Her Spy to Have (Spy Games Book 1) (3 page)

She was lifting Kiefer’s slippery, round little frame from the pool and drying him off with the towel so he wouldn’t track water through the house when the patio screen slid back and footsteps could be heard on the deck behind her.

The girls’ cries of “Daddy!” quickly shifted to squeals of “Uncle Garrett!” and an even higher level of agitated excitement, if that were possible. Kiefer struggled free and darted for the deck, leaving Isabelle with the damp towel clutched in her hands.

Garrett
. A sense of impending doom crawled around the pit of her stomach.

I have two sisters
.

Never, in a million years, and given the circumstances under which they’d met, would she have considered the possibility he’d arrange for her to work for one of them.
Please let it not be him.

She turned around.

And there he was.

She hadn’t seen him since Bangkok. This time, instead of CSIS, everything about Garrett Downing screamed money. He still wore the Tilley shorts, but the Ecco sandals and ugly tourist shirt were gone. He’d replaced them with soft leather, slip-on driving shoes and a dove-gray polo shirt. On his left wrist he wore a diver’s wristwatch that no doubt cost more than she’d earned in the entire past year. Familiar hazel eyes, as direct and all-seeing as she remembered, met hers over the children’s heads, just for a second, but long enough to ratchet up her anxiety level. He didn’t seem at all pleased to see her, which struck her as odd, since her being here hadn’t been her idea. But it was his look of surprise as it traveled from her face to linger at the glittering navel piercing above her bikini bottom that annoyed her, although she couldn’t say why.

He’d escorted her to the airport and seen her off, just as he’d said he would. She’d been met at the Ottawa airport by an off-duty RCMP officer who’d shown her his ID and politely asked for her passport, then chauffeured her to a downtown hotel and said she could order room service if she was hungry. The next day Peter Mansford, a Nova Scotia Member of Parliament, had arrived to see her, and after a two-hour interview, offered her a position as nanny to his three children for the summer.

She’d liked Peter at once. He had a quiet manner, very polite, and when she’d met his wife Cheryl, she’d liked her, too. Still, it wasn’t as if she’d had a whole lot of choice in accepting the offer. While his name had never been mentioned, it was clear Garrett intended to keep close tabs on her. Right now, pleasant as it was, Isabelle was under what was unquestionably an unofficial house arrest.

She wrapped the towel around her hips so she wouldn’t feel quite so naked. Either she was under arrest or she wasn’t. There was only one way to find out. She crossed the wet grass between the pool and the deck, and while the children mobbed their father, thrust out her hand to his guest.

“Mr. Downing,” she said. “We meet again.”

* * *

It turned out that Isabelle Beausejour had hidden layers. He didn’t recall her being quite so…attractive.

The entire package appealed to him, he decided, once the initial shock wore off. On the surface, there was nothing remarkable about her, but there was nothing displeasing, either. Average height, average features, average coloring. Brown hair, brown eyes. If she were a bird, she’d be a pretty little wood thrush. The toned body was what caught him off guard. So did the navel jewelry.

He’d asked Peter to check her references and find her work. He’d told him nothing more than that. To say he hadn’t been pleased when he’d first heard the news that Peter and Cheryl had hired Isabelle was an understatement of colossal proportions. She was a smart girl. They might as well have hung a sign around her neck that read I’M UNDER SURVEILLANCE. He’d felt sorry for her predicament, yes, but not sorry enough to want her around his own family.

His brother-in-law hadn’t ended up as his riding’s Member of Parliament by missing opportunities, however. He’d viewed the situation through a different filter.

“I checked her references, just like you asked. I had the RCMP run a background check, too. Hell, they even consulted Interpol, given how much she’s traveled. When someone with excellent references, who’s well-traveled and speaks four languages fluently, with no criminal record, lands on my doorstep needing a job when I need a nanny, I’m not slamming the door in her face. It’s a win all around.”

The RCMP and Interpol, and therefore Peter, didn’t know she’d tried to sell her passport, though. Garrett had gotten an RCMP officer friend to pick her up at the airport on his own time, and take her passport from her, because he didn’t want word to get out that CSIS had any interest in her. Neither body knew how deeply involved in organized crime her father, Marc Leon Beausejour, had become. He was only a small fish in a big, murky, cesspool of a pond, true, but hopefully, he’d lead CSIS to bigger catch.

Garrett’s greatest concern right now was how much involvement Beausejour’s daughter might have with organized crime too, and any potential danger she brought to his family. He’d searched Interpol’s databases himself and found nothing on her. Peter’s reports claimed she’d been an exemplary employee to date. The children liked her. She never went out alone, although distance and a lack of a driver’s license no doubt accounted for that. She was quiet, and for the most part, did very little to draw attention to herself. When the children went to bed, she watched television or read books in her private suite. She had a preference for Russian literature. Cheryl had loaned her a laptop and Garrett had been monitoring her online activities for weeks. She’d contacted no one, not even friends. There appeared to be no significant other in her life.

So here he was, about to spend a month of vacation visiting his sister and digging for dirt, because Bangkok had been a bust. He’d found the Thai maintenance company that had been brokering the stolen weapons systems, but the only clear Canadian link appeared to be Isabelle’s father, and he hadn’t shown up for his last scheduled meeting with them. It was as if Beausejour had dropped off the face of the earth. If he was alive he had to be somewhere in Europe, where he could move across borders without having to present a passport. CSIS had already investigated the possibility he held more than one, and under different names, but no database photos had matched.

Isabelle’s movements over the past five years had been easier to track because of her employment history, but before that, other than an occasional trip to Montreal, they were anyone’s guess. Garrett was counting on at least some of her father’s recent travels reflecting hers, especially around holidays and her birthday. Unfortunately, on her last birthday, she’d been in Bangkok.

Where her father hadn’t shown.

He took the slender hand she offered him. “Well, well, Ms. Beausejour.” He skated his eyes over her in a way that would have had his sister slapping him if she’d been here to see, but he was curious to see how she’d react. Maybe simple friendliness was the wrong approach to take with her if he wanted information. “What a pleasant surprise.”

He meant the bikini, all skinny strings and tiny triangles of turquoise, and she had to know it, but if she did, she didn’t let on.

“It’s a very small world,” she replied. She turned to Peter. “The children and I were about to go for a swim, but I think they’ve lost interest now. Would you like me to get them dressed?”

Peter lifted Chelsea, who’d been tugging on one of his fingers, into his arms, and kissed her plump little cheek before answering. “I’ve got some paperwork to do. I bet Uncle Garrett would love to go for a swim with them, though. Wouldn’t he, guys?”

What Garrett would love more than anything was to spend time alone with Isabelle, figuring out what made her tick, but separating her from the children wasn’t going to be easy. Peter knew that, so he’d handed him an excuse to stay close to her for the afternoon.

“Just let me go drop off my suitcase upstairs and change into my swim trunks,” Garrett said.

He went to get his belongings from where he’d left them in the kitchen, then dragged his suitcase up two flights of stairs to the third floor. The Mansfords’ house was a roomy, three-story dwelling on property owned by a third generation family farm in the middle of the province’s largest dairy region. Peter had gone to law school, and then entered politics, while two of his older brothers ran the family business. Cheryl, Garrett’s sister, worked in the nearby city of Halifax as a public defender with one of the law firms.

The third level of the house had two suites of rooms—one for long-term guests, like Garrett, and the other for any live-in help the Mansfords might hire, such as Isabelle. Each suite had a sitting room, bathroom, tiny kitchenette, and bedroom. The door to Isabelle’s suite was closed.

He tried the knob. The door wasn’t locked, nor had he expected it to be. He decided to have a quick look inside before she could hide anything she didn’t want him to find. He propped his bag against the wall and opened the door.

The sitting room was neat and tidy, and identical to the one he’d be occupying, right down to the furnishings. There was a sofa, a flat screen TV, and DVD player. A closed laptop sat charging on the small glass coffee table. Next to it was a dog-eared copy of
Anna Karenina
. To the right of the room were the kitchenette and bathroom. Straight ahead was the bedroom.

Garrett poked around. Everything in the suite was neat and tidy. Isabelle didn’t have many possessions, or if she did, she didn’t carry them with her. He found her ancient canvas duffle bag in her closet, the one he’d helped her drag to the airport in Bangkok, along with a few articles of clothing on hangers. In the bathroom, her toiletries lined up neatly on the counter beside the sink. A clear plastic, zippered makeup bag had been tossed carelessly in the cupboard with the towels and spare rolls of toilet paper.

It was obvious Isabelle wasn’t a hoarder. High maintenance, either. He tried to imagine his sisters surviving for more than a day with so few belongings. This visit, however, wasn’t so much about unraveling secrets by prying into Isabelle’s life as it was to win her trust, and hopefully track down her missing father.

He closed the door to her suite behind him and opened his, heading straight to the bedroom. From its wide, double-hung windows, he had a view of the entire backyard. He dropped his suitcase on the king-sized bed and peered through the lace curtains.

It didn’t take great observational powers to see that Isabelle was, indeed, good with the children. She stood on the side of the pool, her head tipped to one side, nodding occasionally, her dark ponytail sweeping one bare shoulder while she absorbed whatever Beth was explaining to her. He couldn’t help but grin. It took a special kind of patience to listen to the bossy seven-year-old’s long-winded and often roundabout stories.

She started to laugh at whatever Beth was saying to her. A wide, genuine smile transformed her face from average to something astonishing, revealing yet another one of her startling layers.

He let the curtain drop back into place.

No matter which way he tried to wrap his head around it, he couldn’t figure out what her ultimate game was. Either she was innocent of any wrongdoing and her life totally sucked, or she was as deep in the cesspool as her father. He wished he believed it was the former, but he couldn’t get past her attempt to sell that passport. She’d known what she was doing. If he hadn’t caught on to what she was up to that night, she’d have succeeded. A part of him regretted not getting a chance to witness the performance she’d planned to put on at the Embassy.

He changed into his swim trunks and grabbed a pool towel from the linen closet in his bathroom, then headed downstairs and into the family room. He could hear Peter in his den at the front of the house, talking on the phone. He eased open the screen on the sliding patio door and walked to the edge of the pool.

Within seconds, he had what seemed like a horde of screaming children hanging off his arms and legs, clinging like burrs.

“Did you guys multiply or something while I was inside?” he asked, grabbing Kiefer around the waist with one arm and flipping him upside down so that his chubby legs flailed in the air. “Because when I left, there were only three of you. Now there’s got to be at least fifty.”

“There’s still only three of us,” Chelsea assured him, her green eyes wide and serious. “Four, if we count Izzy.”

He set Kiefer on his feet and glanced Isabelle’s way. She was treading water in the deep end, sunlight glinting off her wet hair. He raised his eyebrows. “Izzy, huh?”

“Isabelle is a bit of a mouthful for young children. Peter and Cheryl have no problem pronouncing the unabridged version. You haven’t had any trouble so far, either.”

In other words,
Don’t call me Izzy
.

He wasn’t normally a difficult person. He got most of his informants to open up to him by being the “good” cop, not the bad one. Women usually liked him. He liked them, too. But there was something about Isabelle and her quiet, unflappable nature that made him want to shake all that calm. The last time he’d had the urge to be a jerk with a girl had been in the second grade. He’d had a huge crush on a cute blonde in the third row who didn’t know he existed.

Since he wasn’t eight years old anymore, and he couldn’t put gum in her hair, that left calling her Izzy—but when the timing was right.

Right now was about having fun.

* * *

“Last one in the pool is a floater,” Garrett said.