For offering to tutor Bryan, and for the advice. I mean it.”
Her bristles softened almost visibly. “Like I said, Josh, I’m no expert.”
“That’s ten times the expert I am.”
Smiling just slightly, she nodded, and he thought he was forgiven for intruding and even for snooping. She didn’t like people looking out for her. He’d been warned about that, he thought, studying her eyes, how green they were, and the stubborn set of her jaw. Arthur had sent federal agents to protect her, but she always spotted them and sent them packing. That was why, he’d said, he wanted someone else, a civilian, and Josh had been the logical choice. Josh and his former partner had a very successful private security firm; they’d gone into business together after leaving the ATF. After the raid. After he’d shot Beth.
A wave of nausea rose and receded with the thought as he stared at her, the curve of her neck, the little pulse he could see beating there after their run. Alive. God, it was a miracle.
In truth, he thought, Arthur Stanton must have had a whole other set of reasons for sending Josh, of all people, on this mission—reasons Josh still wasn’t certain he understood.
“Do I pass inspection?”
He shook free of his thoughts and realized he’d been staring at her. Her cheeks were a little pinker than they had been just from the run. Embarrassed? Flattered, maybe?
“Sorry. You’re…you’re a beautiful woman, Beth. I got distracted there for a minute.” And he still was. Did she look this good to him because she really was as beautiful as she seemed? Or did she only look that way to him because he was so God damn glad to see her alive?
“Thanks,” she said. “I think. Goodbye, Josh.”
It was his cue to leave. Sighing, he stepped outside, and Beth closed the door.
He didn’t leave right away, though. He walked down the road a short distance, then stopped and looked back. He wasn’t used to cases where the client didn’t want to be protected, much less those where she wasn’t even supposed to be aware of her bodyguard’s presence.
Much less those where you don’t particularly want to leave the client’s side, his inner voice scolded.
He ignored it. He liked being able to have someone watching his clients 24/7. And though it was doubtful, there was always a chance that brown car might come back. Its driver could just be waiting for him to leave.
So he would spend a few minutes doing surveillance, just in case.
The brown car didn’t return. But Beth did step out onto the porch. She looked around carefully, up and down the road. And he thought maybe she was looking for the brown car, too, but he couldn’t be sure.
He could be sure, though, of the item she held in her hands. He figured any man who’d worked in law enforcement could spot a gun from three hundred yards away, just by the way a person held it, the shape of the thing, its weight. Identifying firearms in the hands of suspects was something he’d had drilled into him during his training. You didn’t want your agents shooting people for pulling out wallets or cell phones, after all.
He hadn’t lost the skill.
Beth had a gun in her hands. A large caliber semiautomatic handgun. Black, not silver. From here it looked like a .45; a damn big gun, and the scope on the top made it look even bigger. You didn’t see scopes on handguns very often. Avid hunters seldom had them, because avid hunters had much better luck with shotguns. Militarily trained snipers rarely used them, because rifles were so much more accurate. Professional killers used them, because, though huge, they were easier to conceal than a shotgun or rifle would be.
Beth Slocum meant business. She could probably take down a small elephant with that thing.
She held the gun two-fisted, in front of her body, muzzle to the ground, arms extended. She handled the weapon as if she knew how to use it.
She was nervous, he thought. But she was ready, too. Or thought she was.
Whether that readiness would make her safer or put her at greater risk remained to be seen.
Beth looked up and down the street, waiting, watching, listening. She didn’t see anyone. Probably, she told herself, the brown car had been nothing more than a sightseer or nature lover. Probably her blood pressure was going through the roof over nothing.
After several minutes she went back inside, hit the release and let the fully loaded clip drop from the hollow butt into her waiting palm. Then she locked the gun in its assigned drawer, next to the tiny derringer. The key was on a chain around her ankle. She returned the clip to the top of a bookshelf, where she could grab it fast but no one else would ever notice it.
Her telephone was ringing. She snatched it up and whispered hello, half-afraid the man she’d been thinking about—Mordecai, not Joshua—would somehow start whispering to her from the other end.
“Hey, Beth. It’s Julie.”
“And Dawn!” Dawn called from somewhere in the background. Not on an extension, though.
Beth closed her eyes against the rush of sheer pleasure hearing her daughter’s voice brought welling up inside her. God, it was heaven to hear her voice. Warm, sweet heaven. The night of that horrible raid, Dawn had been only a baby. Beth had been shot, certain she was dying, when she’d given her daughter to her best friend, begged her to take Dawn out of that place. And Jewel—Julie now—had done it. She’d raised Dawn as her own, believing, as the rest of the world had, that Beth had died in the raid. By the time Beth found them again, Dawn had been happy, thriving, and calling Julie “Mom.”
And yet…. “Are we private?”
“Yeah. Pay phone, outside a convenience store. Nowhere near us. It’s clean, don’t worry. I’ll put Dawny on after we talk.” Her next words were muffled. “Dawny, go grab us a couple of Diet Vanilla Cokes, will you?”
“Sure, Mom. Be right back. Don’t you dare hang up.”
Beth sighed, ignoring the blade she felt twisting in her heart every time she heard her daughter call her best friend “Mom.” She swallowed the pain, kept it hidden from her voice. “It’s not like it matters. Sooner or later, he’s going to find me.”
“Not necessarily,” Julie told her, just as she always did. “Beth, you have a new name, new town—”
“It won’t matter. His gift is genuine, Jewel. Even if his mind is broken, his gift is for real. He’ll track me down.”
“You have some reason to feel like he’s getting close? You sound…shaky.”
Beth swallowed. “I don’t know. It’s probably nothing. I’m probably overreacting.”
“I have never known you to overreact. Maybe it’s time you accept some of the help the government is always offering—the bodyguards, I mean.”
Beth shook her head. “I don’t trust anyone who works for the government. Hell, it was a government man who shot me.” Her and thirty other teenagers, she thought silently, in a riot that should have been avoided.
