Quinn Security

by Dee Bridgnorth

  Lucy knew that what she was witnessing from across the diner was the confrontational aftermath of Kaleb having seduced the girl, and by the looks of it, that seduction had probably taken place recently.

  Steeling her emotions, she cursed herself for her own recent flare of interest in the womanizer—what in God’s name had she been thinking?—and forced herself to beam a big old smile down at the elderly couple seated in one of the booths in her section, trying her damnedest to put Kaleb Quinn out of her mind.

  Chapter Seven

  KALEB

  “Hey, guuurl…”

  Dealing with Courtney was the absolute last thing he needed right now…

  “You rushed off the other morning,” she said, playing up the melody in her feminine voice, as she sank into the curve of her hip, manicured fingernails touching down and grazing his table. “I don’t think you have my cell phone number.”

  Kaleb was no stranger to these tactics, but he was usually afforded a much longer grace period. He’d learned a lot about women over the years—the decades, if he was being honest with himself, since he’d looked about thirty-two for the past fifty years or so—and one of their design flaws was that they each had a post-coital timer, an internal clock of sorts. After sex, they felt elated, both physically—thanks to Kaleb—and emotionally, thanks to delusion. Each female had a different timeline, but most got swept up in their own fantasies about the budding romance to come, and generally let him breathe for anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, before the panic and regret would start to set in.

  Courtney’s personal internal timer must have been set on a short fuse, because it had barely been a day and here she was, hunting him down to ferret out how he might or might not feel about her.

  And Lucy had glanced this way.

  Shit.

  “No, I definitely have your number,” he lied to assure her. He didn’t want another scene like the one her friend Pamela had caused some time ago. “Remember, I got it from you before we left Libations.”

  She looked momentarily skeptical, but like all women, didn’t want to reveal her unease. She was still hoping he’d like another roll in the hay and she’d be on her best behavior so long as she believed he was looking forward to round two.

  “Oh, silly me,” she said, but he’d read her all wrong. Courtney wouldn’t be nearly so tame, which she proved when she pulled her cell phone from the back pocket of her tight, mini-skirt and tapped the LCD screen. “You didn’t try texting me, did you? Darn service hasn’t been so great.”

  “Ah…” he stammered, unsure of which way to steer the evolving lie. “I’ve actually been assigned a new client,” he told her. “Big case. I’ve been thinking about you, but Troy’ll hand my ass to me in a basket if I let myself get distracted.”

  “Is that right,” she said in a flat tone as the light behind her eyes snuffed out.

  “Wish it weren’t,” he said, beaming a sexy grin up at her. “I’m afraid I might be busy for a week or two.”

  He hadn’t meant to cut his eyes in Lucy’s direction and he regretted it the second he did, because Courtney followed his gaze, saw the slender and extremely beautiful blonde waitress, and then glared down at Kaleb.

  “It doesn’t look like you’re so busy right now,” she said, forcing kindness into her phony, feminine tone, as she slid into the booth seat across from him. “I’m starving.”

  “Oh, good,” he said dryly.

  He felt Lucy’s gaze graze over to him here and there as she edged her way through her section of the diner. This didn’t look good. Not one bit. And the worst part was that Kaleb was more than guilty of everything Lucy was probably now assuming.

  “Hey, aren’t you supposed to be at Acorn right now?” he asked, hoping she’d get the hint.

  “Pamela’s holding down the fort,” she said in a sharp, accusatory tone.

  Yes, Kaleb had also slept with Pamela, a fact he now regretted. He could only assume that after Pamela had caught him fleeing Courtney’s apartment the other morning, she’d confronted her friend. Knowing how frenemies worked when the dynamic was entirely female, Courtney had likely only been challenged thanks to whatever Pamela had said to her. Challenged to lock Kaleb into something real and lasting to prove her friend wrong.

  Then the inevitable happened.

  Lucy had made the rounds and had only one more table in her section to tend to—Kaleb’s.

  “Mornin’,” she said in a friendly tone that to Kaleb’s ears sounded crestfallen. Regardless, she offered Courtney a companionable smile and asked, “What’ll it be this morning?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Courtney as she lifted her heavily made-up eyes and looked at Kaleb. “What’re you having, honey?”

  Honey?

  Kaleb was too afraid to meet Lucy’s gaze and the best he could do was use a mocking, humorous tone to say, “Gee, I don’t know, darling. The eggs are good.”

  “Won’t they go straight to my thighs?” Courtney angled a territorial smile up at Lucy and commented, “He loves my thighs, but not as much as my boobs.”

  Lucy narrowed her eyes and dryly stated, “Two orders of scrambled eggs then,” and turned quickly up the aisle before she’d had a chance to fill their mugs with coffee.

  “Funny,” said Courtney as she stared at him. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say she was jealous.”

  “If I didn’t know better,” he immediately countered, “I’d say you were.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Courtney,” he said firmly as he leaned across the table, instilling a confidential tone. “I’m at work. Lucy is my client. I’ll have to talk to you later.”

  “So… no breakfast?”

  “You know what turns me on?” he challenged and her eyes lit up like fireworks. “Confident women who don’t test me when I say I’m working.”

  “Fine,” she said, easing towards the edge of her bench. As she stood up, she told him, “Call me. The sooner the better. Me and my boobs will be waiting.”

  Christ.

  He shot her a grin so she wouldn’t linger to test him further and it wasn’t until Courtney had crossed up the aisle and exited the diner that he felt like he could actually breathe.

  He wanted nothing more than to get Lucy’s attention and explain himself, maybe apologize, or at the very least convince her that Courtney meant nothing to him. But how could he do that? First of all, if he did, if he really tried to make the argument that the boutique sales girl meant nothing to him, he’d only look like an even worse womanizer than he already did, plowing through women night after night. And second of all, if he tried to explain any of it, he’d risk revealing to her that, unlike Courtney and Pamela and Leeanne—God rest her soul—and all the other women he’d taken to bed over the years, Lucy was actually something special. He was interested in her, and not just interested in getting her between his sheets. Quite the opposite, in fact. Lucy was differen,t and it wasn’t lost on him that he’d been feeling a growing affection for her in his heart.

  But he wasn’t supposed to be feeling anything like that towards her. She was his client. In danger. And he had a job to do. One that didn’t include revealing emotions he wasn’t supposed to be having in the first place.

  So when she neared his booth with two steaming plates of scrambled eggs in her hands, he thanked her in as professional a tone as he could muster and avoided addressing Courtney Harrington in any way, shape, or form.

  “Your girlfriend take off?” she asked, holding the second plate of eggs after she’d placed the other in front of him.

  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “Does she know that?”

  “Lucy,” he tried to say but she’d already started off through the diner again. “You can leave the other plate of eggs!”

  But she didn’t turn around.

  ***

  PO Rachel Clancy hadn’t pushed her precious file on the sheriff a second time. It had been crushing enough to watch him shove the entirety of th
e lab reports into his trash bin. Her strategy from here on out, which she carefully devised, would be to continue her own investigation, privately and on her own time, to tighten the puzzle pieces together. She knew in her gut that Dante Alighieri was the rumored “wolf-man” who had been darting through town like a ghost. Where he was now, no one knew, but she was determined to track him down, no matter where he was hiding. If he was in Alaska, she’d fly there. If he’d only gotten as far as Jackson Hole, she would drive there. She had issued an APB out, using his name, and now knew exactly what he looked like, thanks to a copy of his driver’s license that had been faxed over to her from the DMV. She’d since learned that he worked as a consultant and investor, whatever that meant—each were vague titles that did little to inform her of his true line of work—and that business dealings hadn’t been what had brought him to Devil’s Fist.

  Despite her commitment to furthering her investigation, which she fully planned to throw in the pompous sheriff’s face in order to demand her long-deserved promotion, it seemed that Rick had other plans for her. Rather than marginalizing her to her desk at the precinct to discourage her, he’d actually been calling her along on just about every inquiry he needed to make.

  She could only assume it was a keep-your-friends-close-and-your-enemies-closer-type situation. Or in her case, a keep-Clancy-busy-so-she-won’t-get-very-far-on-her-own-type tactic. She hadn’t had a spare second to herself thanks to the sheriff’s constant demands, and it was doubly cumbersome that whenever she was with him, he consistently silenced her and kept her in an almost secretarial role, as though his thermos had to constantly be filled to the brim.

  As they strode into Angel’s Food diner, the sheriff letting the swinging glass door go behind him so that it nearly smacked her in the face, he handed her his thermos and said, “Fill her up, officer.”

  She held her head high, ignoring the punch of insult in her chest, and neared her uniformed self to the diner counter where she got one of the brunette waitress’s attention, as Rick stalked up through the diner with his hands on his hips.

  He was looking for Angel. He’d probably like to interrogate Lucy Cooper, too, thanks to the stunt she’d pulled last night and her failure to show up for a formal interview. Cleaning her apartment, though not a crime in and of itself, had seriously rubbed Rick the wrong way and he wasn’t about to let it go.

  “Thanks,” she told the waitress after the girl had filled Rick’s thermos with dark roast.

  There was a pitcher of half and half on the counter, and Rachel tried not to act on the fantasy of spitting into the sheriff’s coffee as she topped it off with cream and added two sugars, just the way he liked it.

  “Hidy-ho!” she heard Rick holler and she turned to find him sauntering up to Angel who, by the startling looks of it, was eyeing him with the kind of interest Rachel would’ve expected from a bubbling teenage girl hoping the captain of the football team would ask her to prom. “Lovely mornin’ we’re having, I’d say.”

  “It is now,” Angel cooed back to Rachel’s sudden horror.

  Oh God, were they flirting?

  “You’re looking healthy, Sheriff. You go for a run this mornin’?” asked the bombshell as she neared him, coming a bit too close into his personal space for her response to seem strictly neighborly.

  “Please,” he said with a grin, “call me Rick, and I pumped a little iron at the crack of dawn.”

  “I can tell,” she complimented, and Rachel had to make a concerted effort not to roll her eyes.

  If the sheriff had been planning to question Angel about her role in Reece Gladstone’s unlawful imprisonment, he was doing a terrible job of it and she would’ve liked to pick up the slack on his behalf, but she knew that it would only get her on breakfast take-out duty. She was getting damn sick of this. Her patience had worn thinner than a sheet of single-ply toilet paper on damp tiles.

  As Rick went on to describe his particular brand of bench presses—apparently, the timing of inhales and exhales was something he assumed Angel would find interesting—Rachel noticed Conor Quinn enter the diner and cut his dark eyes over to where his brother, Kaleb, was sitting in one of the red vinyl booths.

  Conor was thirty-two years old from what she’d gleaned, the second youngest Quinn. He was a former Marine and had served in the military for the bulk of his twenties, which Rachel both respected and admired. She’d been curious about him for years now, ever since he’d come back to the Fist in his army fatigues and a Marine-issued sack of his belongings slung over his muscular shoulder. He was a towering 6’1”, and as the years passed, he let his light brown hair grow out shaggy from the tight crew cut he’d come home with. He had a just-tumbled-out-of-bed look about him that, to Rachel, definitely worked in his favor. Boyish with bedhead and a laid-back ease about him…

  It made her wonder…

  As he passed through, she must have caught his eye, because Conor slowed up and neared her.

  “How’s it going, Rachel?”

  “It’s going,” she sighed, as she twisted the cap onto the sheriff’s thermos.

  “Not well, I take it?”

  She met his gaze and felt a zing of connection that she might’ve liked to explore had they been standing with beers in Libations. As it so happened, though, she was definitely on duty and knew better than to voice her grievances, especially when doing so could reveal details of an investigation that a Quinn brother ought not to be privy to.

  “No, no,” she assured him, perking up her tone and expression. “Everything’s going just fine, thanks.”

  “You sure?”

  What if it wasn’t? she wondered. What was he going to do about it?

  At least he was nothing like his brother, Kaleb, she thought. If she wanted to test his potential of being a shoulder to lean on, at least she wouldn’t be running the risk of being seduced. If Conor had a reputation for anything, it was keeping to himself and serving as the silent glue that had been holding his family together ever since their father, Xavier, had passed away some years back.

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” she told him. “Just palling around with the sheriff.”

  “Palling around?” he questioned, perhaps sensing that the last thing she wanted to be was Rick Abernathy’s pal. “When’s he gonna make you one of his detectives?”

  “Ha!” she blurted. “That’s the million-dollar question.”

  “I’d say,” he agreed.

  She knew he wasn’t here for her. The only possible reason he could’ve come to Angel’s Food was to have breakfast with his brother, so she told him, “Don’t let me keep you,” and glanced over her shoulder at Kaleb who was now watching their conversational exchange from his booth.

  “See ya around, Clancy,” he said before heading off down the aisle towards his brother.

  Hope so, she thought.

  ***

  Kaleb could not have been happier to see his brother nearing his booth, but it would’ve been a nice touch if Conor had arrived in the diner when he’d actually needed him. He’d texted his brother discretely as a preemptive measure when it was clear that Courtney was here and here to stay, but Conor had missed her by more than a few minutes. Still, being in the company of someone who wouldn’t look at him like he was a heaping pile of hot garbage would be a welcomed change of pace in contrast to Lucy’s sudden sentiment.

  Then it occurred to him—Kaleb was dense, apparently—that Lucy wouldn’t be giving him the cold shoulder if she didn’t care. In the past, she’d always joshed around with him about his playboy conquests whenever she’d taken his order. She’d never clammed up or gotten sullen. She’d only rolled her eyes or shaken her head at him with a big ol’ boys-will-be-boys smile on her angelic face. Had she developed some degree of feelings for him? Was that why her mood had plummeted as soon as she’d seen Courtney slink over him? Were her feelings hurt because she was interested in him and didn’t appreciate coming face to face with a woman—albeit a delusional one—who had acted as though she and
Kaleb were an item?

  “What’s going on?” asked Conor as he slid onto the bench across from him, his eyes locked on the dregs of Kaleb’s eggs. He already had a fork in his hand and was shoveling scrambled eggs onto the prongs like he hadn’t eaten in days. “Where’s what’s her name?”

  “Courtney,” he supplied. “She headed out, but not before she was sure to be obnoxious,” he complained, and his brother’s eyebrows shot up to his light brown, shaggy hairline.

  “By obnoxious do you mean that she acted like someone who was hoping for more than a one-night stand? Because I hate to break it to you, bro, but a lot of them tend to do that.”

  “Yeah, I’m starting to catch on.”

  “Never bothered you before,” he commented as he frowned at the plate he’d practically licked clean. “I could use some bacon.”

  “Don’t hold your breath,” Kaleb advised. “Lucy’s been avoiding this particular table.”

  “That doesn’t sound like her.”

  Kaleb didn’t know what to say so he shrugged and tried not to glance at the subject of their conversation. Out of his periphery, he caught sight of Lucy clearing one of the tables in her section, setting dirty plates and utensils into a busing bin.

  “Ah,” Conor said, knowingly. “Let me guess. Something happened with Lucy last night and Courtney singlehandedly derailed it this morning.”

  “Something like that,” he grumbled, but then realized he’d given his brother the wrong impression. “No, nothing happened with Lucy. Not like that.”

  “Yeah, right, nothing happened but you’re in a sour mood and Lucy’s avoiding you, for absolutely no reason at all.”

  If he knew his brother was going to take every opportunity to bust his balls, he wouldn’t have insisted using all caps that he come to the diner ASAP.

  “How’d the meeting go?” he asked Conor, changing the subject.

  Troy had called a meeting at Quinn Security, which Kaleb had obviously missed since he’d volunteered himself to keep Lucy safe.

  “Talk about sour moods,” he stated as his eyes widened like graphic images from the war he’d returned from had just filled his mind. “Troy is only tolerable when Reece is around, which is basically never in terms of all of us having to suffer his snappish personality.”