“Merry Christmas, kiddo. Sorry to keep you up so late.”
“That’s okay. I’m on duty, anyway.”
“In your pajamas? Where’s your gun stashed?”
Miranda curled her legs beneath her in the chair in the Gallagher estate’s security command center and grinned. At least one perk to working the holidays for a man who was as wealthy and techno-savvy as he was unsettling and opinionated was access to a pretty sophisticated computer setup. This was the best satellite link she’d had with her brother since he’d been deployed. “Long story. So tell me, what did you do to celebrate?”
John’s hair was a few shades darker than her blond locks, but the same green eyes looked back at her and smiled. “Well, I just stuffed my belly with a ridiculous amount of food. They went all out for the holiday meal—ham, turkey, prime rib. Baked potatoes. Mashed potatoes. Sweet potatoes. Cherry pie. Pecan pie. Chocolate cake. Ice cream…”
“Stop. I’m gaining weight just listening to all that.” Although his deep, indulgent tone was familiar, she couldn’t help but notice the tight lines bracketing his smile. “You look tired.”
“I just came off the front line today.”
The time difference between the States and the Middle Eastern region where his marine unit was stationed required these rare face-to-face hookups to take place at odd hours. But she didn’t think a lack of sleep fully accounted for the gaunt look of his handsome face. “John? You do remember that I’m a twenty-eight-year-old grown-up now, right? You don’t have to protect me the way you used to. Did something happen?”
He looked away from the camera for a second, then tried a little harder to make his smile stick. “Did I tell you I got that care package you sent? Loved the books and the sports drinks. Not sure what I’m going to do with the red-and-green socks, though.”
“Nice dodge, big brother.” John Murdock avoiding a straight answer raised her concern another notch. “But you didn’t answer my question. Is it really that horrible there?”
She and John had been a family unto themselves since the time she’d been a teen and he’d been in his early twenties and their parents had died in a car accident. She could read her brother’s moods and expressions like he could read hers—and they didn’t keep secrets from each other.
“I’m in a war zone, kiddo. It’s rough.”
“John…”
His tension eased on a wry laugh. “Fine. I was never able to outlast your stubborn streak.” Miranda’s heart squeezed in her chest at the pain that passed over his features. “We had a bad encounter on one of our last sorties. I lost a good friend. I asked the CO if I could write a letter to his family. It was tough.”
“Oh, John. I’m so sorry.” His pain became her own. She was so far away, so helpless to do anything for him. Was there any job she was going to be able to successfully accomplish anymore?
No. Don’t go there.
This wasn’t about her. She swiped at the tears stinging her eyes and smiled for his benefit. “What can I do to help?”
“Give me a present,” John answered, the shift of his wide shoulders making the effort to lighten the mood. “Tell me what you did to celebrate the holiday.”
“I worked.”
“That’s a lousy present. I’m going to have to have a talk with your captain when I get home. At least tell me you have fun plans for New Year’s Eve.”
“As far as I know, I’m working then, too.”
John shook his head. “Can’t the criminals let you celebrate at least one holiday?”
“I’m trying to earn some brownie points with Captain Cutler. So I volunteered for a special assignment with one of his friends, Quinn Gallagher.” She gestured to the wall of computer towers, wires and monitors behind her. “That’s why we’ve got such a great link this time. Mr. Gallagher is letting me use the computer lab in his security offices.”
“That explains why it looks like you’re sitting in a bunker. You’ve got plenty of ventilation there, right?”
“There’s a huge cooling system here with all these electronics.” She glanced up. “I’m staring at a vent now that leads up to the main floor and is bigger than my closet.”
“Maybe I should be there instead of this tent.”
“I wish you were. It’s hard to feel like celebrating the holidays without you.” Miranda patted the belly of her red plaid flannel pants and pouted. “There was no one to bake me a caramel apple pie.”
John laughed. It was a good sound to hear, and eased her worry about him just a bit. “You’re really roughing it, aren’t you?”
“Hey, you haven’t had to butt heads with Quinn Gallagher.” Her body tingled at the memory of that heated encounter in the upstairs hallway. She hugged her knees up to her chest, trying to dispel the prickly aftershocks of sexual awareness before her brother picked up on any of her unplanned and inappropriate fascination with her temporary boss. “He’s like something out of a comic book—a driven, brainiac, his-way-or-the-highway kind of a guy. Although, I haven’t decided whether he’s more the hero or the villain yet.”
“A comic-book character?” John scoffed. “I knew I should have gotten you to read more Austen and Brontë than that fantasy adventure stuff you ate up in school. You’re talking about the guy who created Gallagher Security Systems, right?”
“You’ve heard of him?”
John thumbed the collar of his captain’s uniform. “GSS doesn’t make flak vests just for cops.”
“I can imagine his company making only the best for our troops. Even his house here in Kansas City is a fortress. I’ve had a crash course in keyless remotes, motion-activated sensors, panic room protocols and redundant armor systems to close off windows and doors in the event of an attack. I swear, if there’s a security technology out there, Quinn Gallagher has it installed here. The whole estate is like a model home for security technology.”
“So what are you doing for GSS?”
“It’s for Quinn, specifically. There have been threats against the family, and he has this adorable little girl.” Who, despite Miranda’s screwed-up efforts thus far, seemed to like her, as well. “I’m working as a nanny for a week.”
John snorted a laugh. “You? I never pictured you as the domestic type. This Gallagher does know you can’t cook, and you’ve never changed a diaper, or—”
“Give it a rest,” she chided with a grin. “I’m the girl’s bodyguard. I tried to tell Quinn that we weren’t playing to my strengths here. But I met the most important requirement.”
“What’s that?”
“I was available.”
John’s deep-voiced chuckle made Miranda smile, as well. “Is there a mother in the picture?”
“Quinn’s a widower. Why?”
“Because you’ve mentioned him by name at least three times in the past thirty seconds. Somebody’s got a crush.”
Despite the refrigerated temperature of the basement office, Miranda felt her cheeks heat with embarrassment. “I do not. I mean, can you imagine someone like me together with someone like him? There are so many reasons why it would never—”
John’s image disappeared off the screen and an odd image blipped into its place. Long tables. Equipment, knobs, wires. A blurry glimpse of a figure whose face was above the angle of the camera shot. There was no marine, no khaki tent wall in the background. For one second, maybe two, she was looking at a different place, a different person.
Miranda’s mouth was still open, midprotest, when snowy static blurred the picture on the screen and John suddenly reappeared.
“John?”
“Did we lose the connection?” he asked. “We were supposed to have the feed for twenty minutes.”
She unwound her legs and dropped her feet to the floor. “You saw it, too?”
He was sitting up straighter, too. “I lost the signal for a few seconds. Instead of looking at you, I was looking at—” he shrugged “—someplace else.”
“Like a visual party line. I don’t know what it was.”
“Who knows how many satellites we’re bouncing off of to make this connection? A line’s bound to cross somewhere.”
“Yeah.” But wouldn’t the monitor just go blank or fuzzy if they lost the satellite connection? “I need to go report this.”
“Randy?”
“A lot of weird things have been happening here.” It had been the weird behavior of a suspect near the witness SWAT Team 1 had been assigned to protect that had diverted her focus, allowing the Rich Girl Killer to sneak up from behind and attack her. Was this a diversion that could take her attention away from protecting Fiona Gallagher? “Do you remember me telling you about the RGK?”
“Yeah. He cracked your head open and you think that means you failed your team. The guy’s dead, Randy. He’s got nothing to do with a computer glitch.”
“I know.” Maybe she could confess to her brother the secret self-doubts the police psychologist had had to pry from her. “But I nearly blew that mission to hell, John. And now I second-guess everything. Every thought, every action. Everything I see. I can’t let anything happen to that little girl. But I don’t know that I’m the best person for this job.”
“Nobody trains harder than you. Nobody understands responsibility and wanting to do the right thing more than you. You’re smart. You’ve got good instincts. Hell, I taught you everything I know about staying safe.” And he’d done it very well. “I’m the one fighting a war. I do not want to get a telegram that says something happened to my baby sister while I was away.”
Her heart lurched in her chest. “Thanks for the pep talk. I’ll be careful if you will.”
“Deal.”
“Swear?”
“I swear.” He nodded toward her. “Now trust those instincts and go find out what just happened here.”
They each touched their hands to their respective screens. It was as close to a hug as either one of them was going to get. “I love you, John.”
“I love you, too, sis.”
Miranda’s fingers were still there when the satellite feed ended and the monitor returned to its screensaver image.
And then she was on her feet, searching for anyone else on the estate who was still up at this hour.
“W
HAT ARE YOU DOING OUT
here?” Miranda’s footsteps had been noiseless on the stairs, and yet Quinn had known he was no longer alone the moment she reached the landing. Some switch of hyperawareness had been turned on in his brain, specifically tuning his radar to alert to her presence. “Is something wrong?”
He pulled back from the door frame where he’d been watching Fiona sleep and quietly closed the door to her room.
“Quinn?” She’d come up beside him, the point of her chin tilted toward him, those green eyes sharp with concern as they tried to read his expression.
“She’s fine.” He tightened his robe around his bare chest and the sweatpants he’d worn to bed. He adjusted his glasses at the temple to buy him another second to wipe the depth of his worry from his face before turning to her. “I’m the one who can’t sleep. I keep thinking that if I drop my guard for even one moment, if I let her out of my sight…”
“That’s what I’m here for, right?” She pointed to her bedroom door. “I can take the comforter off my bed and bunk on the floor in here if you like. I grew up doing lots of camping with my family, so it’s no problem.”
Keeping the fact that he’d been tempted to do that very thing to himself, Quinn shook his head. The one person innocently unaware of all the dangers swirling around his daughter was Fiona herself. But if she woke up to find one of them in there with her, that sharp little brain of hers would quickly realize that something was wrong. It was one thing for him to be afraid, but seeing that fear tainting his daughter’s eyes would tear him in two. “She’ll be fine. Father’s prerogative to worry, you know.”
“Sounds like my big brother.” She gently splayed her fingers against the door. “Fiona’s a lucky girl. It’s a secure feeling to know someone’s looking out for you.”
Miranda’s serene smile when she spoke of her family eased an answering smile onto his own mouth. “Did you make the connection to your brother?”
She nodded, curling her fingers into her palm. “Thank you.” In the dim light of the hallway, Miranda seemed shorter, not quite up to Quinn’s nose where she’d been earlier in the evening. A more observant glance up and down the red and white of her pajamas revealed that she’d been running around the estate in her socks, adding a younger, inexplicably vulnerable air to the tough chick who’d been armed and dangerous and argumentative from nearly the first moment they’d met. “Talking to John is the best present I could have asked for.”
So why wasn’t she still smiling? “But…?”
Her shoulders lifted with a deep breath. “Something hinky happened to the link while I was talking to him. John disappeared for a couple of seconds, and I was looking at something else, some
where
else. Kind of like someone switching the channel on the TV, and then switching it back. I asked the guard on duty, O’Brien, about it. But he seemed to know less about computers than I do.”
“Hinky, hmm? Let me check.” Her confusion was cause enough to trigger his own concern. And since he wasn’t sleeping, anyway, Quinn headed down the stairs to his office study, with Miranda following on quick, silent footsteps. He sat at his desk, turned on a lamp and pulled up the estate’s mainframe access, typing in code after code to get into the secure server that constituted the brain for all of the estate’s electronic activity.
He felt her lean against the back of the leather chair to look over his shoulder. “You know how to do that?”
“I know my way around lots of different technology. I designed this system myself.” Once he was in, he scrolled through all the recent online activity. “I didn’t make my millions by being a pretty face.”
“No, you couldn’t do that.”
What? Quinn stopped midtype and turned in his chair to question the taunt.
She slapped her hand over her mouth, her face blushing rosy pink all around at the stray thought she’d spoken out loud. The hand came down and she backed away from the chair. “That didn’t come out right. You aren’t pretty. Not with the chest and the arms and the… I mean, you’ve got that whole hero-beneath-the-nerdy-black-glasses thing going for you…” Her hands came forward, imploring him to understand her embarrassed rambling. “You’re Clark Kent on the outside. But underneath, you’re really…” Her posture withered as she hugged her arms around her waist. “Shutting up now.”