Willing

by Lucy Monroe

  “Mine, too.” Josie waved her hand toward her desk. “So are my disks, for that matter. They took pretty much everything related to my computer.”

  Claire frowned, her intelligent eyes sharp. “Diskettes aren’t worth anything. Even new, they hardly cost anything. The only value they could have to a thief is the data stored on them, and you don’t keep data that could be turned into income.”

  “You said you had copies of your dad’s records on your computer,” he reminded Josie.

  “Yes.”

  “Did anyone else know about the computerization of his files?”

  She shrugged, her mouth twisting wryly. “Probably quite a few. He complained about it a lot to the other trainers that worked for him.”

  “The school was destroyed along with all its files. Your computerized records were stolen along with anything that might conceivably have copies of them on it.”

  “You think someone tried to kill Dad because of what he had in his files?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I’ve been through them. There’s nothing there that could warrant that kind of reaction. Despite his personal paranoia, he doesn’t keep track of behavior he deems suspicious.”

  “Your dad’s records had to have something in them that someone didn’t want him to have.”

  Claire sat down with a thump on the armchair in the corner and ran her fingers through her hair, making the wild tangle even messier. “Nitro’s theory is scary, but it’s the only one that makes sense of what has happened.”

  Daniel put the list he’d been holding down on the desk and curled his fingers into fists, using techniques he’d taught himself to control his inner rage. The whole situation was really starting to piss him off. First these miscreants blew up his and Tyler’s merc school before Daniel had even had a chance to work out how he was going to turn wannabe mercenaries into soldiers. They tried to kill his business partner, and then they broke into Josie’s home while he was elsewhere.

  He didn’t even want to think about the fact the woman whose body gave him so much pleasure would probably be dead if she hadn’t been out taking a midnight stroll in the forest the night of the explosion.

  “I have to agree with you two. Whoever broke in here took a lot of stuff to make it look like a regular burglary, but they dismissed too many things a real thief looking for easy cash would not have left behind.” Josie’s worried expression did nothing for Daniel’s temper.

  “Which means they aren’t going to fence the stuff.” From the despondent tone of Claire’s voice, Daniel figured she was thinking of her grandmother’s necklace. “They’ll probably just throw it away.”

  Josie got up and went across the room to put an arm around Claire’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”

  “You lost stuff, too.”

  “Not my mementos.”

  “At least we weren’t home,” Claire said, her voice stretching for a positive note.

  Josie didn’t say what Daniel was sure she was thinking, because he was thinking it, too. If Claire had been home, she wouldn’t have had a chance against the perpetrators.

  “I wish I’d been here,” he said.

  Claire’s eyes widened, and she shook her head. “I don’t think I could keep living someplace a person had died.”

  “I don’t want to kill them,” he said to Claire, wondering what the suddenly impassive expression on Josie’s face meant. “I want to know who they are and why in the hel—blazes they tried to kill my business partner.”

  “I have every intention of figuring that out.” Stubborn determination radiated off of Josie like the afterglow of a nuclear explosion.

  “We’ve got pretty much nothing to go on.” And he was a mercenary, not a trained detective.

  Wolf was the tactician expert, and Hotwire knew more about searching out information than the ground staff for black ops, but Daniel knew best how to fight and win. If he couldn’t identify his enemy, he couldn’t fight.

  Josie stood up, her pretty body enticing him, even though he knew making love should be the last thing on his mind right now.

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “You must see something I don’t.”

  “We now know our enemies are worried about something Dad has in his records, worried enough to kill to make sure it stays buried.”

  “So?”

  “All we’ve got to do is go through those records with a fine-tooth comb.”

  “We don’t have them to go through, and from what you remember, there’s nothing suspicious in them anyway.”

  “I wasn’t looking for it when I computerized the files. And we do have a copy of the records.”

  “You have a backup?”

  “Yes.”

  “But they took all your storage media.”

  “Not my jump drive. I keep it with me all the time.”

  “Everyone should. It’s the most efficient form of backup,” Claire said, sounding like a female version of Hotwire.

  “What’s a jump drive?”

  “Hold on a sec, and I’ll show you.” Josie grabbed her hot pink backpack-style purse from the hardwood floor beside the door and dug in the outside pocket.

  She pulled out a small silver object about the size of his finger. “This is my jump drive. It holds 256 megabytes. I keep my whole document directory on it all the time.”

  “And you’ve got the school’s records on it?” He knew about bombs the size of pens that could blow up buildings, but the idea that a tiny thing like that held all the records stored in several filing cabinets made his head hurt.

  “We don’t have a computer to pull the drive up on,” Claire said dejectedly from her chair.

  “No problem.” This was a logistics problem he could handle. “Hotwire should be here soon, and he always travels with his laptop, but is there any reason we can’t just buy you two new computers?”

  “Hotwire is coming?” Claire and Josie chorused at the same time, ignoring his suggestion to buy new laptops.

  Claire looked dismayed by the prospect, but Josie looked overjoyed, and that did nothing for Daniel’s temper. “Yes, he wants to help with the investigation,” he bit out.

  Josie smiled. “That’s so sweet of him.”

  She hadn’t thought Daniel was sweet when he’d offered to help. In fact, she’d tried to talk him out of it. His temper slipped one more notch.

  Josie put the vegetarian lasagna in the oven and turned back to the counter to grate carrots for the salad she would serve with it.

  “I didn’t know you could bake the lasagna without boiling the noodles first,” Claire said from the table, where she was spreading garlic butter on a loaf of French bread.

  “It’s a trick Wolf taught me.” She sprinkled the grated carrots over the salad and then smiled at Claire, knowing anything she told the other woman had almost no chance of being used in practical application. “You increase the sauce a little bit and cover it for the first forty-five minutes of baking.”

  “So, Wolf is giving you cooking lessons while Hotwire teaches you how to be a computer geek?” Daniel leaned against the counter, so close to her that she could feel the heat of his body luring her.

  Only he’d been acting as if he’d never had an obsession with her body, as though they hadn’t spent the night before making love. He’d said he wished he’d been there when the thieves came, implying he regretted the night they’d spent together. She couldn’t regret it, and knowing he did, even if his reasoning was more than justified, hurt.

  “Wolf gave me a few tips, but labeling Hotwire as a mere computer geek is like calling an Olympic triath-lete a Sunday jogger. Did you have a question about that?” she asked, nodding toward the list of missing items he was holding.

  He’d come into the kitchen when she started making dinner and had been holding the list then, but so far, he hadn’t said anything about it. He hadn’t said anything at all until just now. He’d been standing there all broody and masculine, putting off male pheromones her bo
dy was reacting to despite his lack of overt encouragement.

  Increased tension emanated off of him in indecipherable waves. What had him so uptight?

  “Did you leave the journals off on purpose, or did you forget about them?” he asked.

  Josie was puzzled by the question. She’d never said the journals had been taken. “They aren’t missing.”

  Chapter 10

  “What?” Daniel asked as if she’d said his fly was undone.

  She frowned, thinking the answer should be obvious. “I hid them in the top of my closet before we left yesterday.”

  “Why?” Claire asked, and Josie realized her roommate might assume she’d been worried about Claire looking through her things.

  “No particular reason. My dad drilled into me to always put important stuff out of sight when I’m going to be away.” Hence his secret underground room.

  It wasn’t anything different than Daniel would probably have done himself, so why hadn’t he expected her to do it?

  “I wish I’d been that cautious with my grandmother’s locket, but I always left it hanging from my mirror as sort of a talisman.” Claire bit her lip and went back to buttering the bread, leaving some rather large clumps in one section while barely touching another.

  “Don’t beat yourself up,” Daniel said. “It’s not your fault you weren’t raised by a slightly paranoid vet with a penchant for soldiering. Josette has a lot of her dad in her.”

  “I am not paranoid.”

  Daniel shrugged, and she wanted to slug him. “There’s nothing wrong with being careful,” she told him.

  “It’s more than that, and if you’re honest, you’ll admit it. You refuse to have a decent security system, but you practice defensive operative tactics at home.”

  “Are you trying to say you can take the soldier out of the battlefield, but you can’t take the training out of the soldier?”

  He didn’t smile at her subtle joke like she’d hoped he would. “I’m just saying you’ve got a lot of your dad in you.”

  “I’ve never denied that, but I’m not a carbon copy of him.”

  His jaw set grimly. “We can’t always control how much of our parents we have in us.”

  “Here.” Claire laid a tinfoil-wrapped loaf of garlic bread on the counter, breaking Josie’s eye contact with Daniel. “I’ve spread the butter, but I won’t take responsibility for baking it.”

  Josie forced the expected laugh, moving so Claire could get by and put the butter back in the fridge. Her movement put her body into contact with Daniel, and he quickly stepped away, going into the living room without another word. She watched him go, feeling rejected.

  Unwilling to focus on Daniel’s confusing behavior when it just led her thoughts into a useless circle, Josie turned to Claire. “Even you can’t get sidetracked and let the bread burn by a computer that isn’t here.”

  Claire’s smile faltered, and she sighed. “And isn’t likely to be for a while either.”

  “Of course it will. My homeowners’ insurance covers theft. I’ll lend you the money to buy your new laptop until the claim is settled.”

  “You really don’t think we’ll get our things back?”

  Josie sighed. “No. I don’t. Even when we find the culprits, unless they’re idiots or incredibly cocky, they’ll have destroyed the evidence of the break-in rather than be caught with it.”

  Claire didn’t reply, but closed the fridge and scooted around Josie to get out plates for the table.

  “Set a place for Hotwire. I’m sure he’ll be here in time for dinner.”

  “All right.”

  The front door slammed, and Josie’s and Claire’s eyes met.

  “What’s the matter with Nitro?” Claire asked.

  “I wish I knew.” She hoped it wasn’t that he was preparing to end their newfound intimacy.

  She didn’t know what she would do if he expected her to go back to noncontact friendship. Act like the succubus he’d once called her and climb into his bed in the middle of the night with the intent to seduce probably. Wanting him and believing he did not want her but not really knowing what it would mean to have him had been almost bearable.

  Wanting him but knowing the addictive and intense emotions she could feel when they were connected physically would be impossible for her to stand. Her sanity would never last staying in the same house with him but not touching.

  Not after he’d shown her a kind of pleasure she hadn’t even dreamed about, not to mention a closeness she had never known could exist between two people. When he touched her, they connected on a level far beyond the mere physical.

  Didn’t he feel it, too?

  The doorbell rang as Josie was pulling her lasagna from the oven.

  “I’ll get it,” Claire called from the living room.

  Daniel would have told her to wait for him if he didn’t know, with a certainty he could not have explained to someone else, who was on the other side of the door.

  “It’s your friend, Hotwire.” Claire’s voice had an odd quality Daniel was in no mood to wonder about at the moment.

  He was too busy watching with grim acceptance as Josie quickly set the hot dish down on the counter and ran into the living room to greet the other man. Daniel followed her, arriving in time to see Hotwire wrap Josie up in a hug that required full-body contact.

  It lasted several seconds, every one over the first unnecessary excess in Daniel’s opinion.

  Claire stood shyly to one side, and Daniel noticed right away that Hotwire didn’t hug her.

  “Thank you so much for coming.” Josie smiled up at the blond man as if he’d found the cure for cancer or something.

  “It’s no trouble. You’re a friend, Josie.” He turned to Daniel. “Hey, Nitro. I tried to call you last night and early this morning on your cell phone, but I got voice mail. You didn’t call back.”

  Daniel hadn’t known his cell phone had almost no signal in the hotel room, so he hadn’t heard it ring. He’d been relieved when he’d listened to the messages after realizing he’d missed two calls because they’d both been from Hotwire. His friend had only wanted to give an ETA for his arrival at PDX and to say he’d had no luck looking for Josie’s dad via the Internet yet.

  “I didn’t check until early this afternoon.” When he’d first become aware he’d missed the calls. “By then you were airborne.”

  “Why’s that, I wonder?” Hotwire asked, his blue eyes too damn knowing.

  “We had a break-in here last night. The whole day has just been crazy,” Josie said, probably thinking she was explaining Daniel’s uncharacteristic behavior.

  Hotwire knew better, and his shrewd gaze met Daniel’s. “I was real surprised you didn’t answer last night. You usually sleep with your cell phone beside your bed. And there was no answer when I called Josie’s phone either.”

  She sighed. “My cell phone was lost in the fire.”

  “I called here. Didn’t any of you hear the phone ring?”

  “I was working,” Claire replied, her vague expression giving nothing away of Daniel and Josie’s movements.

  She was a discreet roommate, the best kind if you had to have one.

  Josie turned an interesting shade of pink, and he waited to see if she would tell Hotwire the truth, but her lips stayed sealed while her moss green eyes assaulted him with mute appeal. Did she want him to explain, or to lie?

  He’d never lied to either Wolf or Hotwire, and he wasn’t going to start now. He put his arm around her waist in an unmistakable gesture of possession. “Josie and I weren’t here last night.”

  She didn’t pull away, but her body was tenser than that of a member of the NRA at an antiwar rally.

  “Where were you?” Hotwire drawled, seemingly endlessly amused by the situation, if the twinkle in his pale eyes was anything to go by.

  “We stayed at a hotel.”

  “For security reasons?”

  “N—”

  “Are you hungry?” Josie slotted
in before Daniel could even get the word out. “Dinner’s ready.”

  She stepped away from him and headed into the kitchen. “You know where everything is, Hotwire. Why don’t you get freshened up while I put the food on the table?”

  Josie had known as soon as she stepped away from Daniel that it had been the wrong thing to do. His expression had turned to stone, and he’d been more withdrawn than ever over dinner.

  He hadn’t even sat beside her at the table. There were six places at the table, and Claire had left one end and the chair to its right unset. Daniel had chosen to sit on the other side of Claire, leaving the chair to Josie’s left for Hotwire.

  He’d allowed the conversation to flow around him without making much contribution, leaving it to Claire and Josie to tell Hotwire about the break-in and their belief it had been the work of her father’s would-be killers. Every time she tried to draw Daniel into the discussion, he answered monosyllabically, which was not out of the ordinary for him, but frustrated her nonetheless. She could just feel him smoldering, even if nothing showed on his face.

  “You have no idea where your father is?” Hotwire asked her as he pushed his plate aside.

  She directed her thoughts away from her lover and back to the discussion at hand.

  “No.” She stood up and started clearing the table so she could serve dessert. “I’m going to finish reading the journals just in case I’m missing something, though.”

  “We can start going through the computer files tonight.”

  She smiled at him, relieved they had a direction to go for their investigation. “That would be great.”

  She hated feeling helpless, and knowing her dad was somewhere out there, maybe even not remembering why he’d left the hospital, filled her with fear.

  Daniel had risen when she did and silently began stacking plates. He put them in the dishwasher while she dished up four bowls of French vanilla ice cream and poured a berry compote she’d made earlier over them. Despite the smallness of her kitchen, she and Daniel did not bump once.

  “Can I help with your investigation in any way?” Claire asked as Josie and Daniel each brought two bowls to the table and sat down.