Jaimie: Fire and Ice (The Wilde Sisters 2)

What better recommendation could there be?

Zach phoned him.

“I need some legal advice,” he said.

Caleb flew to New York. They met for drinks and dinner and talked well into the night. They went to Zach’s office; Caleb pored over all the data he needed to see. At dawn, o

ver coffee, bacon and eggs at a diner on Tenth Avenue, they shook hands and Caleb became Zach’s attorney.

A week later, another handshake, and Caleb’s brother, Travis, became his financial adviser, though adviser was too simple a term. Travis Wilde was a financial genius. Under his guidance, Zach watched the enormous amounts of money Shadow generated turn into a serious fortune. What else could you call it when you could plunk down cash for a four-bedroom, five- bath condo on the fiftieth floor of a new glass tower at Fifty-Seventh and Fifth?

So many changes and all at blistering speed.

Now, he had a new life…except for the times he let the old one intrude.

On this hot October afternoon, he was back from just such a situation. Idly, he wondered when The Agency would stop using such a monstrously stupid word for a mega screw-up.

The Director had contacted him. They’d flown him into a place people were frantically flying out of, and he’d done what had to be done. He had no doubt about that, but it had been tough, even brutal; it had reminded him of what he’d grown up knowing.

The world was filled with lies, liars, and deceit.

A smart man never trusted anybody.

His father had told him that and taught it to him the hard way. It was probably the only thing he had to thank the old man for and if he ever had the misfortune to see him again, he’d have to tell him so.

Dammit.

It was too late for second-guessing and too hot for cheap philosophizing. And where in hell was John? Frowning, Zach peered the length of the pickup lane where his driver was supposed to meet him. He’d called him on his cell as soon as the plane had touched down.

“I’m here,” Zach had said, as if that weren’t self-evident, and John had said yessir, he’d be right there, but if this was his idea of five minutes…

Zach swiped the back of his hand across his forehead.

It was like this each time he returned from handling a “situation” for The Agency. He came home pumping adrenaline, nerves jagged after being reminded, as if he needed reminding, that the world was not necessarily a good place.

The heat didn’t help.

Zach pulled off his denim shirt, unzipped the duffel and stuffed the shirt inside. Beneath it, he had on a black T-shirt that was a couple of days beyond not just needing a visit to the laundry but crying out for it.

He suspected he didn’t exactly smell like a field of flowers, but it wouldn’t matter; he wasn’t going to be around people from this point on.

It had been different on the full-to-the-last-seat airplane, where the shirt had been a small blessing, keeping the fat guy to his right and the even fatter one to his left as far from him as possible. After the past ten days, he’d had had enough of people to last a lifetime.

The plan had been that he’d have a cargo plane all to himself on a secondary runway at what remained of a still-functioning airport somewhere east of Istanbul and west of Aleppo, but the plan had been aborted, no reason given, and a contact had come up to him and said that someone would meet him at the entrance to the main terminal and walk him through immigration.

Actually, the skinny geek who’d sidled up to him looking as nervous as a cat at a dog show had not walked him through anything. They’d walked around it instead.

Once the guy got him past the building, he’d handed him the small duffel Zach had left at the safe house days ago. Everything that said he had a life back in the real world was inside it. A wallet stuffed with bills. His cell phone. His driver’s license. His beautiful Born-in-the-USA passport.

“It’s all there,” the geek had said in a voice as thin as a thread.

Zach had ignored him, zipped open the duffel, nodded at the sight of all his stuff, then scribbled his name on the receipt the guy held out. Receipts, even in the middle of “situations.” Typical Agency crap.

They’d started walking toward a vehicle that might have been a Jeep in another life. They got in and the geek drove him across the field to a commercial jet that bore a logo Zach had never seen before. He’d climbed the steps to the cabin and stepped into an aluminum tube crammed with people wearing the desperate faces of those who aren’t sure they’re actually going anywhere until the instant they do.

Zach understood that.

It was the way you felt when you were lucky enough to find a way out of what was rapidly becoming a war zone.