Be on the Lookout

by Tyler Anne Snell

  “His daughter?”

  “Yes, a scientist—book smart but maybe not exactly up to par on the common sense. Her father, Deacon—what a name—says she’s pretty nonchalant about the whole thing, but he’s completely freaked. She’s due to present her research at a convention in New York City on Sunday and he’s worried the person or persons sending her the letters—to her home, I might add—might try to cause her harm before she can make it there.”

  “And that’s where we come in.”

  “Hopefully that’s where you come in.”

  Jonathan respected his boss and friend too much to turn the request down on the spot. Though he had been on the fence about it until the next day.

  When she’d shown him the pictures of the letters Deacon had faxed over, they’d made a chill run up his spine despite his calm.

  “Okay, I’m in.”

  And he’d stayed in even after the call had come in that said scientist refused to have more than one bodyguard around. Never mind her safety was in question.

  The doors slid open and Jonathan made his way to check in with a suddenly sour mood hanging over his head at the thought of Kathryn Spears. Other than the basic information about her, he really didn’t have much to go on, but he had already formed an opinion about her.

  She was controlling, apathetic and had an ego. There were no doubts about it.

  “Welcome, and how may I help you?” chirped the front desk attendant. He looked to be in his early twenties. His name tag read Jett.

  Jonathan set down his bag and started to take out his ID.

  “Check-in for Jonathan Carmichael.” He passed his driver’s license over as well as the company credit card, having done the hotel check-in dance many times before. Another part of this routine was his next question.

  “Can you tell me if my friend has checked in yet? The name’s Kathryn Spears.”

  The man looked back up and without missing a beat nodded.

  “About an hour ago.”

  That surprised Jonathan.

  “You remember her?” he asked.

  “Yeah, the first thing she did was ask for coffee that was actually good.” Jett didn’t seem to be offended by the question. “I sent her to a café a block over.” His eyes went over Jonathan’s shoulder. “I guess she found some.”

  Jonathan didn’t have to follow the man’s gaze too far. Walking through the front doors, Kathryn had a cup between her hands and no trace of a smile across her lips. She met his stare with recognition he didn’t expect and made a beeline for him.

  “Mr. Carmichael,” she said, stretching out her free hand. There was no question in the greeting. “Glad to see you finally made it.”

  Despite himself he grinned.

  “Miss Spears, glad to see you were able to get that coffee that was so important.” They shook and he was once again surprised by the woman. Not only was her grip firm, but she held it longer than necessary, squeezing tight as she answered.

  “Two coffees, actually.”

  They dropped hands but his grin stayed. Even though he’d been shown her picture before he’d left Orion, the still of the woman sitting behind a desk covered in papers didn’t do the woman before him justice. She was attractive, sure, but there was something else there that caught and held his attention. An unspoken element that he couldn’t yet place or define.

  Suddenly, Jonathan Carmichael was intrigued by his client.

  “I would have waited for you,” she continued, voice notably cool, “but I’ll be honest, I think you being here is a bit unnecessary.”

  Jonathan let out a laugh at that, considering earlier he had thought the same about her.

  “Don’t you want to play it safe rather than be sorry?” he asked.

  Kathryn’s lip quirked up at the corner. Her smile wasn’t humorous.

  “I’d rather not have to worry about a bodyguard following me around everywhere, watching my every move while I get ready for one of the largest career moves of my life.” She popped her hip out to the side a fraction, he noticed. “That would be my choice if I’d been given one.”

  Jonathan couldn’t decide if the way she spoke was born out of ego or frustration, but he definitely felt a chill wafting from each word. Part of him instantly felt the need to defend his skills and the company that was more than just his employer but an important part of his life. However, Jett was obviously still listening in, so the bodyguard went a more judicious route.

  “The Orion Security Group doesn’t force clients to hire them,” he pointed out. “It was your father who did that, and you consented. As for watching your every move while I’m on the job, I can assure you that—if I’m doing said job correctly—my eyes won’t be on you but on your surroundings, trying to keep you safe. So if you have a problem with this arrangement, it’s your father—and really, yourself—you’ll need to be speaking with.”

  Kathryn didn’t immediately respond. When she did it was clipped, definitely chilly.

  “Noted. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to do some work up in my room.”

  She started to turn to go—already testing the boundaries of his job as her bodyguard—when Jonathan smiled once again.

  “Hey, I’ll walk with you on the way to mine.” She gave him a questioning look. “Oh, didn’t your dad tell you? He requested we have adjoining rooms.”

  Jonathan might not have known the scientist long, but he knew he’d struck a nerve with that comment.

  It was going to be an interesting few days.

  * * *

  KATE DIDN’T WANT to wait for the bodyguard. No matter how attractive he’d turned out to be. The picture she’d been forwarded from her father and Orion’s Nikki Waters had shown her a lightly tanned man who looked like a stock image a website might use to show an everyman, not a bodyguard. He had seemed flat, one-dimensional. Someone who would easily blend into the background and, hopefully, not bother her.

  However, in person she’d been surprised to see that maybe she’d misjudged him in that department. His dark blue eyes had depth, his facial features were sharp and his goatee was trimmed and neat, matching the jet-black hair that stood an inch or two high. He wore a gray tee and jeans and he wore them well. When he turned back to the desk attendant, she even spotted the bottom of a tattoo on the back of his upper arm, peeking out under his sleeve.

  Maybe Jonathan Carmichael wasn’t the type of man to blend.

  “This is a massive invasion of privacy,” Kate commented as she led them into the elevator. Like the hotel, it was dated. She pressed the second-floor button and hoped above all hopes that it didn’t get stuck. Her nerves had been rubbed the wrong way, annoyed at her father and the man next to her. Getting trapped in the small space with him would most likely incite a flurry of rudeness from her. She was already having a hard time being polite without the added close proximity.

  “Again, I’ll remind you that your father hired Orion and you agreed,” he said, not looking at her but obviously surveying the elevator. He was tall enough to reach up and push against the ceiling—trying to do what, she wasn’t sure.

  “I meant the adjoining-room situation,” she corrected.

  Jonathan stopped his inspection and gave her a dry smile.

  “Just because there’s a door there doesn’t mean I’m going to use it. I don’t even have a key. We just wanted the rooms to be close, and since it’s an older hotel they just happen to share a door.” His eyebrow rose. “Unless you want me to get you a key?”

  Kate felt heat crawl up her neck.

  “No,” she said quickly. “I don’t need or want one.”

  “Good. Then there shouldn’t be a problem.”

  The elevator doors slid open and Kate hurried with her coffee to her room down the hall. Jonathan was right behind her with his bags.

>   “I’m going to look in your room, okay?” he said as she pulled out her key card. “I’d like to know the layout, just in case.”

  Kate wanted to argue, but was trying to channel her inner Spears’ manners. She still rolled her eyes.

  “Sure, why not?” She opened the door and swung it wide for the bodyguard. “Knock yourself out.”

  He moved past her, bags still in hand, into the room. For a moment she worried about her more intimate things being left out in the open, but it was a baseless fear. She was meticulous, a trait that had bled over from her professional life into her personal one. She’d already unpacked and sorted her things.

  “To be honest, I expected something different,” Jonathan said, apparently okay with his inspection.

  “Something different?” she repeated. “Like a man in a mask lying in wait?”

  The corner of his lips pulled up a fraction.

  “I meant I expected to see, I don’t know, test tubes and beakers on the nightstands. Aren’t you a scientist?”

  Kate walked over to the small desk in the corner and leaned against it. She felt a twitch try to pull her own lips into a small smile, but she tamped it down.

  “Generally labeled, yes, I suppose.” She took a sip of her coffee. “What else do you know about my work?”

  If Jonathan knew about her project, she was sure she’d have seen some kind of reaction to her question. However, the man simply shrugged.

  “If you’re asking do I know what you’re currently working on—why you’re here for the convention—I don’t. Orion tries to look into a client’s life without being intrusive. Our analysts dip into your past and present to try to find potential threats, but we don’t overstep. Your father and Nikki made it clear that, as far as your work goes, the only person who can tell me about it is you.” He paused, tilting his head slightly. “And I suspect that that information is something you won’t be sharing with me.”

  Before Kate could stop it, the image of a bloodied woman tied to a chair flashed across her vision. Head bent over, body beaten. Her last breath having already left her body hours before.

  The image was something she’d had to confront for a long time. It twisted the very core of her heart.

  “No,” she said, voice turned to ice. “I won’t.”

  Chapter Four

  Jonathan wasn’t invited to stay past the woman’s answer. He didn’t want to, either. Kathryn’s voice had gone steely, her eyes almost to slits, and even from his spot across the room he’d been able to see her breathing change. Whatever she’d just experienced, it pulled his curiosity to the forefront, but he kept his mouth shut. What was behind her dark eyes was something darker. Something he had no business seeking out.

  His room was to the right and was an exact replica of hers. The adjoining door was placed between the desk and the dresser with its TV on top, locked tight with a key card swipe on the handle. It was true he didn’t have the key to it, but he doubted he’d be able to get one if he wanted it. Kathryn Spears wasn’t hiding the fact that his presence was something she neither wanted nor thought she needed.

  “Hey, Nikki, this is Jonathan,” he said into his phone after he’d unpacked, leaving a message after the beep. “Just made first contact with Miss Scientist. Let me say, you picked one hell of a last contract for me.”

  Jonathan unpacked quickly, not as neatly as he’d noticed said scientist’s room to be, and reflected on what he knew about the woman next door. He hadn’t been lying—it wasn’t much. Nikki had received the reports from the analysts and made the decision to only tell him what he needed to know in an effort to preserve some of Kathryn’s privacy. What Jonathan knew was that the scientist was dedicated to her work and that work was a secret.

  But that didn’t mean he wasn’t curious as hell as to what it entailed.

  A quick knock on his door pulled him from his thoughts. He was surprised to see Kathryn standing on the other side. Her expression had softened, but only slightly.

  “I want to apologize for being frosty,” she greeted him. “I just, well, my work is a sensitive topic and this convention is very, very important for my career. My father tells me that sometimes I tend to get a little too into the zone and can lose sight of my manners.” Jonathan hadn’t expected an apology. “So, why don’t you come with me to the Chinese restaurant a few blocks down and we can get reacquainted?”

  “I appreciate the offer, but you know as part of my job I’d go anyway,” he pointed out. Kathryn gave him a wry smile.

  “I’m inviting you to eat with me,” she corrected. “Not sit creepily behind me like a weird stalker.”

  Jonathan stepped back to retrieve his wallet and walked out into the hall. As she shut the door, he snorted.

  “You apologize and then call me a stalker. I feel like you don’t often apologize to people.”

  Kathryn crossed her arms over her chest, smile gone.

  “I don’t.”

  The walk down to the lobby and out to the street was silent. Their conversation hadn’t stalled. It had stopped completely. Jonathan walked at her side but kept his eyes in a constant sweeping motion of their surroundings. It was late afternoon and the streets were packed even tighter than when he’d first driven in. Gaggles of pedestrians crowded the corners of blocks and only half waited for the Walk sign to flash green before darting across the street. Jonathan wondered if Kathryn had been to the city before. She walked with purpose and little doubt. Jonathan followed without question or comment.

  Two blocks from the hotel, they hung a left into a small, one-room Chinese restaurant. It was dark and surprisingly quiet despite the street noise. The handful of patrons paid them no mind as they slid into a booth against the wall. Before they could settle in, a man took their drink orders. Jonathan checked his sight line to the door again and then decided to break his client’s quiet.

  “So you’ve been here before?” he asked, motioning around them. “Which means you’ve been to New York before?”

  “Yes, to both. An associate who is based in Buffalo frequents a lab here and commutes just to eat the chicken fried rice when in the city.” She shrugged. “Not the healthiest traveling diet, but I had to admit I was impressed the last time we ate here.” Kathryn paused before smirking. “And I’m somewhat of a fast-food queen back home, so take my word for it as a weighty stamp of approval.”

  “Noted.” The timing couldn’t have been better for the waiter. He came for their orders and Jonathan decided to test out the scientist’s theory. He ordered the chicken fried rice.

  “So home, that’s in Florida?” he asked, eyes scanning the new couple who’d just entered.

  “Yes, where the humidity is king. I’ve lived there almost all of my life, with the exception of school.”

  “You moved back when finished, then?”

  She nodded.

  “Out of graduate school I was offered a somewhat rare job at a lab that was located near my father.” She shrugged. “At the risk of sounding like a child who can’t crack it without their parent nearby, I couldn’t have hoped for a better setup. I love my father dearly, so back to Florida and its god-awful heat I went.”

  Though it was out of sight, Jonathan felt the burn of the tattoo on the back of his arm. Not a physical pain, but a memory that often flared to life when the past swarmed him.

  “There’s nothing wrong with staying close to family,” he said, truth in each word but no experience within them.

  “And what about you, Mr. Bodyguard? Where’s your home?”

  A simple question and one he had fielded time and time again.

  “I moved around a lot growing up. Never in one place for too long.” He shrugged. “When Orion started up in Dallas, I decided that I liked that city best. As someone who’s traveled the world for the job, you can take my word for it ‘as a
weighty stamp of approval.’”

  She smiled. Jonathan wondered how often she used that expression.

  “Noted. You know, I’ve done some research of my own on Orion Security, and I must say that as a service of bodyguards, it has a fascinating track record,” she began, lacing her fingers atop the table. Jonathan had wondered when she’d bring up Orion’s history. He’d had no doubt that a woman whose life was so poised in research would do her own. He sat up straighter and nodded.

  “We’ve had a few interesting cases.”

  “Ha! Interesting? If I recall correctly, last year one of your fellow bodyguards was instrumental in bringing down an underground drug-running organization that the police had no idea existed.” Jonathan shrugged but couldn’t stop the smile that sprung to his lips. The bodyguard to whom she was referring was none other than Mark Tranton. What she didn’t know was that the media had been forced to keep the identity of his equal partner in crime, his now-fiancée, Kelli, and her daughter out of the public eye.

  “Each case—each client—is always interesting. It’s just part of the job.” Kathryn seemed put off that he hadn’t divulged more, but she clearly wasn’t done with the topic.

  “I also found a newspaper article about a woman named Morgan Avery,” she said after a moment. Her expression softened just as Jonathan felt his body tense. At the moment he realized maybe he shouldn’t underestimate the woman sitting across from him. While Morgan Avery was in no way a secret, it was a truth rarely connected to the agency. When he didn’t respond, Kathryn took it as a sign to continue. “You used to work for Redstone Solutions, elite bodyguards, if I read their bio correctly. Morgan came to Redstone for protection but was turned away.” Jonathan felt his hand start to fist. He moved it to his lap. “You quit a few weeks after she was killed.”