Olivia looked back and forth between the two men, and Cat walked around the table to put an arm around her shoulder.
“I know that it wasn’t the best of ideas—” Bo started his mouth suddenly dry.
“It wasn’t the best of ideas, Bo? It was an absolutely horrible idea! And to make it worse, you both could have been killed! What the hell were you thinking, man?”
Bo said nothing.
“I know you did not want this assignment in the first place but for crying out loud. I thought you, of all people, given everything that happened, would have been able to keep her safe.”
“That’s not fair!” Cat interjected, trying to usher Olivia into another room away from the storm that brewing.
“No, Cat, it’s true! I expect that he would be one that would throw his all into seeing that she was protected. It was supposed be a chance to make shit right in his mind again. Instead I end up with someone who acts like he is green and never done a protection detail in his life!” Jake was mad.
“Jake, that is enough.” Bo’s own anger starting to spill over, “I know that it was a mistake—”
“A mistake that almost cost you everything, again.”
“No! It was never going to be that again—”
“And just how in the hell can you be so sure of that? Look at the last time! You had it all under control, until your CO took the control away and then what? It was no different than today.”
Bo’s heart ached. Why was Jake bringing all of this shit up now? Bo had enough to worry about and besides this entire thing was Jake’s idea in the first place.
“You need to pack your shit up and head back to Miss Woods’ apartment. Now. No more bullshit, Bo,” Jake ordered, turning and walking away, “I am going to head over to the police department to see what they have done with your Jeep.”
Jake grabbed his jacket and stormed out of the office.
Chapter 9
“He was way out of line,” Cat said, coming back into the room as Jake left.
“He was right.”
“No, he wasn’t. What happened overseas? You couldn’t do anything about it. You couldn’t save her even if you had tried. If anything, you could have lost your own life in the process.”
“He was right though, I still shouldn’t have allowed Olivia to put herself in danger.” He rubbed his hands with his face. What the hell had he been thinking?
“You didn’t have a choice, Bo.”
Olivia stepped out of the room she had been taken to. “Forgive me for not staying in one place. I meant what I said. You had little to no choice but to accompany me to the office. I would have taken a cab had you not gone with me. And that would have been a complete disaster. If you had not been the one driving the vehicle, I was in there is no chance in hell that I would have survived.”
“You have a point, Bo is an amazing driver.” Cat nodded
“So please stop beating yourself up. I will have a talk with Jake about all of this when things are said and done and see what I can do to help cool his head off.” Olivia put a hand on his shoulder and Bo saw the expression on Cat’s face when she did that. A mixture of shock and a smile
What was Cat thinking? That he was sleeping with her?
He wasn’t. She was an assignment. He pulled away from Olivia’s touch.
“Alright. You came here for help. What did you want help with?” Cat asked, breaking Bo out of his thoughts and back onto the task.
“For one, I managed to get into the city servers to view the live feed for the cameras on the streets that I was on when the bastards started trying to do their thing-”
“Someone was paying attention when I was teaching them,” Rudy interjected, smiling, coming up beside the three of them. “Pleased to meet you, Miss Woods, I’m Rudy, the resident tech guy.”
“Olivia, please,” Olivia said, taking the hand he held out to shake.
“So, you got into the city cameras, great lesson, and?”
“Yeah, it was a great lesson you taught, however, there is only one problem.”
“What’s that?” Rudy said watching the images of cars whiz by on the camera.
“Unless our friends are going to come by and wave at the camera, we need to see the archives of the footage from earlier today.”
“Oh, right, duh.” Rudy shook his head quickly.
“Can you help us?” Bo could hear the hopefulness in Olivia’s voice.
“I can, but I have to ask what the hell are you going to do if I can dig up the footage.”
Bo and Olivia looked at each other. Bo hadn’t really thought that far ahead, he was grasping at straws.
“I had this idea that if I was able to see the footage, I might be able to get a license plate that the police could track down,” Bo said, shrugging his shoulders.
“That sounds logical, but you know you could have just given me a call to do that for you and you would have avoided that whole showdown with Jake.” Rudy walked back over to his bank of computer screens at the back of the room.
“Yeah, well... I wasn’t expecting Jake to behave quite like that,” Bo explained, trailing after him.
Both Cat and Olivia followed until they had all crowded their way into the back corner of the office around Rudy’s desk.
“No pressure or anything,” Rudy muttered, as his fingers flew across the keyboard.
Bo watched in fascination as Rudy expertly navigated his way through all of the different screens; streams of codes rolled up the screen as he went along. Bo always wondered how Rudy could keep track of everything that he was typing at the speed he was, but then from what Bo understood of Rudy’s past, while he was young he had been doing this for a very long time.
He once managed to hack into the computers that run all the street lights and turned them all red remotely. The city had ground to a halt for almost a half an hour while they worked to undo what he had done.
“Go it.” Rudy smiled as the code slowed down and a pop up with files came up.
“What am I looking at?”
“You, my well-muscled friend, are looking at one hour bites of the traffic cams across the city. What were the streets and times again?”
Bo relayed the information Rudy needed and a few more keystrokes and clicks later, Rudy stopped again.
“I think this is what you are looking for.”
On the screen was a screen shot of the back end of the silver car that had been chasing them. Smack in the middle of the screen was a crystal clear shot of the license plate.
“How the hell did you do that?” Cat’s eyes were wide.
“If you paid attention more when I am showing you things, then you would have a better understanding of how I do these things.” Rudy rolled his eyes.
His computer beeped. Another pop up appeared.
“And there we go. Hang on, I’ll print it out for you.”
“What the hell?”
“I had it run the plate while you all were oogling the fact that I managed to find the shot of the license plate.”
“Brilliant.” Bo smiled.
“Also sent off a package to Detective Brookshire, so he now has all of this information. I do hope it helps. At least helps you enough that you both can go back to Miss Wood’s place and not get yourself into any more mischief.”
“Thanks for that,” Bo said, taking the sheet from Rudy’s printer.
“Any time.”
“Does this name mean anything to you?” Bo asked, handing the piece of paper to her.
Olivia looked at it a moment and Bo could see the look of shock and horror pass across her face.
“What is it?” Bo asked instantly worried again.
“This is my brother,” Olivia said, holding up the page in good hand.
“Your brother?” Bo felt his heart hammer hard in his chest. “Why?”
“Yes, my brother.” Olivia struggled with the words, Bo wanted so much to reach out and hold her. Nothing was worse than having to find out that a family member
might be the one who tried to kill you.
“What can you tell us about him?”
“I haven’t seen him in seven or eight years now, I guess. He was into some pretty heavy shit the last time we spoke. I didn’t get all of the details, being an attorney for the justice department, but you know how that goes. I figured I would one day have to be removed from a case that involved him and some sort of wrongdoing. I never imagined any of this.” She gestured to her arm in the sling, tears filling her eyes.
“I don’t think any of us would think that our family could do us harm,” Cat empathized quietly.
“The good news is that the police now have a lead on him and if there is any merit to him being a part of this then they will have him in custody soon enough and we can sort this out.” Rudy looked down at his keyboard.
“I think I want to go home now,” Olivia said quietly.
*****
They pulled out into the late evening night. The darkness in the industrial area was punctuated by the occasional streetlight.
Her head was swimming with thoughts. How was her brother related to all of this? What was he doing?
She knew they were right. That there was nothing more that she could do about the situation. She felt badly. Someone else who had been shot that day at the cafe had not made it and it was all because of her and her bother.
Bo hadn’t said anything since they had gotten in the car. She wondered what he was thinking as she glanced over at him.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly.
“For what?” Bo asked without taking his eyes off the road.
“For all of this. Getting you into trouble with your boss and now this whole mess with my brother.” She felt the tears welling up in her eyes again.
“Don’t be, Liv, it’s not your fault.” The sound of his voice, as he spoke, the way he shortened her name, something no one had done for years, sent shivers down her spine.
“I just don’t understand any of it. I don’t know why Gerald would want to hurt me. I haven’t done anything to him. I just have left him to his own devices.”
“That was probably the best thing you did for yourself but it may have also been the thing that’s been festering at him all of these years. Guys like him don’t like seeing other people succeed. And you have succeeded far beyond what you should have given the rough start to life.”
She said nothing, he was right. It wasn’t what she had done to him, but rather what she hadn’t done. She hadn’t been there for him, hadn’t helped him to see the light of the good side of life. She had left him to rot while she blossomed.
“You are alright. Sometimes people like that can’t be fixed. They don’t want to be. They think that what they are doing in life is what they were meant to be doing. That it is somehow alright and that there isn’t any other option out there for them. You can’t change a person who doesn’t want to even see that there is a problem or that what they are doing is wrong.”
She could hear a twang of pain in the last words he spoke.
“I am sorry about dragging you into this mess. And what happened with Jake. I really shouldn’t have forced you to break the rules in order to make me happy. It wasn’t fair.”
Bo stopped at a stop sign on an empty street, not a car nor a person was around, and looked right at her.
“Olivia, I don’t do anything that I don’t want to do. I learned a long time ago that sometimes you have to go with your gut instinct and not the orders on the paper. The orders on the paper are not always right. They don’t always make sense and if you think even for a second that there is something amiss or wrong or something that could be done differently and have a better outcome you have to go with that feeling.”
“But you were in the army. Aren’t you supposed to follow orders, no matter what you think?” She searched his eyes in the dim light.
“Yes. We are supposed to. But even those orders aren’t always ones that make sense and people can get hurt,” he said, looking away and putting the car into drive again before heading left down the street.
They drove along in silence. Olivia mulled over what he had said.
“Who was she?” she asked and then almost instantly regretted it. It wasn’t her business but she had asked, she only hoped that he wouldn’t be mad at her.
Bo said nothing for a bit but kept his eyes squarely on the road.
“Her name was Sooraj. Her name means Sun in Urdu. And she was my ray of sunshine. She was a villager in one of the villages that we were set to protect. It happened by accident. One day, I was on patrol and she came up to me with food and water. They were always doing that for us. It was their way of showing us their gratitude for what we were doing for them.
We sat and talked while I ate, and the next day it was the same. Every day we would eat together. I found myself eagerly awaiting the time when I knew I would be able to see her again.
I never expected it to go as far as it did, but I found myself helplessly in love with her. I was so much in love that once I was done with my tour that time, I was going to retire from the army and find a way to bring her home. Settle down and start a family. ”
Olivia nodded. “What happened? Why didn’t you?”
“About a month after we started seeing each other, word came down that the village she lived in was in reality a base of operations for some insurgents. That they were building bombs and IEDs there. I told my CO that there was no way that was true, as I had seen nothing but innocents in all of my time there. But he wouldn’t listen to me. They raided the village that night and killed nearly everyone in it. It was only after the fact that they realized that their information was tainted.”
Olivia’s heart ached as he told the story. She could hear the pain in his voice as he spoke. He had really loved her.
They didn’t say another word for the rest of the ride home. The night watchman tipped his hat to them as they waited for the elevator to take them upstairs.
“I am so sorry, Bo,” she whispered as they got onto the elevator.
“Don’t be. It wasn’t you.”
“I shouldn’t have pried like that. It wasn’t fair or right.” She had felt incredibly horrible about the whole thing.
He stepped out of the elevator and onto her floor, taking careful, measured steps down the hallway, checking and rechecking to make sure everything was clear.
He went into the apartment and came back a few moments later.
“All clear.” And ushered her in.
He sat down on the couch and breathed a heavy sigh before turning to set up his laptop once again. She turned and went to her liquor cabinet. It had been a long day.
“Do you think that’s a good idea with the pain meds you are on?” Bo questioned, watching her pour two glasses of an amber liquid.
“I don’t give a shit at this point. I have had a really horrible day and I need something to take the edge off.” She sipped and handed him a glass as she sad down on the couch beside him.
He looked at it a moment before accepting it.
“It’s my way of saying I’m sorry for all the shit that’s happened,” she explained quietly, leaning her head on his chest.
“I have already told you that I don’t do anything I don’t want to.” His voice came out as more of a rumble and she felt that all too familiar shiver run down her spine.
*****
Olivia looked up at him. Their eyes met for the briefest of seconds before he leaned in towards her.
His lips were warm and soft, and Olivia felt her head spinning with growing arousal as she felt the tip of his tongue against her lips, gently parting them, then slowly moving inside her mouth to meet her tongue passionately.
She couldn't quite tell how long the kiss lasted, but she knew wasn't as long as she would have liked. Bo pulled away just enough to look into her eyes and smile.
Olivia smiled back, although she ached for more of his touch. She wanted to feel his lips again... she wanted to feel his hands, his fingers, his
every body part against hers.
And she could have him, if she wanted him, Olivia realized. And she did want him. She wanted him more than anything.
"I want... you," she whispered to him.
He kissed her softly, and declared, "I am yours."
She swallowed, his deep words sending shockwaves of excitement through her.
"I want you... to touch me," Olivia told him, her voice suddenly unsteady.
He obeyed, and lifted his hand to her face, slowly tracing it with the tips of his fingers. Olivia shivered, closing her eyes as he continued to caress her face, then moved on to clasp the back of her neck.
His hands came back up, slipping the material away to cup her warm, full mounds.
"Oh... " she groaned.
She wanted this, this slow and tender exploration. One by one, each piece of her clothing, as if by magic, disappeared.
She was naked now, naked for the first time before this man.
"You are so beautiful," he whispered.
"Bo..." she trembled. But he was already gathering her in his arms, lowering her to the bed.
When he had made sure she was lying comfortably, Bo lay next to her, and she noted with a bit of disappointment he was still fully dressed. Well, she could take care of that.
"Wait," she said, as his hand reached for her.
"I want to see you, too. Take your shirt off."
He smiled coyly, reaching behind his head too slowly—much too slowly, and slipped his shirt off over his head. The ripples in his chest were now exposed to her adoring gaze; she stared at him hungrily.
Somehow, she found him different than she expected, not as bulky as she had imagined this man to be, but he did have a well-defined muscular trimness and a sensuous grace about him she found to be much better than what she had expected.
She very much wanted to touch and kiss his newly exposed skin, but again she resisted. For some strange reason, she was enjoying remaining passive, and she lay back to allow him to continue. But wait, there was just one more thing...
"Wait, Bo—your hair. I want you to take your hair down."
She watched with excitement as he flipped his dreads over his shoulders. They were longer than she had thought they were.
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