Tyler felt like he'd been punched in the gut. He couldn't talk. Couldn't breathe. Could this be Katrina? The little Kitten who had stolen his heart? His kitten had green eyes and Viv's eyes were a brilliant blue, but there were always colored contacts, and now that he looked, she was the same build and... Oh, crap. How had he not recognized her? When he couldn't get her out of his mind he had gone back to New Hampshire the following summer looking for her, but she hadn't been there. But, if she was a professor then maybe she'd been gone for the summer. Why hadn't he thought of that? He had tried to be as honest as possible when he said goodbye. He didn't want to just not show up again, he didn't want her to keep going to the club looking for him. And he didn't want her to think that she'd imagined that what they had together was special. It had been special, so very special. He had felt he owed it to her to let her know before he left, so he did. He was chickenshit for gagging her so she couldn't talk back, but it was the best he could do. He knew he couldn't have dealt with questions.
Viv started talking again. "One night I went to the club and this handsome guy sat down at my table. We talked for about forty-five minutes before he asked me to go to a one of the public rooms, said he was from out of town and no one in the room could give him a personal reference so he wouldn't ask me to go to a private room with him. He said his name was James, I asked if I should call him Master James, he said not yet, that he'd have to earn that title first. He told me that I could refer to him as Master James, but that I should call him Sir since he hadn't earned my trust yet, and one couldn't be someone's Master without their trust."
Tyler couldn't listen to the rest of the story. "Katrina, Kitten, Viv... you can stop. I know how this story ends. I need to go check on your dad, give me five minutes, I'll be back."
And he left the room. He needed to think, needed to get himself under control. So he went to check on Mr. MacNeill, saw he was still asleep, and then went to his room and sat on the bed. As he was wondering what to do, he realized he had to give it a shot. And he would have to hope that Mac would understand.
Chapter Five
Viv sat in the kitchen and wondered what the hell that had meant. He obviously realized who she was, he had used the name she had used back then along with the nickname he'd used for her. Hell, almost everyone had used that nickname for her back then, it's why she had picked Katrina, because it just went so well with the disguise. She was tempted to go find him, but he had said he'd be back, so she sat and waited.
And then a shadow fell into the room, and he was standing in the doorway holding a laptop. He walked to the table and put the laptop down, then reached for her hands, she put her hands in his and he pulled her up and kissed her. He kissed her as only Master James had ever kissed her, that magical mix of gentle and demanding. He somehow owned her soul all over again. When the kiss was over she realized tears were spilling out of her eyes and then she felt her breath catch as her chest clenched into a sob.
"Sshh, it's okay, we've found each other again. Did you know I came looking for you the next summer and you weren't there? I hated leaving you, but I had no choice at the time. I tried to make a clean break, but I couldn't stop thinking about you. Wanting you. And now I've found you and your life is in danger and I'm supposed to take care of you and there is no way I can concentrate enough to do that right now if we jump right back into this. I'm sorry Viv, but we are going to have to hold off on exploring this until the situation is safe. Okay?"
"What about David? You're willing to deal with him? Or are you just putting me off long enough that you can try to get his blessing first?"
"I'm not putting you off to get his blessing. I've thought about you too many times over the past three years. I've compared every woman I've met since then to you, and not one of them came close. No one makes me feel the way you did. I'll have to figure out how to deal with your brother. If he hadn't seen me in action then it might not be so bad, but... he has. And he's not going to like it."
"What if we tell him about New Hampshire, tell him the relationship was already there before we realized we had him in common?"
"That's part of the problem. He knows that I fell for someone in New Hampshire. He even knows how I left her, and he knows how unusual it was for me to do that. When he finds out that girl was you he's either going to blow a gasket or walk away and let us have a go at it. But, I think we should start out with your dad when he wakes up. We'll tell him that we recognized each other yesterday but didn't say anything until we had a chance to talk. Tell him we had a very brief fling three years ago and lost track of each other. That way when he sees us looking at each other and holding hands or whatever in the next few days he will realize there is already something there that we are trying to build on."
"You know, it really is something we have to build on. There is a chance that what we had three years ago won't translate into real life."
"Yes, I know,” Tyler sighed. “So for the next few days we'll try our damnedest to keep the sexual overtones from creeping in. No more calling me Sir, either, you little minx. We'll talk and get to know each other while I keep focused on keeping you and your dad alive. When the situation is over and we can talk to your brother about it we'll level with him. And hope he doesn't call me outside to fight him over you. He might, you know."
She sighed again. "He might. Especially if he's seen you in action as a Dom."
* * * *
Tyler sat down across the table from Viv, in a spot so he could see all of the doors coming in as well as the window. He flipped open the laptop and signed onto the wireless connection he found, then went into the proxy he needed and left a message in a box that Mac could check. It was all encrypted, no one else should be able to get access to it and even if they did it would be practically impossible to get through the encryption. It wasn't part of the government system either, so it really should be safe. Still, he'd given as little detail as possible.
At location okay, not the best but can make do. Shocker, remember girl in NH three years ago? I found her. Or maybe, she found me.
That should give him some time to deal with it before they saw each other. He backed out of the proxy and signed off of the wireless connection, then stood and started gathering ingredients for lunch.
"I'm remembering that you don't eat fish. Is that because of your research into them? Mac said you'd gone back for a zoology degree, something to do with fish."
"Sounds like David. My original degrees had more to do with conservation and fighting pollution, but then I wanted specifically to study various species of fish and use those with my other studies as I research how they are being affected by the things we are doing to the planet, so I went back for the Zoology degree. And yes, after studying fish as in-depth as I have, it's hard to eat them. I'm surprised you remembered that about me."
"I knew from the beginning that our time was limited, so I soaked in every detail. You didn't know that. It wasn't fair, and I'm sorry about that."
"I know what you used to do for a living, and I can come up with a lot of guesses as to why our time had to be short. Plus, I was never angry with you, it just seemed that the way you said goodbye, was, I don't know. You didn't have to do that, and I appreciated that you did. If you had just left without telling me anything I'd have gone back to the club looking for you and you would not have been there and my heart would have been a different kind of broken. I'd have felt used, I think. Or I would have doubted what I'd felt. So, telling me that you were leaving, and that I hadn't imagined what we'd had together, was a pretty nice thing to do. Not something most men would do, I don't think."
"I felt chickenshit for doing it when you couldn't ask questions or say anything back."
"Yeah, I guess it was chickenshit, but… I was still never really angry. My marks did fade completely in about two weeks, a full week before my next research trip. But I was sad to see them go, they were some sort of connection to you. I guess. What are you cooking?"
He kissed her forehead.
"I prefer to have the big meal in the middle of the day and then eat light later on. So, for our lunch today, late as it is, we have chicken Parmigiana, green beans, and a mixed veggie dish that will make your mouth water."
"If you can get my dad to eat his vegetables that will be a miracle. Why will it make my mouth water?"
"It's just zucchini and squash and onions, but I cook it with beef bouillon powder and brown sugar and a touch of steak sauce and it just brings the flavors alive."
She watched his hands flying around cutting up the vegetables and her eyes got wide. "David wasn't kidding, you really can cook. Well, I guess I knew that; the dinner you cooked for me three years ago was incredible. Where did you learn this?"
"One of my foster dads was a professional chef and he spent a lot of time teaching me things."
"Foster dad? You haven't mentioned family before. I... I guess I don't know what questions to ask. Do you want to talk about it?"
Tyler started to shut down, and realized that he couldn't do that. Not with Viv. It wasn't a huge deal anyway; just something he'd prefer not to talk about. But, if he were going to try to make a relationship work with her, he had to share this kind of thing.
"How about I give you the short version now and maybe we go into the longer version later?"
"Sure, if that's what you're comfortable with."
"My mother was a spy when she got pregnant with me. They were actually called spies back then, too. Not the politically correct titles we use nowadays. Anyway, apparently my biological father had been a spy as well, but he's not listed on my birth certificate and I don't know who he was. I just know what little my mom told an eleven year old kid. Once she started showing that she was pregnant my mother got an office job with the agency, something that didn't require travel, and she kept those kinds of jobs after I was born. It was just her and me, she never spoke of her parents and I never asked why I didn't have grandparents. I've looked for some grandparents as an adult, but she must have changed her name or something because I could never find an actual record of her birth. I mean, I have the one that is on file, but it doesn't appear to be an accurate statement of where or when or to whom she was born. Anyway, she was a good mom, a great mom, but she was killed when I was eleven years old. Since there were no relatives, I went into the foster care system. I had three sets of foster parents in seven years, and only one set of them was really bad, so I guess I had it pretty good, compared to what other kids have experienced in the foster care program."
"And David is the closest thing you have to family, right?"
"Yeah. I first met your brother in college. I had a full scholarship as part of the foster care program. Kids in the foster care program who have at least a 3.0 GPA when they graduate high school get a full scholarship to a pretty decent list of colleges in the state as long as they keep their GPA above certain points at each semester. I wanted to do what my mom had done, so I used my mom as a reference point and managed to get someone at the CIA to tell me what classes I should take if I wanted to work for them. It seems Mac had received similar advice from the FBI and we were signed up for many of the same classes. Mac and I met on the first day of school and we've been close every since. That first year, when he realized I didn't have family to go home to for Christmas, he invited me to go home with him. You were still in high school but had been invited somewhere overseas as part of an exchange program or something. It's funny, I've been around your house a lot in the last fourteen years, but I've never seen you. I guess you've been off at school doing your own thing, but I've spent enough time around your dad that I've got a lot of affection for him."
"And you are willing to risk that friendship with David to see where things might go with me?"
"I told you, I went back looking for you. For three years I've wished I'd found out your real name, or something about you that could lead me to you. I even, ummm, kind of found a way into the member files at the club, but they don't list aliases and there was no way to figure out which file belonged to someone who called herself Katrina out on the floor. And Ron wasn't working there anymore either. I found information about him, but he and his wife were both listed as living on a ship on some sort of research grant when I went looking, and then six months later when I looked him up they were at the South Pole on an expedition. I realize now that should have been a hint that if you were friends with him then maybe you did that kind of thing, too. And that would have led me to the University. Ah well, hindsight."
He was quiet a moment and then said, "I should tell you that when I left the message in the drop for Mac to let him know we're okay, I told him it seemed I'd finally found the girl from New Hampshire from three years ago. It occurred to me that it might be better to let him have some time to think it over. I've learned a bit about his Irish temper, sometimes it's better to let it have a chance to cool off before you actually see him."
"I'm surprised he hasn't come flying in the door at us."
"He can't, not without endangering you. We have to have complete silence between us. If this asshole is monitoring communications then we'll give ourselves away. The internet box I'm using is secure, we're both going through a series of proxies to get there, plus we're using some pretty intense encryption. That's the only way we can talk, and even for that we need to keep it short."
"But, if this guy is going to wait around until I show up then this might take awhile. Weren't you going to be flying out to an interview in a few days?"
"More than a few days, it's almost a week away. We'll have to figure out something. With any luck this will be over by then. I miss having all of the toys that I used to have at my disposal. I guess I hadn't realized how much I've come to rely on all of those cool gadgets to do my job. My guess is that if nothing happens in the next day or two that Mac will go to a payphone and call the cell I called him from the other day so we can work on Plan B."
"What is Plan A?"
"The guy goes to your house looking for you and Mac kills him. There won't be any legal problems, with the hit Mac had on his passport and the documentation for why the hit was there, and then the guy going to the house... Mac won't have any trouble proving self defense. It will be considered an international thing and the agency will keep the DA from even thinking about doing anything with it."
"How many people have you killed?"
Tyler grimaced. "Let's not go there, okay?"
"Sorry."
"No, don't be sorry. I don't want you to be sorry for asking me questions. I'm going to have a bit of a learning curve, working on opening up and actually letting someone inside. But, there are some questions that I'm not sure I can ever answer, and that's one of them. Don't be sorry for asking though."
"Have you ever had a long term relationship?"
"Two. One in high school and one in college. I haven't allowed myself the luxury of one since. Not with the job I had at the time. But now that I'm out, and alive, I think it's about time I gave myself permission."
"You're thirty-two years old Tyler; there hasn't been anyone since you graduated college?"
"Oh, I had a few ladies that I could call up while I was in town. Probably a dozen or so in cities around the world. And I treated them as if they were special, but they weren't a relationship. None of them knew my real name."
"Just Master James?"
He figured she wouldn't like the answer, but he wanted to be honest with her. "Yeah."
"If you could have found me when you came back looking for me, would I have turned into one of them? Just another submissive in another city?"
"No. If I had found you I was going to tell you that it would be a couple of years before I could offer any hope of a relationship to you. I would have asked to see you when I could make it into town until I could release myself from the work obligations I found myself under."
"Maybe it's just as well you didn't find me. I'd have assumed you were married and trying to get me to be your out-of-town mistress."
"I think I hear your d
ad waking up, the smell of the food must have done it."
She lowered her voice. "Something tells me you are a better liar than me, why don't you tell him about us meeting in New Hampshire, I'm not sure I can pull it off. I'll go see if he needs any help."
"Let him do it without help. I know you want to care for him, but he's got a huge male ego and it's hard for him to let you help him. He'll be okay.
* * * *
Viv knew Tyler was right; it was time to start giving her dad more space. It took him ten minutes to get up and go to the bathroom and make it into the kitchen. But she sat and talked to Tyler and didn't go to him. She got up and started putting out dishes and silverware and pouring drinks. By the time her dad made it in, Tyler had dinner ready and they all sat down to eat.
Viv took a bite of the vegetables. "Oh, my god, you were right. These vegetables are incredible."
Her dad wasn't buying it. "Nice try Viv, trying to get me to eat vegetables."
"You kind of have to, dad. Tyler cooked them and it would be rude to refuse to even try them. Besides, they really are incredible, at least try a bite."
Mr. MacNeill scooped a very small amount onto his plate and took a bite and then looked wide eyed at Tyler. "Where were you when my wife was trying to stuff vegetables down my throat? These are really good. Who would have known you could make squash taste like this?"
Tyler smiled. "I'm glad you like them, Mr. MacNeill. Eat up."
Safeword: Rainbow Page 6