COLE (Dragon Security Book 1) (19 page)

Donovan

Getting Kate out of the hospital was an ordeal all of its own. Ash bowed out—lucky guy!—and Daniel pulled Veronica out into the hallway. Kate stared at me for a long few minutes, then she groaned as she slowly sat up.

“Are you going to leave so that I can get dressed?”

“You can dress in the bathroom.”

“You aren’t afraid I’ll sneak out the window?”

“We’re on the tenth floor. If you want to go out the window, I say more power to you.”

She shot me a dirty look just as the door opened and the nurse walked in.

“I need to remove your IV,” she said, all business as she tugged on a pair of rubber gloves. “If you’ll just lie back and try to relax.”

A flash of fear crossed Kate’s face as she did as she was told, laying back against the pillow again and turning her face to the window. I leaned against the wall and watched as the nurse easily and professionally slid the long needle out of the back of Kate’s hand and covered the wound with a Band-Aid.

“Done,” she said.

Kate kept her face averted, holding her hand against her chest as the nurse disposed of the needle and removed her gloves. She glanced at me, a flirty smile slipping over her thin lips. I nodded, but then my attention moved back to Kate.

“Still not good with blood?” I asked after I heard the door close.

Kate stiffened. “Don’t act like you know anything about me.”

“Then I’m supposed to forget I haven’t known you since I was seven?”

“You might have known me once upon a time, but you don’t know me anymore.”

She threw her legs over the side of the bed, still cradling her hand, and stood. She hesitated, as if she wasn’t sure where she was going next.

“I can ask Veronica to come help you,” I offered.

That earned me another hard glare. “I’d rather have you help me than her.”

“She’s…interesting.”

“She must be really good in bed since that’s the only reason I can imagine why Daddy would marry a woman like her.”

“How long have they been married?”

“Six months. And I’ll be surprised if it lasts another six.”

I had to agree with her. I’d only known her a few minutes, but the way Daniel looked at Veronica didn’t seem to bode well for a long marriage.

Kate crossed to the tall, plastic wardrobe stuck in a corner of the room and pulled out her clothes, a pencil skirt and simple, white blouse. She glanced back at me, a little bit of a blush on her cheeks.

“Stay there.”

“That’s my job.”

She rolled her eyes, then disappeared into the bathroom.

I pulled out my cell phone and called the head of the prep team, Carson, to check on their progress at her house. He assured me they were finished and on their way out. The cameras were up and working, routed to David’s computers back at the compound. David had a program that monitored the cameras and motion detectors set up by Carson’s team. If anything were to happen at the house, David’s program would alert me instantly and set off an alarm to which David could respond. It was a system that had saved more than a few of my targets since it was implemented a year ago. David was constantly tweaking it, so it was more and more efficient each time we used it.

Thank God for computer nerds.

She came out of the bathroom a minute later, so beautiful that I couldn’t take my eyes off of her for a moment. She’d always been beautiful. Tall and slender, with curves that were subtle, yet incredibly feminine; she was the object of so many teenage dreams that Joshua and I used to joke about the gun his father should have bought. But again, most of those boys were burned pretty significantly by Kate herself whenever they tried to get too close. Yet, there was something different about her now—something that had been missing back when we were teens—that called to something deep inside of me that I’d thought I’d successfully destroyed when I left town.

“Stop staring at me,” she said, as she gathered the rest of her stuff.

“Just watching over my target.”

“Do you stare at all your female clients that way?”

“Sometimes.”

The blush I’d noticed earlier was more profound now. She glanced at me and quickly looked away as she drew her bottom lip between her teeth. I’d forgotten about that, about how she chewed her lip when there was something, or someone, she was thinking about having for herself.

Interesting.

“Ash said that they were putting cameras in my house.”

“They did.”

“And that you’d have to stay in my house with me until this is over.”

“Yes.”

“I hope you don’t expect me to play hostess to you. My fridge is empty, and I don’t even know if there are sheets that fit the bed in my spare bedroom.”

“I can take care of those things.”

“Can you?”

“I’ve done this a few times before, Kate.”

She nodded as she stood and slung her bag over her shoulder. “I’m sure you have. But this is the first time I’ve had a bodyguard following me around, so excuse me if I’m not quite sure how it works.”

“Just think of me as an old friend come for a visit.”

She snorted again. “As if I’d have you in my house if Daddy hadn’t insisted.”

She started for the door, but she sort of swayed, as if she’d been hit by a sudden wave of dizziness. I moved up behind her and grabbed her upper arms, pulled her back against me so she had something to lean on. I felt her knees start to buckle and felt her push back into me, but then her spine stiffened and she straightened up again.

“Are you okay?”

“Let go of me,” she said, jerking away from me.

“Kate…”

“Let’s go.”

With that, she was out the door, strutting down the hall as if nothing had happened.

Daniel was waiting, sitting on the edge of the same bench he and I had shared. Veronica was gone, a relief for everyone, I’m sure.

“Promise me you won’t let anything happen to her,” Daniel said more to the floor than to me.

“I promise.”

It wasn’t a promise I made lightly. But it was one I meant to keep.

***

She wasn’t thrilled to learn her car was still in the parking lot at the bank and that it would remain there until this issue was resolved. She also wasn’t thrilled to get into the black SUV Ash had left for us. She stared out the window all the way to her house. I followed the GPS coordinates Ash had programmed into the system, glancing at her from time to time just to make sure she was still there. There was a knot in my stomach that was tight and uncomfortable, a sort of nervousness that I’d thought boot camp had beat out of me. Women don’t make me nervous. I usually know where I stand with any woman—no matter the circumstances. But this one? She was my personal dynamite, and I wasn’t ever sure when she would go off.

“Your dad still has his law firm?” I asked in an attempt to kill the silence.

She shrugged.

I knew the answer, of course. I kept tabs on the family over the years despite the fact that I never intended to contact them again. I wanted to know they were doing well, that life was treating them better than it had in the last five years I’d known them. First Louise, Joshua and Kate’s mother, had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at thirty-five. It was a quick and ruthless illness that turned her into a ghost long before death finally came. And then, less than four years later, just as they were putting their lives back together and looking forward to the future, Joshua was killed. They deserved happiness, and it offered me a small condolence to know that they did have it, in a small way.

I hadn’t known that Daniel remarried. But I followed the cases his firm handled these last ten years, some quite notorious cases that underscored the reputation he already had as one of the country’s top litigators. Not only that, but cases that had made him quite wealthy, too.

I wondered if that could have something to do with what happened at Kate’s bank. It seemed more likely that it was just a hit on the bank. However, I wasn’t quite convinced that was what it was. Why would a bank robber hit the bank after hours, after everyone was gone and there were no employees to open the vault? After all, the cash drawers would have been emptied when the bank closed, so the vault would have been their only option. So why attack then? Why not wait until morning, to wait for those moments when the employees were setting up for the day and the vault was open? Why not wait until it would be a much simpler attack, a snatch and grab?

Could it be that one of Daniel’s former clients, maybe someone he hadn’t been able to get off, had gone after Kate in retribution?

I glanced at her, wondering what it was she might have unwittingly gotten herself into. And then I shook my head, shaking away that line of thought. It wasn’t my job to find out the who or the why. It was my job to make sure she made it through this unhurt.

We pulled into the driveway of a modest brick house on the outer edge of Santa Monica. It had a small yard, a few rose bushes growing low under the front windows. And there was a one-car garage that Ash had left the remote to in the SUV’s cup holder.

“Where did you…?”

I pulled the SUV carefully into the garage and reached to grab her arm to keep her in her seat until the door closed completely behind us.

“I’d rather you not make a target of yourself.”

She jerked her arm away. “You don’t have to manhandle me. You could have simply asked me to wait.”

“Would you have listened?”

She didn’t answer, but the look she shot me was all the answer I needed.

She climbed out and marched toward the door that led into the house. I followed closely behind, checking my phone to make sure an alert hadn’t come in from David’s program. Before David’s program, I would have swept the house before I allowed the client to walk in, but the program made that unnecessary. If anyone had gotten into the house between the time Carson’s team left and we arrived, I would know it because the program would have known it.

The garage door opened into the kitchen. It was a galley-style kitchen with counters on either side. Kate didn’t pause as she made her way through, turning the corner at the archway into a large, welcoming living room. There was an overstuffed couch and a comfortable looking recliner situated in front of a plasma television on the wall. There were no adornments, no pictures on the walls, no flowers in fancy vases, none of the personal touches that I would have expected of Kate. There was no clutter at all, just the furniture, like a showroom in a retail store.

Kate continued through the room and up a narrow hall. I should have stayed in the living room, but I followed.

“That’s your room,” she said, gesturing to the first door on my right. “And the bathroom, obviously,” she said as she pointed to a door further up the hall on the left. Then she pushed through the door at the end of the hall, sighing as she went to the king-sized bed and threw herself onto it.

I stood in the doorway, taking in the heavy furniture, another television on the wall, and the tall windows that were darkened by black drapes. Again there were no adornments in this room. A couple of books on the bedside table. A few clothes scattered over the back of a very uncomfortable looking chair in the corner. The only personal touch seemed to be the generic treadmill in the corner.

But then there was one picture in this room. On the bedside table, nearly hidden by the books. It was a photograph I immediately recognized because I was the one who took it. It was a picture of her and Joshua with their arms around each other that I took a couple of weekends before graduation, before that night. They were laughing, staring into each other’s eyes with a sense of affection that you could only find in certain siblings. In twins.

Looking at that photo was like having someone reach in and tear a piece of my soul away.

“I’m safe in my own bedroom,” she said. “I think you can leave me alone now.”

It was almost a physical effort to pull my eyes from that picture. When I finally focused on her, I saw her glance back and look at the photo, too.

She sat up, her hand moving to her head as she did.

“I might have to put up with you following me around. I might even have to put up with living with you for a few days. But I don’t have to put up with you invading my personal space.” That glare was back, that look that held all the hatred I knew she felt for me. “Please leave the room.”

“Just so you know, if you try to sneak out the window, I will be alerted by the motion detectors our team set up. So I suggest you don’t try it.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

I studied her face for a second, some part of me unable to simply walk away. There was something about looking at her that was like coming home. Like I’d finally come full circle in my life. Logically, I knew nothing had changed. I knew she would never forgive me for what she thought I failed to do the night her brother received the injuries that killed him. I knew that, even though the boys who actually delivered the blows were serving their time in jail, she believed I’d gotten away with something. But being here with her, standing in her home, offered me some sort of hope that I had been afraid to seek.