DONOVAN (Gray Wolf Security, #1)(10)

“I can take care of those things.”

“Can you?”

“I’ve done this a few times before, Kate.”

She nodded as she stood and slung her bag over her shoulder. “I’m sure you have. But this is the first time I’ve had a bodyguard following me around, so excuse me if I’m not quite sure how it works.”

“Just think of me as an old friend come for a visit.”

She snorted again. “As if I’d have you in my house if Daddy hadn’t insisted.”

She started for the door, but she sort of swayed, as if she’d been hit by a sudden wave of dizziness. I moved up behind her and grabbed her upper arms, pulled her back against me so she had something to lean on. I felt her knees start to buckle and felt her push back into me, but then her spine stiffened and she straightened up again.

“Are you okay?”

“Let go of me,” she said, jerking away from me.

“Kate…”

“Let’s go.”

With that, she was out the door, strutting down the hall as if nothing had happened.

Daniel was waiting, sitting on the edge of the same bench he and I had shared. Veronica was gone, a relief for everyone, I’m sure.

“Promise me you won’t let anything happen to her,” Daniel said more to the floor than to me.

“I promise.”

It wasn’t a promise I made lightly. But it was one I meant to keep.

***

She wasn’t thrilled to learn her car was still in the parking lot at the bank and that it would remain there until this issue was resolved. She also wasn’t thrilled to get into the black SUV Ash had left for us. She stared out the window all the way to her house. I followed the GPS coordinates Ash had programmed into the system, glancing at her from time to time just to make sure she was still there. There was a knot in my stomach that was tight and uncomfortable, a sort of nervousness that I’d thought boot camp had beat out of me. Women don’t make me nervous. I usually know where I stand with any woman—no matter the circumstances. But this one? She was my personal dynamite, and I wasn’t ever sure when she would go off.

“Your dad still has his law firm?” I asked in an attempt to kill the silence.

She shrugged.

I knew the answer, of course. I kept tabs on the family over the years despite the fact that I never intended to contact them again. I wanted to know they were doing well, that life was treating them better than it had in the last five years I’d known them. First Louise, Joshua and Kate’s mother, had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at thirty-five. It was a quick and ruthless illness that turned her into a ghost long before death finally came. And then, less than four years later, just as they were putting their lives back together and looking forward to the future, Joshua was killed. They deserved happiness, and it offered me a small condolence to know that they did have it, in a small way.

I hadn’t known that Daniel remarried. But I followed the cases his firm handled these last ten years, some quite notorious cases that underscored the reputation he already had as one of the country’s top litigators. Not only that, but cases that had made him quite wealthy, too.

I wondered if that could have something to do with what happened at Kate’s bank. It seemed more likely that it was just a hit on the bank. However, I wasn’t quite convinced that was what it was. Why would a bank robber hit the bank after hours, after everyone was gone and there were no employees to open the vault? After all, the cash drawers would have been emptied when the bank closed, so the vault would have been their only option. So why attack then? Why not wait until morning, to wait for those moments when the employees were setting up for the day and the vault was open? Why not wait until it would be a much simpler attack, a snatch and grab?

Could it be that one of Daniel’s former clients, maybe someone he hadn’t been able to get off, had gone after Kate in retribution?

I glanced at her, wondering what it was she might have unwittingly gotten herself into. And then I shook my head, shaking away that line of thought. It wasn’t my job to find out the who or the why. It was my job to make sure she made it through this unhurt.

We pulled into the driveway of a modest brick house on the outer edge of Santa Monica. It had a small yard, a few rose bushes growing low under the front windows. And there was a one-car garage that Ash had left the remote to in the SUV’s cup holder.

“Where did you…?”

I pulled the SUV carefully into the garage and reached to grab her arm to keep her in her seat until the door closed completely behind us.

“I’d rather you not make a target of yourself.”

She jerked her arm away. “You don’t have to manhandle me. You could have simply asked me to wait.”

“Would you have listened?”

She didn’t answer, but the look she shot me was all the answer I needed.

She climbed out and marched toward the door that led into the house. I followed closely behind, checking my phone to make sure an alert hadn’t come in from David’s program. Before David’s program, I would have swept the house before I allowed the client to walk in, but the program made that unnecessary. If anyone had gotten into the house between the time Carson’s team left and we arrived, I would know it because the program would have known it.

The garage door opened into the kitchen. It was a galley-style kitchen with counters on either side. Kate didn’t pause as she made her way through, turning the corner at the archway into a large, welcoming living room. There was an overstuffed couch and a comfortable looking recliner situated in front of a plasma television on the wall. There were no adornments, no pictures on the walls, no flowers in fancy vases, none of the personal touches that I would have expected of Kate. There was no clutter at all, just the furniture, like a showroom in a retail store.