply didn’t question St. John.
“Go home,” St. John said. “If he does leave, I’ll handle it and let you know.”
“I’ll stick it out a bit longer. I’ll notify Rand when I pack it in.”
“Up to you,” he said. “But have him keep me posted.”
By ten o’clock she was wishing she’d taken St. John up on his suggestion. At least at the house she could read or something. Sitting here in the dark in her car, having to keep alert in case somehow Ian slipped out unnoticed, was leaving her with little to do but think. And inevitably her thoughts were about the one thing she could do nothing about.
Under the existing circumstances she’d had to do what she’d done. It was the only way to get the job done in the way Josh wanted it done. She’d had no choice. So why did she feel so lousy about it?
The only
answer she could come up with was the one Rand had already given her. And she didn’t much like it. Especially since, if it were true and she’d somehow managed to fall for Ian, what she’d had to do had likely destroyed any feelings he might have had in return. He was a good man, but this was a lot to forgive.
Besides, she had no business getting involved—or even wanting to get involved, which she still wasn’t convinced she did—with somebody on an assignment. With somebody who was her assignment.
At midnight Rand called her.
“St. John just let me know Gamble has now started a whole new research prospectus. Gamble’s here for the duration, I’d say. Go get some sleep.”
“All right.”
“Sam?”
“What?”
“Are you okay?”
She opened her mouth to say yes. Instead, out came “No. But I’ll get over it.”
She was half braced for one of his usual teasing comments, but all he said was, “If you need to talk, you know I’m here.”
“Offering me a shoulder to cry on?” she said, not completely comfortable with the sudden sensitivity of the always wisecracking Rand.
“If that’s what you need,” he said. “I’m no relationship expert, but—”
“Well, that’s an understatement,” Sam said with a chuckle.
“Hey, at least I got you to laugh.”
“Yes, you did,” she said with a smile. “Good night, big brother.”
But the moment she disconnected, her smile faded away. And she realized she wasn’t at all sure that she would get over this.
Ian shifted in the chair, only aware when his muscles protested that he’d been sitting in one position far too long. But he couldn’t help it. This was the first new idea he’d had on this in weeks, and it might, it just might work. And that possibility grabbed him as it always did, until everything else slipped away.
Well, almost everything.
He told himself it was because Samantha had indirectly inspired the idea that she kept popping into his mind. He surely had no other reason to keep thinking about her. Not now that he knew the truth.
He smothered an echo of the qualm he’d felt around seven o’clock, at the thought of her outside waiting for him as usual. It was her job, after all. It wasn’t like he was keeping her from the work he’d thought she was doing.
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