by Lucy Monroe
“Uh…no problem.” Well, not one she wanted to admit to in front of Mat. She was pretty sure he didn’t want to hear about her inexplicable lust for the other scientist.
“Well, I have a problem with the two of you taking up space in my office when I need to work. Get a room, or something, why don’t you?” Mat said.
Elle gasped. Now that she hadn’t expected from her overprotective oldest brother. With unmasked surprise on her face, she looked at him over Beau’s shoulder.
Mat rolled his eyes. “What? You think I haven’t realized you’re a grown woman. Hello? You were married, Elle.”
“You couldn’t tell that by Papa,” she muttered, still shocked.
“Hell, he probably thinks you’re still a virgin. Kyle was much too happy with you for that to have been the case.”
Had she really spent so little time with the family in the past four years that she didn’t know what to expect from her brother? “I can’t believe you just said that.”
“Maybe if you had seen me more than a handful of times in four years, you would not be so shocked,” Mat said, echoing her thoughts. “And as much pleasure as I find in this little reunion, I have work to do.”
Elle felt the rejection like a slap.
But Beau laughed, and finally releasing her, he turned to face his newest scientist. “Hey, man. You in a hurry to get going this morning?”
“Aren’t I always?” Mat asked, with a sigh.
Elle looked her brother over with concern. He looked tired and stressed. She wanted to ask if he was all right but didn’t think he’d appreciate the sisterly concern in front of his boss. In light of his words, she wasn’t sure he’d appreciate it at all.
When she’d lost Kyle, she’d pulled away from everyone she loved and only now realized the damage she might have done to those relationships. She’d spent the last four years living her job. New assignment notwithstanding, it felt like the rest of her life was catching up with her all of a sudden.
And she wasn’t sure she was ready for it.
“You’ve done an incredible job coming up to speed so quickly in a position you didn’t hire on for,” Beau said to Mat.
Mat shrugged away the praise. “Thanks.”
“I mean it. We’re damn lucky we hired you.”
“Did you hear that?” Elle asked in a forced, teasing tone. “They’re glad they hired you away from the think tank. You’d better not mess up, big brother.”
“I’m fully aware,” Mat said, eyes the same gray as hers full of serious lights.
She was still his sister and she loved him, no matter if he was justifiably angry with her, or not. It was time to remind him of that. She moved forward and gave him a tight one-armed hug. “Don’t worry. There’s not another brainiac on the planet who can outdo you.”
He surprised her by turning and returning the embrace full on, his eyes telling her that he loved her too and maybe even understood the last four years. Then he stepped back and focused on Beau again. “I just wish I’d had a chance to work with Dr. Bigsley before taking over his job.”
The admission came as close to acknowledging weakness as she’d ever heard him make. This job really was getting to him.
“Gil was a brilliant scientist, but I agree with your sister. He had nothing on you, Mat.”
“Was?” Elle asked, her professional instincts taking over. “Frank said he disappeared. You’re talking like he’s dead.”
Beau looked unhappy. “You want the truth?”
“I prefer it,” she said.
“Do you?” he asked, an expression on his overtly masculine features that lent a cynical tone to the question that had not come through in his voice.
“Yes, of course.”
Beau stared at her in silence for several long seconds. What was going on? Why the look? And why was Matej looking between the two of them with an indecipherable expression as well? What was going on?
“Gil Bigsley loved his job. He believed in what we’re doing here. I have a hard time accepting he just blew it all off to run away to South America, or something,” Beau explained.
“So, you think something bad happened to him?” Elle asked.
Beau shrugged, but his words hadn’t left a lot of room for interpretation. That was exactly what he thought.
“I agree.” Mat interjected. “I hadn’t met him in person, but I admired him. A lot. For him to abandon the goals he wrote so passionately about, he had to have had a pretty compelling reason.”
“What do you mean, he wrote about his goals?” Elle asked.
“He published several articles on environmental theory,” Beau said.
“I see.”
“He also kept a blog, which he hasn’t posted to since three days before he disappeared,” her brother added.
“He kept a blog?” Beau asked with the same disbelief Elle felt.
She hadn’t come across any such thing.
“He used a pseudonym, but he told me his real name when we started e-mailing privately after I said he sounded like one of my favorite authors,” Mat said.
“You met him on his blog?” Elle asked, for clarification.
“Yes. It was one of the few I visited frequently. His posts were always relevant to today’s environmental issues. He talked about some of his projects here in vague terms, but I knew he was as committed to finding solutions as I am.”
“No wonder he was so adamant about hiring you sight unseen. Gil was the reason we didn’t go through the usual interview process before we offered you a position,” Beau said.
“He was the reason I took the job without meeting you all as well. He’d told me a lot about the company once we got to know each other. Nothing that would compromise security, but enough that I knew I’d be happy working here.”
“Is that why you sent your résumé in?” Beau asked.
“Yes.”
Elle had been planning to include news of the scientist’s disappearance in her weekly report. However, in light of this morning’s revelations, she changed her plans to call her boss about it as soon as possible.
“What was the name of his blog?” Beau asked.
“The Emerald Hope.”
Beau made a strange sound. “I used to visit that blog too. I never realized Gil was the author. I feel like an idiot.”
“Don’t. He was careful to protect his identity. Probably so nothing he said could be connected to ETRD.”
“Probably,” Beau said.
“And you say he hasn’t posted there since before he disappeared?” Elle asked.
“Right. Not only that, but my last e-mail from him said he was looking forward to working with me.”
“And the local authorities still refused to investigate his disappearance?” Elle asked, shaking her head.
“Yes.”
“Do you have the name of the officer who made that determination?” she asked Beau.
“Frank does.”
Elle nodded, making a mental note to get it. She wasn’t supposed to be working on a live case, but things changed. She could feel Beau watching her while she considered the ramifications of the scientist’s disappearance. He didn’t sound like the type of man who would have been involved in the security breach Alan Hyatt had discovered on his last case as an active operative.
Which meant either something else was going on, or that case wasn’t as neatly closed as they’d all thought.
“I hate to bring this up and feed the rumors of my brusque manner and borderline lousy interpersonal-relationship skills, but…” Mat paused meeting first Elle’s eyes and then Beau’s. “Out.”
Elle smiled. First because this was so like the brother she’d always known. Mat was done discussing his cyber-friend’s disappearance. That didn’t mean that he wasn’t interested or concerned, but that he’d said all he thought was important on the subject.
She was also smiling because if Mat really were worried about his job he wouldn’t be so rude to his boss.
“I beli
eve that’s our cue to vacate the premises,” Beau said.
“I believe you’re right, but maybe I should be the one to go. After all, you clearly came here to talk to Mat.”
“Actually, I came here looking for you.”
“You did?” How had he even known she was in the building?
He had to have checked the security log for her arrival, but why would he have done so? She supposed it wasn’t too odd that he wanted to know when the new security consultant was in the building. However, if this kind of micromanagement continued, it was going to make it difficult for her to fulfill her other assignment of finding out what projects the company was working on. Not impossible, but slightly more challenging.
Her dual assignments of snooping and ensuring ETRD’s security were of equal importance to TGP, but now she had the possibility of yet another objective: finding a missing scientist.
She definitely needed to talk to The Old Man.
“See you later, Mat,” Beau said as he took her arm and steered her out the door.
“You said you came looking for me. Why?” she asked.
“What were you doing in your brother’s office?” Beau gave her another one of those enigmatic looks tinged with cynicism. “You obviously weren’t waiting for him.”
“You assume that because…”
“You’re here with me, not back there with him.”
“Maybe I didn’t want to make a big deal out of talking to him.”
“Nope. If you wanted to talk to him, you would have said so.”
“You’ve known me less than twenty-four hours and you think you can make that kind of call?”
“Yes.” No explanations, just a simple agreement.
“Arrogant much?”
“Call it what you want, but my brain isn’t only good for figuring out quantum physics.”
“You trying to say that you’re not just a brainiac with a pretty face, but that you actually pay attention to the other human beings that inhabit your space too?”
“Why were you in Mat’s office?”
“You know, you’ve got a bad habit of answering a question with another question.”
“I’ve got to have one or two bad habits or I’d intimidate people with my perfection.”
“Oh, you are more than a little arrogant. I bet you’ve got more than a couple of bad habits.”
“You’ll have to let me know if you discover them.”
“I’ve already discovered three. You’re arrogant, you jump to conclusions and instead of answering questions, you ask your own.”
“Technically, the third falls under arrogance. Wouldn’t you agree? So, really that’s only two. And one is a character trait, not a habit. Which leaves you at one.”
“Not. You may be right that arrogance is a character trait, but that doesn’t mean you get to dismiss the bad habits that are a result of it.”
“So, two.”
“Right. And I’m sure there are more.”
“I’m sure you’ve got lots of experience ferreting out information that interests you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Being a top-notch security consultant and all.”
There seemed to be another message in his words, but despite her yes, extensive experience “ferreting out information,” she couldn’t figure out what it was.
They walked in silence, Elle not sure where Beau was taking her. Certainly not toward his office. That was the other direction at their last turn.
“Well?” Beau asked.
“Well, what?”
“Don’t play dumb; it doesn’t suit you.”
“You think I’m smart?”
“I know it. In fact, I’d guess you could give your brother a run for his money in the brains department.”
“There you go jumping to conclusions again.”
“You going to deny it?”
“Nope. Maybe you should tell Mat too.”
“He already knows.”
“Unfortunately, you’re right.”
“Unfortunately?”
“He and the rest of my family are disappointed that I chose to use my intelligence in the field of security rather than plugging myself into a think tank or academia. You know, making the world a better place.”
“They don’t think you do that with your job?”
“Do you?”
Beau was silent so long, Elle was sure he was going to give her a negative.
“Look, don’t worry about it. I do what I do because it’s what I love. No one else has to understand. Or approve.”
“But it hurts that they don’t.”
“Maybe.” She sighed at her own honesty. What was the matter with her around this man? She kept finding herself saying stuff she hadn’t meant to. “Sometimes.”
“But you don’t let that stop you from doing what you know is right for you.”
“No.”
“I respect that.”
“Thanks.”
“And for the record, I do think you are making the world a better place, just in a different way than your brother is.”
“Thanks.”
“I understand, you know.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes. The only people who understood and supported my decision not to go professional with football are Frank Ingram and my little sister. Well, my granny did too, but she’s gone.”
“The rest of your family didn’t approve?”
“I haven’t been invited home for Christmas dinner in this century.”
Okay, so the century was pretty new, but that still meant his family had been practicing active rejection of his choices for close to a decade—maybe more.
“That sucks.”
“I agree.”
“They’re that angry that you chose to pursue your academic career rather than one in sports?”
“Furious.”
“You’re serious?” she asked, though she could tell he was.
“They figured I could do the physics thing after I made a few million playing pro ball.”
“That’s supposing you weren’t injured in a way that made that difficult or impossible.”
“Now see, that’s how I looked at it.”
“But they didn’t?”
“My little sister did. Well, not at first, but she got it eventually.”
“Good.”
“You’d think so, but it was her acceptance that triggered my parents’ final rejection.”
“You’re not serious?”
“I am.” Beau tugged Elle into a cavernous laboratory. “A couple of years after she made vocal support of my decision, she joined the Peace Corps.”
“And your parents blamed you for that decision?” Elle guessed.
“You got it. In their minds if I wasn’t such a ‘raving environmentalist,’ she wouldn’t have gotten the idea that she should ‘waste’ her education helping others.”
“They call you a raving environmentalist because of your job?”
“They called me that while I was still in college, because I made once-a-week trips to the recycling plant to drop off recyclable materials, rather than leave them for the garbage-man to pick up.”
Elle chuckled. “I guess they’d call me one too.”
“Maybe.” Beau stopped at a long lab table and powered on a laptop sitting beside experimental apparatus.
Elle mentally catalogued the apparatus and what it would be used for. “But I have to tell you, Beau, my family would approve one hundred percent of both you and your sister’s choices.”
“You think?”
“I know.”
“Potential multimillion-dollar paychecks sway a lot of people’s thinking.”
“My mother calls my Lamborghini an insect car.”
“So she doesn’t know any better.”
“Oh, she knows, but it’s her way of letting me know that that kind of stuff doesn’t matter. That it doesn’t impress her.”
“Does that bother you?”
Elle grinned. “Nope. I bought the car for me, not to impress other people.” And maybe because owning one had been a dream she’d shared with Kyle, but that wasn’t something she had to dwell on or admit.
“You like your designer labels, but you don’t care what other people think of them?”
“You got it in one.”
“See, my jumping to conclusions isn’t always a bad thing.”
“When you’re right, I guess.”
“Are you saying I was wrong earlier—that you were in Mat’s office to see him?”
She glared. “You know always being right can be pretty irritating.”
“So my team tells me.”
“Oh, man, you really are arrogant.”
“Is truth arrogance?”
“If you’re so darn smart, you tell me what I was doing in Mat’s office.”
“Leaving him a note.”
She stared at him, momentarily nonplussed.
Beau laughed and shook his head. “You don’t have to be a super security consultant to know how to pay attention to detail. I saw the paper in the middle of your brother’s otherwise immaculate desk.”
“You so sure it was from me?”
“Yep. Anyone else would have left it in his in-box.”
“Unless they wanted him to bitch about leaving a mess on his desk?” she guessed. She did know her brother.
“Exactly.”
“Whereas I get a typical sisterly kick out of annoying him.”
“Are you saying my sister waxes eloquent about some new man every time she calls just to annoy me?” He did a good job of feigning surprise.
But Elle wasn’t buying it. “Pfft. As if you didn’t know that.”
“I think my sister would like you.”
“Maybe I should meet her. My little sister thinks I’m a sellout, just like the rest of the family.”
“At least they’re still inviting you to family dinners.”
Not that she’d taken them up on many invitations in recent years. “Oh, they love me for sure, even if they don’t exactly approve of me. My mom even said once that she just wants me to be happy. Of course she followed that with a treatise on what she thinks would make me that way.”
“Let me guess—it starts with getting rid of your insect car.”
“Not quite. She thinks my widowed, therefore single, status is far more a travesty than the car I drive.”
“You’re a widow? That Kyle guy your brother mentioned?”