Job Hunt (16 page)

Jack’s body flushed with heat every time he caught that gaze. His heart picked up speed, butterflies crowded his stomach, and juggling, pimps, and surveillance were as far from his mind as the moon.

God, I really need to get laid.

Jack’s mind stutter-stepped over that thought, irritated by its inaccuracy. Jack knew that he could get laid any time he wanted to, but cruising nightclubs for meaningless hookups had long grown stale. He could just as easily relax with a bottle of his namesake in the comfort of his home.

No, it wasn’t the idea of getting laid that made his heart race and his breath catch in his throat. It was the combination of
Gareth
and images of getting laid that destroyed his focus and made shivers of want wash over his skin.

Gareth Flynn shouldn’t be allowed out. At the very least, he shouldn’t have been allowed to cross Jack’s path again.

The man defied all Jack’s logic. Always had, from the time Jack had been a scrawny seventeen-year-old with a cocky attitude and a crush the size of Everest, to the moment Gareth stepped out of his office and back into Jack’s life.

The odds of that happening had to have been minuscule, but no… not only was Gareth Flynn right there, he was showing a distinct interest in Jack. There were just no odds big enough for that.

Jack was as enthralled by the man now as he’d been years earlier. Gareth had been an excellent CO: decisive, empathic, and with eyes in the back of his head. Jack had taken to him immediately, had cared about his captain’s approval when he’d never needed approval from anyone. Other feelings had come later, and time had done little to change those. Gareth was supportive without being judgmental. And… of course… he just had to be the biggest tease alive.

That tiny amused smirk on Gareth’s face used to send Jack straight to the gym to beat the stuffing out of a heavy bag. In the beginning, because he didn’t understand how an expression that small could cause so much confusion, later, because he needed to work off his frustration. He’d been decent at hand to hand, even then—quick and unexpected and dirty enough so that he occasionally managed to surprise his instructors. Never Gareth, though, apart from one memorable occasion when he got in a stunning hit. Gareth had handed him his ass moments later, but the thin scar where Jack’s fist had split his brow still told that story. Jack had seen it just that morning.

Jack caught the juggling balls one by one and dropped them into his lap. He was right back where he’d started, thinking about sex and Gareth and feeling hot and uncomfortable and rattled.

Swearing wouldn’t help.

Complaining wouldn’t help.

Being mad at himself for being an idiot might help for a little while.

Jack was telling himself firmly to get a grip when something on the screen in front of him caught his attention.

Stealth was not a skill that men were born with. It had to be learned and needed to be practiced. The blond guy who was leaning on the bar, pretending to chat up the bartender while casually spiking drinks was far too obvious. The only reason he hadn’t been caught yet was because the crowd around him had its mind on other things. Jack reached for his phone and dialed Clive Baxter’s number.

“Can you see the feed?” he asked without preamble. “The Woolwich one. Blond guy at the bar.”

“What am I supposed to be looking at?” The detective sounded confused.

“He’s dealing,” Jack replied. “And spiking people’s drinks.”

“Not my brief, Jack.”

“You’re a fucking detective. You don’t choose what to investigate!”

“Like you do?”

That was patently unfair. Jack had never turned down a job, whether it was his brief or not. He still didn’t, even though his employer was now Nancarrow Mining. “If that’s what you believe, then what the fuck am I doing, sitting here on a Saturday night?” he asked, voice tight. “If you think that—”

Gareth leaned into his line of sight and made a quit motion with his hand. A command, not a request. Jack ended the call without another word and tossed the phone onto the table, not ready to let it go but too drained to fight over it. He’d not thought so before, but Clive Baxter seemed no different from the last lot he’d worked for, blinkered by his own pet projects and only willing to move if something advanced his cause.

“Can you pull off the images for me?”

“What?”

Gareth held up the USB stick he carried on his key chain with one hand and waved at the surveillance monitor with the other. “The pictures of the dealer. Can you copy them for me?”

Before he knew it, Jack sat at the computer and bypassed the login. Gareth’s tone, the don’t-think-just-do voice he hadn’t heard in too long, cut through the anger and the fatigue. Gareth’s hands on his shoulders helped to ground him further. Jack worked the feed, using the controls to zoom in, to find the clearest images, and transferred them out.

“It’s not conclusive enough to take him to court,” he said while he worked. “That’s why I wanted Clive to….”

“The dealer is not tonight’s objective,” Gareth counseled.

“Doesn’t mean we have to let him get away.”

“We’re not going to.”

Jack leaned into Gareth’s touch and sighed. “You’re telling me to focus, aren’t you?”

“You’re plenty focused.” Gareth pressed a light kiss to Jack’s temple, right over the tattoo. “I’m telling you that you don’t need to solve all the world’s problems at once.”

“Even if I trip over them?”

“Even then.” Skilled fingers worked the tight muscles in Jack’s neck, loosening the knots. “You don’t need to solve all the world’s problems all by yourself, either.”

“Do you really think me that conceited?”

“I think you’re a sucker for punishment.” Fingers tightened on Jack’s hair and pulled his head back until he stared straight up into Gareth’s eyes. The look he got was serious and searching. Jack felt stripped bare and squirmed without knowing why. “When did you start trading people for crusades?” Gareth asked.

“I… what?”

“All you seem to do is find a cause and fight,” Gareth said and let go of Jack’s hair, smoothing the mussed spikes back into a semblance of order. “You don’t trust easily. I get that. But you don’t ask for help when you need it, either. And that’s just stupid.” The hands on Jack’s shoulders spun him around, chair and all, and Gareth seated himself so Jack could see him without craning his neck.

“You used to know the difference,” Gareth said softly. “Now…. What happened?”

Jack shrugged, unsure how to explain why he felt safer working alone. “Too much time undercover,” he settled on after a silence.

Gareth didn’t comment. He merely sat and watched Jack, the video feed totally forgotten.

J
ACK
RETURNED
to New Scotland Yard late Sunday afternoon. He’d had a busy day, crisscrossing London by bike on various errands, like ordering two pairs of shoes in an unassuming little pub near Elephant & Castle, and stopping at St. Thomas’s hospital to check on Daniel and Nico. He wanted dinner and a night off, but he recognized that for the pipe dream it was. The clubs would be buzzing in another hour, and he had promised to help look for the pimp.

The officer manning the gate nodded a greeting as Jack parked his bike, which was odd, though not as disconcerting as stepping up to the reception desk and being handed a pass along with an order to report to the twelfth floor. He wasn’t sent through the security scanner. He wasn’t strip-searched. Instead, one of the guards paged the elevator for him and gave him a nod as he stepped in.

The elevator’s walls were mirrored, and he frowned at the dark shadows under his eyes that strove to match the dark shadow on his jaw. There was no hiding the week he’d had. Seven days earlier, he’d been eating takeout on his couch while dreaming up ideas to improve data security at Nancarrow Mining. His old life had been behind him. Done with. Over. He barely thought of the case that had made his choice for him. He was in shape, at ease, and pleased that he’d finally managed to cut himself a tiny slice of contentment.

So how was it that only a few days later he was fixing security leaks for his new employer, owed favors to one of Scotland Yard’s finest, and was chasing yet another pimp while trying to help two traumatized teenage boys? All that while suddenly working for the one man he had fought so hard to forget.

It was just his luck that the years hadn’t changed his former CO. Not in any of the ways that mattered. True to form, Gareth Flynn was not just on his radar but right on his case. The Post-it Gareth had left under his phone that morning—
Julian’s called a meeting to discuss the second leak. Remember that there’s more to breakfast than coffee—
had made him smile. The text a few hours later reminding him that it was lunchtime had not.

Jack had spent a large part of his career in darkened back rooms full of computer equipment or on undercover assignments, usually alone, which suited him just fine. He’d been trained to look the other way and let bad things happen to good people if the job demanded it. And while he didn’t find it easy, he had never let anybody else make that call for him. Jack trusted himself, his instincts, and his reasoning. Gareth’s mile-wide protective streak, while useful when Jack needed a break, wasn’t something he would handle well on a normal day.

“I thought you’d ditched me, Horwood.” Lisa caught him as soon as the elevator doors opened, and Jack blinked twice.

“Just a few errands,” he answered. “Gareth is meeting with our boss.”

“Yeah, he called me.” She nodded and guided him toward her office, where the coffee table was set with food. “He also told me to make sure you’re fed. What’s with that?”

Jack shrugged and hid his scowl. He loaded his plate when Lisa told him to get stuck in, chewed and swallowed mechanically, but if anyone had asked him what he’d been eating, he couldn’t have answered.

“How did you meet Gareth?” Lisa finally pulled him from his abstraction. She held a mug of black coffee out to him, and Jack took it, grateful for the chance to duck out from under her scrutiny. Whatever it was she wanted, he wasn’t going to like it.

“I thought you read my file?” he queried. Then added without needing another prompt, “He was my CO.”

“I didn’t know that. Your file isn’t exactly easy to read.”

“Yours doesn’t look any different,” he assured her. It was sort of true. To anyone else her file would look just like Jack’s: pages of redacted script with the odd tidbit of information left readable. Not to Jack, though. He knew that Lisa Tyrrell was thirty-six and that—like him—she had spent plenty of time on clandestine assignments. She’d been excellent at it… until she had sacrificed her cover to save a man’s life. It was something Jack could respect. Ever since he’d found out, the fact that he owed her a favor didn’t bother him nearly as much.

“Clive told me about your… discussion last night,” Lisa said as he set his mug down. “He asked me to tell you that what he said wasn’t meant the way it sounded.”

“I know.”

“He should have asked you to collate the details and passed them on.”

“I know.”

“We’ll make that standard procedure from here on out.”

“I know.”

“Horwood!”

Jack flinched at the sudden increase in decibels and looked up. Lisa was pissed. Jack didn’t care. They had wasted a chance at catching a dealer red-handed. That was the only thing he cared about right then. “Why the hell don’t you use facial recognition software?” he queried instead.

“Because we’d first need a face to recognize.”

It took Jack only moments to catch on. “The strobe lights. Shit!”

“You said it.”

“Man needs a decent phone,” he grumbled. “What about a photo fit? Give the software at least something to go on.”

“Will that be enough?”

“It’s better than nothing. We can improve the hit rate if you let me play with it.”

She reached for her phone. “I’ll call in an artist for you to work with.”

She didn’t mention anything about computer access, and Jack shrugged and went back to his coffee. If she was happy to be oblivious, he wasn’t going to tell her that he wouldn’t need it.

C
HAPTER
THIRTEEN
P
RIVATE
I
NVESTIGATIONS

“F
RAZER
,
GET
your ass in here!”

Donald waved a hand over his head to indicate he’d heard. He dropped screwdrivers and wires onto the desk next to Jack’s hand, picked up his tablet, and trotted across the room.

“Oh my God, boss, I love you!” he groaned the minute he smelled the freshly brewed coffee and saw the mugs on Gareth’s desk.

“Knock yourself out, kid.” Gareth waved him into a chair and handed over a mug of blond, sugar-laced coffee, made just the way Frazer liked.

“Is Horwood always such a menace?”

“How do you mean?” The question was rhetorical. The first thing Gareth had seen when entering the corporate security office that morning had been Jack Horwood in tight black jeans, bent over his desk. The image had done nothing for his peace of mind. Neither had Jack’s smirk and the way he deliberately hadn’t moved from his position across the desk as he greeted Gareth.

“Security logs say he’s been here since before six this morning,” Frazer reported, surfacing from his coffee mug and settling into the visitor’s chair. “When I got in, he already had stuff running on the servers, and I finally tracked him down in the gym lifting weights. He hasn’t stopped since.”

“That sounds about right.” Gareth wondered if Jack had come to work straight from his surveillance gig at Scotland Yard or if he’d managed a few hours of rest. Jack curled on the narrow cot in Scotland Yard’s ready room the night before had been an adorable sight. He’d had his back tight to the wall and a pillow tucked against his chest. Sleep-darkened eyes had opened for a moment when Gareth had moved, only to fall shut again when he’d signaled an
all clear
. “He can get carried away when he gets his teeth stuck in a problem.”