“Any reason I can’t rest here?” he asked quietly.
“You shouldn’t be in the line of fire yet.”
“I was in the line of fire from day one,” he said. “It was me who got blown up. Remember? You think you’ll pass me by on any leg of this journey? I was there with Bullard. Bullard. Who is still missing, in spite of the number of people we have out looking for him. Including Ice running point on that, yet we’ve found no sign of him. Even Terk is out there, searching the damn ethers or whatever the hell he does. No sign of Bullard. I won’t sit and do nothing. I can do this. So I will do this. No matter if you want to send me back, I’ll do this from wherever.”
“I should send you back, yes,” he said. “Maybe we’d get it all solved before you are physically fit and cleared to return to work again.”
“I’m fit now,” Garret bit off. “The rest of the team agreed, and I’m here, so you better get used to it.” With that, he turned and walked away.
Grabbing his bag, Eton followed. “Well, let’s hope it’s a simple case of stopping by for one night and popping somebody.”
“It won’t be that easy,” he said. “You know that.”
“Do we have any information? I feel like I’ve been traveling forever.”
“Hardly,” he said. “We do have some intel, none of it terribly useful yet.”
“Goddammit,” he said and then swore again.
Garret grinned. “I see your mouth still spews a blue streak.”
“It’s a stress release,” he announced and shrugged. “You’ve never complained before.”
“I’m not complaining now,” he said cheerfully. “The fact of the matter is that you care, and this is your way of showing it.”
*
Sammy Hedrick drove home slowly. It had been an opportune time to have the stranger stop and ask if she needed help. Too bad he hadn’t shown up a little earlier. But, if he had, he would have seen the slashed tire. She still wasn’t sure why the tire hadn’t given up the ghost a whole lot earlier. But she’d only left her friend’s house a few minutes ago, and she had yet to tell her dad what had happened. He would be pretty pissed off and upset to think that she’d somehow gotten a flat tire at her friend’s place. Sammy wasn’t exactly sure that it had happened there. She was hoping to have her dad check it out. But it depended on how he was doing first, sick or not sick. Most of the time he was sick these days. There just wasn’t any break at all.
As she drove through town, she saw the stranger behind her.
Eton was his name. She rolled that around in her mind. Wasn’t there a university or something called that? Oh, yeah. Eton College somewhere in England? He didn’t really look English though. She wasn’t sure what he was. Big, that was one thing, and tall. Well tanned and used to a tough physical life, judging by the muscles. He was a male in his prime. And she heartily approved.
The fact that she’d been taken in by his sex appeal was something she chalked up to the fact that she’d been on a bit of a dry spell. As Annie would say, a very long dry spell. But Sammy had had enough short-term relationships that had gone nowhere that she really wasn’t interested in taking that route anymore.
She wanted something that would last. Something that was steadfast as compared to her previous relationships. It wasn’t like the guys were the problem either. She had come across as too intense, according to one of them. Another said he wasn’t ready for a commitment, while she obviously was. The first one though, that was just weird. He’d been there, and then he’d been gone. She thought the term ghosting applied in his case. She suspected he’d be back, and, sure enough, a couple months later he’d turned up, sending her a little smiley emoji saying, Hook up? She hadn’t even responded.
The last thing she needed was to always be waiting on some guy to get in touch with her. She had better things to do with her time. Now that she had finished her architectural degree, she had to make some big decisions. She could go to a big city and set up her own business. But who would hire her with so little experience, since she was only twenty-nine? It was a good thing that her father was also an architect. A fairly major architect. He was famous for his underground homes and his Swiss house.
She absolutely loved him and wanted him to keep on with his work. The trouble was that his work was starting to drag, right along with his health. He had asked her to come work for him, and she’d been his assistant for years now, while attending university part-time, but it didn’t feel quite right to step in as his replacement. If he could hold on for another four or five years, she could make a name for herself, apart from his reputation, at the same time. In the meantime, not so much.
She parked outside her home, her father’s famous house, hopped out, and wondered what she should do about the tire. Deciding there was no point in keeping it in her trunk, she should bring it closer to the house for her father to inspect. She opened up the back of the car, struggled to get it from the vehicle, then rolled it up to the side of the house and just plunked it down. It had a decent-size slash. At least it wasn’t like somebody had taken a knife and jammed it in a bunch of times, like some psycho ex-lover, but somebody had stabbed it once and then definitely cut it.
Of course it could have come from something off the driveway or along the road, but still it didn’t seem likely. Frowning, she headed inside. “Dad, I’m home,” she said, calling out for him.
She headed into the kitchen, put on the teakettle, and threw down her purse. Obviously it said something about how rattled she was that the tea came first. Then she went looking for her father. He was in his second-floor office, still at the drafting board, but staring out the window, an almost vacant smile on his face. She rushed to his side. “Dad, how are you doing?” she asked gently.
He looked up at her, gave a mental shake, and smiled. “I’m fine,” he said, with more force than necessary. She frowned at him. He smiled, reached over, and patted her hand. “Honest.”
“Well, I’m back from Annie’s,” she said, “and I’ve put on the teakettle.”
He pushed his chair back with a big smile. “A piece of that spice cake would be lovely,” he said. “A cup of tea and cake—the elixirs of God.”
“We need to do something about lunch before cake,” she teased.
He frowned. “I’m not very hungry,” he admitted.
Her heart sank again. He was never hungry anymore, and eating was something she had to force him to do. “I’ll go make you anything you want,” she promised. “What would you like?” He just stared at her, and she knew that some of his thoughts were already drifting away. “Never mind,” she said. “I’ll make something, and you can have it before cake.”
At that, he smiled and said, “Cake sounds good.” Then he returned to his work.
She stepped up behind him to look down at the work he had done. One of the odd things about his condition was that his mental clarity seemed to be sharp when he was working. At the end of every day, she came and checked over his work to ensure everything was solid and wouldn’t collapse under the intrusion of the real world. She patted him gently on the shoulder, as he brought out his ruler again and started marking line blinds, involved in piping systems. “How is the job going?”