looked away from the wall, too, meeting her gaze with those inky-black eyes that shouldn’t have been able to look warm when he smiled, but did.
At the moment he wasn’t smiling.
“You’re worried,” she said.
“Let’s say I’m reserving judgment about your latest career move. You’ve been consulting for law enforcement.” He spoke the words as though they scraped over his tongue.
“I’m a consultant, Dad. I consult.”
He still eyed her stoically.
“I have no intention of turning down perfectly good money. Besides, I like the work. I feel like Nancy Drew solving mysteries.” She didn’t say that she also got a kick out of the police relying on her.
“You also enjoy being one of the ‘experts’ that prosecution calls on for testimony in court?”
She smiled, hoping to lighten the moment. “It makes me feel…expert.”
“I’d rather see you focus on normal jobs.”
She might have argued that consulting for Jake Trinity wouldn’t be anything resembling normal. She didn’t. Her dad didn’t need to know she’d been so preoccupied with the man that she could see him in memory without even closing her eyes.
Though, in all fairness to her, Jake Trinity had been a good-looking guy with tawny hair and a sculpted bone structure that would look handsome whether he was nineteen or ninety. Ten years ago he’d screamed clean-cut good breeding with his wire-rimmed eyeglasses and preppy name brands.
Mallory remembered thinking he’d been too good-looking to be allowed. Then again, she’d been sixteen at the time and impressionable. Had she not been so impressed with the gorgeous young man who’d popped up on the job unexpectedly, she might never been tempted to approach him.
Nope, time hadn’t dimmed that memory. She still recalled every detail of that night with perfect clarity.
The Commercial-Cam Monitoring Network Prototype.
Ten years ago this video surveillance system had been state of the art. One of Innovative’s major competitors had paid her dad big bucks to acquire the prototype before the system officially launched onto the market.
The job had been meticulously planned and about as fail-safe as any job could be—they were sort of like security systems and people, never one-hundred-percent perfect. But this particular job had been going off like clockwork, until a very handsome man who shouldn’t have been in the building showed up while she secured the egress route for her dad’s escape.
Mallory should have hightailed it back up the rope to her own egress route on the roof. She should have radioed Polish Paul and told him she’d been made, so they could have aborted the job. That had been the backup plan. They always had a backup plan. Getting out of a building was just as important as getting in, Polish Paul always said.
But Mallory hadn’t done either of those things. She’d confronted that handsome young man instead, thinking she could stall him long enough to buy her dad the extra minute and a half he needed to complete the job. And she had. Almost.
But almost hadn’t been good enough. In this instance, almost meant that Jake Trinity had gotten to the silent alarm and changed their lives forever.
Almost everyone had gotten out of the building by the time the police had arrived.
Except for her dad.
He’d lied and said he’d tripped the alarm. She hadn’t believed him, of course. Neither had anyone else. Duke Hunt didn’t make those kinds of mundane mistakes. Mallory knew he simply hadn’t wanted her to feel guilty about ignoring the backup plan. He hadn’t wanted her to feel responsible for him going to prison or for the crew being forced into retirement. And his lie hurt almost as much as knowing she was responsible.
Almost as much as watching him handcuffed and thrown into the back of a police cruiser.
Almost as much as learning that the world she’d always believed perfectly normal wasn’t normal at all. To hear the police and the child welfare people tell it, her world was an illegal and morally ugly place.
That had confused Mallory at sixteen.
At twenty-six, it still did.
She was Duke Hunt’s beloved daughter, well-loved and cared for. She’d always thought being loved was a good thing whether she’d grown up on the fringes of the underworld or not.
With maturity, she’d come to understand that the real world wasn’t quite as black and white as the authorities painted it. The real world was an unpredictable place filled with good guys and bad guys. Not the classic depiction of white hats and black capes, either, but a place where the boundaries between right and wrong were often blurry and the bad guys could be more charming and gallant than the good guys.
No, her upbringing hadn’t been conventional, but burglary aside, it hadn’t been morally bankrupt either.
Which had led to another life-altering change.
During a visit to the prison where she’d gotten to see her dad through a four-inch-thick sheet of protective glass, she’d been informed that they were all retiring from the family business. The way her dad saw it, four years in prison wasn’t such a raw deal after an illustrious twenty-odd-year career. He’d made Mallory and all of his crew promise to turn their lives around and go legitimate.
Thanks to his business acumen and foresight, he’d provided the means for her and his crew to do exactly that. Nowadays, his crew was sitting pretty with legitimate businesses. Polish Paul owned a tattoo parlor; Eddie Gibb a pawn shop. Only Opal, who’d opted to spend her share of the nest egg on a nice house and expensive plastic surgeries, didn’t own a business. She worked as Eddie Gibb’s office manager instead, squeezing work for Mallory into her free time.
All in all, life was good.
Except for this love-hate thing she had for Jake Trinity.
She loved the fact that she and her friends had gone legit. Well, reasonably legit. She hated being responsible for making the decision that had changed all their lives.
Both occurrences began and ended with a very selfrighteous man she couldn’t seem to get out of her head no matter how much time passed. He’d had a dramatic impact on her life, and Mallory had never been able to decide whether to love him or hate him for his interference. Taking this job for TSS would give her the perfect opportunity to decide which it would be.
The way she saw it, Mr. Straight-and-Narrow would benefit from being knocked on his holier-than-thou ass. And if he wound up taking a hard look at his own morals to see if they held up under temptation, then she’d be honored to provide the temptation.
“Damn.” Her dad’s voice blasted away the image of Jake Trinity quicker than a bait pack exploding in a rigged safe.
Mallory smiled, released the last handhold and tagged the ceiling to end her climb. “Hunt Junior rules the day.”
She didn’t signal her belay
