Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
Despite waking up in the middle of the fucking night to go sit on the gravel and rock like a baby, Seth was up early. The house was quiet when he prowled into the kitchen to find coffee. He’d bought his own yesterday, so he got that out, found the filters, and poured grounds into the basket. Then it was water, pot under the basket, button on.
The thing started burbling right away so that was a good sign. He lifted his head to look out the window. The back of the house faced east, and the first rays of dawn were crawling above the horizon. The sky was pink and orange, and he felt like he could breathe again. Unlike last night.
He scrubbed a hand over his head and yawned. What the fuck had he been thinking last night? He’d told Callie about Mia, about her existence. He hadn’t even told his teammates about the daughter he’d lost before she was born. The daughter he’d walked away from.
But he’d said the words to Callie. Not all of them. Not the part about walking away before she was born.
Callie had been sympathetic, but he knew what she’d thought. She’d thought Mia died. Seth had been so shocked at the words that came out of his mouth that he hadn’t corrected the impression.
He’d said he had a daughter. That he’d lost a daughter. That’d she’d be Nikki’s age.
Being around Nikki had ripped off the scab and exposed the wound again. He hadn’t expected it to happen that way. He should have known it might. He’d thought about Mia a lot since moving to Sutton’s Creek. Probably because the mission, while the most important of his life, wasn’t as distracting as his life in the Hostile Operations Team had been.
He’d always been on the go, flying from one war zone to the next, dropping into hostile territory to extract hostages, planning missions when he wasn’t actively engaged in one, and thinking every day that this was the day he could die.
Ghost Ops wasn’t like that. They were ghosts, haunting the perimeter, watching, waiting. Analyzing. He hadn’t realized that he wasn’t suited to the stillness until it was too late.
If Ghost offered him an opportunity to return to active duty today, he’d take it.
Charlie sauntered into view in the field, taking mouthfuls of grass before sauntering onward. As if he was enjoying the coolness of the day before the sun was high and the flies were biting.
The horse made Seth think of the two women asleep in their beds, and he knew he wouldn’t leave yet. Not until they were safe. He’d signed onto this mission precisely because it was so critical, because failure meant that people would die.
People like Nikki and Callie. People like Mia. Rory and her baby, Emma, Daphne, and all the fine citizens of Sutton’s Creek. If some megalomaniac dictator on the other side of the world got possession of Athena’s technology and deployed it before Athena was active, they could attack the United States with impunity. Northern Alabama would be high on that list because of all the research and development taking place there.
He couldn’t let that happen, which meant he was staying right where he was. He had to keep digging for a connection between Callie and the two Russian agents, because he had to be thorough and certain, and he had to keep her safe from whoever had murdered Volkov and quite possibly torched Griffin Research Labs when she was working late.
It was still possible that had been an accident and nothing to do with her, but Ghost Ops wasn’t putting that one to bed until they knew for certain. Guesses didn’t keep you alive for long in this business. Intuition and gut feelings were a thing, but research was the pillar you could build a house on.
Seth got his coffee and went outside to drink it standing in the cool morning air, feeling the heaviness of the dew that saturated the grass and listening to the morning chirp of birds. He finished the cup and dropped to the grass to do a hundred pushups before he let himself go for the second cup. When he stepped through the back door to the kitchen, Nikki was there in sweatpants and boots, a wrinkled T-shirt half tucked in, a mug of coffee cupped in both hands. Her presence kicked him low in the gut, but it wasn’t as hard a kick as yesterday had been.
“Hey,” she said when she saw him.
“Hey.”
“I gotta feed Charlie.” She sounded half asleep. “Coffee first though.”
“It isn’t too strong for you?”
“Rude. And nope.” She popped the p. “It’s just right. Callie makes it too weak, so I try to get here first. Hafta admit I was worried when I saw you’d beat me to it, but it’s good.”
“I’m glad. Sorry I was rude.”
Not that he thought he had been, but they’d already established he didn’t know fuck-all about teenagers.
She grinned. “Well, you weren’t exactly. But you assumed because I’m young—and that was rude.”
“You got me there. Won’t happen again.”
She nodded, then leaned against the counter and took a sip. “So… do you like my sister or what?”
Okay, he hadn’t expected that one so early in the morning. “Rude,” he said with the same inflection she’d used.
She laughed. “Still gotta answer though.”
This kid. “You mean do I like her like a girlfriend?”
“Precisely.”
He’d been right to suggest they pretend to date. Clearly. “Yeah, I think I do. That okay with you?”
She shrugged. “Callie can make up her own mind about who she goes out with. But if you aren’t really into her, if this is just about some easy sex, then you need to move along. I don’t want her to get her heart broken by some pretty boy who can’t keep it in his pants.”
Seth legit choked on his own spit. Once he stopped hacking and knew he wasn’t going to die from inhaling liquid into his lungs, he gaped at the teenager standing so casually with her back to the counter. She hadn’t moved a muscle. Hadn’t tried to help him not choke to death or even looked remorseful.
Diabolical. He kinda liked that.
“You tell it like it is, don’t you?”
“There’s really no other way. I used to think life was easy. But then I lost my parents, and now I watch my sister work her ass off taking care of me when she’s supposed to be living her own life. If you’re here for good reasons, then she deserves it. But if you aren’t, then you need to move along and find somebody else to get busy with.”
Seth finally poured that second cup. He’d been knocked off kilter by this kid and her questions, but he was ready now. Maybe.
“I’m hearing you, but here’s the thing. I’m interested in dating your sister. She’s interested in dating me. Neither one of us can predict how that’s going to go. We might really like each other, or we might find out we aren’t compatible after all. No way to know without starting down the path. I’m not looking at her and thinking I want to get married or anything. I’m thinking she’s pretty and interesting and I’d like to know her better.”
“She is pretty and interesting. She’s fluent in three languages, and she’s pretty much a computer genius. Did you know she graduated at the top of her class in college? That kind of thing turns guys off sometimes. They don’t like it when a girl is smarter than they are.”
She frowned and he wondered if she knew that from experience.
“Then they aren’t the right kind of guys, are they? Any man who’s threatened by a smart woman isn’t all that smart himself.”
He knew Callie was smart. He’d read her transcripts. Her professors routinely praised her as someone who could go far if she had the right opportunities. For her graduation project, she’d designed and implemented a program to streamline the academic grant process, correcting several inefficiencies and saving the university millions in administrative costs over a period of years. She’d gone straight into government service work, no doubt costing herself a fat paycheck from a civilian company.
Could be because she’d had ulterior motives, but he imagined it was most likely due to the patriotic mother who’d been so proud of her new country.
“Amen, my dude.” Nikki set her empty mug on the counter. “Okay, if you really want to date her and see how it goes, I’m on board. If you’re just trying to get into her panties, not cool. Take that shizz somewhere else. I can’t stop you if that’s what you’re really up to, but I won’t make it easy either. Just so you know.”
“I’m duly informed.”
“Excellent. And now I gotta feed Charlie and clean his stall so I can get ready for school. Even though tomorrow is the last day and we aren’t doing anything anyway. They really should just let us go and be done with the pretense.”
He’d already heard from Ethan, who would pick up her trail as soon as she turned onto the road at the end of the long driveway. He would follow her to school and then head to the range until it was time to follow her to the stable in Madison. Seth had put a tracker on her vehicle last night. He’d put one on Callie’s Toyota too.
Hopefully they wouldn’t need them, but better to have them active if they did. Callie and Nikki had location tracking enabled for each other on their phones, and that was good, but Seth felt better with a backup system in place.
“You need help out there?”
Her eyes lit up and he cursed the impulse that had made him offer.
“That’d be great. Thanks.”
Seth followed her outside, coffee cup in hand, wondering what the hell he’d gotten himself into. He soon found out when she handed him a rake, a shovel, and pointed at the wheelbarrow.
It was gonna be a seriously shitty morning.