GUARDED

Chapter 1

MARA

The latency numbers aren't the problem. I've told Singapore that four times. I'm prepared to tell them a fifth.

I'm doing exactly that when the car turns off the county road onto the private lane out to Seabreeze Point. Crushed shell and gravel. The co-op that runs this stretch of coastline won't let anyone pave it.

Sara goes quiet beside me. The specific quiet that means she's about to hand me a problem she thinks I'll enjoy less than she does.

"The problem is that Kwan promised engineering could deliver something they never approved." I get out before the driver reaches my door, because I've been sitting for four hours and my body has opinions. "Singapore doesn't need a new deck. Singapore needs someone to stop lying in meetings."

My company builds software that predicts where a project is going to fail before the people running it know enough to be scared. It sounds simple until you've watched it save a launch. Kwan wanted to ship a version that guessed instead of knew, and promised the board it was already working.

I've booked three weeks here. Not a trip. A retreat, in the corporate sense: back-to-back planning sessions with every team that reports to me, run from a porch instead of a conference room.

I don't look at the house. I've seen the photos.

I don't look at the water either. I know what it's going to do to me. I'd rather it not do it in front of an audience.

The wind here doesn't visit. It moves in and stays, salt and grit and the particular quiet of a place built to keep the rest of the world out.

Nearest grocery store is a forty-minute drive.

No neighbors close enough to hear anything, which used to sound like peace and today sounds like something else.

There's a man at the door.

"That's Stone," Sara says, low, before I can ask. "The security firm sent his credentials this morning. Ex-Navy, highest rating they issue."

I clock him the way I clock everything I've already been briefed on: quickly, to confirm, not to discover. Six-two. Arms crossed. A stillness that isn't boredom, the specific kind that costs something to maintain.

He's watching me like weather, not a woman. Which I find almost restful.

"Sara. Make sure he understands I'm not a package."

I go inside because I have eleven minutes before Berlin. I intend to use four of them being a person who isn't currently on a call. Which is a luxury I schedule for myself the way other people schedule dentist appointments.

Sara catches up to me in the front hall, tablet against her chest. There's a version of her voice I've learned to hear underneath the professional one.

"There was a thing this morning. On the company page.

A comment. It's gone now, Legal pulled it, but I told the security guy, because he should know. "

"What did it say?"

"Something about the view."

I feel that in my sternum first, a small cold drop. I put it away.

"Fine," I say, in the voice that ends conversations, and Sara lets it end.

The house is the kind of beautiful that only shows up once money stops trying to prove anything. Glass I could walk through by accident if I weren't careful. It smells like the ocean and something warmer underneath, sandalwood, deliberate, curated.

It's the kind of house that could make a person want to slow down. I don't have room for that this week. This is a work trip, and work trips don't include feelings about real estate.

The briefing happens at four because he insists on four. I sit through it with my laptop open. Men who underestimate me tend to overexplain, and looking distracted usually tells me exactly how much of a briefing is performance and how much is real. I have this down to a science.

He's positioned my chair so my back is to the interior wall instead of the glass. I move it back around before he's finished his second sentence. I like the light. Nobody rearranges my furniture in my own rented cottage without asking.

He watches me do it without comment. Which bothers me more than a correction would have.

"There are three access points I care about," he says. "The front door, the porch slider, and the utility gate on the south side. The gate latch is decorative. I'm replacing it tonight."

"Mm."

"When you leave the property, I know before you leave, not while you're leaving. Give me ten minutes and I clear the route myself."

I type. He stops talking. The typing continues four seconds, five, then thins to nothing, and I look up, sunglasses off, into eyes that are gray in this light and entirely unhurried.

"You stopped typing," he says. "The next time you tune out a briefing like that, I walk the perimeter without telling you where I'm going."

My chin comes up. "That's a threat."

"That's a schedule."

"Do you also do fun facts, or is it all schedules and threats?" I ask.

"I know the tide tables for the next six weeks," he says.

"That's not a fun fact. That's a symptom." I close the laptop before I let myself enjoy that too much. "Three access points. The gate latch is decorative. Go."

He goes. He's thorough. He asks two questions I hadn't thought to ask myself. Which I decide, for the sake of my evening, is impressive rather than simply what I'm paying for.

The percolator is the only appliance in this kitchen I trust. I put it on at seven the next morning because seven is when my body starts the day regardless of what my calendar says.

I'm three notes into the tune my mother used to hum over her own stove, down, down, up, hold, some jazz thing older than both of us, when I feel him in the doorway.

I don't have to turn around. He changes the air in a room just by entering it.

I stop humming mid-note. Which annoys me more than the humming did, because it means some part of me cared whether he heard it.

"Coffee," I say, to cover the gap. "There's a machine that does espresso and probably taxes, but I like the noise this one makes."

"That's a reason."

"It's the only reason I have this early." I pour and slide the pot an inch toward him, not quite an offer, and watch him take it like one anyway.

His hand closes around the mug, steady in a way that has nothing to do with caffeine. The kitchen isn't small. He still manages to make it feel smaller.

"You could sleep in. You're the client."

"I could also learn to enjoy losing arguments with my board, and neither one is happening this decade." I try the coffee and make a face at it I don't bother hiding. "You always this chatty at zero-dark-thirty, or am I special?"

I haven't slept more than five hours a night since I started closing out this retreat's schedule, and it shows in the second cup, the one I don't pretend is anything but necessary.

"You're special. I checked the file twice."

I file that one somewhere dangerous and refuse to smile.

By ten I'm on the porch with the retreat briefs. I notice, in the part of my brain that never fully shuts off, that he's positioned himself at the rail's north end, where he can see the drive, the dunes, and me, all at once.

I decide not to have a feeling about that.

The retreat eats my whole day, same as always: Berlin, then Austin, then two hours of a tablet and a stylus and a man in Austin who can't see the hole in his own plan until I draw it for him in four sentences.

This is the part of the job I actually like. Not the money. The part where I take a mess and make it smaller.

At four-twenty a pelican lands on the rail eight feet from my chair. It looks at me like I owe it money. Something about the sheer indignity of its face gets past every defense I have at once, and I laugh before I know I'm going to.

Not the laugh I use on calls. The other one. The one I retired somewhere around business school because it makes you look like your life isn't fully assembled.

I don't need to look at him to know he's gone completely still.

"You saw that, right?" I say, once I've got my face back under management. "He looked at me like I owed him money."

"He does that to everyone."

"You've met?"

"He's on the rail every afternoon at four twenty. Watches the house eleven minutes and leaves."

"You timed a pelican?"

"I time everything."

"God, that's bleak. Do you have a hobby that doesn't involve a stopwatch?"

"I collect latches."

His hand goes to his right pocket once, quick, like checking something's still there, before he catches himself doing it. A habit older than this job, I'd guess. He doesn't explain it, and I don't ask.

"That's not a hobby, that's a symptom of your entire personality."

He doesn't smile. I've noticed that about him, that he holds a line the way I hold a line. I go back to the briefs before I do something unwise with my face.

My personal phone buzzes on the side table. Unknown number, the kind I answer without armor because I'm still half-expecting a courier confirmation from the printer downtown.

"Mara Voss."

The voice is thin and pleased with itself, easy as a man ordering a drink. It takes four words for the temperature in my chest to drop straight through the floor.

"Enjoy the view while you can, Mara."