3
“What was that all about?” Tansy wanted to know when they were far enough away from the guardhouse that Conrad couldn’t hear what they were saying.
John glanced over his shoulder to where Conrad was still standing, watching them walk away. “He just bribed your dog.”
“He gave her a treat,” Tansy said, and put the dog down on the path.
“He tried to buy her acceptance.”
“That’s ridiculous. And anyway, she doesn’t like men.”
Mimi pranced over to John and did a flirty sort of wiggle with her hind quarters while she looked up at him with big, brown eyes.
John’s mouth twitched. “She seems to like me all right.”
“There’s no accounting for taste,” Tansy informed him haughtily.
“I guess not. How long were you involved with Just Conrad?”
Involved? “Oh, no.” Tansy shook her head. “I don’t get personally involved with the help.”
John’s voice was dry. “Of course not.”
She glanced at him. “It’s not because I’m a snob.”
“Sure.”
“It’s not! Are you allowed to get romantically involved with the people you work with?”
“There aren’t any women in the teams,” John informed her. “And I’m straight, so getting involved with Max or Rusty would be kind of weird. For them, too.”
Well, yes. “But in the Navy in general? You said you spent some time on submarines before you applied to the SEAL teams. Weren’t there women on those subs?”
He sounded reluctant to admit it. “A few.”
“Were you allowed to get involved with them?”
“We weren’t supposed to. That don’t mean it didn’t happen. A lot of sailors find themselves a cruise boo.”
“A cruise... what?” Boo?
“Boyfriend or girlfriend,” John said. “Not the same person as the boyfriend or girlfriend on shore.”
Tansy felt her face twist. “Oh, ick. They cheated?”
He shrugged. “Six months is a long time to go without when you’re used to getting some regularly.”
They walked a few paces. Tansy wondered whether he was used to getting some regularly, and whether he’d ever had a... cruise boo. Or a girlfriend on shore, whether he cheated on her or not. But they probably didn’t know each other well enough yet for her to ask.
“Well, I never had anything to do with Conrad. He works for my father, and that kind of relationship isn’t a good idea.”
“He looked like he thought it might be.”
“We spent a lot of time together,” Tansy admitted. “I guess maybe he got used to me. Last year, after I came back from the Mediterranean...”
She slanted a look at him. It was nice not to have to explain. When she said ‘the Mediterranean,’ she knew that John knew exactly what she meant. He nodded.
“I moved back in here with my dad. Before that, I had my own place.”
“I wondered about that,” John said. “You’re, what? Twenty-five? Twenty-six?”
“Twenty-seven, actually. Two months ago.”
“Congratulations,” John said.
“Thank you. For a couple of days last year, I wasn’t sure I’d make it, so getting a year older actually felt kind of good this time.”
He didn’t say anything to that. “So when you came back from the Mediterranean...”
“I moved back in here with my dad. We both needed the company. I was scared of living alone—what if someone broke in and kidnapped me? No one would even know it happened, because there wasn’t anyone else there—and my dad wanted to make sure I was safe. There was nothing he could do while I was on the yacht, and when I came back, I guess he felt he had to try to make up for it.”
“Makes sense,” John said.
“So when I moved back here, he gave Conrad the job of making sure I was safe. He would have given me Mick, I think, if I’d asked, but Mick has been my dad’s chief of security for a long time. I wasn’t going to take Mick away from him.”
“It was nice to feel safe,” Tansy said. “To know that if someone tried something, there was a big, strong, armed security guard just a few steps away.”
John glanced at her. “How come Conrad isn’t guarding your body anymore?”
Tansy shrugged. As shrugs went, it was pretty good, if she did say so herself. It might even make her look like she hadn’t cared. Like giving up Conrad hadn’t been one of the hardest things she’d ever done. “Nothing happened. It seemed self-indulgent to keep a bodyguard I didn’t need.”
John glanced at her. There wasn’t anything accusing in his eyes, but even so, Tansy wondered whether he was thinking that she’d made a life out of being self-indulgent. He wouldn’t be wrong, after all.
“Chances are he wouldn’t have been much help if something did happen, anyway,” John said.
“He’s competent,” Tansy told him. “Mick wouldn’t have hired him otherwise.”
“And yet you asked for us.”
Him. She’d asked for him. She didn’t really care about the others, although she was glad they were here, so her father would be safe.
John was still on the subject of Conrad, though.
“I don’t like his face,” he told her, with a scowl over his shoulder.
Tansy looked around, too, but Conrad had gone back into the guardhouse. “Why not? He looks like he should be on a magazine cover.”
“Going around with you,” John said, “he probably has been.”
Tansy bristled. She stopped in the middle of the path and put her hands on her hips. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He glanced at her and kept walking. She had no choice but to follow, so she could hear what he said. “You get around.”
She scowled at his back. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’ve seen pictures,” John said, making air quotes around the headlines as he recited them. “‘Tansy Leighton and Hot Hollywood Heartthrob cuddling in Cannes. Tansy Leighton and Italian Stallion hot and heavy on the Riviera. Tansy Leighton and Brainless Brit—’”
Tansy couldn’t help it, she burst out laughing. “Brainless Brit? Is that poor Nigel you’re talking about?”
He gave her a reluctant smile, and that dimple made an appearance. “Some inbred dude with a high forehead and a rabbity chin. You were going around with him a couple of years ago.”
“He’s married now,” Tansy told him. “They have a baby. And he’s anything but brainless. Hot Hollywood Heartthrob—I can’t believe you called him that!—turned out to be gay, and deep in the closet.” Until someone dug up a sex video of him with another guy, and outed him. “And Italian Stallion was one of those guys I told you about, who was only interested in my dad’s money. Conte de Something-or-other... except Italy hasn’t recognized their nobility for almost a hundred years now.”
John didn’t say anything.
“That all happened before Kareem. I haven’t been on a single magazine cover since then. Or at least not since everyone got their fill of what happened in the Mediterranean and stopped writing about it.”
John nodded. “I saw that, too. Lots of press the first month.”
“It was all anyone wanted to talk about for a while. It’s no fun, being ‘that girl who got kidnapped by terrorists.’”
“Must have made it hard,” John commented.
“It did. Talking about it just made it harder and harder to forget. Reliving all the details in every interview...”
She shivered.
“I’m sorry,” John said.
Tansy forced a smile. “It’s all right. You—all of you—came and got me out of there. Before anything really happened to me.”
“I wouldn’t say that, exactly.”
“They didn’t hurt me,” Tansy said. “They pushed me around a little when they first came onboard, but Kareem told them to leave me alone, and they did.”
She grimaced. “I should have realized, right then, that he was in on it. Why else would they listen to him? Why else would they let him send the crew to shore?”
John didn’t answer, and she continued, “But I know what they could have done. And they didn’t. I wasn’t beaten. I wasn’t raped. I wasn’t starved. They just locked me in a room for two days and let me worry. There are a lot of people a lot worse off than me.”
The walked a few yards in silence.
“I didn’t mention you,” Tansy said. “In the interviews. They said—the people I talked to at the hospital, they were FBI or Homeland Security or something like that—they said I couldn’t mention you. That nobody was supposed to know the SEALs or any part of the US military had been involved. They said I should pretend I had escaped on my own.”
He nodded. “A lot of what we do is covert ops. I’m sure everybody realized you didn’t kill four people and swim to shore without help, but we’re not supposed to talk about it.”
“Doesn’t it bother you that you’re out there saving the world and someone else takes the credit?”
He smiled. “I’m not doing it for the glory.”
“Why are you doing it?” Something must compel him to put his life on the line every day so that other people—like her—could be safe.
“Because someone has to,” John said, and looked around. “Where are we?”
“That’s the stables over there.” Tansy pointed at the big building. “Do you ride? We could take a couple of horses out on one of the trails and see some of the rest of the neighborhood.”
John hesitated.
“It’s all right,” Tansy said, understanding. “Not everyone enjoys horses.”
“I don’t mind horses. You learn all sorts of things in the Navy.” After a second he added, “Although to tell you the truth, I do better with a camel.”
A camel? Really? “Where did you learn to ride a camel?”
“I’d tell you,” John said, “but...”
“You’d have to kill me. I get it. You can’t talk about it.”
He shrugged. Muscles moved nicely underneath the tan T-shirt. “I wouldn’t kill you. I just won’t tell you. But there are only so many parts of the world where they use camels for transportation, so you should be able to make a pretty good guess.”
Somewhere in the Middle East. And Tansy didn’t really care if she got any closer than that. “I’m afraid we can’t accommodate your desire for a camel. But we’ve got a couple of horses. Several of them are old and placid.”
“Old and placid is just about my speed,” John said, with another of those smiles that took her breath away. “Lead on.”
Ten minutes later they were both in the saddle, and on their way down a bridle path that started on the Leighton estate and then moved into common land beyond the rear gate. To JB’s annoyance, there was no guardhouse at the back of the property, and no lock on the simple gate that was there. Anyone wanting to come in from the front had to show their credentials at the guardhouse where Just Conrad sat. But anyone who didn’t want to do that, could just walk the bridle path onto Leighton property, and straight up to the house, with nobody even noticing they were there.
“What’s the point of having Just Conrad up at the road if your six is hanging out?”
“Excuse me?” Tansy blinked blue eyes at him from the back of a chestnut mare she’d called Stella.
JB rephrased his question. “What’s the point of having a guard up on the road if anyone can walk right up to the house from the back?”
“The only people who come through the back are friends,” Tansy said. “Visitors announce themselves at the gate, but friends walk through the woods to the house.”
Nice world view. “What’s to stop someone who isn’t a friend from walking through the woods to the house?”
“Well...” Tansy seemed to think about it. “Nothing, I guess. I mean... nothing. There’s nothing there to stop them. But no one ever has.”
“First time for everything,” JB said, and reached for his phone. He needed to talk to Max, and have Max talk to Mick, and get some kind of security back here, whether it was someone from Leighton’s army, or Uncle Sam’s, or something else.
And that’s when the shot came.
He heard the crack of the rifle. He didn’t hear or feel the bullet. He had no idea where it came from, or where it landed. It didn’t strike him, but that was all he knew in that moment.
The placid mare Tansy had given him to ride—and privately, JB had to admit the old girl was just about his speed—took off down the path in a flurry of hooves. For a second, JB was sure he was going to fall over backwards, and he tightened his knees automatically and managed to hang on to the saddle. Behind him—farther behind with every second—he could hear Tansy scream.
Was she hit? Was she hurt?
But no, over the thundering hooves he could make out the words. “Hold on, John! I’m coming! Hold on!”
But I’m supposed to save you! flashed through his mind.
And then he slipped sideways out of the saddle and had to roll to avoid being trampled by the pounding hooves, and he hit the ground with a bone-jarring crunch, and after a couple of rolls, ended up flat on his back, looking up at the sky, realizing that he wasn’t breathing and that might mean he was dead.