Chapter Four
As Hawk walked away from Sinead, he felt her stare on his back.
Or rather, her glare.
He understood she was rattled from everything that happened. Hell, he wished this mission was going easier too—the muscle of his ass was balled into a knot that didn’t make walking without a limp easy.
He left her in the front office with Ayla and told her to wait there while he spoke to the team.
He managed to walk the length of the corridor between the front of the security office to the war room without giving away his discomfort.
Pausing at the door, he glanced back to see that Sinead was still seated with a magazine in her hands. She wasn’t reading it, though. She was watching him.
Instead of a glare, he saw the same look she wore on the ridge right before he shoved her behind him.
Worry.
He liked seeing her worry as much as he liked having that bullsnake take a chunk out of his ass, but he needed to speak to his team about the men he took out on the ridge.
When he stepped into the war room, Gray’s expression was carved from granite and Denver’s focus appeared riveted on the open laptop in front of him.
Hawk dropped into a chair, forgetting about his inconvenience and winced as pain shot through his glute. His jaw locked. “Talk to me.”
Gray tapped a tablet screen and two names appeared. “Those are the men you took down.”
Hawk studied the names and felt no spark of recognition or familiarity. “Known connection to Ms. Winthrop?”
Gray shook his head. “None that we’ve found. But they weren’t amateurs.”
Denver leaned back in his chair. “Mercenaries.”
He met each brother’s stare as the word hovered in the room like a bad smell.
“I knew it. The way they moved. The way they positioned themselves. They didn’t hesitate when I fired. It wasn’t two guys stumbling across a woman in the mountains and deciding to cause trouble.”
Denver returned his focus to his laptop. “I called up my favorite hacker from my former special ops team. He’s working on following bank records to see if we can figure out who hired them.”
“Think it’s possible they left a payment trail?”
“I’ve seen a lot of careless criminals.”
Hawk grunted his agreement. The mercs could have used any number of online payment options, shell accounts or prepaid cards. They just had to hope it wasn’t cryptocurrency, because that made tracing it harder, if not impossible.
“We’re still digging into the names to find any connection to Sinead, her family or her father’s empire,” Gray told him.
Even though Hawk hadn’t been directly told that she came from wealth, he wasn’t surprised to hear that her father had an empire.
It did raise questions about what she mumbled under her breath on the ride from the resort.
I’m more than you think I am.
A knot formed in the pit of his stomach. Maybe she’d been fighting assumptions her entire life, and he’d become just one more person who thought he’d already figured her out.
He committed the names to memory and waited for more on the case.
Gray shifted gears. “In the meantime, we’re sending a small group of trainees from the Black Heart Tactical Training Facility into the mountains to search for an abandoned vehicle. It’s unlikely they hiked the ridge to stalk Sinead.”
No, they’d come in with a plan. Who sent them was the bigger question.
“Who’s part of the reconnaissance group? Church? Gabe?” The two trainers at the Black Heart Tactical Training Facility were the best. If anyone could locate a vehicle in the thick of that mountain, they could.
Gray shook his head. “New trainee named Wyatt Colson. Former forest ranger who entered the program. He’s got good knowledge of the mountain already. We have confidence he’s going to find the vehicle.”
“Then we can run the plate.”
Gray gave a single nod.
Hawk thought of the last look he exchanged with Sinead. Despite her calm exterior, she hadn’t been able to hide her feelings from him.
Not just worry—fear.
His fingers curled on the edge of the table. “Find the vehicle, we find who’s taken an interest in her.”
“Exactly.”
The meeting shifted after that. Gray dispatched Colson and his team, and Denver’s phone buzzed twice with incoming messages.
A video call came in, and Gray connected. A woman appeared on the big wall monitor. Alexandra Navarro, known as Lex, was the new profiler for the team but she worked remotely from New York City. She looked calm and sharp, the way she always did when she was taking people apart from a distance.
“Hello, everyone.” The raven-haired woman swept the room, her oversized glasses reflecting her own surroundings.
“Lex.” Hawk thumbed his cowboy hat in greeting.
She zeroed in on him. “Tell me about Sinead Winthrop.”
He didn’t answer right away.
After a moment, he began to speak. “I don’t know what to make of Sinead Winthrop.
She’s wearing brand-new thousand-dollar hiking boots.
She knows her way around a gun well enough to shoot a small, moving target.
She didn’t flinch when she picked up the dead snake.
She’s got pictures in her phone of saving her safari guide after a lion attack. ”
“So she’s not your average heiress,” Lex said in her no-nonsense manner. “Got it. What else?”
“She’s stubborn. She’s observant. She’s scared, but she won’t fall apart.”
At that moment, the war room door burst open. Hawk launched to his feet.
They all swung around to greet whatever trouble was hitting them this time.
The person who ran in was trouble, all right. And as tall as Hawk’s knee.
“Navy—” Denver pushed out of his chair, prepared to wrangle his offspring, but she ran right up to Hawk and wrapped her arms around his leg.
The small arms around his thigh…shouldn’t make it hard to swallow.
He looked down at her, unsure what he was seeing. He was used to Navy’s little handshakes, not this type of affection.
He reached down automatically and brushed his hand over her head as if he’d done this a dozen times since joining the team.
Soft brown curls threaded between his fingers and made his throat constrict tighter.
“Your boo-boo all better?” she asked.
He looked down at her big gray eyes and nodded. “Much better.”
A smile broke over her face. She bobbed her head, sending her braids bouncing, and ran back out.
The room was silent for a long beat.
Then Denver chuckled. “Someone is getting soft.”
He jerked his focus back to Lex, to profiling the men who attacked Sinead and who could be behind it all.
Lex tilted her head. “Does your ward understand the level of threat?”
“She understands people shot at her. She doesn’t understand why.”
None of them did.
Gray’s expression turned darker. “Now that we know the guys following her were mercenaries, she probably wasn’t even in danger until she called for help. They were probably waiting to take what she dug up, but Hawk showed up and they reacted.”
Before anyone could respond, Ayla stepped into the office carrying a stack of papers. “Sorry to interrupt. I need these signatures to move forward with the Warren deal.”
Hawk was already moving toward the door. “Where’s Ms. Winthrop?”
Ayla set the papers in front of Gray, looking up at Hawk as she did. “Willow took her to the dining hall.”
The dining hall in the therapy lodge.
A room full of rugged vets and more than enough ranch hands who hadn’t seen a woman like Sinead Winthrop walk through their doors in a long time, if ever.
A beautiful woman with enough attitude to draw every guy to her like lightning to steel.
He’d been in enough barracks to know exactly how this would go. He pictured her at one of the long tables, men gathered around her, delivering bad pickup lines because beautiful women pulled stupidity out of even decent guys.
His jaw clenched hard enough to pop.
He told himself that being a bodyguard wasn’t only standing between a client and a bullet. Emotional care was part of the game, and keeping her from feeling cornered mattered more right now than finishing this meeting.
He started for the door.
Gray tapped a pen against the table. “Meeting’s not over.”
“Text me anything else you find.”
He’d told Sinead he’d only be a few minutes.
He didn’t question the instinct to find her.
He just followed it.
* * * * *
Sinead expected a dining hall in a veterans therapy lodge to feel like a holding pen. Instead, it was filled with sunlight and low chatter. Soothing music played in the background, and the dinner buffet smelled nothing like a cafeteria and more like a bistro.
She balanced a tray in one hand and shuffled through the line behind Willow Malone. The striking woman chatted while filling her plate with herb-crusted chicken and rice pilaf.
“I can cook at home, but I don’t always have time. Besides, I can’t pass up Chef’s chicken. You should try his fried chicken sometime.” She rolled her lovely gray eyes upward as if swooning.
Sinead smiled. “Everything looks delicious.” She avoided the chicken but filled her plate with roasted vegetables and rice.
Around them, men sat in small groups. A few ate alone, but once in a while another resident would call out a greeting, including them even if they chose not to socialize.
“I’m really impressed with this place.” Sinead added fresh fruit salad to a bowl and grabbed a bottled water.
She and Willow crossed the hall to a table near the tall windows. “The therapy program is my brother Oaks’s pet project. He had a friend in the military who didn’t adjust so well.”
They traded a knowing look.
Willow took a deep breath. “Actually, my husband Decker was also in the program.”
Sinead couldn’t conceal her surprise. “How amazing that the program helped him through a rough time.”
They settled into seats.
Willow opened her water and took a long drink. “They don’t tell you that being pregnant makes you so thirsty. I feel like one of my horses—I could use a trough.”
Sinead laughed. “Congratulations to you and your husband.”
Willow beamed and they began to eat. Sinead asked more about the program and learned it was funded by government programs, various charities and by the Malone family.