“I’m dedicated to my country, to each witness I protect, and I will lay down my life for both; you can trust that.”
She sighed with relief. “Good. I was hoping for that, not just your words, but the honesty I see in your eyes when you say them. I’m a fairly good read of people. I can usually tell when they’re lying to me, but sometimes I can’t. I needed to be sure. Here’s the thing. We have a traitor among us. I was brought in to flush that traitor out. I don’t think they’re going to pull me off this after the case is done with—the Director has assured me that I’ll stay wherever she wants me, but while I’m handling protection detail I can’t watch what’s going on in that office as closely as I need to. I have all the people I moderately think I can trust out in the field, some I don’t know if I can trust out there too. Right now I don’t know who in that office is compromising our witnesses and I don’t know how. I have been looking into it, but if I’m not there most of the day every day then I can’t do the job as it should be done and one of our agents could be compromised.”
He nodded. “You want me to spy for you.”
“Yes,” she saw no need to beat around the bush here.
“Okay.”
“Just like that? No questions asked?”
He shrugged. “I have had my doubts for a while now about that office, about what’s going on, and about why you came to us. We’ve lost some high profile witnesses in some bloody ways along with good agents. If I can help stop this then I will. But I do have a question. Why did you trust me? Why not Huck or one of the others?”
She smiled. She maybe could have consulted Huck, but she hadn’t. Why? That was his question. “Because your recommendation comes from somebody I trust a lot more than a government file.”
“Yeah, who is that?”
“A mutual friend. I believe you know her—Henri.” Judging from the smile that tugged at the corner of his lips she could tell he knew exactly who she spoke about. How many women in the game did they know named Henri anyway?
“You know Henri?”
“I know her. We have history—limited, but I still would trust her with my life and apparently she says you’re the only member of this team that she would trust to turn her back on.” Henri turned her back on few people in this business so if she would trust York to that extent then Autumn figured maybe she could trust him with her secret.
“Yeah,” he mumbled. “We have history.”
“I don’t need details. All I need to know is that she trusts you and I’m hoping that we’re not both wrong in our trust.”
“You’re not. I’ll do what needs to be done to help you plug the leak.”
“Thanks,” she smiled at him. “But please be careful because whoever is doing this isn’t afraid to be the cause of somebody dying. I’m sure he, or she, will go through whatever it takes to ensure they get away with it. Heck, for all I know there could be more than one person in on this.”
York nodded. “I lost a good friend already. Grace Henshaw,” he said and she nodded. “I trained her when she came on board and to lose her that violently makes me feel as if I didn’t do my job—as if I’m responsible.”
“But you’re not. You didn’t do this so don’t own his guilt.”
He nodded again. “I know. But if I hadn’t talked her into it. She was perfectly happy being the woman behind the team. I told her she should ask for training to be on the front lines because she liked what we did so much. I went to bat for her to get an entry spot when there wasn’t one available and she shouldn’t have gotten her foot in the door there. If I had just left her where she was…”
“I read the report. There were a lot of people who could have, and probably should have, said no. She wasn’t experienced for this and she should have worked her way up the ranks. But I do know she had skills and there were a lot of people who would have benefited from having her multi-trained. Trust me when I tell you the people who said yes said yes because they wanted to use her down the line.”
“You sound like you’ve been there.”
“I worked my way up from the bottom, but I won’t lie to you when I say I didn’t progress in the track I did out of my own desire. They used me just like they use everybody else.”
“They’re using you still.”
She nodded. “They’re using all of us. We don’t get much say in that.”
“True,” he admitted. “I just wish it hadn’t happened to her. I trained her for nearly a year before Huck ripped her away from my command and put her with Chris Urban. They both died in Georgia that day.”
“I know, and I know how much you’re hurting. You don’t get this far in the field without losing somebody.”
“I know. You must miss your old team.”
“I do,” she said. “But my replacement is already in. His name is Julian, he was Air Force and did some missions with the Squadron.”
“Oh yeah, I know him. My buddy, Jet, works with the Squadron.”
“Yeah, Julian’s good I hear. I didn’t have much time to get to know him.”
“He is good, and honest. He’s the kind of guy you would want on your team.”
“Then they’ll love him. He’ll fit right in with the unit. We were always about covering each other.”
“When the Special Conditions unit started here we were the same way. I know we’re not that old of a unit, but in the starting days things were good with us. Somewhere over the past year things started going downhill.”
“I know. And I know you all haven’t hired any new people within the past year, which is what makes this more difficult. Betsy came in to replace Grace and since she had been with the unit on a part-time basis anyway she really wasn’t so new.”
“I know. Betsy only worked a couple days a week and she came in mostly to deal with the excess case loads we started having.”
“Why didn’t you all hire somebody to help Betsy out after she took Grace’s spot?”
York shrugged. “I think Huck had planned to do it, but he never got the okay on the expense. Plus, Betsy swears she’s fine and if you look at how she works you would probably agree. That woman works faster than anybody I’ve ever met doing the same job she does. Plus, she seems to be a walking computer. Did you know she can recite a recently read case file with eighty-nine percent accuracy?”
“I know you all think that’s a good thing, but it doesn’t make my job easier here.”
“How so?”
“If she can remember a recently reviewed case file with that much accuracy then how much more accurate would she be if all she had to remember was the witness, the new name and the new location? I’m not saying she’s our leak, but I can’t rule her out either.”
York nodded. “I see the problem,” he said. “Fortunately for you, finding things out is my specialty. I’ll take care of the investigation for you as much as I can. You focus on keeping your witness safe.”
“Oh joy is me,” she mumbled. “Not that I am going to hate this, but the guy is rather rude.”
“They all are until the bullets start flying,” he said. “Trust me; by the time they end up as a file in our Special Conditions unit they’re not real happy with the government.”
She laughed hard. She understood the ease at being unhappy with the government. Sometimes she wasn’t happy with the powers in charge either. It felt as if her entire career was one big chess board and she was the pawn sent to do the Queens’s bidding. In this case, Candice was the queen who dominated the board. Autumn would never mistake that woman laying her life, or her career, on the line to save the king in some elaborate chess board. No, the entire board was hers and pieces were hers to do with as she pleased. Unfortunately, this time Autumn had been moved into new territory yet again and she was going to be in charge of protecting one crabby artist—one crabby cute artist actually.
She pushed the thought of Colt Grayson from her mind. She could not think this guy was cute. First, she wasn’t looking for a boyfriend, in fact she wasn’t even sur
e she liked men anymore because all the guys she had dated turned out to be real jerks and she had told herself she was going to stay single forever because men just weren’t worth it. Second, this guy was in her care. She had to make sure he survived to testify. She wouldn’t let an ounce of lust derail her mission no matter how great a body he had, or how cute those honey brown eyes were.
Autumn packed her needed supplies and clothing. She wasn’t sure how long she would be away from home and she didn’t have an agent set to relieve her yet either. Basically, Candice had told her in her umpteenth phone call of the day that she could consider the assignment a twenty-four hour, minimal relief assignment, but that she would be generously compensated for the excess time. Autumn would have loved to have a backup for more than just the one-day a week visits to the office to do the morning meeting. She had things she had to do as well, not just trying to keep tabs on the office, but keeping her place in order too. She hated letting anybody in her house so since she didn’t trust the neighbors she had asked York to water her orchids for her. He had laughed at her when she asked, but said he would help her out. “I’ll even take in your mail,” he said. “But when I’m off on that assignment you just made sure I would have to take over in Alaska I expect you to keep tabs on my place too.” She had agreed. York didn’t have any plants that needed watering, but she could pick up the mail, dust a little and make the place look lived in a couple days a week. She wouldn’t want him coming home from assignment to find his place cleaned out. He had a security system, but that didn’t mean somebody wouldn’t get in and take a couple things on their way out before the cops arrived.
She had driven down to Colt’s place. She parked across the street so she could have her car in view, and then she walked over to his building and waited for him to buzz her in. Once she was upstairs he already had the door open for her. He was standing there, this time in sweats and a t-shirt. His tennis shoes were laced and she saw a jacket along with his keys on a nearby chair.
“What do you think you’re doing?” She signed. He looked as if he were getting ready to go out, but he hadn’t cleared that with them. She had just sent the other agent away when she arrived—or more like the other agent was already getting ready to pull away from the curb by the time she gave him the silent wave from outside Colt’s building.
“I need to get out of here and run.” He signed as if she should have known that. Well she did know that, or more like she had an idea, she just needed confirmation before she lit into him with ground rules.
“You don’t go for runs and you don’t leave this house without an escort.” His lips tugged upward on one side. “What?”
“I didn’t realize the government was in the business of providing escorts. Who picks up the tab on that?”
She shook her head. “Smart Alec,” she signed angrily. “The point is unless I am on you, you don’t leave.” She noticed the quirk of his lips again and she knew exactly where his dirty little mind was going. “As your agent of protection,” she clarified. “Now, no running today.”
“I need to go for a run,” he restated. “I’m going with or without you.”
She could shoot him and then he wouldn’t be able to run, but this was Witness Protection which was a completely different ballgame than the assignments she handled while working the special Homeland Security unit. “Let me change my clothes and I’ll go with you. That’s mandatory,” she assured him because if he tried to go without her she would shoot him.
He shrugged. “I can wait.” He tilted his head toward the couch. “You’re on the couch, but I gave you extra blankets and I put that divider over there so you can have a place to change your clothes. And of course there’s a bathroom down the hall—just the one, sorry.”
She smiled. He had done a lot to try to fix the area up for her, which told her he might be more accommodating than he would be trouble. The divider was nice. It was dark wood. With the corner of the room it was in she could change without even a hint of being visible from the window if he decided to open the shutters. Plus, she had privacy from the front and a little from the other side. She could make do with this setup. She had lived out of her suitcase before so she could do it now too.
“Thanks,” she looked back to him. “Can you give me fifteen minutes?”
He nodded. “Just make sure you try to keep up with me while we’re running.”
There was something wickedly devious in his stare. “Oh, trust me; I have no problem keeping up with you.” She was a runner. She could have run track had she not been goofing off so much in high school. Her grades were really good, but her after school activities…well, they weren’t exactly the best. She knew that back then too, but she was too stupid to pay attention to the need to do things right, smart and with attention to her own safety. She was just too angry with the world—with her mother, to care back then.
“Is it okay if we run the park? It’s not ideal for me after what I saw, but it’s safer than the trail right now.”
She didn’t like the idea of running in the park. The killer could be back there waiting. “I saw a lake out back; how about if we run around that?”
He nodded as he picked her bag up from the stone tiled floor and carried it over to the couch area. She hadn’t expected him to do that, but he had anyway. When he put her bag down on the floor he turned to her and waited for her to acknowledge him. She was going to have to keep in mind that she couldn’t converse with him like everybody else. She had no problems communicating with the deaf, but she didn’t have to do it very often lately and sometimes she would forget to stay attentive. She was so used to people just conversing with her while she did ten other things that getting back to singular communication was going to be hard for her—good for her, but still hard. Her job mandated that she be able to handle a conversation while shuffling briefing files, answering phones, checking monitors and watching out for potential hostile enemy activity. Inside these walls she was going to need to focus on Colt, outside, however, her job would be focused solely on keeping him alive and safe.
“I’m sorry about the other day.”
“It’s—”
He stopped her from signing by grabbing her hands. She was just going to tell him it was okay and there was no need to apologize, but then she remembered how much it infuriated her when people cut off her sentence and she shouldn’t have done that to him.
“I was rude,” he signed one handed while still holding on to her hand. He held it just a little while longer before letting go and finishing his apology. “I was just so angry at the other guys for treating me as if I were less than nothing—as if I didn’t deserve respect simply because I couldn’t hear them, and I took that anger out on you. I am sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she smiled. “I have worked with a great deal of people and I know that sometimes when the agents need an interpreter they’re less…cordial,” she spoke diplomatically. His lips quirked upward and she could tell he had a different terminology in mind. “We’ll start fresh,” she signed. “I’m Special Agent Autumn Kitsap. You don’t have to add the formalities; just call me Autumn.”
“Colt,” he extended his hand and shook hers.
When he released her hand she started signing again. “Just because I look small doesn’t mean I’m weak. I can protect you, but at the same time I can be your worst enemy. If you make my job difficult I will make your life hell,” she assured him. He laughed. His voice was deep and rich and smooth like freshly poured caramel. When he sobered enough to sign again he smiled at her, with a devious glint in his eyes.
“I’m sure you can,” he patted her on her arm. “Honestly, you scare me more than the other guy. You looked too sweet to be all honey. I look forward to studying your every curve,” he signed those words and she felt butterflies flutter in her stomach. What the heck was wrong with her? He wasn’t talking about her body—although a man telling her he looked forward to studying her curves did not exactly conjure up the image of him talking about gettin
g to know the curves of her personality.
“I’ll be ready once you are,” he gave her one last wicked smile before walking away. Somehow, that look and that smile made her think maybe he was talking about the curves of her body. God, she hoped not. Dealing with protecting him was one thing. Dealing with fending off her wayward lust and his advances would take this assignment to a whole new level of difficult.
God, the man was cute. He wasn’t necessarily that super beautiful man that most women swooned over, but she wouldn’t deny that she liked what she saw. He had a certain air of confidence that was sexy, and if the art on his walls and what she had seen in the information she found while researching him was any indication of the brevity of his work she would say he was a passionate, skillful artist. That passion gave him another air of sexy. He had to be determined and persistent to meet that level of goodness with his work. She wasn’t an artist herself, but she knew creating at the level and the quality his work was at didn’t come just by wishing it to be so.
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