Uncommon Pleasure (5 page)

“I tried to get here last night,” John said. Based on the rough lick of laughter in his voice, Ty knew exactly what kept John at home. He tucked a filter in the cup and scooped coffee grounds into the filter as images of Lauren Kincaid flashed like lightning in his brain.

The sex had been hot. Wet. Only a couple of inches shorter than him, she’d tucked his cock snug between her thighs, lubricated her grinding, swiveling search for ecstasy with sweat and her slick fluids, making him work to keep her trapped between his body and the door, and that was before he got inside her tight pussy. He’d been well on his way to losing his mind when the knock came on the door, but the way she trembled under him, offering up her body so he could “just finish” flicked a switch inside him. She’d been just nervous and hesitant enough to activate a whole bunch of primitive centers in his brain he’d rather not acknowledge.

And that was that. Hot. Different. Done. Especially after he
asked her if she wanted a drink like what they shared was just a fuck. He’d get used to it eventually, ruining relationships even when his instinct was to nurture them. She’d walked away without a backward glance, too. Not that he cared. Except he couldn’t stop thinking about her, and the 180 degree turns between
hold her
and
discard her
were giving him mental whiplash. She had depths and textures he’d barely begun to explore. In another lifetime he’d take his time reconnoitering everything she knew she wanted, maybe teach her a thing or two she didn’t know she could want. But that lifetime was over.

“Shhhhh,” Lucy said. Ty resolutely kept his back to the two of them as he closed the filter cup and ran water into the carafe. “Last night is still last minute! Quarterly taxes are due tomorrow.”

“You updated all my records two weeks ago,” John said reasonably. Ty heard a drawer close. He turned around to see Lucy stuffing a manila folder full of receipts into her leather briefcase.

“That’s not the point.”

“Good thing I’m marrying my accountant,” John said.

“Is she more patient than I am?” Lucy said.

“No, but she’ll let me make it up to her,” John said.

Now that he was looking for it, Ty saw the diamond glittering on Lucy’s left hand, and despite his efforts to not feel a goddamn thing, happiness lifted his spirits for a moment. “Congratulations,” he offered as he crossed the room to shake John’s hand again, then bent to give Lucy a swift kiss on the cheek.

She let her hand linger at his shoulder. “Thanks, Ty. How are you?”

“Fine, Luce,” he said. The delight gleaming in her eyes dimmed for a moment, and he hated to see that. He took care of people, or used to, not the other way around. “I’m good,” he said firmly. “Coffee?”

“No, thank you,” she said. “I like my stomach lining intact. Lunch?” she said over her shoulder to John.

“One,” John confirmed, and made no bones about watching his girlfriend—
scratch that
—fiancée, hurry toward the door, tall and slender and firing on all twelve cylinders. The office door opened just as Lucy reached it. Two men with buzz cuts, dressed in khaki cargo pants and polos, stood on the other side. One was Sean Winthrop, the lieutenant who took command of the rifle platoon just as Ty’s enlistment period ended. The other man didn’t even look familiar.

“Excuse me,” Lucy said with the same Southern poise Lauren reached for last night.

“Allow me, ma’am,” the stranger said, stepping to the side to hold the door open for her. She swept through. All four men watched her cross the parking lot and climb into the Explorer. Her skirt hitched up enough to reveal a flash of stocking and garter belt before she slammed the door, started the truck, and shot out of the lot.

“Anyone got dibs on that hot piece of ass?” the door-holder said.

Sean shot him a narrow-eyed look as John said, quite mildly, “That hot piece of ass is my fiancée.”

The kid all but came to attention. “Sorry, sir.”

“You don’t need to apologize to me,” John said, still deceptively bland as he focused on his e-mail. “You need to apologize to her, but I don’t want your death on my conscience, so I’ll accept your apology on her behalf.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

“Knock off the sir. I’m a civilian.”

“Still working for you. For the moment. Sir.”

Not bad, Ty thought. John must have agreed because he nodded. Sean crossed the room to give Ty a handshake and a quick, hard hug. He was Ty’s height, with blue eyes unusually brilliant against his tanned skin and close-cropped blond hair bleached nearly white by a year in Afghanistan’s relentless sun.

“You out?” he asked Sean. Ty’d chosen not to reenlist after the
last tour, but last he heard Sean still had a year to serve. Had he really gone that long without talking to him?

“On leave,” Sean replied. “Just finished a deployment in Afghanistan. Not sure what’s next.”

“You’ve got options?”

“Resign my commission, continue with the platoon, or take a reassignment to Quantico.”

Where the Marine Corps Officer Candidate School was, along with the command center that developed strategies for combat, among other things. Quantico was a plum assignment for a young officer moving up the chain of command, and Sean had the brains and education to go with the combat experience…

Ty gave himself a hard mental shake. Used to be personnel assignments were his specialty, but this wasn’t his company, or his op, and that’s the way he liked it. “So yeah, you got options,” Ty said, and left it at that.

“Chase Duvall,” Sean said with a nod at the runaway mouth. Ty shook his hand and waited until after he’d seen him in action to pass judgment.

“Huddle up,” John said, stepping over to the large table that occupied most of his office. A whiteboard hung beside the table, and the four men clustered around a computer screen displaying a satellite image of a business park, three-story brick buildings clustered around the inlets and curves of a man-made lake with a fountain in the center. A blacktop path encircled the lake. Park benches sat under flowering trees, among bushes and annuals, landscaping that far outstripped the sickly shrubs outside his hotel.

“Standard surveillance operation,” John said, then brought up photographs of two men and a woman. “These individuals work for Reynolds Freeman, the pharmaceutical firm, and are suspected of selling information to a competitor. The company did some basic e-mail tracking and turned up enough dirt to justify digging deeper.
I’ve got a team watching homes and the most likely contacts at the competitor. I need to know when they get to work, when they have lunch, who with, when they leave. We’re compiling evidence for a possible court case here.”

The specifics were for the new guys. Ty had done this before, knew the drill, could do it in his sleep. Chase and Sean nodded, Chase chewing away at his thumbnail as John pointed out the front door, loading dock, cafeteria door leading to the lake. Sean had his arms folded across his chest and was studying the images. “If we see them leave during the day, do we follow or just note it?”

“For now, note it, and call in. I’ll take it from there,” John said. “Ty’s lead on this one, so you’ll work with him to organize schedules.”

Ty shot John a look John returned with the same calm, level gaze. After a moment, Ty spoke. “There are about a dozen companies working out of that business park,” Ty said without breaking eye contact. “Pay attention. Lots of coming and going, lots of entrances and exits. Don’t get distracted.”

“When do we start?” Sean asked.

“Right now,” John said.

“Equipment’s in the closet in the reception area,” Ty said with a jerk of his head. Sean and Chase filed out.

Ty closed the door behind them. “What the fuck? You know I don’t do lead. I’m back on the T-22 in four weeks and this will go on longer than that.”

“Good thing it’s not a hundred degrees out like it was last month, because you’re going to be sitting outside for those four weeks,” John said, then got serious. “I need you on this. It’s a big subcontract for me, a foot in the door. If this goes well, I’ve got more work than I can handle. Hell, if you’d just buy in we’d take this operation to the next level. The game’s getting bigger. More complex. I could use you.”

He used to get a big charge out of teaming up with John to put together personnel, intelligence, equipment, and terrain to pull off
risky, complicated operations. During their time in the Corps they’d talked frequently about going into the rapidly growing industrial security business together, but shit happened, and when the time came, Ty backed out. John went ahead without Ty on board as personnel specialist, dragging Ty into operations when he wasn’t working. Ty kept waiting for John to quit on him. So far he hadn’t.

“Not gonna happen.” He tilted his head toward the front room. “Ask Winthrop. He’s thinking about getting out, and you know he’s good.”

“He’s not out yet, you stubborn motherfucker,” John said, but without any heat. “You can’t keep ignoring life.”

“Watch me,” he said, then opened the door to find Sean and Chase back-to-back in John’s meticulously organized, ultrasecure room containing the high-tech surveillance gear. He watched them dig through the toys and mulled over the way fate liked to bitch slap him.

Gulf Independent was headquartered in that business park. He’d spend the next four weeks watching Lauren Kincaid come and go from work.

The normally crisp edges of numbers and letters had begun to
blur half an hour earlier. When Lauren’s eyes slid involuntarily to soft focus, she sat back and pulled off her glasses, then opened her drawer and retrieved her soft-sided lunch box. “I’m going to go sit outside,” she said to her coworker, Danelle, over the low wall separating their cubicles. “Want to come?”

Danelle was slumped down in her chair, gazing fixedly at the monitor as she alt-tabbed between two chat sessions and an Excel spreadsheet full of formulas and complex macros. “You don’t have to go down to the courthouse again?”

Thanks to a screwup with the bank and the title, it had taken Lauren three trips to get her car plated. Inefficiency brought out the cranky bitch in her, and so the conversations with the county clerks became regular break room fodder.

“Sorry to disappoint you, but no. The car’s finally plated.”

“I’m in the middle of this, so I’ll pass. It’s cooler than it was, but find a bench in the shade. You got too much sun on the rig.”

Lunch box in hand and moving on autopilot, Lauren walked down the hallway, rubbing the grit from her eyes. She took the stairs to the first floor, cut through the cafeteria’s seating space, and headed out into the midday heat, intending to space off into the distance and think about a puzzle of a different sort than locating, logging, and casing off a productive well.

The night with Ty.

The sex had gone exactly as she’d hoped, but nothing else had. Everything—his entire demeanor, the bottle of whiskey, the sight of him in that dismal hotel room—felt wrong. But he was a grown man, a seasoned Marine, perfectly capable of taking care of himself.

Except he wasn’t taking care of himself. But Ty and his rootless life were none of her business. He wouldn’t thank her for meddling, even if she could think of a good reason to go back to his room. Worse, odds were good if she knocked on the door she’d overhear someone else’s good time. The memory of the interruption still made her blush. Eventually, her curiosity would fade.

The benches farthest away from the door were all occupied, so she settled for a spot in the curve of the man-made lake, the edges of the growing tree barely shading it. The shaded benches nearby were more desirable, and therefore full, with two women gossiping on one, and a man and woman on the other, sharing food. A single man dressed in lightweight cargo pants, a pale blue button-down shirt, and lace-up boots occupied the last bench, a Texas Longhorns cap shading his eyes from the late September sun.

Ty.
The hat covered his slicked back hair and obscured his forehead and eyes, but she’d seen the line of his jaw and the Oakley shades under a hard hat too often to mistake him. “Hey there,” she said. “Can I join you?”

At the sound of her voice his head jerked up, his eyes completely unreadable behind the shades. “Sure,” he said, gathering the newspaper and brown paper bag strewn over the ends of the bench.

“What are you doing here?” Roughnecks rarely had a reason to come to the company’s headquarters.

“Lunch break.”

“I meant, did you have a meeting about the driller job?”

He shook his head, not even bothering to look at her as he did, and his demeanor settled the question of whether or not she’d made the right decision to turn down his offer of a drink. She sat down, opened her lunch box, withdrew the Tupperware container holding her turkey sandwich, and took a bite, all the while relaxing her eyes by focusing on the horizon and making her mind go blank. She could play the ice princess when the situation called for it, and was dressed for it in a sleeveless sheath dress and summer-weight cardigan, her hair restrained in an intricate knot by two polished mahogany sticks.

When she was halfway through the sandwich he sighed and pulled a pen from the pocket of his cargo pants, then wrote on the newspaper and held it out to her.

Look in my right ear.

Surprised, she swallowed the mouthful of sandwich then peered behind him and saw the tiny, clear earpiece, the type the security detail for the president wore. She pulled back and looked at him, brows lifted. He pulled out a touchscreen phone with a keypad that slid out from under the phone and looked at her until she gave him her phone number. He thumbed away at the little keypad. A moment later her phone buzzed with an incoming text.

“Doing what?” she said, then thought the better of it and texted him back.

She glanced at him, saw a dark teasing little smile lifting the corners of his mouth. “Very funny,” she said, her voice low.