Fire Touched (Page 64)

“Have you looked at me?” she said. “I am covered with scars, and I’m too skinny. I have no muscle. I’m ugly.”

I wasn’t a guy, so I knew better than to argue with that last statement. What I thought didn’t matter—what she thought mattered.

“Thomas doesn’t think you’re ugly,” I told her. “No one who watches him watch you—no one who saw his face when he picked you up back there in that hotel would ever, ever be under that impression.”

“I’ve tried lingerie,” she said after a moment.

“Big guns are required,” I said. “Subtle won’t work. Naked.”

“But I don’t have big guns,” she said. Then she dropped her head in her hands. “I can’t believe I just said that. I can’t believe I said that to someone I’ve just met.”

“Thomas will like your guns just fine,” I assured her. “Just ask him.”

Her jaw dropped open. Then she closed it and laughed.

We talked awhile more. I offered improbable suggestions, and she responded in kind. Just outside of Pasco, she fell asleep.

It had been a long time since I’d talked with a woman who was just my friend. I’d called Char, my old college roommate, over Christmas. Maybe it was time to call her again.

—

I parked the Subaru, and before I had the engine off, Thomas had the passenger door open. When he saw Margaret asleep, he extracted her from the seat without waking her up.

Yep, I thought with satisfaction, he’s a goner.

I got out of the car, locked it with the appropriate button on the key fob, and handed the keys to Thomas.

He took them, looked at me, then glanced over his shoulder at Adam, who was standing beside the black SUV in the parade-rest position that he habitually fell into when waiting for someone. Zee had the hood of the SUV up and was tinkering.

I frowned at Zee. There was nothing wrong with the SUV. I kept all of our cars in excellent running condition.

“You should come visit us in San Francisco,” Thomas said, his voice quiet. “I would be delighted to serve as your escort.” Then he smiled. A real smile. He didn’t have Adam’s dimples, but it was a good smile anyway. “In the purely tourist sense of the word.”

“We’ll do that,” I said. “Margaret and I had fun.”

Margaret opened her eyes and, in a sleepy voice, said, “Take care, Mercy. And thank you. I hope not to need the big guns.”

I laughed. “I think you’ll find that your guns are plenty. Safe travels.”

Thomas turned and headed for the hotel entrance.

I stalked to the SUV, and said, “There is nothing wrong with the SUV.” Zee kept tinkering. I stood on my tiptoes to see what he was doing. “Is there?”

Zee removed himself from under the hood and held up a small device. “Not anymore. Someone’s been tracking you.”

Adam held his hand out, looked at the device, and snorted. He passed it to me. It bore a neat label with the SUV maker’s logo on it. I’d never had to do anything more complicated than an oil change on the SUV. If I’d noticed the little box, I’d have assumed it belonged.

“Feds, I bet,” Adam said. “We are persons of interest.”

“How did you find it?” I asked Zee.

“Nothing you could do, Liebling,” he said. “I felt it transmit. It didn’t bother me much, but since we had a moment here, I thought I’d take a look.”

Adam stuck it under the bumper of the Chevy parked next to the SUV. The Chevy bore all the signs of a rental vehicle, including a license-plate surround that advertised for Enterprise. I patted its trunk. “May someone rent you for a very long drive to Alaska,” I told it.

Adam snorted, then asked Zee, “Could you tell how long it has been there?”

Zee nodded. “Six months, maybe a bit more. Someone wants to keep tabs on you, Adam.”

This time it was my turn to snort. “If I’d known it was there, we could have done something more interesting—like drive out to the middle of the Hanford Reach every full moon and park for the night.” Which we did, mostly. We had other hunting spots, but the Reach was the best. “Sorry I didn’t find it, Adam. I’ll keep a better eye out next time.”

“No worries,” said Adam softly. “I’ll have a talk with a few people I know about boundaries that shouldn’t be crossed. It won’t happen again.”

—

We arrived home to find every door and window in the house open, and the smell of burning wool in the air.

“Hey, Boss,” said Warren, as we came through the doorway, his expression somewhere between pained and amused. “We had a little mishap. Aiden was sleeping when his blankets burst into flame. Happily, Mary Jo was here. While we were all trying to figure out what to do—besides hold our ears to try to shut out the fire alarm—she grabbed the fire extinguisher from the garage and put the fire out. Mattress is a goner, but the room’s okay. We have the situation under control.”

About that time, Mary Jo came up the stairs, carrying an armful of sodden, blackened fabric that had at one time been a Pendleton wool blanket. She looked at me, and said, “Life is never boring around here.” Then she grinned at me, an expression she hadn’t turned on me in a very long while. “Your fire demon says that he needs to leave. We convinced him that it would be rude to leave before you got back, but I’m not sure we could have kept him here much longer.”

As she finished speaking, Aiden came up the stairs. His hair was wet, and he was wearing sweats from the pack stores—I made a mental note that we were going to have to get him clothes if he was going to stay here long.