21. Sneak Peek Of Avenging Amity #2
“Yes, well, saying it like that makes my position sound rather unreasonable.”
“It is unreasonable.”
Despite everything, a brief laugh escapes me.
“Stay where you are,” Adrian says. “Keep the police around you until the car I’m sending arrives. It’ll take you somewhere secure. Don’t tell Flynn where you’re going.”
My amusement disappears. “You don’t trust him either.”
“I trust you. That’s enough.”
I look toward Flynn again. He’s watching me.
“Who are you sending?”
“Declan Sharp.”
The name means nothing to me.
“Should I know him?”
“No. But you’ll know when he arrives.”
That sounds ominous.
“Adrian, what exactly have you just inflicted on me?”
His answer carries unmistakable amusement.
“An Australian.”
He ends the call. I stare at my phone.
Someone has tried to shoot me three times this morning, the detective investigating it may be protecting the people responsible, and Adrian Blackstone has decided my solution is an Australian bodyguard.
Bloody hell.
My day continues to deteriorate.
***
The Kensington Hotel, London. 1015 hours.
Adrian arranges a car to collect me from the café and take me directly to the hotel, with strict instructions that I stay inside until Declan arrives.
By the time I reach my room, I’ve acquired a headache, a swollen ankle, and an increasingly hostile relationship with every window I pass.
The room is on the fourth floor overlooking a quiet side street. I close the curtains before removing my shoes and setting my briefcase on the desk. Adrian’s instructions were irritatingly specific.
Stay inside. Don’t contact my office. Don’t tell anyone where I am.
Flynn wasn’t pleased when I refused to provide an address.
That improved my mood considerably.
My phone shows three missed calls from chambers, two from my mother, and one from Flynn. I send my parents a brief message assuring them I’m safe and promise to call later, then silence the device.
I’m examining the damage to my heel when someone knocks.
Three firm strikes.
I cross quietly to the door and look through the peephole.
A man fills most of the view.
Huge, with broad shoulders beneath a battered leather jacket, short blond hair, and a face that looks as though it belongs somewhere with considerably more sun than London provides. His skin is deeply tanned, his features rugged, and he’s watching the corridor rather than staring at my door.
I keep the security chain in place and open it several inches.
His blue eyes meet mine.
“G’day. Amity Lovell?”
“You’re Adrian’s Australian.”
One corner of his mouth lifts. “Declan Sharp. That’d be me.”
I look past him into the empty corridor before closing the door, releasing the chain, and opening it again.
Declan steps inside and immediately checks the room. Windows, adjoining door, bathroom, balcony access. He moves with an efficiency that makes my irritation compete with curiosity.
“You always inspect other people’s hotel rooms?”
“When someone’s already tried to shoot them twice, yeah.”
He checks the window locks before letting the curtain fall.
I fold my arms. “Were you in the forces?”
“Australian Army.”
“That explains quite a lot.”
“Does it?”
“The tendency to enter a room and immediately assess how everyone might die.”
His mouth twitches. “SAS.”
I straighten slightly. That explains considerably more.
At six foot three, possibly more, he makes the perfectly respectable hotel room seem designed for smaller humans.
“Adrian gave me the basics,” he says. “Car attack ten days ago. Driver shot. Sniper this morning. Police detective telling you it’s random.”
“DCI Flynn.”
“I want everything you’ve got on him and whoever you’ve been investigating.”
“That could take hours.”
“Then we’ll be spending hours together.”
“I have work to do.”
“So do I.”
“And precisely what does your work involve?”
“Keeping you alive.”
“I’ve managed that reasonably well for thirty-two years.”
“Last ten days have been a bit shaky.”
I stare at him.
Infuriating man.
His expression sobers. “You don’t leave this hotel without me. You don’t go home, you don’t go to chambers, and you don’t wander off because you decide I’m overreacting.”
“You’re rather fond of issuing orders.”
“Occupational hazard.”
“I don’t take orders well.”
“Adrian mentioned that.”
Of course he did.
“You’re under my protection now, Amity.”
I stare at him. “You’re joking.”
“I never joke about keeping people alive.”
An Australian ex-SAS soldier is standing in my Kensington hotel room, telling me where I can and can’t go and apparently planning to follow me everywhere.
This is either the worst day of my life or the beginning of something I can’t predict.
***
Chapter 2: The Assignment
Declan
The Kensington Hotel, London. 1020 hours.
Amity Lovell is staring at me like Adrian sent her a badly trained gorilla in a leather jacket.
Can’t say I blame her.
I came straight from a protection job on the other side of London, haven’t shaved since yesterday, and I’m still wearing the jacket I’ve had for twelve years.
She looks exactly like the woman Adrian described.
Elegant, strawberry-blonde, polished enough to walk into Parliament and make half the room sit straighter.
Lady Amity Lovell, according to the background Adrian sent me.
I’ve been assigned actual nobility.
She also looks pissed off.
That works for me. Pissed off people are usually paying attention.
What she doesn’t know is I started assessing her security before I walked through the hotel doors.
Main entrance exposed to the street. Too much glass. Two public exits, one service corridor, three visible cameras. Maid’s cart left unattended near the lifts. Fire stairs accessible with a room key. Sightlines from the building opposite that I don’t like one bit.
Then there’s the bloke downstairs with the newspaper, still on the same page after nearly four minutes. Could be waiting for someone, could be hotel security, or he could just be shit at reading.
I’ll find out.
“You’re staring at the window,” Amity says.
“Yep.”
“Is it offending you?”
“A bit.”
Her eyebrows lift.
I cross to the curtains and check the angle toward the buildings opposite without exposing myself to the glass. Fourth floor. Plenty of elevated positions across the rooftops, upper windows and offices opposite.
After this morning, I’m treating every one of them as a potential firing position.
“Who chose this room?”
“The hotel assigned it.”
“Right.”
“What does right mean?”
“It means we’re moving.”
“We most certainly are not.”
I turn.
She’s standing beside the desk with her arms folded, bare feet on the carpet and one ankle already swelling from whatever happened during her run from the shooter. Her briefcase is beside her, close enough to grab.
Smart.
“Window’s a problem.”
“The curtains are closed.”
“Curtains don’t stop bullets.”
Her lips press together.
I walk to the door and check the peephole, corridor sightline, lock and security chain. Decent enough against an opportunist. Useless against someone who knows what they’re doing.
“You always behave like this?” she asks.
“Pretty much.”
“How exhausting.”
“Still alive, though.”
That earns me a look.
I almost smile.
Adrian warned me she wouldn’t like being protected. What he didn’t mention was that she’d look at me like she was preparing a legal argument for having me forcibly removed from the country.
I’ve protected politicians, executives, diplomats and rich bastards who thought hiring security meant acquiring a servant with a gun.
Amity isn’t any of them.
Someone put three rounds at her this morning after shooting up her car ten days ago and putting her driver in hospital. She should be rattled.
Instead, she’s watching me work and cataloguing every reason she intends to argue with me.
“Sit down,” I tell her.
“There it is again.”
“What?”
“The ordering.”
“Get used to it.”
“I assure you, I won’t.”
“You left out the Lady part.”
Her eyebrows lift. “Because it’s irrelevant.”
“Righto, Duchess.”
Her eyes narrow.
Yeah. That one’s staying.
This assignment’s going to be fun.
I take out my phone and send a message to a London contact with the hotel name, a description of Newspaper Bloke, and a request for everything available from the surrounding cameras.
Then I look at Amity.
She sees an uncultured Australian brute Adrian has dumped into her hotel room.
Fine by me. People underestimate blokes like me all the time.
While she’s deciding how quickly she can get rid of me, I’m already working out who knew her route this morning, where the sniper fired from, how they found her twice in ten days, and whether the man downstairs is waiting for her to leave.
Someone’s hunting Amity Lovell.
Now I’m hunting them.
***
The Kensington Hotel, London. 1035 hours.
Amity lasts another twelve minutes before deciding she doesn’t need me.
“I appreciate Adrian’s concern,” she says from the desk, injured ankle elevated on the second chair, “but Scotland Yard is handling the investigation.”
I’m beside the window, checking the photographs I took on the way here.
“Scotland Yard reckons it was random.”
“DCI Flynn said they haven’t established a connection between this morning and the attack on my car.”
“Yeah. He’s full of shit.”
Her head turns slowly. There’s that look again.
“You have a remarkably direct way of expressing yourself.”
“Saves time.”
“And you’ve reached this conclusion after being involved in my life for less than an hour?”
“I reached it after looking at the shooting.”
She lowers the document in her hand. “You’ve been to the scene?”
“On the way here.”
That gets her attention.
Adrian sent me the location before I arrived. I made one pass on foot, photographed the impacts and checked the likely firing positions.
Three rounds across a tight area on a busy London street, and the shooter was gone before police arrived.
Professional.
I turn my phone toward her and enlarge the first impact.
“Shooter was roughly four hundred meters out. Probably a suppressed .308.”
Amity looks from the photograph to me. “You can tell that from a hole in a wall?”