Anxiety-generating ants crawled around Flick’s stomach, up her throat. “Time and help to get better,” Flick explained, her voice breaking as she uttered the lie.
“You’ll be fine, Mom.” Pippa placed her hand on Flick’s back and Flick couldn’t help jumping at her touch. She felt rather than saw Pippa’s concerned look and stared at the floor, avoiding her gaze. “But you might have to sell your house. You won’t be able to manage the stairs.”
“I am not selling my house,” Gina said between gritted teeth.
Because there was something else in that house that Gina didn’t want anyone to know about, Flick thought. What could it be? A skeleton? A toy boy? An altar? Okay, she was letting her riotous imagination run away with her. But what could Gina be referring to? It had to be bad if she wouldn’t tell Pips.
“You keep postponing the discussion about your house but you have to deal with it at some stage, Mom. It’s silly that you have an entire top floor you never use, that half the bedrooms on the second floor are closed up too, and that you rattle around there like a ghost.”
“I am not discussing this any longer, Phillipa,” Gina said in her best don’t-test-me-anymore voice. “What did the nurse say about my drugs?”
“As I told you, you’re not due yet,” Pippa replied.
“Then I might as well try to rest,” Gina said. “You two can go now.”
There was no room for discussion, so they dutifully kissed her goodbye and left the room. In the corridor outside, Pippa threw her hands up in the air. “Is she acting weird or was that just my imagination?”
“Yeah, weird,” Flick admitted. That, at least, was the truth. Should she tell Pippa about her mom’s requests? If she was going to, then now was the time.
“I wonder what’s worrying her?” Pippa’s hand clenched and unclenched around the strap of her tote bag.
“Not sure.”
What Flickwassure of was the strong feeling that she really wasn’t going to like whatever Gina had sent her to look at.
“It’s still dark. Why are you calling me?”
“It’s oh-six-hundred, so get your ass out of bed and let’s go. Eight klicks, if you can pull your head out of said ass.”
“ESAD.”
Kai Manning smiled. If his best friend and business partner could successfully spit out the acronym for “eat shit and die,” then he was halfway to waking up and he wouldn’t need to break into Sawyer’s house—the pale gray and white bungalow he was standing in front of—and physically kick him out of bed for their early-morning run.
How Sawyer had managed to complete BUD/S and be an effective SEAL with his ongoing love affair with sleep was something that still confused him. Standing in the chilly autumn air with the phone still to his ear, Kai heard Sawyer yawn, followed by a shuffle that suggested that he was out of bed and marginally functional. He ended the call and sat down on his front steps, rested his arms on his bent knees, and looked down the road. All the seasons in Mercy, Virginia, were lovely, but autumn was the prettiest of them all. The trees were all turning from green to rust and red and gold, and were the perfect contrast to the still-green fields and the bluey-purple of the Blue Ridge Mountains that formed the majestic backdrop to the town.
Kai placed his elbows on the step behind him and stretched out his long legs. Pretty town, pretty houses, pretty river . . .pretty fucking everything.Blergh.
And now he needed to decide, ASAP, whether he agreed with making Mercy—population barely topping ten thousand—the headquarters of Caswallawn International. Caswallawn . . .
Mike should be here, sharing in the spoils of the business they created. Instead, to honor and remember him, they’d named their holding company Caswallawn after his favorite Celtic god of war. Mike had been always been obsessed with the Celts and the early history of the British Isles—a strange interest for the son of a fiercely patriotic Army sergeant.
Thinking about Mike hurt too damn much, so Kai switched mental directions. As a company they’d been here for three years, renting an old warehouse off Main Street, partly because Sawyer wanted to come back to his hometown but mostly because the setup costs for the business had been a lot cheaper in Mercy than in Washington, D.C. Their meager savings had stretched a lot further out of D.C. He reluctantly admitted that the location wasn’t bad. It was only a thirty-minute drive from Dulles International and it was an easy commute for anyone from D.C. attending their personal-protection-training courses and corporate-team-building events.
They’d received the news the week before that the building and land they occupied were up for sale, and they had the option to buy. They had to decide to stay or relocate. The business side of his brain said that staying in Mercy was a no-brainer; the property was cheap, they’d avoid the relocation costs for both the business and his staff, and his clients liked the quaint, charming town.
Axl, the third partner in Caswallawn, who spent even less time in Mercy than he did, had voted to stay where they were. Since he was even more nomadic than Kai, the move didn’t affect him at all. Kai’s was the only dissenting voice.
It made no sense but, three years later, Kai still wasn’t used to the town, didn’t understand it. All he knew was that the moment he drove into Mercy a spot between his shoulder blades started to itch—one of those frustrating prickles in a place he just couldn’t reach. It pissed him off that this quaint little town made him feel angsty in a way that various missions in hostile places had never managed to do.
On the plus side, he didn’t live in Mercy on a permanent basis and, as per normal, he’d be leaving in less than a week. He rented a house here—apartments made him feel claustrophobic—and the business was here, but he spent his life on the road, leaving the day-to-day running of Cas to Sawyer. Sawyer was calm, decisive, clear-thinking, and, unlike Kai, had the patience and charm to deal with civilians. They’d defined their roles years ago: Sawyer managed the business side of Cas, overseeing the personal-protection-officer training and the teams of PPOs they hired out to whoever needed their ass protected and, more importantly, could afford their services.
He got paid to pass along his hard-earned-in-crappy-places combat and military skills to teach personal-security-detail tactics to SWAT officers, trainers, some military personnel, and security contractors. Most of his training was done overseas, for companies outside of the US. He trained mid to large groups of guys—sometimes sprinkled with a few women—and taught them how to keep their colleagues, civilians, and themselves from becoming human sieves in the many hellholes of the world.
Axl, the third spoke in their wheel, was in charge of their Kidnapping and Ransom Crisis Response division. They each had their space in the business and it worked. Rather well.
Movement under a shrub to his right brought Kai back to the here and now. He watched, amused, as a wide-eyed kitten eyeballed him. He carefully stretched out his hand and eventually felt tiny whiskers brush his hand and the rasp of a surprisingly rough tongue on the pad of his index finger.
The kitten cocked its head as his finger made contact with the area just below its ear and he heard the rumble of its purr, tough-sounding for such a little guy. He’d never had much to do with animals— not many kids raised as he was did. It had been hard enough feeding, raising, and looking after himself. He hadn’t the time or the resources to look after anything else.