Jaimie: Fire and Ice (The Wilde Sisters 2)
Page 61
“What’s your point?”
“Did you protect people? Without them knowing you were protecting them?”
“Lissa…”
“Dammit, I’m not asking you to give away state secrets! Did you keep people safe by being around them without them realizing you were there for that purpose?”
“I provided certain covert services from time to time, yes.”
It was Lissa’s turn to roll her eyes.
“Well, don’t you know anyone who still does that kind of thing? Someone you can trust, someone you can rely on, someone tough enough to make sure nothing happens to Jaimie even as he gathers information?”
“Last I heard,” Caleb said dryly, “Batman was busy.”
Lissa folded her arms. “Just what we need. Comic relief… What?”
“There is this one guy,” he said slowly. “Tough as nails and smart as hell. I’d trust him with my life.” A quick, harsh laugh. “Actually, I have.”
“Well?”
“He’d need to find a way to ease into Jaimie’s life…” He paused. Then his lips curved in a slow smile. “He has one hell of a condo in Manhattan. He could pretend he wants to sell it.”
“Jaimie works in D.C.”
“Details,” Caleb said blithely. “He’ll come up with something, I’m certain of it.”
“Great! That’s great! What’s his name? And when are you going to call him?”
“I’m not going to call him.”
“But you just said—”
“This is the kind of thing I’d rather discuss in person.” Caleb dug his cell phone from the pocket of his sweatpants, hit the speed-dial number for the pilot of his Learjet, made a quick apology for waking him and arranged for his plane to be ready at 5:00 a.m. “OK,” he said briskly, after he’d ended the call, “I’ll fly out tomorrow.”
“Jaimie mustn’t know!”
“She won’t. If she asks, I’ll say something’s come up and I have to take a quick meeting, but I’ll be back by dinner.” He wrapped an arm around his sister’s shoulders and hugged her. “We’ll have our holiday weekend, just the way we always do, and by the time Jaimie returns to D.C. Sunday night, my guy will be on the case.”
Lissa let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding.
“That’s fine. It’s excellent. I just hope he’s as good as you say he is.”
“He’s almost as good as I am.” Lissa rolled her eyes again and her brother grinned. “Trust me, sweetheart. Zach Castelianos is just what our Jaimie needs”.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Zach wasn’t an early-morning type.
Given a choice, he stayed up late, sometimes until the soft pink fingers of dawn stroked the gray sky.
There were things he liked about the hours that unfolded after sundown. Cities revealed the truths
they’d kept hidden: Streets that were quiet and crowd-free. Skyscrapers that rose into the dark like silent sentinels. Owls swooped through the trees in Central Park. If you were quiet, a fox or a raccoon might run across a path ahead of you. Once, he’d even seen a coyote and he’d wished it well.
It wasn’t easy to make it in this world, for either men or beasts.
He liked the night away from cities, too. He’d trained and served in vast stretches of desert and on mountain peaks that reached for the skies and the stars blazing in them.