The Unnaturals (The Unnaturals Series Book 1)

by Jessica Meigs

  Riley sniffed and swiped a hand across her eyes before shaking her head. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m dumping all of this on you. Hell, you’re the last person I should be telling. You used to work for Internal Affairs and everything. You’re probably going to turn around and call up your old buddies and tell them all about what I just told you.”

  He reached out and took her hand, giving it a squeeze. “Riley, it’s okay,” he assured her. “I’m not speaking a word of this to anyone. I’ll take it to my grave if you ask me to.” He forced himself to let go of her hand and added, “Besides, I trusted you with the story of what happened to my wife and with the location of my only niece. You can trust me on this.”

  “Really?” Riley asked. The hope shining in her eyes was undeniable.

  “Really,” Scott confirmed. “We’re in a bad spot right now. I’m going to need your help and you’re going to need mine if we expect to make it out of this one in one piece. So rest assured, I’ve got your back.”

  Riley’s lips stretched into a grin. “And I’ve got yours,” she promised.

  There was a lull in the conversation as they continued walking down the sidewalk, trying to not draw attention to themselves. Scott could hear the sound of sirens in the distance, but for once, he wasn’t worried about that. Instead, he found himself thinking about the woman beside him and about how her simple promise had seemed to settle something inside him, some deep-seated concern that he hadn’t really known was there—that she would turn on him the first chance she had or that he would end up dead at her hands, accidentally or otherwise. It was a trust issue, he knew. He’d never trusted anyone else in this line of business. But, for some reason, he was starting to trust Riley. At least enough to work with her on this and perhaps give himself a decent chance of coming out of it alive.

  “So who did you call?” Riley spoke up, her tone lilting with curiosity as she glanced at him. Scott raised an eyebrow in question, and she clarified. “I saw you on the phone a little bit ago. Who were you calling?”

  “The cavalry,” he said, and a grin spread across his face before he could stop it. “Henry is on his way to pick us up and get us back to the hotel, since I did the ridiculous and torched the car.”

  Riley shook her head. “That wasn’t ridiculous. It needed to be done. There was too much evidence in that car for us to just dump it somewhere.”

  “You say that like you’ve torched a car a time or two,” Scott commented.

  Riley’s face took on a slow, mischievous look. “You know the old ping pong ball trick?” she asked. Scott knew what she was talking about: a makeshift bomb that involved a ping pong ball, a cleaning agent, duct tape, and a vehicle’s gas tank. He’d never actually used it for himself, but he’d seen the resulting damage it could cause. “That’s one of my favorites,” she said. “I’ve used it on a target a time or two. Only problem is you can’t really time the damned things.”

  “I always preferred to get one-on-one with my targets,” Scott said with a shrug. “Blowing them up or setting them on fire just seems too impersonal. I always thought they should at least know why they’re being put down like dogs.” He looked at Riley then and had to suppress a shudder. The look in her eyes suggested that she made it very aware to her mark why he or she was going down. Though he didn’t know her that well, he could imagine her going out of her way to torment her mark a bit before squeezing the metaphorical trigger.

  “So what brought you into this job, anyway?” Scott asked, realizing he didn’t know very much about the young woman outside of the typical rumors that swirled around the Agency’s offices.

  Riley shrugged. “Brandon,” she said. “I was…not in a good place when he found me.” She slipped her hands into her pockets as she walked. “I was seventeen, living on the street. My mom had died when I was fifteen, and I’d been dodging foster homes for two years.”

  “What about your father?” Scott asked.

  “I don’t know who he was,” she admitted. “He took off before I was born. My mom never talked about him. It was always just me and her, and with the way she was always gone, it might as well have just been me. I’ve been taking care of myself from a very young age.” Riley chewed on her bottom lip and stared off into the distance, as if she were mulling over what to tell him. “Well anyway, I was on the street for two years, which was like a crash course in everything I needed to know for basic survival. When Brandon came along…it was perfect timing.”

  “How did he find you?” Scott asked, itching with curiosity that had reared its head when she’d told him the little she had about her past.

  Riley hesitated, staring out across the street, a dark look in her eyes. “You’ve got to understand, I was at rock bottom,” she said, her words tentative, and the way she said them made him start to realize what she’d been through—and what she might have been doing when Brandon Hall had found her. “I was seventeen, and I had been on the streets for about two years. I held out as long as I could, but…” She shrugged. “Girl’s got to eat, you know?”

  “Riley, did you…?” Scott started to ask, but he trailed off as she refused to look at him.

  “He picked me up one night,” she admitted. “He must have driven up and down that street five times before he pulled over. I don’t know what it was about me that caught his eye. But he took me to a hotel, and he made me an offer.”

  “Oh God,” Scott murmured before he could stop himself.

  Riley snorted. “Not that kind of offer, though sometimes I wonder if that would have been better than what I got,” she said. “He recruited me. I was so desperate to get off the street…” She glanced at him then, and he saw a haunted, dark look in her eyes. That was enough to warn him off of pursuing the story any further.

  “So what’s with the bag, anyway?” Scott asked, breaking the silence between them as he tried to distract her from her dark thoughts.

  Riley gave him an embarrassed smile and shrugged. “It’s just my bag.”

  “Riley, I’ve seen you with the bag,” Scott pointed out. “It’s not just a bag to you.”

  She sighed and shrugged. “It’s…God, this is going to sound so stupid,” she muttered. She cleared her throat and didn’t look at him as she added, “It’s Linus.”

  “Linus?” Scott repeated. “Like the Peanuts character?”

  “Yes, like the Peanuts character,” Riley said, a bit snappishly.

  “Why do you call your bag ‘Linus’?”

  “Why do you need to know?” Riley retorted, on the defensive. “It’s my bag. I can call it anything I want to, and it’s not your business to know why I call it what I do.”

  “Hey, it’s okay,” Scott said. He put his hand up to indicate for her to calm down. “Chill. I was just curious, that’s all. I’m not judging you or anything.”

  A car turned onto the street ahead of them then and, seconds later, flashed its headlights twice. Scott hesitated, and instinctively, he groped for Riley’s hand and grasped it in his own. She looked at him with visible surprise but didn’t say anything as the vehicle continued its approach. It eased to a stop at the curb beside them, and the driver’s window rolled down. Scott’s shoulders tensed, and he almost took a step back as it descended.

  “Are you two coming or what?” Henry’s voice said from the car’s interior. Scott blew out a breath and opened the back door, letting Riley climb in before joining her. Once they were settled and Henry was pulling away from the curb, Scott blew out a breath of relief.

  “Thank you for coming to get us, Henry,” he said, unable to keep the gratefulness from eking into his words.

  “Wasn’t like you gave me much of a choice,” Henry grumbled from the front seat. “I couldn’t very well leave you out on the street to deal with whatever trouble you two have brought down on yourselves.” He paused, and Scott met his eyes in the rearview mirror. “Either of you hurt?”

  “Not by anything I can’t handle,” Scott said. He wouldn’t mention the soreness that
was rapidly settling into his muscles at this point. It wasn’t enough to worry about. “I think Riley here got out without a scratch on her.”

  “Just shows which of us is the better agent,” Riley quipped.

  “You two have made the news, for the record,” Henry said. “I heard it on the radio. Police have put out a BOLO for a white four-door sedan, and someone shot up the Smithsonian. They’re looking for a man and a woman that fit your general descriptions, though they weren’t too terribly on point about the specifics.”

  “We wore cover,” Scott told him.

  “For your sakes, I hope you did,” Henry replied. “You know the Agency’s policy on arrestees. They won’t be too quick to bail you out of jail.”

  “They’ve bailed me out plenty of times before,” Riley spoke up.

  “Yes, but you’re a special case,” Henry said.

  “How so?”

  Henry didn’t seem inclined to answer the question. Instead, he beckoned to Scott, who scooted forward and stuck his head between the front seats. “You two need to be very careful, you hear me?”

  “Something going on that I need to know about?” Scott asked, taking his cue from Henry and keeping his voice down.

  “Maybe,” Henry said. “I’m not totally sure yet. Vanessa and I are still looking into things. I’ll let you know if something changes.” He slowed the car to a stop at a red light and twisted in his seat. His eyes met Scott’s, and he said, “Brandon Hall just got promoted to Ismay’s position. He’s the new Deputy Director.”

  “How the fuck did that happen?” Riley demanded, her voice loud in the interior of the car.

  Scott’s eyebrows shot up. “But he’s not quali—”

  “I know that as well as you do,” Henry interrupted. “But the fact of the matter is that he got it, somehow, some way, and now we have to deal with it.”

  Scott narrowed his eyes. “There’s something else going on, isn’t there?” he said, as pieces started trying to slot themselves into place.

  “Like I said, Vanessa and I are looking into it,” Henry said with enough impatience that Scott knew he was starting to tread on a very fine line and that it was probably advisable for him to back off. So he simply nodded and sat back in his seat, mulling over what Henry had told him as he waited for their arrival at the hotel.

  ~*~

  It was another two hours before Henry got them back to the hotel, the man having spent most of that time driving them in a long, meandering path around the city so they couldn’t be easily tracked. Scott looked exhausted, and the pain from his muscles tensing when he’d been hit by the Taser had kicked in by the time Henry pulled up in front of the hotel. Riley was ready to curl up into a ball on the bed and pass out for the rest of what remained of the night herself. But they had things to do first.

  Riley got her partner to their room with minimal fuss and attention, waving off the concierge that tried to help them with the excuse that Scott had merely had too much to drink and was going upstairs to sleep it off and no, she didn’t need any help getting his skinny ass up there. Once they were ensconced in their hotel room with the do-not-disturb sign on the outside of the door and all the security locks in place, Scott collapsed into the desk chair with a groan and rubbed his face with both hands.

  “You know that sore, stiff feeling you get after you ram a car into a bridge guardrail during a high-speed chase?” Scott asked.

  Riley paused in the act of gathering their first aid supplies and gave him a strange look. “I can’t say I’ve ever been involved in anything like that,” she admitted. “Though I have wrecked plenty of cars before, so I have some idea of what you mean.”

  “Yeah? Well, that’s what I feel like right now.”

  “Ouch.” Riley dragged the ottoman Scott was so fond of in front of the desk and patted it. “Think you can manage to move your sore ass from that chair to this ottoman so I can get a look at your back?”

  “I was a SEAL before I was an agent,” Scott said. He grasped the arms of the chair and levered himself to his feet. “If I can handle what they threw at me every day, then I can deal with the soreness in every muscle in my body from that damned Taser. And if I can’t manage to move from point A to point B after being shot with a Taser, then I deserve to get fired.” He dropped onto the ottoman with a grunt.

  “I’ve never been shot with a Taser before,” Riley admitted. She cracked the seal on a fresh, unopened bottle of rubbing alcohol and set it aside before tugging at his shirt. “Come on, off with this.”

  Scott grasped the bottom of his shirt and eased it over his head, moving gingerly. “Count yourself lucky and hope it never happens,” he grumbled.

  Riley would have grinned or even laughed at his statement, maybe even voiced some agreement, but her brain derailed as she got a look at the physique that had been hidden for the few days she’d known him. He was far from the skinny man he’d appeared to be. Instead, he was toned and muscular, his shoulders pleasantly broad and his torso proportionately lean, just the right amount of muscle to complement his height and weight. She stared at his back, the bottle in her hand all but forgotten, and scrambled to get her mind back on the tracks where it belonged.

  It’d been a while since Riley had spent any significant amount of time around a man; most of her assignments that had involved them were completed within a day or two, with her barely getting to know whatever man she was around. The most time she’d spent around a man outside of Brandon Hall was when she’d been partnered with Kevin Anderson, and she didn’t like having to think about that. She suspected that the Agency had every intention of making her and Scott work together until further notice, whether she liked it or not.

  And truth be told, she liked it. She might have begun to enjoy it.

  Riley guessed that Scott suspected the same. If he didn’t think they would be working together for the foreseeable future, why on earth would he tell her about his dead wife? Why would he admit to the girl in the fast food restaurant being his niece? He had extended the hand of trust toward her with that gesture, and she’d initially ignored it. Oh sure, she’d allowed him to kiss her—as if she’d had a choice in the matter at the time—and she’d caved and told Scott about her past and about what had really happened in Paris, all of which had left her feeling needy and vulnerable, though she hadn’t admitted that to herself. The last person she’d trusted had ended up dead, and she’d almost been blamed for his murder. She didn’t want that to happen again.

  But she didn’t have to trust Scott that far, she reminded herself. Kevin had been different. She didn’t have to have that with Scott. They could just be friends.

  Even as the thought crossed her mind, Riley worried that she might have sunk too far for that by now.

  “Riley? You still alive back there?” Scott’s voice cut into her thoughts, and she startled, nearly spilling the bottle of rubbing alcohol all over the carpet. She cleared her throat and set the bottle on the desktop.

  “Yeah, sorry,” she said, clearing her throat again awkwardly. “I was just thinking and drifted off a bit there.” She focused her attention onto the task at hand, leaning close to get a look at the wounds the Taser’s probes had left on Scott’s back. They weren’t as bad as she’d thought they’d be, but they did look like they had hurt. She snagged a clean, dry washcloth, dabbing at the thin trickles of blood that had oozed from the cuts to run down Scott’s back.

  “What were you thinking about?” Scott asked. “Or is this the point where you tell me to mind my own bloody business?”

  Riley shrugged before she remembered that he couldn’t see the motion. “No. I was just thinking about…hell, all kinds of stuff.”

  “Anything pertinent to the current assignment?”

  “Maybe,” Riley hedged. She wet the corner of the washcloth with rubbing alcohol. When she dabbed at his wounds with it, he didn’t even flinch. She had to admit, she was impressed with his ability to ignore what she personally knew hurt like hell.

  �
��That was a very loaded maybe,” Scott observed.

  “It was,” Riley agreed. She dropped the cloth onto the desk and scooped up the bandages Scott had bought the night before.

  “Care to share what you had it loaded with?”

  “Buckshot,” Riley said. Scott snorted, and his shoulders shook with a suppressed laugh, nearly derailing Riley’s brain again.

  “No, seriously,” Scott persisted once his laughter had subsided. Riley pressed a bandage to his back and began to tape it down. “Maybe it’s something I can help with.”

  You have no idea, Riley mused. She finished taping the first bandage down and moved to the second. Her hands shook slightly as she pulled a square of gauze out of its package and debated whether or not to ask the question that had been on her mind since earlier that afternoon. She wasn’t sure she wanted to ask; she was a little scared of what the answer would be. But, at the same time, she had to know. She couldn’t take the not knowing. Mind made up, she cleared her throat and asked quietly, “Why did you kiss me?”

  Scott’s back muscles stiffened under her fingertips almost imperceptibly, but it wasn’t so little that she didn’t notice it. “I don’t know what you’re—”

  “If you say you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m going to stick my finger in this hole in your back, and something tells me you’re not going to like that very much.”

  Scott sighed. “I suppose if I tell you it was just part of my job, you’d kick my ass, wouldn’t you?”

  “Well, is it the truth?”

  “No.”

  “Then yes, I would kick your ass, and take immense pleasure doing it,” Riley confirmed. “So why did you do it?”

  “We needed a cover.”

  “There were an infinite number of covers you could have used outside of kissing me,” Riley pointed out. “Besides, it stopped being just a cover when you started hiking my skirt up. So why did you pick that particular ‘cover’?” She did finger-quotes around the word, ignoring the fact that he couldn’t see it with his back to her.