David took the license, not even the slightest bit embarrassed by his desire to do so. Ricki was the most important thing in the world to him. He wasn’t going to welcome trouble into their lives until he’d had her fully investigated.
He walked the license back down the hall, handed it to Annie, and asked her to do a quick check. She didn’t bat an eye even though she’d been off the clock for more than an hour. When David returned to his office, Pepper was still sitting on the couch, leaning forward a little and picking at her fingernails.
“What all do you know about your sister?”
She shrugged, not bothering to look up. “I know she went to MIT after leaving home, that she graduated with honors. I know she got into some trouble there with a roommate and a group of other hackers, then she moved to California and opened up Friend or Foe. And I know she sold Friend or Foe about a year before she married you and started working for Gray Wolf.”
“You know all that, how?”
“Social media. I used to follow her on Friend or Foe. You do know that she had a blog on there that she updated daily. Talked about you a lot there at the end. She was really impressed with you.”
David leaned back against the front of his desk, his ankles crossed and his hands clasped. “How did you know we were in Texas?”
“Ricki announced it on Twitter when you opened your offices last winter. So when I got to Austin, I just asked around and someone told me where to find you.”
“Very convenient.”
“I just…I just came to see my sister. We haven’t seen each other in seventeen years.”
David lowered his head. He understood that, but he also knew there were reasons why Ricki had cut herself off from her biological family.
“Do you want me to tell you something that only Ricki and I would know? I mean…I get you being cautious. You guys have something really sweet going on here.” She gestured around herself. “This is a really nice place. So much better than the house we grew up in. Hell, you could probably fit our entire house in your living room back there.”
David knew that was true. Ricki had said the same thing once or twice the first time he brought her here. The more he looked at Pepper, the more he saw the resemblance between her and Ricki. It wasn’t just her appearance; it was more the way she held herself, the gestures she made. There was even something familiar in the expressions on her face. She reminded him of the Ricki he knew when they were first getting to know each other, the damaged, angry woman who seduced him and pulled him close because he was just as damaged, because he couldn’t dominate her or hurt her the way her stepfather had done.
David had spent the last seven years fighting the hurt and the damage that came from Ricki’s fucked up childhood. Did he really want to invite this piece of her past back into their lives?
“I was eight when she left. But I remember her slipping into my bed at night when I had nightmares. I remember her sneaking pieces of candy to me when dad sent me to bed without dessert. I remember the dark hole that was left behind when she was gone.”
David studied her face, wondering how he would have felt as a child if Ash had suddenly disappeared. He and Ash were exceedingly close as children. When Ash went off to college, then the military, he knew of that dark hole she was talking about, and he was nearly a grown man by then. What would it have been like as a child?
Annie tapped on the door and brought in a single piece of paper, the initial check on Pepper. He glanced at it, noted that she had a couple of outstanding traffic tickets, but nothing truly serious in her background. Annie caught his eye, and he offered a slight nod, telling her to go ahead with a more in-depth check. But for now, this was good.
“Do you have a place to stay?” he asked, as Annie left the room.
Pepper patted her bag. “Not really. I’ve been sleeping in my Jeep for a couple of days.”
He’d pretty much surmised that. He stood and gestured for her to follow.
“We have converted the first floor into office space and conference rooms. The second floor has been converted into an apartment space, a central living area, several guest rooms, and a private living space for my family and me. You’re welcome to stay in one of the guest rooms for as long as you need.”
“When can I see Ricki?”
David hesitated as they started up the stairs. “Ricki’s pregnant.”
“I know. She announced it on Twitter.”
“Yes, well, she’s experiencing a few complications. The doctor has ordered her on bed rest for the duration of the pregnancy in hopes of controlling her blood pressure. She’s also had some issues with high blood sugars, so she’s having to follow a fairly strict diet.”
“That sucks.”
“It does. She’s not happy about it.”
“If you need help taking care of her, I’m more than happy to do it.”
David’s thoughts had already moved in that direction. It really did seem like a fortuitous solution to his current problems. If Ricki wouldn’t let him hire a nurse, maybe having her sister here would alleviate some of the burden on his shoulders, but also satisfy Ricki’s concerns about having a stranger in the house.
“We’ll discuss it in the morning. For right now, I’m sure you’d like to get some rest.”
They rounded the top of the stairs and found Kipling still hard at work on the couch. David watched him check out Pepper, mild curiosity brightening his normally emotionless expression.
“Pepper, this is Kipling McKay, our operations manager. Kipling, this is Ricki’s sister, Pepper Dennison.”
“Nice to meet you,” Kipling said, pushing the papers off his lap to stand and offer her a hand. Pepper accepted it, smiling as she took in his large, military physique.
“Do all your employees look like this?” she asked quite bluntly.
Kipling laughed while David was taken aback, not sure what to say. But Kipling was always right on the ball.
“Well, if you were in danger, would you hire someone who looks like me, or some wiry little fellow with no military experience at all?”
“You, of course. As much as I hate this society that is so appearance oriented, I have to say there is a certain measure of security in muscles.”
He nodded. “I agree.”
“Pepper’s going to be staying with us for a while.” David gestured toward the far side of the sitting area. “I was going to put her in the room next to yours.”
“Great,” Kipling said. “It’ll be nice to have a little company now that Ingram and Bailey have moved back into their cottage.”
David just nodded, glancing over his shoulder to the door that led down the corridor to his private living quarters.
“She’s fine,” Kipling said, resting a hand on his arm. “Still sleeping.”
“Thanks.”
David gestured for Pepper to cross to the guest room. He pointed out where the towels were in the private bath and where she could find extra pillows and blankets, then he left, anxious to check on Ricki himself. As he walked down the corridor, he found himself hoping he hadn’t just made a big mistake. But she was family and family meant something.
He just hoped Ricki felt the same.
Chapter 2
Nolan
I sat on the floor, my back against the wall and my bare knees against my chest. The nightmares were growing more and more frequent, coming nearly every night now. I’d tried everything: therapy, drugs, booze. I’d even taken heroin once to see if it would end the dreams. But it only made me more paranoid and made the dreams more intense. And it made me feel intensely uncomfortable in my own body. So now it was just the booze, a couple of drinks every night to help me get to sleep. But it did nothing to keep the nightmares at bay.
I ran my fingers through my hair, aware that my hands were shaking. The images of the dream were always the same. My unit marching into that village, our guns at the ready. We’d been told there were insurgents there, told they were the same insurgents who attacked our base
a week before, killing a favorite private and injuring half a dozen others. We were there to seek justice, to make them pay for what they’d done. We were too emotional, too eager to take them down.
Especially me. I never should have been there; I never should have led the way into the village.
And then it turned into a living nightmare that kept playing in my head every night, over and over again, till I woke with this pain in my chest and this need to jump out of my own skin.
The pounding of my heart slowly began to return to normal. I pulled myself up to my feet and headed out into the living room. Gray Wolf had assigned me a cottage to live in on the property, a small place that was perfect for a man on his own. It was the nicest place I’d lived since…well, ever. I grew up moving from place to place, usually in trailers and teeny motel rooms, following my dad from one town to the next. He was a rodeo guy, a bronc rider. Broke his jaw and his ribs and his arms a dozen times, always in a cast, it seemed like. I knew more cuss words by the time I was eight than I did anything else. That might be why the social worker told my dad he had to put me in school or she’d put me in foster care when I was fourteen. We settled for a while then in a rundown trailer park that was the epitome of all trailer park jokes. After graduation, it was either ride broncs like my dad, or go into the military.
Sometimes I wondered how my life might be different if I’d chosen the rodeo circuit.
He was still out there, no longer riding, but moving from rodeo to rodeo, coaching other bronc riders. It was his life. He never knew what else he could do. And it was a simple life, not that bad, I supposed. Not much different from guarding rich nobodies, the threat of taking a bullet always right around the corner. But at least here, I was in one place all the time and I knew where my next meal was coming from.
I went in the kitchen and grabbed myself a beer, downing it in just a few swallows. I took another and stepped outside, sitting on the front steps of my narrow porch. There were four other cottages, one for each of the operatives who worked for Gray Wolf. Ingram and his family had the biggest cottage, added onto last month when he brought home a wife and child that no one knew about, at least that’s what I’d heard. Knox, the lone woman, was assigned the cottage next to him, but she lived with her boyfriend in town. Then there was my cottage and Elliott’s next door. He had a pretty girl living with him, but she kept late hours—some sort of cook at a fancy restaurant downtown—so his windows were still lit. He was probably binge watching some cop show on Netflix while he waited for her. And Alexander. He and that lawyer lady, Tierney Michaels, had the cottage closest to the main house.
I didn’t fit in here. These guys, they all had families, people who cared about them. David up in the main house with his wife and kid, another on the way. And Kipling…Kipling was the only one who didn’t have a family, but he clearly had made a home for himself here. Living in the main house with David and his family, walking around the place as if he owned it or something. He fit. I didn’t.
None of these people came from the sort of background I did. They all had people; they all had stellar military records; they all had someone to hold onto. I had nothing. I was a fuckup, who was responsible for the deaths of so many innocents. I didn’t deserve to have what they had. As much as I envied them, I knew I didn’t deserve it.
I deserved to be in a grave. I was just too much of a chicken shit to put myself there.
Chapter 3
Pepper
I took another shower the moment I woke, feeling like I needed to scrub my skin for days. I’d managed to keep clean on the streets, going into truck stops and buying tickets for those showers. But this was so much better. This was an actual shower stall with expensive soap and shampoos that left my hair glowing with health. This was a real sink with real toothpaste and mouthwash that left my mouth tingling for hours and hours. This was so much better than anything I could have found on the run.
I combed my hair for so long that it was threatening to fly away. Then I twisted a hair tie into it, pulling it back into a ponytail that bounced against the back of my neck when I walked. I pulled on a pair of jeans I’d been hoarding in the bottom of my bag, a pair that were still clean and had fewer holes in them, and a t-shirt that was fairly clean with just a few small stains here and there that were mostly hidden in the heart pattern scattered all across the material.
David didn’t say what to do when I woke in the morning. I slipped out of my room and found the sitting room empty. I went cautiously downstairs, reluctant to walk in on any business that I wasn’t supposed to hear or see. But the main workroom was fairly empty, just a couple of people sitting at desks, staring at their monitors. And there was a tall, dark-haired man at a separate desk, typing steadily on one of those laptops that are designed to survive World War III. He was cute, this guy, slender but muscular, his hair cut like he was about to be deployed to Afghanistan, broad shoulders, slender fingers, and a jaw that was just the right amount of bold without being too wide or too narrow. He had long eyelashes that made his brown eyes look like they were ringed in eyeliner or something, those kind of eyes that were just too pretty to be on a man.
Beautiful.
If I was a different girl, I might have walked over there and flirted with him. If I was bold and strong, not this weak girl who ran when things got tough. But I wasn’t that girl. Not yet. But I was working on it.
The middle-aged woman sitting at the front desk smiled when I walked toward her.
“David’s in the kitchen with Chase.”
I smiled politely, though I had no idea where the kitchen was. But she must have seen something on my face because she pointed toward a couple of doors that opened directly across from the stairs.
“Thanks.”
Sure enough, David was sitting at the kitchen table, a forgotten plate of eggs in front of him, reading through a stack of papers. He looked up when I came in and immediately turned the papers over. Must have been about me.
“Reading about my incredible penchant toward flightiness?” I asked, as I crossed to the counter to pour myself a cup of coffee.
“You’ve moved around a lot.”
“I get bored if I stay in one place too long.”
“Three colleges, two vocational schools, and fifteen jobs since you turned eighteen?”
“Only fifteen? I thought the number would be higher than that.”
“Well, this only shows the jobs you had where you used your social security number.”
“Oh, okay. Then it doesn’t count the half dozen babysitting jobs and the couple of gardening gigs I took off the books.”
“Exactly.”
“Too bad. That might have been a better read.”
“Lots of cities, too. New York, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Aspen, Portland, Seattle, Miami, Key West, Asheville, Dallas, Providence…”
“Yes, well, Terry’s in New York, but he was in Boston for a while. Mom’s just outside Chicago. I have friends in Miami and Seattle. Can’t quite remember why I was in Denver.”
“Terry?”
“My brother…but you knew that already. He’s a real estate lawyer in Manhattan. But he got married and they popped out three kids—one right after the other—so it’s like staying in the middle of a daycare when I go there.”
David made this sort of grunting sound. “Why not pick a place and stay put?”
“Don’t know. Maybe I’ll do that here.”
He watched me walk toward him, a dubious look on his face. “How long do you plan on staying?”
I shrugged. “Until I can find a job, a place to live. Is that alright?”
He studied me for a long moment. “What if I offered you a job? You could help out with Ricki, do some busy work in the office. I could pay you a couple thousand a month.”
My eyebrows rose. “Seriously? Just to take care of my sister?”
“Sure. You’d really be helping me out.”
I found myself wondering what else that report showed him. Did he know t
hat Terry told me to never darken his doorstep again? That I needed to grow up and learn how to survive on my own? Or that my mom was dating some guy who was tons worse than my dad? That being in the same room with him was like being on the set of a porno without realizing you are part of the plot? Did he know that most of my friends had stopped taking my calls, that they were all settling down to their careers and their significant others, no longer interested in having a loser of a friend sleep on their couch? Did he know that the only reason I came here was because I had nowhere else to go?
Did it matter?
“Okay.” I lifted my coffee between my hands, letting the heat warm me, thinking of how many showers I’d be able to take over the next few weeks. “When do I get to see her? Or Chase?”
A decidedly little boyish giggle sounded from under the table. David smiled, peeking under the edge of the table.
“I don’t know,” he said, pretending to be a little confused. “Chase was here a few minutes ago, but he’s suddenly disappeared. Maybe he became invisible.”
Another giggle filled the room.
“Invisible, huh? There was this girl who taught me how to do that once a long time ago.”
“Yeah?”
I nodded, remembering back to when Ricki was still my best friend, the one person in my house whom I could really look up to. I was about five or six and Daddy was on a rampage, looking for whoever had forgotten to leave his paper on the end table so that he could read it before supper. The truth was, he’d probably moved it himself just so he’d have an excuse to lash out. He did that when he’d had a bad day.
Ricki leaned close to me as he barged into the room.
“Pretend you’re invisible,” she whispered. “Get under the table and pretend that you’re somewhere else, anywhere else. You’ve become invisible and you’ve floated out into the world to see the Eifel Tower or something.”
It worked. It always worked. I continued to do it even after she left. Even when he took his temper out on Terry and me, when he made calm, studious Terry cower in the corner of the room, when he made Mom scream at the top of her lungs. He would turn on me and…nothing. He never said a word to me, never raised a hand to me. I was invisible.
CHASING PEPPER (Gray Wolf Security, Texas Book 5) Page 2