But he had no time for speculating about other women at the moment.
“You, too,” he replied, aware it was a disconnected nicety but unable to help it.
“I was about to send Taylor off on her first assignment,” Draven said in a casually chatty manner completely unlike him. “Nothing like starting out doing a favor for Josh himself.”
That snapped Tony to attention. Was there something else going on at Redstone besides what he’d come here about? “Josh has a problem?”
“One of his people has a problem, so yes, you could say that.”
Tony felt the adrenaline spurt ebb a little. He looked his boss in the eye, a task more easily said than done to almost anyone who had to deal with the steely, tough John Draven.
“Lilith,” he said.
Draven’s brow rose again. “You know?”
“Beck,” he said briefly, knowing that would explain; Logan Beck, the newest—well, now apparently second newest—member of the security team, was engaged to Liana Kiley, Lilith Mercer’s assistant.
He was also Tony’s partner in situations that required a twoman team; they’d worked well together on Logan’s case, and although he generally preferred to work alone—as did Logan—Tony was now amenable to the pairing when necessary.
“I’ll handle it,” Tony said.
Draven lifted a brow. “What?”
“This one’s mine.” At Draven’s expression, Tony turned back to Taylor, who was watching this exchange curiously. “Would you excuse us for a minute, please?”
The woman’s glance flicked to Draven, who, after a split second, gave her a barely perceptible nod. She didn’t miss the signal and left without a word.
“She’s going to be good,” Draven said when Tony didn’t speak right away.
“Yeah,” Tony muttered.
He began to pace the small room. Now that he was here and had his boss’s attention, he had no idea what to say. He should, he realized, have thought about this a little more before he’d burst in.
He should have thought about it a little more, period, he thought. Had he learned nothing from Lisa? Had he forgotten standing in the morgue, looking down at her lifeless body, knowing she was there because of him?
I’m trying to stop something like that from happening again, he told himself as Draven continued to speak of the woman who had just left.
“She did some good work at Redstone in Toronto. She was ready to move up.”
“Yeah.”
Silence seemed to echo in the room while Tony continued to pace and tried to figure out what to say.
“You got back last night?”
“Yeah.”
He left it at that. The Hawk IV that had picked him up in Caracas had actually touched down a little after 1:00 a.m., so technically this morning, but he knew Draven already knew that. And he’d already filed his report in flight, so he knew Draven knew the final result of his investigation into the local kickback problem as well.
“You know,” Draven said at last, “I’m told I talk more than I used to these days, but I’m in no way comfortable carrying on a whole conversation myself. What do you want, Alvera?”
Tony stopped mid-stride and spun around to face his boss. “I want this job.” There, he thought. It was out.
“What job?”
“The one you were going to give her,” he said, jerking a thumb toward the door where Taylor had exited.
Draven frowned. “I don’t think this is anything that requires your…unique skills, Tony.”
“Nothing does, at the moment.”
Not really his decision to make, but he knew it was true. Lucky for him, Draven was in a flexible mood this morning.
“There may not even be a real problem,” his boss said. “It could just be a fluke, coincidence. Accidents and pranks do happen.”
Not to Lilith, Tony thought.
“It’s probably nothing, but Josh wants to be sure,” Draven said. “You know how he is about his people.”
“Yes. I do.”
No one knew better than he did about Josh Redstone. Tony doubted there was another man on the planet who would have done what Josh did after an angry, scared, knife-wielding gangbanger had tried to mug him outside an L.A. hotel. Tony hadn’t even realized he was trying to rob the wunderkind whose Redstone Aviation was beginning to soar, had seen only a man headed toward a limo, which to him had meant money and made the man a target.
He hadn’t expected that the man would fight back, and well enough to have his sixteen-year-old ass on the pavement in less than ten seconds.
And he never would have dreamed that that man, not even ten years older than he himself, would see something in that angry kid, something that, instead of calling the cops as he should have, made him give Tony the chance of a lifetime. The chance at a life.
A life he would always owe to Josh Redstone.
“This is probably nothing a couple of days of simple investigation can’t close,” Draven said, looking at him with growing curiosity, the last thing Tony wanted.
“Then I won’t be tied up long,” he said, more sharply than he liked.
Draven’s mouth quirked slightly. “You really want this?”
“I want this. Sir,” he added, not caring that it was so obviously an afterthought tacked on to ameliorate the gruffness of his prior words.
Draven’s brows lowered even farther. “You don’t look—or sound—too sure about that.”
Leave it to Draven to see past the surface, because truth be told, he wasn’t. In fact, he was reasonably sure he would regret it; it was only the extent of that regret he wasn’t sure of right now. But that didn’t seem to make any difference.
“I mean it,” he insisted.
Draven studied Tony for a long, silent moment. Tony set his jaw and waited, knowing Draven wasn’t a man to be pushed.
“Why?” Draven finally asked.
Tony had prepared for that question, at least. “You know I worked with her a lot, during Beck’s case. We…got along. I’d like to help, and I’m free, with nothing on the horizon that would require me more than anyone else on the team.”
Draven listened, looking thoughtful. If he noticed that this prosaic explanation was at odds with the inner tension Tony was feeling—and Tony had little doubt Draven would
