Blindsided (16 page)

“Yes. Each of these images comes back between 55 to 78% chance. I suspect it would be higher if I could get a clear shot of him.” She got up, restlessly moving about the room.

“How did you get these?” he asked, sliding into her recently vacated chair. Still warm.

“Security video, satellite image, media files,” she answered. “If I suspected he was near, I’d hack in and see if I could find him on the feeds.”

He frowned, looking at the places and dates at the bottom of the pictures. Scrolling down he found a couple from her own recording studio—
inside
the studio even. One showed the street outside her family home. The rest were various places both in and out of the country.

“Okay.” He was willing to bite. “Where are these shots from and why did you suspect him of being there?”

“Some were major publicity events for the record company. He’s turned up a few times for those. The two most recent ones, one in Panama City, one in Hong Kong, they were within days of a Viadal death.”

The last tidbit of information was alarming, and went far to support her off-the-wall theory, but it was the first that caused his gut to clench. Stalking her. If she was right, then the bastard, and most likely their killer, was stalking her. Acid pooled in his stomach. “How did you find them?”

“I have a probability scanner on this system,” she explained as she walked around the room. “I can plug in the security feeds and the computer compares and analyzes it to the age generated image I have. It can take a while and will spit out hundreds of possibilities that hit a 50% threshold. Willis helps me narrow them down from there.”

“Huh.” He spun the chair to watch her. She’d found an errant pillow, which had made it to the floor, and was neatly putting it back in place. “How many security feeds can you run?”

“Hundreds at a time. It still takes a while.” Her lip curled up in disgust. “All the images I hacked from Hong Kong databases took this baby two days to analyze.”

“Still impressive. We don’t have anything this good. Something like this would take weeks and hundreds of man-hours to pull, plug in and compare. And of course, there’s the red tape.”

“What one doesn’t know…” she shrugged and left it at that.
 

Teigan nodded, inclined to let her get away with the omission.

“Who set up your system?” Garret asked, catching Teigan’s eye with a reproachful look.
 

Yeah, yeah, message received. I should be asking her this shit. But as she just said…what one doesn’t know…

“No one touches my system but me. At least not without my express permission.”

“Can I have a copy of this info?” Teigan asked.

On a sigh she sat back down in the chair she occupied earlier, fumbled until she found the teapot and her cup. She poured herself some more to drink, but didn’t drink the now luke-warm liquid, merely turned the cup in her hand.

“You have eleven days left before Garret’s birthday. I’ll ask for two, then Willis will drop off everything I have.”

“Two days for what?” Teigan asked uneasily.

“To put everything in order, get out of Dodge.”

He sat up straighter in the chair. All the warmth she’d left behind had faded and it wasn’t so inviting anymore. “And where do you plan to go?”

“Now telling you that kind of defeats the point, doesn’t it?” she said, finally giving him the smile he’d been longing for. It left him hollow.

Chapter Nine

August 2
^nd
2104:0846

She should have known he wasn’t going to give her two days. Not even one. Less than eleven hours to be precise. Teigan, and she was pretty damn sure it was Teigan—hard to tell for sure when their voices and scents matched so well—had immediately tried to dissuade her from bolting. It was the fact that he’d tried to convince her at all that had confirmed, in her mind, that it was the older brother and not the ex-V-10. Garret seemed more pragmatic. He accepted without question that something had to be a certain way. Teigan seemed the type of man who would bend and twist and rewrite the rules to get what he wanted. His mind worked out-of-the-box and came up with a half dozen ways to utilize the information she had for them without exposing her. None of them would work. She knew that, had accepted it, but either he was here to give it one more go at convincing her otherwise, or he’d decided he didn’t need to honor the deal at all.

She didn’t believe that. There had been numerous opportunities for Teigan to turn her in. He hadn’t.

The sound of her footfalls echoed statically in the marble hall, her measured breathing keeping time, at war with the thrumming heartbeat urging her to greater speed. She was halfway down the curved stair before she realized she was close to running and checked herself.
 

What was she doing? Racing down these stairs like a young school girl on prom night.
 

She took a deep breath, smoothing her blouse before continuing on at a more sedate pace. Thirty-three steps across the foyer, forty-seven down the hall and a right. She pushed open the door to her father’s study.

Across the room, near the floor to ceiling built-in shelving, there was a soft thump of a book being closed, the gentle shift and slide of worn leather on shelf. Inhaling deeply, she measured the mix of scents. Nothing distinct, but her heartbeat didn’t inexplicably pick up its pace. Had Willis been wrong? He’d told her Agent Evans had requested a moment of her time, not Garret.
Only one way to find out for sure.

She strode across the room—the door banged closed behind her—and offered her hand. “Garret right?”

“That’s right.” Large calloused fingers engulfed hers. He returned the little extra squeeze she put in the handshake.

“Hmm.” She nodded, taking her hand back when he released it. “Your scents are close enough that I wasn’t one hundred percent certain.”
 

“Sorry.” He didn’t sound sorry.

She cocked her head, trying to sense the slight difference in height between the two brothers. According to their files Garret was just a touch taller. Thus far she hadn’t noticed. Perhaps because Teigan’s presence hit her with a punch that was surreal? Which was odd, you would think knowing what Garret was, would make him more imposing, not less. “You’re quieter than Teigan. I thought that was an older brother trait,” she teased.

“Knowing how to be silent is good when you’re a soldier,” he replied.

Silence fell around them. The study had been constructed to block out other noises, thus preserving the peace of her father’s sanctuary. The only break in the hush was the faint draw of air in and out of their noses. It was unnerving. Aria didn’t like silence. With the loss of her sight she had come to rely too much on her other senses.

“What were you reading?” she asked, her voice sounding a good octave higher than normal as it sliced through the stillness.

“Just looking.” His voice was flat, emotionless.

Okay.

She turned her full gaze on him. She couldn’t see more than a very shadowed outline in the dim room, but she’d been told more than once that her blank stare was mildly unnerving. It was only fair that the man was as unsettled as her.

He cleared his throat. “This is quite a collection. You don’t see books in print too often anymore.”

She felt the slight smile play at the corners of her lips, nostalgia washing over her. “It is grand, isn’t it?” she asked, running her fingers over the worn spines. “I leave much in this house as it was because it makes it easier for me to get around. But these were my father’s treasures. He may have had his faults, but this,” she waved her hand around the library, “this place held everything that was wonderful about him.”

Her fingers went back to tracing the bindings, found the one that still held the warmth from Garret’s touch.
 

“Ah.” She drew down the delicate tome from the shelf. “Worn cloth binding, soft leather cover with imprinted title and detailing around the edges.” She flipped it open, drawing in a deep breath. “It still smells like him.”

She turned back toward him. He hadn’t moved an inch since she came in. She hadn’t been paying attention while searching the shelves for the book he’d been looking at and now he was close enough that she could feel his heat, could sense the broadness of his shoulders loaming before her. Strange how it did nothing for her. Not like his half-brother did.
 

“Brave New World or Fahrenheit 451?” she asked for something to say.

“451,” he replied.

“Good read. Very powerful. You’re welcome to borrow it.” She held the book out, turning up the wattage of her smile. “It isn’t doing me any good on the shelf.”

She swore his pulse jumped, his breathing becoming deeper, more rapid. Excitement? He took the book from her fingers, leaned forward. Feeling the wave of heat, she automatically stepped back, and succeeded in bumping into the shelf behind her.

He followed, boxing her in with his body.
 

Oh crap! What had she done? She hadn’t been trying to flirt, just get him to relax, maybe open up a little. Now she was trapped.
 

For the first time in his presence, fear rippled through her. This man could do anything he wanted to her. She was a fool, a damn fool for thinking him aloof but harmless.

Her own heart thudded, her fingers flying over the shelf behind her, looking for either a heavy tome or one of her father’s famous bookends. Garret’s shirt brushed the side of her cheek. Smells flooded her senses, a whiff of fading adrenaline, slightly stale sweat, all overlaying the heat of man. Her fingers found a marble statue acting as a bookend. She closed her hand around it. One wrong move…
 

A soft scrape of a book sliding back onto the shelf.

“It’s a tempting offer,” Garret’s warm voice whispered across her ear, “but no thanks.”

Behind them a throat cleared. Garret stepped away from her, turning around. Her knees turned to jelly and she had to grip the shelf to keep from falling.

“Took you long enough,” Garret admonished and walked away.

***

“Sorry, I had to grab something from the Airlan. You seemed to have made yourself right at home.” Teigan’s voice came out tight, gruff even to his own ears. It took all he had in him to suppress the budding jealousy that rose like bile in his throat.
 

Budding my ass, try flaring
. The sight of his brother all but plastered against Aria was like a double sucker punch to the gut. Betrayal: The word that flashed like a neon sign in his mind.

He shook the thought away. Who was he kidding? He should have expected this. The reason she’d shown any interest in him at all was because she’d thought he was Garret. Now that she knew who was the super soldier and who wasn’t…well, it was obvious that he didn’t measure up.

Garret gave Teigan a look filled with amusement and plopped down on the scuffed leather couch. “Just following orders, though I’m not sure Watchdog Willis meant it when he told me to make myself at home. I thought your butler was going to choke on the hospitable words.” He directed the last bit over his shoulder to Aria, who remained clinging to the book shelves.

Aria seemed to awaken from her dazed haze. With a quick check to her French twist—Teigan quickly suppressed the image of why it would’ve been mused—she confidently followed Garret’s path across the room.

“Willis is my butler, driver, mentor, bodyguard, and closest thing to family I’ve got left. He’s a bit overprotective at times,” she added, with more than a touch of affection in her tone.

She hesitated, her nostrils flaring as she stood posed between Teigan and the couch Garret had thrown himself onto.
If she sits down beside Garret…
Teigan’s hands clenched—she moved behind the massive desk—he forced them back open.
 

Her fingers tapped out a nervous pattern on the hard surface. Though the wood was lovingly polished, the chairs in the room frequently treated, it was obvious they were both very old and had seen heavy use. She lifted her head, and though her eyes were unfocused, her face turned in Garret’s direction.

Damn, damn, and triple damn. Five minutes alone—poof—that’s all it had taken for his little fantasies to go up in smoke.

After a pregnant pause Aria cleared her throat, her empty gaze shifting so it was no longer on Garret but somewhere between the two men. “It hasn’t been two days. Does this mean you’re having second thoughts regarding our deal?”

“We can’t wait any longer. I need the data now, yesterday even,” he told her, glad to have something to focus on other than the tension in the room.

Her head immediately began to shift in negation and he set out to convince her.

“We’re working blind, Aria.” She jerked. Shit. Idiot. He raced on. “Fumbling around in our attempts to set up a trap. With your data we might have a hope of catching Byron before he can strike and someone else gets hurt.”
 

He moved closer, so that her attention focused firmly on him. Her face was pinched as if she was having some deep inner struggle with what he was saying. But though her eyes were in line with his position, there was nothing more for him to read there.