Chapter 2
TWO
Well, that worked out just fine.
Sam Reston sat down behind his desk, looking at the day’s reports, but all he saw in front of him was the delicious Nicole Pearce, with her exquisite face and hourglass figure, wrapped in classy clothes. An aristocratic wet dream.
He’d been waiting for this moment since he’d first seen her moving into that cubbyhole across the hallway from his own five-room headquarters.
He knew her office was small because it had been shown to him before he settled on his own quarters.
Her office wouldn’t have been big enough for his files.
She ran a translation business. Sam knew exactly zilch about the translating business.
Maybe you didn’t need much space to translate French into English.
Or Spanish into Russian. Or Italian into German. Or Norwegian into Portuguese.
She covered them all, an amazing configuration of languages, as her sharply designed website told him.
He’d looked at her list of collaborators and it was 120 strong, each one with an impressive resumé, scattered all over the world.
If there’d been translation work available on the space station, she’d probably have a collaborator there, too.
He’d nearly laughed at Nicole Pearce’s expression when he’d named his price for picking that ridiculous lock of hers—dinner out with him.
Granted, he thought, as he looked at his big, battered shit-kickers now comfortably settled on his shiny, expensive desktop, he did look like a scumbag. Well, you wouldn’t want to be his enemy. But Nicole Pearce wasn’t his enemy. Shit, no.
He’d been aching to touch that creamy white skin ever since he’d first seen her, and when he finally got his chance, he’d make sure his hands were clean.
And gentle. He had strong hands, but he knew when to curb his strength.
The idea of hurting any woman made him physically ill, but the idea of somehow hurting Nicole… no, hurting her was not in the cards.
Fucking her…now that was another matter.
The lock on Nicole Pearce’s office door had been so easy to pick, it was embarrassing. It had taken two seconds, tops, while she’d been checking the time on that fancy wristwatch.
The memory of her slack-jawed surprise when she looked up to see him opening her door had him grinning as he bent forward to check his e-mail. This afternoon he’d get a haircut and a shave and then a half-hour shower before his date, but right now, he wanted to get some work out of the way.
He scanned the subject lines of his e-mails, giving a quick fist pump in the air when he saw NIGHTINGALE LANDED.
He scanned the e-mail, nodding with satisfaction. Twenty-four-year-old Amanda Rogers was now settled in her new life, under a new name and with a new job in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
The last time Sam had seen Amanda she’d been perched, trembling and terrified, on the edge of the client chair.
A pretty girl, or at least he imagined she was pretty under all the bruising, and if you could ignore the puffy black eye and swollen jaw.
One arm had been in a cast. The hand on the other arm clutched the arm of the chair with white-knuckled intensity.
The uninjured arm was slender, with a delicate wrist. An enraged man would find it really easy to snap that arm, and an enraged man had. Her boyfriend, who terrified her.
Soon, it wouldn’t be snapping a slender, delicate wrist. It would be a slender, delicate neck.
Sam knew that. His two brothers, Harry and Mike, knew that.
All three of them had grown up with men who loved nothing more than to beat the shit out of those weaker than themselves. Women and children top of the list.
As always, with Amanda, Sam had hidden his feelings under a business-like mask but inside he was seething with rage at the idea of her fuckhead boyfriend beating her to a pulp.
The boyfriend was six one, two ten, gym strong, and now in jail.
He’d screamed threats to Amanda every step of the way from arrest through booking to the moment when the barred door clicked shut behind him.
Mike had observed him carefully, then had contacted Sam.
Mike had then had a quiet talk with a terrified Amanda at the downtown station and given her a heads-up. The boyfriend had money and was going to make bail. She wasn’t going to survive another round of Boyfriend TLC, so Mike quietly sent her to him.
This was what Sam loved doing. It was what he lived for. His brothers, Harry and Mike, too. The runaway success of Reston Security was gratifying. He couldn’t have asked for a better outcome. He was his own boss and he was making money hand over fist.
But by God, what he and Harry and Mike got their rocks off on was this. His very own underground railroad. Having the money and the power and the knowledge to subtract women, often with their kids, from the brutal equation of violence.
Simply whisk them away to somewhere else where they could have a shot at living a life undarkened by terror. Man, it was a good feeling. The best.
The women came to him in trickles. Some brought by Mike, who was in Violence Central there at the SDPD headquarters.
Most by word of mouth. The women were tall, short, blonde, brunette, pretty and plain.
But they all had the exact same terrified expression and underlying hopelessness.
As if they’d already been beaten to death and were just waiting for life to catch up.
Sometimes they were on their own, sometimes—tragically—with a kid or two in tow.
Often the kid would be in a cast, or have blue-purple bruises or burns.
And Sam would put on his expressionless mask and talk schedules and places and plans.
While inside he was a beserker just dying to deal with whoever had broken the thin childish arm or put out a cigarette on tender flesh or swung a fist at a child.
You want to beat up on someone, fuckhead? Why don’t you try me instead of a forty-pound child? Except I have spent a lifetime studying martial arts and I will rip your fucking heart out of your fucking body and feed it to you without breaking a sweat. Not so brave now, eh?
Sam never, ever allowed what he was feeling to show on his face. These women and kids had seen enough violence to last them a lifetime. So he quietly helped them disappear and reappear with a new life.
For Sam, it was as if the world had huge holes punched into it by monsters. He spent a lot of time and effort trying to close those holes.
Sam had set Amanda up with a new identity and carefully wiped her trail clean. If she kept her nose clean, she was home safe and free.
Setting her up in her new life with new ID had cost $10,000 and Sam had given her $5,000 in cash as start-up money.
Nightingale, in her new home and new life, had joined dove, falcon, finch, flamingo, gull, heron, hummingbird, ibis, macaw and mockingbird in theirs so far this year. Eleven women and seven kids, safe, because Sam had been able to provide that safety.
His clients funded it. They could all afford it.
Sam opened the file on his ship-owner client and added $15,000 in expenses with a great deal of satisfaction. He’d saved the ship owner more than $10 million; the ship owner could fucking well give something back.
Corporate America, via the US government, had spent millions of dollars training him, including SERE school. The US government had made him an expert at escape and evasion.
It gave him enormous pleasure to make corporate America pay for the lost ones, the weak ones, the ones who slipped through the cracks, the ones no one cared about.
Oh yeah, that felt good.
Man, Nightingale had landed, scumbags were going to prison forever and he had a date with Nicole Pearce. All was right with the world.
“Wow. Sam Reston, smiling. Jesus, break out the beer. What happened? You get word that Colonel Stewart got his balls caught in a thresher?” Colonel Roland Stewart, the sadistic son of a bitch who had been Sam’s commanding officer for one and a half years of hell, had left a trail of hatred behind him as he slimed his way up the promotion ladder.
Stewart getting his balls caught in a thresher would definitely qualify for a smile.
“I wish. Son of a bitch’s in the Pentagon now, balls secure.”
His other brother, Harry Bolt, placed two crutches against the wall and leaned his trembling right shoulder against the door of Sam’s office. Sam watched and said nothing. It had all been said before, over and over, loudly, by both Sam and Mike.
Harry had no business trying to stand without crutches. He had no business standing at all, since the last orthopaedic surgeon had said he had to stay in the wheelchair for at least another month while his bones knitted.
Harry was his own worst enemy. Sam had found him a small apartment in his own building in Coronado Shores so he could make sure Harry didn’t do something terminally stupid.
Harry had come back from Syria with a broken body and demons in his head only whiskey and, lately, some jazz singer he listened to endlessly in the dark could keep at bay.
He couldn’t be trusted with his own health.
The more the doctors told him to take it easy, the more he rebelled.
He’d already fallen badly twice, setting his recovery back by months.
Finally, in exasperation, Sam had asked him to come in to the office, simply so he could keep an eye on him. If Harry fell, at least Sam would be there to catch him.
Reston Security was expanding fast and it sounded natural for Sam to say he needed a hand.
But then Harry turned out to be more than just an extra pair of hands—he was an enormous asset to the company.
He was better with computers than Sam, a goddamned genius actually, and he had more patience with dumb clients than Sam did, so he was seconded to the array of latest-generation computers in a quiet room off Sam’s office and to the Asshole Client Detail.