Overture (North Security #1)(8)

Whatever I do for the rest of the afternoon, it has to be the end.





CHAPTER FIVE




Bach and Handel were both blinded by the same ocular surgeon.


LIAM

I watch Samantha flee up the stairs, looking scared enough to make me uncomfortable, lithe enough to make me ache. What the hell’s going on with her today? You’ll be yourself again tomorrow. I know that’s not true. She won’t ever be the timid little prodigy who landed on my doorstep, eyes wide behind her glasses, fingers impossibly nimble across the violin strings. She’s still a genius with the instrument, but it’s no longer a little girl who plays. It’s a young woman, and I’m the one who can’t go back to the way things were. I can’t unsee the flush of arousal on her cheeks. Fucking hell.

I return to my desk and try to focus on the field reports from my agent.

After reading the same sentence five times, I have to push the reports aside.

Footsteps approach the office, and I tense, fighting the impulse to stand up and close the door. Josh is second-in-command for North Security. He also happens to be my brother. He’s whistling and stomping and generally being a pain in my ass. The man can cross a South American jungle without disturbing a single tree frog, but he makes enough noise now to wake the dead. It’s a harsh contrast to the sweet violin that usually fills the air.

“Problem?” I ask, raising a brow.

He pauses with an exaggerated tilt of his head. “Why is it so quiet?”

I glare at him, but it doesn’t shut him up. “You’re fired.”

A hand to his heart, the dramatic bastard. “Where’s our beautiful Disney princess making music and drawing all the little woodland creatures to the window?”

“It was one squirrel.” One squirrel who pressed its little hands against the window every day for almost two months, listening to the music as if he could soak in its beauty.

Strange, feeling a kinship with a rodent, but there it was.

It’s not an accident that Samantha’s music room is right next to my study. The house has thirty thousand square feet. I could have put her anywhere, but I wanted her near me. I’m soaking up every goddamn second until she leaves for good.

Josh leans against the bookshelf and crosses one ankle over the other, the very picture of casual disinterest. I know my brother well enough to see right through his exterior. Unfortunately he also knows me well enough to see through mine. “What’s up?”

“Maybe we shouldn’t go out tonight.”

“And skip Hassan’s bachelor party? He would never forgive us. I would never forgive us either. We haven’t had a break in weeks.”

“She said she wasn’t feeling well.”

He frowns. “Samantha?”

“No fever. No cough. I could call Dr. Foster.”

“Is it the tour?”

I make a growl. “Maybe. It’s a hell of a lot of pressure. She wants us to think she’s all grown-up, but an eighteen-year-old has a lot of growing up to do.”

“We enlisted when we were eighteen,” he says.

“And I’d take a battle zone over Carnegie Hall any day.”

“She’s more mature than you were at eighteen.” He pauses. “Well, maybe not. You were an old fucking soul even as a kid. But so is she. You have that in common.”

The press will be all over every conference. Press with interview questions about her father? Red carpets. Meet and greets with VIP guests who are heads of state and A-list actors. And then there’s Harry March, the celebrity tenor headlining the tour, known for being volatile.

I hate that I can’t protect her from any of it. “There’s no way I can make her stop the tour. She’s got her heart set on it.”

“And you can never say no to Samantha.”

That makes me scowl. “I said no to concerts if they interrupted school for the past six years. She deserves to make her own choices now.”

“Not to mention she’ll be eighteen by then.”

My heart thumps against my chest in useless protest, but I make sure not to show any sign of it to my brother. Christ. I ignore the way my pulse thrums. It would be too easy to rise to the bait. Too easy to take the stairs two at a time and prove to myself that Samantha’s still there, if only for a short time more. “Kiss my ass.”

“You’re really worried about her.”

“Is there actually a reason why you’re here, or do you just love to annoy me?”

“Annoying you is reason enough, in my opinion, but I do actually have something work related. The Red Team has gone dark.” He stands almost at attention, as if we were both still in the navy.

That makes me pause. Three highly trained operatives could handle themselves in the frozen tundra. There were reasons they might go dark in order to maintain cover. “How long?”

“A week.”

Of course. For all that Josh acts like he doesn’t give a shit, he manages the daily operations of North Security with sharp intelligence.

He wouldn’t have brought me this unless it was serious.

“What did their last report say?”

“I’m sending you the full file now, starting with the last entry, but it doesn’t indicate a problem. We have their coordinates to the south of the Ural Mountains. No injuries or major setbacks.”