The Professional (16 page)

He looked up and caught Payne’s knowing gaze. “I see you’ve
come to the same conclusion that I did,” Payne told him.

Guy nodded, his mood suddenly somber. “Getting out will help,”
he said. It had to. And God knows that was the truth for him. There wasn’t a day
that went by that he didn’t think about Danny, about the part he played in his
friend’s death. If he’d only… Aw, hell, Guy thought, abruptly shutting down that
line of thinking.

He could “if-only” until hell froze over and the outcome would
still be the same—Danny Levinson, best friend, beloved son, brother, uncle and
cousin to a family which still grieved his loss, would still be six feet under
in Arlington National Cemetery.

He’d still be gone.

And no matter what Garrett, Payne or Jamie ever said, Guy knew
he’d never stop believing that it was his fault. As the senior officer, he’d
been in charge. He couldn’t take credit for the success of the mission without
also taking blame for the loss. And no one would ever convince him otherwise.

It was that simple…and that complicated.

For the time being, they were each three days and three favors
away from freedom—a brand-new life devoid of mistakes and if-onlys—and God knows
they all needed it. Especially Jamie, who seemed to be taking it the hardest. An
image of Danny’s crooked grin suddenly rose in his mind, causing a barbed-wire
of tension to tighten around his chest.

They all needed it, all right. They needed it badly.

1

Atlanta
Three
months later…

“I
T
’
S
HAPPENED
,”
Jamie Flanagan
announced grimly. He snagged a chair from a nearby table, whirled it around and
straddled it with a dejected whoosh of air that effectively caught his best
friends’ combined attention.

In the process of licking the hot wing sauce from his
fingertips, Guy looked up. “Dammit, we both warned you about this. Which one is
pregnant? Christy? Liz? Monica?”

“My money’s on Monica,” Payne said easily. “She was
clingy.”

“Had to change the security code to the building because of
her, remember?”

Payne nodded, absently taking a pull from his beer. “She was a
pain in the ass, I remember that.”

Guy shot Jamie a pleading look. “It isn’t her, is it, Flanagan?
Say it isn’t her. She’s, er… She’s not mother material.”

Equally annoyed and horrified, Jamie swore hotly. He should
have known they’d leap to the wrong damned conclusion. Considering they’d both
been riding his ass about his “serial” dating, it only stood to reason that
they’d immediately suspect a woman problem.

“Nobody’s pregnant, dammit,” he snapped. “How many times do I
have to tell you bastards that I’m careful?” He exhaled loudly. “I know how to
apply a friggin’ rubber, for chrissakes. It’s Garrett. He’s calling in my
favor
.”

Guy blinked. “Oh.”

Payne stilled and his ice-blue gaze sharpened. “What does he
want?”

Jamie let out another long breath, uttered a short disbelieving
laugh and shook his head. “He wants me to go to Maine for a week to guard his
granddaughter.”

“Guard his granddaughter?” Payne repeated. “Guard her from
what?”

That had been the first question he’d asked as well, and the
answer he’d gotten had been irritatingly ambiguous. Not that he hadn’t taken and
followed orders on less information. He’d been trained to obey, to trust in the
authority of his superiors, and yet something about this felt…
off
. He’d tried to chalk it up to his new civilian
mentality, but he suspected that this gut hunch had more to do with intuition
than new programming.

“Garrett says there’s evidence that a personal enemy of his
might be targeting her.”

Guy frowned. “Personal enemy?”

“What sort of personal enemy?” Payne asked. “I mean, I don’t
doubt that he’s got one—a man doesn’t get to his level without pissing people
off. Still…” he added skeptically.

Jamie couldn’t help scowling. “That’s just it. He wouldn’t say.
Evidently he’s got someone in place through the weekend, but needs me to step in
on Monday.”

“We’ll have to rearrange some things,” Payne said, predictably
jumping into logistics mode. “Guy and I will have to split your cases.”

“It’s piss-poor timing, that’s for sure,” Jamie said, signaling
the waitress for a beer. A midtown staple, Samuel’s Pub had quickly become their
traditional beer and sandwich haunt. Good Irish whiskey, good prices, Braves
decor. What more could a guy want? Jamie muttered a hot oath. “Hell, some notice
would have been nice.”

Guy rocked back in his chair and grinned. “But that would be
completely out of character for Garrett.”

Too true, Jamie knew, but it didn’t change the fact that he’d
be leaving his friends and partners in the lurch three months out of the gate in
their new business venture. Thanks in part to all three of them, Ranger Security
had taken off better than any one of them could have expected. Jamie inwardly
grinned. Turns out hi-tech personal and professional security was in high
demand—and quite lucrative.

Thanks to Payne’s investment capital—though he seemed to resent
his impressive portfolio at times, Payne had “come from money” as Jamie’s
grandmother used to say—they’d secured top-of-the-line equipment and a prized
office building in downtown Atlanta. The lower level housed the offices and the
other two floors had been converted into apartments. Since he and Guy had no
aversion to sharing space, they’d taken the second floor and Payne had moved
into the loft, or the Tower, as they’d come to call it.

Since Payne had taken on so much of the financial burden, it
only seemed fair that he have a place to himself. Not that Jamie and Guy weren’t
paying their way, but their money had come from a sizable mortgage whereas Payne
had merely “transferred funds.” Regardless, provided business continued to grow,
he and Guy should be operating in the black within a few years, and in his
opinion, that was pretty damned good.

“So the granddaughter is in Maine,” Guy remarked. “What does
she do?”

Ah, Jamie thought, inwardly wincing. Here came the fun part. He
passed a hand over his face and braced himself for sarcasm. “She, er… She runs a
de-stressing camp for burned out execs—Unwind, it’s called—and well, Garrett’s,
uh…” He conjured a pained smile. “He’s already arranged for my ‘stay.’”

A disbelieving chuckle erupted from Guy’s throat. “A
de-stressing camp? He’s sending
you
—Captain
Orgasm—to a de-stressing camp?”

Payne coughed to hide his own smile. “To guard his
granddaughter, no less. Talk about sending the fox in to guard the henhouse.” He
snorted. “Garrett must have lost his mind.”

“Oh, no,” Jamie corrected. “He’s as crafty as ever. He issued a
curt guard-her-but-no-funny-business order and promised to—” Jamie pretended to
search for the exact phrase, though he remembered the ghastly threat verbatim.
“Ah, yes. ‘Cut my dick off with a dull axe and force-feed it to me’ if I so much
as looked at her with anything more than friendly interest.”

Payne grinned. “So your reputation precedes you, then.”

Jamie winced. “He might have mentioned Colonel Jessup’s
daughter.”

And honestly, there had been no need. After that horrid
debacle, Jamie hadn’t needed any additional threats to stay away from
daughters—or any relative, for that matter—belonging to superior officers. And
it really wouldn’t be hard. There were plenty of other available women around.

Neesa Jessup had seduced
him
, not
the other way around, and yet when Date Three had rolled around and he’d
attempted to break things off, she’d gone to her father and cried foul. It had
been a huge ugly mess and, given his particular reputation, no one was readily
inclined to believe him. Guy, Payne and Danny had, of course, but they’d been on
a short list. Needless to say, since then he’d been a lot more…selective.

Payne took another mouthful of beer and swallowed. “So I take
it you’re going in undercover?”

Jamie nodded. “That’s the plan.”

“I still don’t get it,” Guy said, his shrewd gaze speculative.
“How are you supposed to guard her if you don’t know where the threat is coming
from?”

Precisely, Jamie thought, still smelling a rat. “He told me
he’d give me an update once I’m in place, but the gist of the order was to stick
to her like glue.”

Guy scowled. “And that’s not going to look suspicious?”

Jamie shrugged. Just thinking about it made his head hurt.
“Hell if I know,” he muttered tiredly. It sounded odd, but not altogether
difficult, so that was a plus, right? In all honesty, it would be a relief to
simply be done with it. This favor was his last niggling tie to a life he’d left
behind. Had to leave behind to preserve his own sanity.

Even as early as last year, if anyone had told him that he’d
wanted to be anything other than a United States Army Ranger, he would never
have believed it. The military had given him purpose, manned him up and given
him an outlet for what he now recognized as disappointment toward an absentee
father.

Thanks to a hardworking mother and a hot-headed Irish
grandmother who weren’t averse to boxing his ears when the need arose—an
unexpected smile curled his lips, remembering—Jamie had been a lot better off
than a lot of the boys he knew whose fathers
had
been around.

Like Guy, Jamie thought, covertly shooting a look at his
friend. Guy’s old man had been a royal bastard, a hard-assed proponent of the
“spare the rod, spoil the child” mentality. Unfortunately that had been the
extent of his religious tendencies. He’d been a mean-spirited drunk who, on more
than one occasion, had sent his son to the Emergency Room. Guy hadn’t heard from
the man since he was in his late teens. Frankly, Jamie had toyed with the idea
of looking the old man up and thrashing the shit out of him. Someone needed to,
at any rate.

Jamie’s gaze slid to Payne. Payne’s father had been at home
while Payne was growing up, but from the little things that his friend had
shared over the years, he might as well have not been. Payne’s father had always
had one eye on the door and the other on another woman. His parents had
apparently stayed married for Payne’s benefit, but Jamie suspected Payne would
have had a lot more respect for both of them if they’d merely divorced and done
away with the infidelities.

They finally ended the marriage when Payne graduated from high
school and since then, Payne’s father had systematically married and divorced
women who were craftily garnering another portion of his inheritance. He needed
to be thrashed as well, Jamie decided, but for different reasons.

Quite frankly, all three of them had been raised in
unconventional households and the older Jamie got, the more he suspected that no
one’s family was normal. Normal was as real as Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

Normal didn’t exist.

And after Danny’s death, he wasn’t so sure that the ideas of
right
and
just
weren’t myths also. If they existed, if they were true, then why hadn’t Danny
walked away from that ill-fated mission with the rest of them?

Being in the military, death was a distinct possibility. One
didn’t enlist without knowing—without
believing
—in
the greater good and being willing to die for that cause. Jamie, Guy, Payne,
Danny—they’d all felt the same way.

Being a Ranger was more than a career. It had been a labor of
love. Brave men had essentially committed treason when they’d formed this
country. Thomas Jefferson had been in his early thirties when he’d penned the
Declaration of Independence. That still amazed him, Jamie thought. So young and
yet so wise. A vastly different world and set of values from where they were
today. But that was a whole other issue.

At any rate, their very freedom was based on bravery, on
loyalty and on a belief in a cause that so many, quite frankly, didn’t
appreciate and took for granted. There were thousands of men in marked and
unmarked graves all over the globe who’d boldly gone to war and sacrificed their
lives for this country. Jamie would gladly give his own…and yet living with the
grief of a fallen friend somehow seemed more difficult than dying himself.

Something had changed that night. Not just for him, but for Guy
and Payne as well. Rationally they’d all known the risks. But knowing it and
dealing with it had turned out to be two completely different things. Did Jamie
still believe in his country? In his service? In the merit of even that
particular mission?

Yes, to all of the above.

He just didn’t believe he could watch another friend die.

Danny, a brother to him in every way that counted, had taken
his last breath in Jamie’s arms. He’d watched the spark fade from Dan’s eyes,
felt his life slip away like a shadow…and Jamie had felt a part of himself die
on that sandy, blood-soaked hill as well.

The familiar weight of grief filled his chest, forcing him to
release a small breath. Whatever Garrett wanted him to do had to be easier than
that, by God. It had to be.

“Look at it this way,” Guy finally said in a blatant attempt to
lighten the moment when the silence had stretched beyond the comfortable, a
still too often occurrence. He shrugged. “She could be ugly.”

Payne nodded, smiling encouragingly. “It’d definitely be easier
for you to guard an ugly woman, Flanagan. Less temptation.” He selected a celery
stick. “What’s her name?”

Smiling in spite of himself, Jamie rubbed the bridge of his
nose. “Audrey Kincaid.”

“Pretty name,” Guy remarked thoughtfully. “But that doesn’t
mean anything,” he added magnanimously, the smart-ass.

“Right,” Payne said. “She could still be ugly.”

Not even with the luck of the Irish, Jamie thought, but it
didn’t matter. She could look like a friggin’ supermodel and he wasn’t going to
touch her with a ten-foot pole.

Actually, he had a grim suspicion who the granddaughter might
be and he knew for a fact that not only wasn’t she ugly, but in fact, she was
drop-dead instant-hard-on gorgeous. The Colonel only had two pictures of family
in his office—one Jamie knew for a fact was Garrett’s wife because he’d met her
several times.

The other was of a young blue-eyed beauty about the right age
with long curly black hair. It was a candid shot of her and an enormous brindled
English Mastiff. Considering the dog wasn’t lunging for her throat, but sitting
docilely by her side, Jamie could only assume the animal was hers.

His lips quirked. Quite frankly, if that was who he was being
sent to protect, he imagined the dog could do a better job of it than he could.
Furthermore, he hoped like hell it wasn’t her, because for reasons he’d never
really understood, he’d always been drawn to that picture, of the woman in it
specifically. Every time he’d visited Garrett’s office he found himself staring
at it—at
her
. There was an inherent kindness in her
eyes, a softness about her that he found particularly compelling. That trait
combined with the obvious intelligence and just a hint of mischief made her face
the most interestingly beautiful one he’d ever seen.

No doubt guarding her would be absolute torture, particularly
given Garrett’s orders. Jamie felt a grin tease his lips. He was pretty attached
to his penis, thank you very much, and there wasn’t a doubt in his mind that
Garrett wouldn’t make good on his threat if Jamie put so much as a toe out of
line.