Chapter 51
Five months later
“Eddy’s Angels,” the receptionist said into the company’s landline receiver. Lynn Franklin was a dark-haired beauty with a killer smile, an astronomical IQ, and a black belt in I-can-kick-your-ass-any-day-of-the-week.
Eddy left the door standing open as she headed back inside. It wouldn’t hurt business at all if passersby caught a glimpse of the brunette behind the serviceable front desk. Besides, it was a beautiful day outside. In a few months, D.C. would be as hot as a Bogotá nightclub, but right now, it was a pleasant sixty-two degrees.
“How may I save your day?” Franklin asked the caller.
“Ed,” Crystal said, just stepping out of an office down the hall. Their little workspace wasn’t cheap, but the colonel had offered a sizeable loan. It was impossible to guess how he had even known she was considering starting the agency. “I’m taking off.”
Eddy nodded. “Franklin has your itinerary?”
“As close as I could foresee it. I’ll be flying into Miami and renting a car, but it’s hard to say where things will go from there.”
Crystal Hatch was buxom, brash, and a bit of a misandrist. Apparently, being cheated on by two husbands could make a woman a little bitter. If there was anyone who would bring in Bruce Oxer, deadbeat dad, it was Hatch.
“Keep in touch,” Eddy said. “Oxer’s ex-Army. Don’t underestimate him.” In fact, several of their clients were connected to the military in one way or another. Apparently, the colonel was sending business her way. And all along she hadn’t even been aware her father was capable of feeling guilt, much less able to atone for his sins. “If you need backup, let us know immediately.”
Behind her, Franklin greeted someone, but Eddy kept her attention pinned on the red-headed Crystal. It wouldn’t do for her operatives to fall off the map, and this one was as independent as a mountain lion.
“Will do,” she said now.
“I mean it,” Eddy warned. “Call me.”
Crystal grinned. “Looks like you have a guest,” she said and glanced, brows raised, over her boss’s right shoulder.
Eddy turned.
Linus Shepherd stood not twelve feet away. He wore a long-sleeved plaid shirt with pearl snaps, and jeans that rode low on his cowboy lean hips. His boots looked to be snakeskin.
“Hey,” he drawled.
Eddy caught her breath then chastised herself for the weakness. “Mr. Shepherd.” She made sure her voice was low and casual. “I thought you’d be in Oklahoma.” She didn’t mention the fact that she had wondered a hundred times if Durrand had allowed him to return to Colombia. But it was none of her business. She had done her job, accepted her pay, and moved on. No point letting things get personal. If she had learned anything in Bogotá, it had been that.
“So…” Tall, tightly muscled and fully healed, Shepherd had a grin that could take down most women at fifty yards. Eddy Edwards was not most women. That was the second thing she had learned in Bogotá. “I see ya hung up your own shingle.”
She raised her brows at him. “Are you in need of a bodyguard, Mr. Shepherd?”
His grin amped up a notch, screwing up that take-no-prisoners smile. “So far today, my body remains unmolested.”
“Need someone to find a missing person or…” She shrugged. “Make a person go missing.”
“Holy catfish, girl” he said. “You’re a regular Eddy Krueger.”
“Not at all,” she argued. “But there are a lot of people who wish to be left alone. We can usually convince their antagonists to do just that. Is someone bothering you?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Matter a fact, there is. Name’s Gabriel Bertram Durrand.”
Her breath hitched in her throat for a moment, but she forced a smile. “I’m afraid I can’t help you with that,” she said.
“Aren’t ya even gonna ask me what the problem is?”
“No,” she said and turned away.
“Listen…” He grabbed her arm. Franklin raised dark brows, silently questioning.
“I got it,” Eddy assured her. The little brunette nodded and turned back to her computer.
Shepherd shook his head. “Is there a factory manufacturin’ gorgeous, killer women around here somewhere?”
“I’m afraid I’m very busy, Mr. Shepherd. So if you’ll excuse me—”
“He needs you.”
Her stomach pitched, but she retained her exterior calm and shook her head. “No,” she said. There seemed little reason to pretend she didn’t know whom he referred to. Gabriel Durrand was the virtual elephant in the room. “He doesn’t.”
“Why do ya think that? Because he didn’t chase after ya?”
“Chase after me?” Her voice was too loud. She lowered it and laughed. “I’m sure you can find your own way out,” she said and turned toward her office. She wasn’t hiding, she told herself. She was making a dignified exit. Far better than cursing like a sailor. Light years ahead of bursting into tears. She’d done enough of both of those things in the weeks following her return from Colombia.
But he trailed her into her office. “Hey, I know he’s shit at communication. Hell, he’s barely human, but…” She turned once she’d reached the far side of her desk. Files lay perfectly aligned on its cross-cut grain. Shepherd glanced out her window to the flowerbeds below. “He ain’t cut out to be a mercenary.”
“What?”
“A guy named Feinstein is looking for soldiers.” Anger jumped in his jaw. “I figure about half of them will come back alive. Maybe a quarter of those will still have all their limbs in the right places.”
Panic reared up inside her, but she pushed back the fear, tamped down the nausea. “He doesn’t care to see me,” she said. “He made that perfectly clear.”
“Yeah, he’s an ass,” Shepherd said and chuckled. “But to be perfectly fair, ya did say you’d shoot ‘im if he followed ya.”
She fiddled with a manila folder. A Mrs. Eileen Frederickson wanted them to find the daughter she’d given up for adoption fifty-five years earlier.
“Jenny?” Shepherd said, bringing her back to the moment.
“Yes, well…he’s been shot before.” She breathed in a deep lungful of air and let it out slowly. “He didn’t seem all that averse to the experience.”
He chuckled. “He’s a tough son of a bitch. I’ll give him that. Too tough, maybe. Wouldn’t know how to apologize if he set your hair on fire.”
But he had apologized. In a letter. A short but crisp missive sent with her check. Eddy, I’m sorry to have misled you, but at the time, I felt I was out of options. I have contacted Andrew Richard Mender and strongly suggested that they consider you for any position you desire. You will make a fine operative. Gabriel Durrand.
The memory almost made her cry again. They’d shared a bed. Shared their lives. Almost died together, Goddammit! And all she got was a you’ll make a fine operative? Well fuck him!
Shepherd stared at her. “You’re right,” he said finally and threw up his hands. “You’re right. Dumb bastard doesn’t know what’s good for ‘im.”
She nodded.
“He cost me the woman of my dreams. Comes ridin’ in there like John Wayne. Always has to be the hero. Doesn’t think about what anyone else needs. What anyone else wants.”
He was right, she thought, but a couple of memories disagreed. She glanced out the window again and gritted her teeth to keep the words at bay, but they escaped. “You were handcuffed to a bed,” she said.
“Yeah.” He chuckled. “And what red-blooded guy don’t want that?”
“They would have killed you.”
He chuffed a laugh. “I had it all worked out. Carlotta would have set me free. We would have had us the time of our lives. Probably had us a little buckaroo on the way by now.”
“Or you would have been hacked into tiny pieces and thrown in the Yari River.”
He shrugged as if either option was acceptable. “The point is, Durrand shoulda been mindin’ his own business. He’s an egomaniac, is what he is. Selfish bastard’d turn on his own mother for a chance to play the damned knight in armor role.”
“Selfish?” She stared at him. Her fingers had curled around the engraved letter opener her mother had given her. “Are you kidding me?”
“No, I’m not kiddin’. Shit, you should be madder than anybody. He lied to ya, didn’t he? Dragged ya halfway around the world just so he could prove what a hero—”
“He almost got killed saving you! If he was any more loyal he’d be canonized on the south lawn of the White House.”
He snorted. “Tell that to Oxer.”
She felt the blood leave her face, but they couldn’t be talking about the deadbeat dad Crystal Hatch was tracking. She didn’t believe in coincidence. “What?”
“Oxer,” he said. “He was a buddy of ours, but Gabe turned his back on him quick as—”
“Bruce Oxer?”
“Yeah. You know him?”
She didn’t answer. “Why’d Durrand drop him?”
“I don’t know. Something about abandoning his son or something.” He shook his head. “Durrand’s loopy about kids. Crazy about his niece. Makes him kinda sappy when…” He shook his head. “Anyway, point is, he came outta that whole Colombia deal smellin’ like a rose.”
“Smelling like a…” She laughed against her will. So what if Durrand had been the one sending business her way over the past few months. She knew he was capable of feeling guilt. And he should feel guilty, only... “He was shot, twice, chained to a wall, left…” Her voice broke. She cleared her throat and went on. “I would have never made it out of there without him. And neither would you.”
He snorted. “Don’t let ‘im fool y’. Yeah, it maybe seemed like he woulda moved heaven ‘n’ earth to keep you safe. And no, he ain’t looked at another woman since” — he rolled his eyes— “forever! But that’s probably just ‘cause he’s shippin’ out in two days. Lockin’ up his cabin in Smithville. Fine with me if he comes back in a body bag. It’s no more than—” he began, but her hands were already grabbing her bag, her feet already turning toward the door, though her mind had no idea what she was planning. “Hey. Where ya goin’?”
“Franklin, call me on my cell if you need me. If you can’t reach me, Candida’s in charge.”
“Got it.”
“See ya later, Jen,” Shepherd called. His boots rapped against the floor behind her. In a moment, he was leaning against the front desk. “Hey.”
The receptionist raised dark brows at him. He smiled, grin crooked with self-effacing charm.
“And here I thought Tulsa had a rope ‘round the prettiest girls on the planet.”