Courting Passion (15 page)

Shaking her head, she punched the numbers for Victor’s home line and waited for the call to connect. He’d texted when his plane had landed at Heathrow airport, so she knew he’d made it safely. There were always debriefing meetings, reports to file and tons of other small errands to wrap up a mission that Skye didn’t fully understand. It hadn’t crossed her mind to check on him after she knew he’d made it safely back into the country.

After only one ring the phone switched directly to the answering machine. Skye frowned harder. The thought that Victor hadn’t turned his home line from instantly activating the answering machine to allowing him to receive calls struck her as odd.

Victor was a master of the small details. It was something he’d been trained as an agent to never let slip.

She wondered if Victor’s native paranoia had sunk further into her psyche than she had realised. With barely a thought she decided to leave a vague message, a feeling of foreboding settling into her bones.

“Dad, it’s me,” she repeated for the machine, loath to just hang up without acknowledging it. “It’s two and I’m at the restaurant. Where are you? Call me, please.”

Skye hung up and took a deep breath. She was not going to lose her cool over something as simple as her father being caught up with work again. Yes, it was unusual, but old habits die hard. Obviously something ‘important’ had come up. That didn’t mean she needed to worry.

The waitress who had been hovering nearby came forward when Skye caught her eye.

“Could I please just have a chef’s salad to go?” she asked with an apologetic smile. The young woman nodded and headed back towards the kitchen.

With a sigh, Skye thought about her now-disappeared lunch hour. Lost in her e-book, the time had flown by. Five more minutes to wait for some food would not annoy her boss any more than taking a full hour for her usually forty-minute break. Besides, she was starving.

Unable to settle back to reading, Skye people-watched out on the busy city street. The end of the lunchtime rush had her spotting more than a few suit-clad men and women hurrying back to desks and cubicles, faces intent. She always enjoyed watching those around her, and some pointers from Victor on how to be aware of her surroundings had sharpened those observation skills.

Glancing back towards the kitchen, she was wondering where the waitress and her salad were when the bell above the door tinkled. Skye’s head swung around, hope lifting in her chest that it would be her dad.

In her mind’s eye she could picture him, his dark brown hair greying more and more as each month passed. His light brown eyes would be amused and his standard wry grin would be firmly in place. She knew he’d smile as he approached the table, with an explanation on the tip of his tongue.

Instead, a tall, handsome man in his mid-thirties entered the restaurant. His black eyes glinted and his neatly clipped beard darkened his olive complexion. Garth Spenser caught sight of her and stalked with a purposeful stride. Skye stood up, every fear for her dad that she’d suppressed returning tenfold.

“My dad?” she asked before Garth had made it to her. “Is he okay? What are you doing here?”

“Skye,” Garth ground out, glancing around at the few scattered remaining patrons. “Not here, I need you to come with me.”

Stubbornness was a trait she shared with Victor. More than a few times they had both rued the familial similarity that made one of them reluctant to give in to the other. Figuratively speaking, she dug her feet in.

“What’s happened? I’m not going anywhere until you explain, Garth.”

“I don’t have time for this,” he replied impatiently.

A scowl crossed his face fleetingly, though the annoyance remained in his eyes. From their previous, albeit brief, meetings she knew Garth didn’t dislike her. He’d struck Skye as a very driven man, with firm goals and timelines mapped out.

However, there was a darkness that resided inside him. It was a trait she could not bring herself to overlook. In many ways, Garth idolised her dad. Her disposition was so different from her father’s and Garth’s. Carefree, optimistic and often seeming to be frivolous, despite her keen intelligence, she’d wondered a few times if Garth thought of her as a changeling, swapped at birth.

Skye sat back down with faked nonchalance. She refused to be bullied or rushed by her dad’s protégé, despite her own earlier impatience and now her growing concern.

“Sit down, Garth, have a cup of tea. I’m waiting for my salad to arrive and then I need to get back to work,” she said, waving a hand to the half-empty teapot. “Please just explain things to me. Where’s Dad? What—”

“He’s missing,” Garth hissed as he leaned over her.

Skye blinked, recognising the tactic as one her father used to use when they argued and she wouldn’t budge to his way of thinking. Garth didn’t intimidate her in the least, though she understood how a lesser person might have quaked with the threatening tone and large, muscled build of the determined man.

“Victor disappeared from Heathrow last night,” Garth continued. “He climbed into a taxi and hasn’t checked in since. His flat is untouched, he never arrived there. We’re studying the CCTV images but we lose him half a mile out from the airport. It was only as I studied the date-book from his desk I discovered he was supposed to meet you here.”

Fear washed over her. She knew the kind of work Victor and Garth performed, but most of the details were still kept from her. As such, her concerns were shadowy and more from an overactive imagination rather than fact. Nevertheless, the mental images playing out in her head terrified her.

“You need to find him,” she insisted. “I wouldn’t even know where to start looking for his enemies, but you and your colleagues should be pros at this sort of stuff.”

“Victor has more enemies than I could poke a stick at. That doesn’t mean any of them knew his flight itinerary or the alias he was using, let alone his real name or where he lived. The Agency thinks you might have information we need that can help us understand what’s at play here. Victor spoke of you warmly and often amongst his closest friends. None of us who work with him have a clue, which means any hints he’s left behind are likely to be with you. Regardless of all that, I still need to you come with me. We’ll keep you in protective custody. Victor would skin me if I didn’t take such a precaution.”

“I don’t need protecting,” Skye insisted, shaking her head. “I’ll try to think over anything helpful he could have told me, but we almost never talked of his work, and certainly not in any detail. I don’t see how I can help you. I’d rather you were out there, searching for him and not babysitting me or worse, asking endless, pointless questions.”

She knew Garth spoke sense, but she’d never been able to shake the uneasy feeling he gave her. Victor trusted him as much as anyone he worked with, but he’d always told Skye to go with her instincts, that they were sound. Waves of pressure resonated from Garth and Skye’s gut told her to not go with him, at least not yet.

Garth uttered a strangled sound of pure, masculine frustration. His hand closed around her upper arm as he tried to raise her forcefully to her feet.

“Skye,” he ground out, “I’m not used to repeating myself. I need—”

It was as she leant back to try to wrench herself from his grasp that the bell on the front door tinkled again. Garth cursed as he turned to look at the new customer. Skye turned to look, curious about who’d upset him so much.

A woman with golden blonde hair tied back in a chignon had entered and was hurriedly walking towards their table. Large, warm brown eyes were set into a pretty oval face. The strict cut of her navy blue suit did little to diminish her curves. Skye began to feel rather under-dressed in her simple black trousers, cream business shirt and rusty red cardigan.

“Katherine,” Garth greeted the blonde with a dry, resigned tone to his voice. “I presume Tarek is coming in from the kitchen?”

The blonde nodded. She cast a curious glance at Skye, tilted her head in silent acknowledgement, then returned her gaze to Garth.

“You were supposed to come in for questioning,” Katherine chided him. “Management warned you we hadn’t finished to our satisfaction. You’re lucky we were able to tail you, despite your half-hearted attempt to ditch us.”

“I felt it was more important to get Skye to safety than answer useless questions,” Garth jeered as a beefy, muscled, sandy-haired man in a navy suit joined their table, seeming to melt out of the very walls.

“We plan to bring her in too,” Katherine assured them with another quick glance at Skye. Skye felt her temper spike at being treated like an ignorant child. She might not have been trained like them, but failing to work at the Agency did not make her a moron. At the earliest opportunity she planned to give them all a sharp piece of her mind.

Garth’s words, eerily similar to her own, were humorous to her ears, but it didn’t cool her annoyance at their treatment of her.

“Look, you know I belong out in the field, not sitting in your damn cubicle helping you fill in a bunch of tick boxes on reams of standard forms,” Garth growled, a scowl on his face.

Tarek stepped closer, his hand moving beneath his suit jacket.

“Just try it you—” Tarek taunted Garth.

Skye had had enough. She picked up her handbag, slung it over her shoulder and stepped away from the table. In the aisle, out of grabbing distance of all three agents, she glanced at each of them in turn.

“I am not some teenager with a brace and plaits needing Daddy’s babysitters to hold her hand,” she insisted. “I’m starting to think the lot of you are a few bricks shy of a load and I’m not going anywhere with any of you. You are welcome to stay here and bitch amongst yourselves, but I’m out of here.”

Turning on her heel, Skye didn’t let any of them get a further word out and made for the front door. She hadn’t gone more than a few paces when the first gunshot sounded. Were it not for the cracking of the enormous floor-to-ceiling glass windowpanes at the front of the restaurant, Skye would have assumed the popping sound was a car backfiring.

Glass shattered, the sound of even more gunshots disintegrating vases and the windows echoing in the now silent restaurant.

“Skye! Get down, damn it!” Garth shouted at her.

Rough hands grabbed her shoulders and pulled her down on to the carpet. Before she could even blink, Garth had upended one of the small tables to give them cover from the continual shots. As her senses acclimatised to the unusual sound she could begin to work out where they were coming from—multiple sources across the street.

A loud boom nearly deafened her, and Skye jumped as she smelt the acrid scent of something burning. She turned her head and saw an enormous weapon in Garth’s large hands, the dull black of the gun drawing her gaze. With a grim look on his face, Garth shot again.

Every piece of glass was destroyed and the cool spring air now permeated the restaurant. Nothing except the table they crouched behind protected them from whoever was shooting out in the streets. The dozen or so clients and workers either screamed hysterically in their seats or stampeded into the kitchen. More than a few were shouting into their phones, presumably having called nine-nine-nine.

 Garth shot his gun yet again, the sound painfully loud. Skye clapped her hands over her ears to dull the noise. For the first time in her life she wished she’d listened to her father and invested in a gun. She’d practiced with her dad’s weapon a number of times—indeed, she was a naturally good shot—but she’d scoffed at his suggestion that she would ever need a weapon for herself.

She made an oath never to so casually dismiss her dad’s instincts or suggestions again.

“They’re only warning shots,” Garth yelled at her. Skye turned to him, incredulous.

“You have to be kidding me!” she shouted back.

Katherine yelled something at them both from where she had been pinned by a couple of tables behind them. With the sound of sirens blaring, the gunshots and all the other noises, Skye couldn’t hear what the woman had tried to convey. Garth leaned closer and spoke again, his voice raised over the general din.

“If these people have your dad, whoever they are, they might try and use you as leverage against him. Your dad is tough, he can withstand almost anything, but if they get their hands on you, prove to him that you are in genuine physical danger from them, he will give them anything they want.”

What Garth had said was clearly true—she knew it in her soul. Her father was the toughest, strongest, most capable man she’d ever known. His strength and bravery were near God-like to her eyes. She had no doubt where he was concerned that he could do almost anything. She was not ignorant, though—when it came to her he had a soft spot. She was one of his few weaknesses. Anyone clever enough could use her—however unwilling she might be—against her father. Skye couldn’t let that happen, not under any circumstances.

Icy fear knotted in her stomach. Suddenly, much of Garth’s annoyance at her made sense. Why the idiot couldn’t have told her this in the first place she didn’t know, but Skye knew she couldn’t live with being used as a blackmail tool. Especially not against her father.

Skye’s knees wobbled as she crouched behind the upturned table. Overwhelming fear for her dad, for his safety and health, nearly crippled her. Somewhere deep in her soul she found an iron-strong determination. She would not be some pawn, an innocent used and traded for knowledge or power. Skye lowered her hands to the floor as she gathered every scrap of her courage and prepared herself to bolt.

Mouth dry, she balanced herself, pretending it was one of the races she used to run against friends as a small child. She told herself this was just a friendly, quick dash. It was anything except for the reality of possibly being a literal flight for her life—for her father’s life.

She would not be used against him, not while she still drew breath.

“Go!” Garth commanded. Gunshots still fired, both from outside and from behind them where Katherine and Tarek hid.

“What if you’re wrong?” Skye asked, a tremble in her tone. Garth shook his head.