“But he’ll be someone at this party tonight.” Macey grinned. “This line, ‘watch your six while hobnobbing because others are watching it as well.’ We’re partying tonight, my friends. Right?”
Kell stared at the electronic wizard with narrowed eyes. Macey should have been a linebacker for the Dallas Cowboys. He was tall, wide, and mean. Instead, his long, broad fingers moved over the keyboard of the laptop with the grace and ease of much smaller fingers.
“Here’s our guest list.” He pulled up the file the senator had supplied days before. “I have these names running through several programs at the moment. It will take time, but there’s a chance we could get a hit and a direction to go in.”
“Before the party?” Kell asked.
Macey grimaced. “Not hardly.”
Kell turned to Reno. “Give me Ian to back me up with Emily.”
Reno nodded slowly, though his gaze was piercing.
“Kell, is this getting too personal? Don’t risk her life because you have too much on the line here.”
Kell stared back at Reno coldly, feeling the hard edge of determination rising inside him.
“She’s mine,” he stated clearly. “Would anyone else protect Raven for you? Or Morganna for Clint?”
Raven, his wife, was also Clint’s sister. A black-haired little minx who drove her husband crazy more often than not. But she still wasn’t the handful of dynamite that Reno’s sister and Clint’s fiancée, Morganna, had turned out to be.
Both men grimaced at the question.
“Ian, keep an eye on his ass.” Reno sighed.
“I have it, Commander.” Ian leaned back against the wall, watching them all intently, his brown eyes somber, his brow lowered broodingly.
“The senator is arriving at the Dunmores’ later than his daughter,” Reno announced then. “He has a meeting on Capitol Hill before he can leave. That means you’ll be shy of backup other than the two Secret Service agents who will be assigned outside the mansion grounds. I’ll contact you as we head toward the Dunmore mansion. You’re still undercover. We’ve not changed the mission parameters on this. Not that I think you’ll have a problem with that.”
Kell let a grin tug at his lips as the others snickered. As his gaze met Ian’s, though, he noticed the somber acknowledgment in the other man’s gaze. There were few men who knew the full details of his past. Ian was one of those men.
The other man nodded slowly. A promise. A vow to help Kell protect what meant the most to him.
“The limo is taking Emily, Kell, and Ian to the party. We’ll be in the senator’s secured SUV when we arrive. Let’s keep this short and tight, men, and see if we can ID our spy and make this mission short, sweet, and without complications.” Reno’s gaze swept the room. “Any questions?”
They shook their heads in reply.
“Good. We’ll be heading out with the senator within the hour. I believe he currently has his daughter corralled in the office discussing her recent strip-joint venture and the chances of it happening again. Are we taking bets on who wins this one?”
Clint, Reno, Macey, and Ian put their money on the senator. A former SEAL. A man who had kept his daughter in line, one way or the other, for twenty-five years.
When all eyes turned to Kell he pulled his wallet from his jeans pocket, extracted the required twenty and handed it over to Macey. “My money’s on the lady,” he drawled. “You don’t tame a vixen, you just travel in her wake.”
EMILY STARED AROUND HER FATHER’S office. The pictures of her mother that sat in a place of honor on the mantel. The painting he had commissioned, just after Emily’s birth, of her and her mother hung across from his desk.
She looked like her mother, Emily thought. The same vibrant auburn hair, blue eyes, and inquisitive features. She had never paid much attention to it over the years. Her own looks rarely concerned her much. But as she stared at the portrait and waited for her father, she saw it now.
Her mother had been more delicate. Fine boned, slender, and graceful. Her hair was longer, hanging nearly to her waist, where Emily kept hers cut to her shoulders.
Her mother had loved parties. Emily preferred adventure. She wanted to go mountain climbing, skydiving, and playing war games in the mountains.
Her mother had lived for fashion. And Emily preferred jeans to silk, but she understood the need for the silk.
She hadn’t known her mother long enough, she thought. She hadn’t had a chance to hear her laughter often enough; she could barely remember the songs her father said her mother sang to her each night before bedtime.
“She loved you with all her heart,” her father said behind her as he came into the office. “She used to say you had the best parts of both of us. I’ve always agreed with her.”
“Weakness?” she asked as she turned to face him. “I hadn’t heard either of you were very weak, Dad.”