Frailty of Things

by Schultz, Tamsen

  “Because,” Rina continued with an irritating lack of response to his tone, “two more assets that Jonathon worked with were killed yesterday.” She gestured to the folders with her head. Garret flipped his open and saw the face of a young mother with a toddler in one photo and in the other, a man, also on the young side, hanging off a boat, grinning. He felt sick.

  “We know Jonathon isn’t the leak, but when these two were killed yesterday in separate incidents, we didn’t want to take any chances with Kit. She’s not an asset and has never been an asset, but given that she was with him when he was shot at in London, her identity isn’t exactly a secret.”

  “And so you’ve taken her into protective custody,” Garret finished. He’d expected as much, had even figured it had to do with Jonathon Parker, but to hear it out loud settled like a rock in his stomach.

  “Yes,” Rina confirmed. “We have.”

  “Where is she? Stanwick?” Caleb asked, repeating what he’d heard Drew say when Rina had walked in.

  Drew shook his head. “No, that’s the team going after one of the three men involved. They are flying out of Stanwick as we speak.”

  “So, how many do they have in custody?” And by “custody” he meant dead or alive.

  “One for certain, one they are on their way to handling, but the third man is in the wind,” Drew answered.

  “Fuck,” Garret said. “So until all three are accounted for one way or another, Kit’s in custody.”

  Drew inclined his head. “We don’t think she’s a target, but we’d rather be safe than sorry. And she agreed.”

  Garret took in all the information. For as bad as things could get, this wasn’t the worst. Kit was somewhere safe and as soon as MI6 cleaned up their mess, she’d be even safer.

  He took a deep breath and let it out. “Fine, where is she? We’ll be taking over protective duties.”

  Rina and Drew shared a look.

  “What?” Caleb demanded.

  “She said you’d come to me for this reason,” Drew responded.

  “Yeah, so?” Garret pressed.

  “And she made me promise not to tell you anything about where she is,” Rina answered. “You may think it’s best for you to stand guard. But she feels otherwise.”

  At that, Caleb shot out of his seat and paced away a few steps. “She has no idea what she’s talking about,” he snapped, turning back to the group.

  Rina’s eyebrow arched. “On the contrary, I think she knows exactly what she’s talking about,” she countered. “In fact, I think her exact words were ‘They got what they came for, now they can go back to doing whatever it is they do.’”

  Caleb paled, looking like someone had just delivered a blow to his solar plexus.

  Garret, on the other hand, felt the impact a bit higher in his chest; for a moment, it was hard for him to breathe. Then he cleared his throat, “Rina, is there somewhere we can talk?” he asked. “Privately,” he added when she cast a pointed look at the closed door.

  She eyed him for a moment, then let out a sigh as she stood. Without a word, he followed her out the door. He had expected to be taken to her office, but was surprised when she stepped into a coffee room. He was not surprised, however, when the single other occupant took one look at Rina and discreetly exited.

  “So talk,” she said, reaching for a coffee mug.

  “Look,” he started, not sure exactly where to start. “Kit, well, she has every right to think and feel the way she does. I’m not sure how much you know about her father, but he traveled a lot, never bothered to tell her anything about where he was going or why, and then when she was seventeen, she found out all sorts of things about his ‘business’ and just what he was doing on those trips—”

  “I’m well aware of the ‘work’ Edward Forrester did before he died,” she cut him off.

  Garret crossed his arms and leaned against the counter as Rina took a sip of coffee. “And then there’s her brother,” he continued. “Caleb took off when she was fifteen without any reason, left her in a, well, to call it a terrible situation would be an understatement. And though I think he regrets it now, he hasn’t spent much time with her at all. He’s come and gone as he’s pleased.”

  “And you? What have you done to her?” she asked.

  Garret flinched, then forced himself to meet her eyes. “I left her too. The first time I met her we spent three days just talking.” And maybe a little more, but not much. “No one knew. It was like we were living in a world of our own.”

  “And then?”

  “And then I left. With Caleb. She was comforting a friend of hers who had just come through a sticky situation when Caleb and I got a call about a man we’d been trying to track for years.”

  “And so you left.”

  He nodded.

  “Without a word.”

  Again, he nodded.

  For a long moment, Rina held his gaze. Finally, she let out a sigh and moved to the other side of the room. “From what I’ve heard, Kit knows her mind very well and has every reason not to want you and her brother involved,” she said.

  “I’m not going to argue with that. But she doesn’t have all the information right now,” he said.

  Rina turned around and arched a single brow at him.

  He took a deep breath. “She’s had a lot of people come and go from her life. But, well, here,” he said, handing Rina a letter.

  She eyed it for a moment, then set her coffee down, took it from his hand, and read. A minute later, she looked up at him.

  “You’re terminating your arrangement with the Agency?” she asked. Under normal circumstances, Garret would have been pleased to have managed to surprise Rina. But as it was, he simply nodded.

  “And what about your other engagements?” she asked.

  “Between last night and now, I’ve contacted everyone,” he responded. It was drastic and a little scary, but he knew it was what he wanted to do.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked, folding the letter back up.

  “A former colleague of mine runs the organization that handles all the security for, among many entities, the United Nations. The role of Director of Security Operations for the UN has opened up and he’s offered it to me. It’s based out of the city, but would let me work from anywhere as long as I’m close enough to come in for meetings.”

  Rina blinked. “So you’re quitting your job to be with Kit?”

  He nodded.

  “And because of that, you want me to go against my word to her and let you and your brother handle her security?”

  “You know how good we are. And we’ll be free,” he added in an attempt to bring some levity to the conversation. It didn’t work.

  “Kit is a woman I have a great deal of respect for, Cantona,” Rina said.

  “You and me both,” he responded.

  Rina pursed her lips and Garret stayed silent. He didn’t even bat an eye, worried that any move he made might sway her in the direction he didn’t want her to go. He knew Rina had the power to say no and mean it. He was just hoping she didn’t.

  Finally, she let out another long breath. And nodded.

  Garret felt the tension leave his body.

  “I’ll let you go. But I want to get one thing straight, Cantona,” she said, walking up to him. He looked down and met her piercing eyes. “If you mess this up, if you so much as even think about bailing on Kit before this thing is long over, it will become my personal mission to make sure that you regret every moment of every day for the rest of your life.”

  He blinked at her vehemence. Not that it surprised him, the loyalty Kit inspired in others, but well, it actually did kind of surprise him.

  “Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “And do you understand that this new job you mentioned goes away if you mess this up?”

  He nodded.

  “And those contracts you just terminated? None of them would be open to you again.”

  “I get the p
oint, Rina.”

  She fixed him with a long stare. Then a hint of a smile appeared on her lips. “I’ll give you the location and details when we get back to Drew’s office.”

  “Thank you, Rina.” They started making their way back.

  “She’s on Cape Cod. If you fly yourselves up, you can be there by this afternoon.”

  He said nothing as he opened the door and Rina preceded him inside.

  “And I really wish I could be a fly on the wall when you tell Kit you quit your job for her,” she added under her breath with a small laugh.

  CHAPTER 11

  KIT LET the hot water from the shower cascade over her head and flow down her back. The steam warming her bones. There wasn’t much to do holed up in a house somewhere between Hyannis and Hyannis Port on Cape Cod, so taking a long, hot shower seemed a reasonable option. She’d already spent several hours writing, figuring her exile could be put to good use, but other than that, she was already bored and it hadn’t even been twenty-four hours.

  The below-zero temperatures would take her mind off things if she were allowed outside. But she wasn’t. She wasn’t allowed to do much of anything. Staying in, essentially alone, shouldn’t be a problem. After all, she lived alone and had for years. But really, if she cared to admit it to herself, what was making this isolation harder than it normally would have been was having left Garret and her brother in Windsor.

  She didn’t harbor any illusions that they wouldn’t try to come after her; she knew they would. But after telling Rina her concerns—about her history with her brother and Garret coming and going as they pleased—the older woman had given her word that she wouldn’t tell the two about the house on the Cape.

  And besides, the truth of the matter was that they did both have jobs that she assumed they would eventually need to get back to. She could even twist things around to make herself believe that she was doing them a favor. But even though there was some truth to it, she couldn’t bring herself to lie to herself that much. And it was a lie. Because she didn’t have to dig very deep to realize that Garret and Caleb would have taken over her protective detail in a heartbeat and stayed as long as needed, if she had asked them to. In the last few days, everything had changed between them—between her and Caleb and between her and Garret—and there was no denying that this time, this visit, had been different.

  So, yes, while everything she’d told Rina had been true, it hadn’t been the whole truth. The whole truth left her feeling like a bit of a coward. If she were honest with herself, she would admit that there was a tiny piece of her that wanted to use this enforced exile as a way to avoid the possibility of Caleb and Garret leaving her again. Because the next time it would be so much worse. It would hurt so much more. At least it had been her decision to leave this time; she wouldn’t wake up one morning to find that they had left her.

  With a sigh, she turned the water off and reached for her towel. Pushing thoughts of her own cowardice aside, she let her mind wander back to the conversation with her brother in the kitchen. It hadn’t been her finest hour, that was certain. But all the hurt and pain of what had felt like Caleb’s abandonment had come flooding back. And he’d been standing there, demanding that she relive the worst few months of her life. Demanding it like a father talking to an errant teenager.

  And she’d snapped.

  Kit finished drying off and wrapped her hair in the towel as she stepped out of the shower. She hated feeling like an ostrich with her head in the ground, so she forced herself to consider the very real possibility that Caleb hadn’t known what their father would do to her. It was true that up until the summer after she’d turned seventeen, her father had doted on her, given her everything she’d ever wanted, treated her like a princess. As a kid, she had thought it was normal, but looking back on it now, it had reeked of nothing but condescension and patronization.

  Standing in front of the mirror, Kit smoothed lotion on her face and body. Glancing out the small bathroom window, she unwound the towel and grabbed her hair dryer. She could see nothing but the snow-covered beach and beyond that, the ocean. It was beautiful in a bleak sort of way and with the not-very-charitable assessment she was forming of herself, she realized it suited her current temperament.

  Switching the blow dryer on, she turned over the events in her mind. She still remembered the gut wrenching confusion—and grief—that had engulfed her in the few weeks after Caleb had left. Garret had suggested that Caleb had been trying to protect her, and truth be told, that did sound like something Caleb would have done for her back then.

  Could she give her brother the benefit of the doubt when it came to him thinking their father would never hurt her? As she let the hot air stream through her hair, she realized that yes, she could. But even so, she thought, as she pulled on a pair of yoga pants and a thick sweater, they’d been so close and then he was just gone. And then he’d stayed gone. For so long.

  With another sigh, she stepped from the bathroom, vowing not to wallow completely in the past. Yes, she needed to sort out how she felt about Caleb and Garret, but she couldn’t do it twenty-four hours a day, and she could also use this imposed break for good. She was halfway to her makeshift computer desk when a movement to her left caught her eye.

  Backlit against the light from the hall, a man loomed in the doorway. Her heart lurched and panic shot through her body.

  “Kit, it’s just me,” came a familiar voice. A too familiar voice.

  The hand that had shot to her chest at the sight of the intruder dropped, but the residue of the panic took a little longer to subside.

  “Garret?”

  “In the flesh,” he said, moving into the room and closing the door behind him.

  “Don’t ever…don’t do that…don’t...” Her voice faltered as her surprise faded; surprise that was quickly being replaced by frustration. “What are you doing here?” she demanded. “I told Rina I didn’t want you here.” Her guilt over the real reasons she didn’t want Garret and her brother there was making her sound angrier than she was.

  “I know,” his voice was soft as he took a few more steps into the room. The light from the bathroom fell across his face and he looked like he’d seen better days.

  “But you don’t have all the facts, Kit,” he said and for the first time, she detected the weariness in his voice. And maybe a hint of wariness too.

  Her eyes narrowed on him. “What ‘facts’ would those be, Garret?”

  For a long moment, he said nothing but just stood there taking her in, as if assuring himself she was indeed there and was in fact safe.

  “Garret?” she pushed.

  His eyes came up to meet hers. “I quit my job and took one that has me working mostly from wherever I want, although I do need to be close enough to New York to make it into the city for meetings on occasion. But I won’t be starting the new job until this thing,” he said with a gesture to her and the room in general, “until this thing that involves you is wrapped up.”

  She heard him, she really did. But her mind refused to accept what he was saying. He couldn’t just quit his job. Could he? Wasn’t there some weird mercenary or spy thing that actually prevented him from quitting and moving into another job? But before her mind went too far down that track, it bounced onto another. Why? Why would he quit? As far as she knew, he’d been at it for years and when they’d first met, he hadn’t spoken about—couldn’t speak about it—but he’d seemed to genuinely like it. What would make him quit?

  She searched his face in silence, but there was nothing to give away what he was thinking. Or was there?

  She focused in on his eyes and there, there it was.

  Taking a step back, she shook her head and held out a hand as if to ward him off. “No,” she said.

  “I’m afraid so,” he answered, calm as could be as he took a step forward.

  She blinked again, the weight of the situation hitting her like a ton of bricks. Then, rather than move away from him, she flew at him.


  “How dare you?” she demanded, trying to shove him back toward the door. “How dare you quit your job to do this,” she gestured wildly about her. “You can’t just up and quit your job,” she argued, even as he grabbed her hands in his and wrapped his arms around her.

  She struggled against him, against the gravity of what he’d done and why he’d done it. And he let her. Holding her loose enough to squirm but not loose enough to get away.

  “Garret, please. Please tell me you didn’t quit your job to be with me,” she demanded. She thought she felt the fight draining out of her, but with so many other emotions whirling inside her, it was hard to tell.

  “I can’t do that, because I did,” was all he said.

  She looked up and met his gaze. His body was hard, firm against hers, but his blue eyes were soft. And sure.

  “Why?” she said. Her voice was quiet but she didn’t bother trying to hide the desperation she was beginning to feel.

  He took a deep breath and released her hands, but his arms stayed wrapped around her. She raised her palms to his chest and felt the steady thud of his heart under her touch. For a moment, she absorbed it. Then she raised her eyes back to his, silently demanding an answer.

  “That night, last week, when we got back to your house and you peppered me with questions about my job. Questions you knew I couldn’t answer, but that you asked anyway to make a point. Do you remember that?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  He took another deep breath. “I heard you that night, Kit, really I did. I heard what you were saying and maybe even understood why you were saying it. But I didn’t really get it. I didn’t really, fully understand what you were saying—what you were saying about how hard it would be for you to live with someone who just came and went as needed with no warnings and no explanations. I’ve been in this job so long that it’s hard for me to look at it objectively.

  “There’s the logistical part to be sure, juggling a life like mine with a family. Honestly, I’ve never actually even seen it done. But that wasn’t what you were talking about, was it?”