As a diversionary tactic she glanced to where he was perched precariously on the wall beside her, and asked, “Are you doing okay? How are you holding up? This is a long climb.”
Her dad peered down the sixty feet of man-made rockclimbing wall separating them from their belay partners below. “I’m going all the way today, babe. How about you?”
“If there’s no challenge, I don’t see the point.”
Today’s rock-climbing challenge had limits. She and her dad both were harnessed and roped with their belay partners clinging to their lines, ready to control the descent if either one fell. As she barely tipped the scales at one hundred and ten, a fall wouldn’t be much of a challenge for her belay partner, either.
Following her dad’s gaze down to the high-tech foam floor far below, she experienced a rush of vertigo that made her tighten her grip on the handholds and suck in a tight breath to chase the thrill that coursed through her.
She smiled.
While indoor rock climbing might not be the greatest of challenges, it was a great workout.
“That’s my girl,” her dad said. “No guts, no glory.”
“No risk, no reward,” she agreed.
“No pain, no gain.”
That comment made Mallory slant her gaze his way again. Her dad winked, alleviating any cause for worry with one charming glance.
Although Duke Hunt had been scaling man-made walls with her three times a week ever since the Vertical Playground rock-climbing gym had opened in their hometown of Atlanta, the fact still remained that he was a man on approach to his sixtieth birthday. Like her dad, she wasn’t one to dwell on impending maturity, but Mallory did have to face the occasional reminder that he was getting older. With a lifestyle as active as theirs, it would have been impossible to ignore the fact.
Though her dad was just as healthy and attractive as he’d always been—a man who women routinely went to pieces over—the passage of time had marked him physically. Distinguished silver shot his black hair at the temples. Laugh lines around his mouth and eyes scored his olive skin more deeply than ever.
But despite this evidence of age, Mallory only saw her dad, a timeless, larger-than-life man who laughed easily, lived life on the edge and loved her more than anything else in his world.
“No risk of failure, no fun.” She contributed a new addition to their collection of motivational sayings.
Lifting her gaze to the remaining thirty feet of wall shooting above her head, she reached for her next handhold.
Each time she planted a booted foot on a hold, she shifted her weight and thrust her body upward. Her muscles strained, and she forced herself to concentrate so she didn’t misstep.
As a sport, rock climbing was half technique and half muscle. Though she was barely of average height, the muscle part of the equation wasn’t an issue. The more Mallory practiced her technique, the more strength she built.
Which didn’t mean squat at seventy feet.
The muscles in her thighs had rebelled a good while ago. Of course, she’d arrived at the Vertical Playground earlier than her dad to warm up by bouldering—challenging climbs that she made without the benefit of protection or aids. She relied solely on her technique and strength to get her to the top and down again.
The top in that instance had only been twelve feet, but the activity had contributed to the sweat now soaking through her shorts and ribbed T-shirt.
“Well, tell me what Trinity said.” Her dad steered the conversation right back around to the one subject she didn’t want to discuss.
“I haven’t talked to him yet. We’re consulting after I’m done in the gym.” She didn’t sound much less winded than her dad, each word coming out as sort of a breathy grunt.
“Did he detail what he’s looking for in his proposal?”
“He wants me to pinpoint the holes in the prototype of a new security system he’s designed.”
“How does his new system look? Anything interesting?”
Interesting meant cutting edge. Staying on top of the latest security developments was a crucial aspect not only of Mallory’s security consulting business, but of her dad’s.
They were two sides of the same coin. Both their business cards read Hunt Security Specialists. Both their business cards had a phone number. Anything more would have been overkill since their reputations grew each year, a tribute to the power of client satisfaction and word-ofmouth referrals.
But that was where the similarities ended.
Mallory handled only legitimate jobs, so she didn’t have bars looming in her future. She consulted about security for commercial businesses and worked as a troubleshooter for the engineers who designed the systems. She’d also been working with several law-enforcement agencies recently, projecting how professional burglars might have entered various properties to carry out crimes.
Irony at its finest.
Her dad…well, for Duke Hunt, old habits died hard. Like Mallory, he consulted about security, but he consulted for professional burglars while they planned their heists.
On the fringes of the law, but not prosecutable. And there was no denying that her dad’s consulting business was a natural fit. Before his forced retirement, he’d spent his adult life working as a professional burglar, specializing in infiltrating commercial properties and cracking safes.
He’d trained Mallory at his knee from as far back as she could remember. By age thirteen, she’d taken her place as a member of his crew, starting off by scouting egress routes and disabling telephone lines. Eventually she’d graduated to disarming motion and heat sensors and had been training to monitor video stations when they’d been busted.
As Duke Hunt’s only child, she’d had an unconventional upbringing that she wouldn’t have traded away one second of—except for the four years her dad had spent in prison.
All because of her run-in with Jake Trinity.
“How’d Trinity hear about you?” her dad asked.
“From the work I did with Triple Safe.”
Duke shot her a smile that epitomized a pride in her abilities that far surpassed normal parental standards. “You were prime on that job, babe.”
She returned the smile. She had been prime on the Triple Safe job. The company had lucked into a chance to bid on a large account here in Atlanta. They’d contracted her to consult, and she’d blown meteor-sized craters in their proposal and helped them redesign their entire system. They’d won the account, established themselves in the industry and generously added to her portfolio and reputation in the process.
“Trinity’s prototype has a few new features. Of course I won’t have a bead on how new until I see the specs,” she said, hoping a minimum of information would satisfy his curiosity. “I did notice in his proposal that he was minimizing the risk of false alarms by using passive
