“She did, but apparently she needed a big change, and being a DEA agent is not something, it turns out, she can do anymore. No kind of law enforcement, actually.”
I understood that. I’d been a cop for thirteen years after I finished college at twenty-one, and when it finally became too much, it hit me all at once.
“Loc?”
“Yeah?” I mumbled, miserable and tired. I’d been on a stakeout the night before with Cooper Davis, and it lasted until a little after three when the guy we were tailing finally called it a night and went home with two strippers instead of burning down a restaurant, as he had threatened. He and his brother were shaking down our client for protection, and while Nash and Rais were with the nice couple, making sure the man and his wife and their new baby remained healthy, Coop and I were sweating our balls off across town—it was June in Chicago after all—following Mario The Torch Riotta and his crew from one sleaze palace to the next.
The following morning, this morning, Cooper had to report for jury duty, which was why he was absent. Poor bastard.
“You have something to say about Guzman?”
“No. She seemed nice when I met her at Croy’s wedding,” I offered.
He looked surprised, like me being anything but a surly bastard was a surprise. That wasn’t great. It said unflattering things about me. The only good part about his fixed regard was that him staring at me, giving me all his attention, meant that I could do the same back. From his silver-flecked eyes, to the gray strands in his short, thick blond hair, to the stubble on his strong, square jaw, he was one of my favorite things to look at. I got why the very much younger Owen Moss was smitten with him.
Owen was our mechanic, tech guy, all-around hardware/software/whateverware fixer. If it ran on any kind of chip, from a phone to a car to a satellite, Owen could hack it, reprogram it, and make it do his evil bidding. It was all way over my head. What was annoying to me, and everybody else, was that when Owen thought you couldn’t grasp something, he gave out a lot of pitying looks. The only person he never talked down to was our boss.
I knew why.
Owen was, without a doubt, into Jared Colter.
I didn’t know a lot about Owen, but what I’d observed since I’d known him was that he startled easy, like a feral cat, his whole body jolting and then recoiling at once. Clearly there had been some kind of trauma, but it all fell away with Jared. He was the only one who could walk up on Owen, bump him, lean into him, or heaven forbid, eat off his plate. And when Jared wasn’t paying attention, Owen gazed at him with such naked, ravenous longing in his big blue eyes that it hurt to see. At some point the whole hair-tousling thing Jared did, the seeing Owen as a kid, was going to get blown all to hell. I had a feeling that one day Owen was going to pounce on Jared like a hungry cheetah on a gazelle, and it would be nice to be around to see the surprise on the big man’s face.
“Loc?”
“Sorry,” I said quickly, forcing a smile. “I’ll take care of it if you have to go while I’m in there, and if she shows later, I’ll come get you.”
“Good.”
“Who do you want in next, after me?”
“Nash.”
I nodded. “Will do.”
Once we were in the room, Jared offered them water, tea, coffee, or—he said after thinking a second, imagining, I was sure, the contents of the refrigerator in the breakroom—some kombucha that Rais had made. I had never had a drop of it myself, but both Nash and Cooper said it was good, and there were bottles of different flavors cluttering up all the shelves. They all declined everything, so Jared introduced himself, and then me, to Sawyer Cox and his two assistants, Donna Rodriguez and Katie Jong.
Once we were all seated, Jared started explaining a bit more about what we did. I was careful to keep a straight face through that—no smirking or eye rolling—and I made sure not to snicker when he told them that we were out to “do good.” He sounded so lame.
“I know when we spoke on the phone, Mr. Cox, that you said you needed a bodyguard for your client, Nick Madison.”
“No,” Cox contradicted him, leaning forward, hands clasped on the polished mahogany table. “He has bodyguards. I need a guardian.”
Jared shook his head. “If you need to appoint a guardian ad litem, that’s not––”
“Sorry,” Cox interrupted with a quick cough. “He’s not a minor, and that’s not the kind of guardian I mean.”
“Please clarify, then,” Jared said, his voice low, serious. He was being patient, but as a rule, cutting him off was a no-no in our office.