Mine's to Kill (6 page)

She had driven down to Colt’s place. She parked across the street so she could have her car in view, and then she walked over to his building and waited for him to buzz her in. Once she was upstairs he already had the door open for her. He was standing there, this time in sweats and a t-shirt. His tennis shoes were laced and she saw a jacket along with his keys on a nearby chair.

“What do you think you’re doing?” She signed. He looked as if he were getting ready to go out, but he hadn’t cleared that with them. She had just sent the other agent away when she arrived—or more like the other agent was already getting ready to pull away from the curb by the time she gave him
 
the silent wave from outside Colt’s building.

“I need to get out of here and run.” He signed as if she should have known that. Well she did know that, or more like she had an idea, she just needed confirmation before she lit into him with ground rules.

“You don’t go for runs and you don’t leave this house without an escort.” His lips tugged upward on one side. “What?”

“I didn’t realize the government was in the business of providing escorts. Who picks up the tab on that?”

She shook her head. “Smart Alec,” she signed angrily. “The point is unless I am on you, you don’t leave.” She noticed the quirk of his lips again and she knew exactly where his dirty little mind was going. “As your agent of protection,” she clarified. “Now, no running today.”

“I need to go for a run,” he restated. “I’m going with or without you.”

She could shoot him and then he wouldn’t be able to run, but this was Witness Protection which was a completely different ballgame than the assignments she handled while working the special Homeland Security unit. “Let me change my clothes and I’ll go with you. That’s mandatory,” she assured him because if he tried to go without her she would shoot him.

He shrugged. “I can wait.” He tilted his head toward the couch. “You’re on the couch, but I gave you extra blankets and I put that divider over there so you can have a place to change your clothes. And of course there’s a bathroom down the hall—just the one, sorry.”

She smiled. He had done a lot to try to fix the area up for her, which told her he might be more accommodating than he would be trouble. The divider was nice. It was dark wood. With the corner of the room it was in she could change without even a hint of being visible from the window if he decided to open the shutters. Plus, she had privacy from the front and a little from the other side. She could make do with this setup. She had lived out of her suitcase before so she could do it now too.

“Thanks,” she looked back to him. “Can you give me fifteen minutes?”

He nodded. “Just make sure you try to keep up with me while we’re running.”

There was something wickedly devious in his stare. “Oh, trust me; I have no problem keeping up with you.” She was a runner. She could have run track had she not been goofing off so much in high school. Her grades were really good, but her after school activities…well, they weren’t exactly the best. She knew that back then too, but she was too stupid to pay attention to the need to do things right, smart and with attention to her own safety. She was just too angry with the world—with her mother, to care back then.

“Is it okay if we run the park? It’s not ideal for me after what I saw, but it’s safer than the trail right now.”

She didn’t like the idea of running in the park. The killer could be back there waiting. “I saw a lake out back; how about if we run around that?”

He nodded as he picked her bag up from the stone tiled floor and carried it over to the couch area. She hadn’t expected him to do that, but he had anyway. When he put her bag down on the floor he turned to her and waited for her to acknowledge him. She was going to have to keep in mind that she couldn’t converse with him like everybody else. She had no problems communicating with the deaf, but she didn’t have to do it very often lately and sometimes she would forget to stay attentive. She was so used to people just conversing with her while she did ten other things that getting back to singular communication was going to be hard for her—good for her, but still hard. Her job mandated that she be able to handle a conversation while shuffling briefing files, answering phones, checking monitors and watching out for potential hostile enemy activity. Inside these walls she was going to need to focus on Colt, outside, however, her job would be focused solely on keeping him alive and safe.

“I’m sorry about the other day.”

“It’s—”

He stopped her from signing by grabbing her hands. She was just going to tell him it was okay and there was no need to apologize, but then she remembered how much it infuriated her when people cut off her sentence and she shouldn’t have done that to him.

“I was rude,” he signed one handed while still holding on to her hand. He held it just a little while longer before letting go and finishing his apology. “I was just so angry at the other guys for treating me as if I were less than nothing—as if I didn’t deserve respect simply because I couldn’t hear them, and I took that anger out on you. I am sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she smiled. “I have worked with a great deal of people and I know that sometimes when the agents need an interpreter they’re less…cordial,” she spoke diplomatically. His lips quirked upward and she could tell he had a different terminology in mind. “We’ll start fresh,” she signed. “I’m Special Agent Autumn Kitsap. You don’t have to add the formalities; just call me Autumn.”

“Colt,” he extended his hand and shook hers.

When he released her hand she started signing again. “Just because I look small doesn’t mean I’m weak. I can protect you, but at the same time I can be your worst enemy. If you make my job difficult I will make your life hell,” she assured him. He laughed. His voice was deep and rich and smooth like freshly poured caramel. When he sobered enough to sign again he smiled at her, with a devious glint in his eyes.

“I’m sure you can,” he patted her on her arm. “Honestly, you scare me more than the other guy. You looked too sweet to be all honey. I look forward to studying your every curve,” he signed those words and she felt butterflies flutter in her stomach. What the heck was wrong with her? He wasn’t talking about her body—although a man telling her he looked forward to studying her curves did not exactly conjure up the image of him talking about getting to know the curves of her personality.

“I’ll be ready once you are,” he gave her one last wicked smile before walking away. Somehow, that look and that smile made her think maybe he was talking about the curves of her body. God, she hoped not. Dealing with protecting him was one thing. Dealing with fending off her wayward lust and his advances would take this assignment to a whole new level of difficult.

God, the man was cute. He wasn’t necessarily that super beautiful man that most women swooned over, but she wouldn’t deny that she liked what she saw. He had a certain air of confidence that was sexy, and if the art on his walls and what she had seen in the information she found while researching him was any indication of the brevity of his work she would say he was a passionate, skillful artist. That passion gave him another air of sexy. He had to be determined and persistent to meet that level of goodness with his work. She wasn’t an artist herself, but she knew creating at the level and the quality his work was at didn’t come just by wishing it to be so.

Autumn pulled on her fitted running pants with the boot cut bottom, her black and pink running shoes, a yellow polka dot sports bra and an ivory tank top. She rummaged through her bag for her sports jacket and found the one she wanted, a pale yellow zip up the front with gathers in all the right places to show off her curves. She brushed her hair back into a ponytail and stepped out from her changing location. He had to still be back in the back room because she would have heard him had he tried to leave without her.

She quietly walked down the slender hallway, looking at the art on the wall as she went. She got lost in one of the paintings of a man embracing a woman, her face was hidden and so was most of her body, all that showed was leg and arms—naked leg and arms, wrapped around a man that from the back looked very much like the artist himself. The hair, and the angles of his side-turned face told Autumn that Colt had painted himself and he had probably done so with the woman he loved. He was taken, so there, she told herself. There was no chance she would go after a taken man anyway so whatever thoughts she was having about wishing she were the woman in that painting had to go out the window. “My goodness,” she mumbled. “It hasn’t been that long since you had a relationship.” But it had been that long. It wasn’t about sex, or wanting sex, it was about wanting the companionship and love. When she worked with the Homeland team she had friends she could relate to, but that’s all they were—friends. She wanted walks in the park, intimate dinners and conversations that went into the early morning hours when it was still so dark outside that visibility was limited to the reach of the streetlight. She wanted those things, but her job had always taken priority. Her job had always been front runner ahead of her social life. How could she bring anybody into the long hours, crazy schedules and the danger her job brought with it? She couldn’t. No man would want that. What she wouldn’t give for a night at the symphony where she could get dressed up in one of those formal dresses she never got a chance to wear unless she were undercover at some gala event stalking another traitor to the country. She just wanted a night where she could be completely relaxed and feminine without worrying about who she might have to shoot to save somebody else. Given her current position she would say that night was still a long way off. “Maybe when you retire,” she mumbled and then snorted. “Like that will ever happen.” She looked at the painting again and sighed.

“You are ready.”

She jumped, startled by the masculine voice. Her eyes widened. He could talk. But he was deaf, she was sure of that. She had studied and learned that deaf people, some who went deaf later in life, still could use their voice, but his was almost as if he wasn’t deaf at all.

“Too loud?” He signed.

She shook her head no. “You surprised me,” she signed back to him. He laughed and she would admit she liked the deep tone of his voice, like the G-string on a top of the line cello the man could make her purr with just a few words.

He continued to sign to her and she wished he would use his voice again, but asking him to do that seemed rude to her so she would stick to his method of choice for communication, besides, he was keeping her on her toes with her own knowledge of signing. She was licensed to interpret so she kept on top of that anyway, but she was a firm believer in the “use it or lose it” mantra and she didn’t want to lose it.

“I went deaf at twenty-one,” he told her. “I still have my voice, obviously. I had to learn to not speak as if I’m trying to let my voice reach China. It was hard. When I first went deaf I thought if I spoke loudly enough I would hear it, but,” he shrugged. “Such is life.”

She smiled. “You have a beautiful voice.”

“I’ve forgotten what it sounds like,” he said. “No matter how long I live without hearing I’ll always miss what I used to hear. I think it would have been better if I were born this way. You can’t miss what you never knew.”

She wanted to hug him because he seemed so vulnerable, but that was not part of her job and she had to keep things professional. She had to remind herself of that. “Did you like music?”

“I’m an artist, of course I liked music,” he shook his head at her.

“You sound like a cello—the G-string to be exact. Can you remember that?”

He shook his head no. “But I remember what it feels like. My ex-girlfriend, many years ago, she used to play. I spent some time with the cello between my legs even though I never got the playing part down.” He laughed before his face seemed to turn to stone. The ex-girlfriend must have been a bad memory for him because his easy going nature he had just shown her had vanished for a stone wall of indifference.