Flirting With Disaster (Camelot 3)

Chapter One

“Yes,” Katie said, gripping the steering wheel harder. “Uh-huh, yes, I get it.” She glanced in the rearview mirror, signaled left, and changed lanes. The traffic was getting thicker as they approached Louisville.

Her brother kept talking, his voice robbed of its customary power by the cheap speakers of her cell phone, which sat in a cup-holder mount and broadcast Caleb’s warnings upward at her head. “If you have the slightest indication that there’s danger attached to this threat, you’re going to call me, and—”

“Yesssssss,” she droned.

The drama was wasted on Caleb, who was going to give her this lecture for the seventeenth time whether she wanted to hear it or not.

It was wasted on Katie’s traveling companion, too. Sean didn’t react to anything she did. Ever.

Katie glanced at the man in the passenger seat of her Jetta, just to be sure. His expression as he stared out the windshield matched the bleak, featureless expanse of southbound I-71. He was like a human wall of granite, completely impervious to everything about her.

A stern, gorgeous cliff face.

Suppressing a sigh, she tuned back in to Caleb’s speech. “—you to be in charge of anything along those lines, Sean. This is a trial run for Katie. I’m only letting her go because Judah insists she’s the one he wants to work with. You got that, Katie? It’s Sean’s show. I need you to play nice and stay out of his way.”

“Yes,” she confirmed. “I know the deal. I agreed to the deal. I am on board with the deal. Now can we stop talking about it, please?”

She flinched at the way her voice came out, sharper than she’d meant to sound. It was only because she was nervous about this trip. Her palms had gone clammy and slimed the leather wheel cover, so uncomfortable did it make her to venture into an unknown city to do an unfamiliar job with a man who didn’t like her.

She had a tendency to bristle when nervous.

One more bad habit she needed to make an effort to tame. Better to be professional. What Katie really needed to figure out was how to act cool and icy like some kind of Bond Girl assassin, slinking around and poisoning people by slipping strychnine into their drinks.

Except without the poisoning. Her goal was to win herself a promotion from office manager to agent for Caleb’s security company, not to become an assassin. Not unless her ex-husband strolled into town needing assassinating.

“We’ll stop talking about it when I’m positive you’re going to cooperate,” Caleb said. “Right now, you sound like you’re blowing smoke up my ass.”

“I’m not,” she replied levelly. “I promise. I understand that this is your company and Sean’s assignment, and I’m just a companion on this trip. I promise I’ll be quiet and helpful and learn things, okay?”

“I need you to be safe.”

She made a face, then immediately regretted it. Wrinkling her nose and pursing her lips in response to Caleb’s babying only proved she deserved to be babied. Not the way she wanted Sean to see her.

She flicked another glance in his direction. If he saw her at all, he gave no sign.

“I’m safe,” she said.

“I care about you, Katelet.”

“I know you do,” she replied. “I care about you, too.”

“And it’s only because I care about you that I’m going to say this again …”

Katie tapped her fingertips against the steering wheel and stopped listening.

She understood his worry. Ever since she’d confessed that she was married and needed to locate her spouse so she could get divorced, Caleb had become all concerned and brotherly. She kept waiting for him to go back to the way he’d been before, but so far, no luck.

Five years older than her, her brother was a born nice guy who had spent most of his adulthood in the Military Police before moving home a year ago to help take care of their parents after their dad had a stroke. Katie had been living in his house rent-free at the time, working as a bartender nights and spending her days in elastic-waist pants, moping and watching daytime TV. Her husband, Levi, had cleaned her out and dropped her like a bad habit, and she’d returned from the life they’d built in Alaska in defeat. She’d practically regressed to adolescence by the time Caleb pulled her out of her self-pity slump.

He gave her a job running the office of his new company, Camelot Security, and after the first month or so, Katie had started to feel useful again. Competent. She’d discovered she had some get-up-and-go left in her after all. That she actually wanted to do something with herself.

Caleb was also the one who’d encouraged her to enroll in a couple of online classes. He’d even appointed hi

mself her personal trainer, helping her whip her body into its best shape in years.

He was a great brother, but Katie was done with the coddling. She’d turned over a new leaf. He needed to get with the program.

“Sean, are you hearing all this?” he asked.

Sean nodded. He was invisible to Caleb, but the two of them apparently had a man-telepathy thing going, because Caleb said, “Great. Give me a call after you’ve talked to Pratt. I want to hear the details of these threats he’s supposedly getting. And if you can, find out why he’s brought this case to us instead of giving it to his security team from Palmerston, because—”

“Caleb,” Katie interrupted.

“What?”

“Give it a rest.”

“I just—”

“We’ve been over this and over this. Sean gets it. I get it. We’ll call you. Now let us do the job.”

Her brother exhaled explosively, which made Katie smile a little. “Aren’t you supposed to be taking today off?” she asked. “Go home and help Ellen with wedding arrangements or something.”

Caleb and Ellen had met on a job and gotten engaged about six minutes later. He pretty much lived over at her place now, and he’d become more of a father to her son, Henry, than the two-year-old’s real father ever had.

“God, no. She won’t let me near any of the wedding stuff. But I did tell Henry I’d take him to the hardware store.”

“So why aren’t you doing that?”