It was my job—saving lives, protecting people who were threatened, keeping people safe. Usually my clients were women, but sometimes having a female close protection agent on a man was the best way to stay under the radar. Which brought me right back to Hipsterman’s radar and why he’d been so finely tuned to me and so immediately afraid of Redhat.
Was he expecting to be followed? Was that why he’d been so careful not to notice me? I should have realized that a guy with such an easy smile for everyone he saw wouldn’t have gone so poker-faced at my presence unless he’d been aware of me tailing him. I didn’t like giving the guy credit for that level of awareness, but it made sense.
I shifted his grocery bag to my other shoulder and felt momentarily bad that I’d be eating his steak. The moment of sympathy passed when I remembered there were two steaks in the bag. He’d have company tonight, and I definitely didn’t wonder how she would console him on the loss of his groceries.
2
Oliver
“Never in the history of calming down has anyone calmed down by being told to calm down.”
Oliver Curran, tech entrepreneur
* * *
I’d slept less than usual, which meant basically not at all, so the smile I flashed at the pretty Black woman behind the front desk took effort. “Hi, I’m Oliver Curran, here to see Quinn Sullivan.”
“Do you have an appointment?” the woman, whose security badge read “Kendra Eze,” asked in a British accent.
“Sterling Gray set it up for me this morning,” I said, looking around the lobby with its general vibe of style, class, and understatement. The Cipher Security Systems building had an interesting look for an agency that specialized in corporate security with a side of bodyguards, and the young woman behind the desk with a textbook open in front of her added to the polish of the place.
“What are you studying?” I asked, looking over the desk at her book when she hung up the phone.
She wrinkled her nose. “Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.”
“Nothing like a little light reading before lunch,” I said in sympathy.
She grimaced. “More like a political thriller meets a Shakespearean tragedy.”
I laughed. “Law school?”
She nodded. “Studying for the bar exam. Mr. Sullivan will meet you on the third floor, Mr. Curran.”
I shot her the wry smile that read as either charming or flirtatious, depending on the person’s mood. “It’s Oliver. Mr. Curran’s my dad.”
It was my classic line, always spoken with an easy grin so the distance I put between my famous philanthropist father and myself didn’t sound like it was said through gritted teeth.
“Good luck with your meeting, Oliver,” the woman said with a friendly but impersonal smile, which meant she wasn’t in the mood for flirting. Too bad. Flirting was my favorite sport.
“Good luck with the bar, Miss Eze,” I said, dialing the wattage of my grin back.
The elevator doors opened to the third floor, and the handsome white guy I knew from photos as Quinn Sullivan stood talking to another guy I identified as Darius Masoud based on the description Sterling had given of his girlfriend’s brother-in-law—Iranian, nice suit, lean and fit. I had developed the habit of instantly classifying faces for skin tone, facial features, ethnicities, and unique elements because faces had become my life’s work. Every app I’d designed and sold since college had been built around faces—recognizing them, altering them, enhancing them, and replacing them with animal heads and cartoon characters. It was maybe a strange way to view the world, but then again, everyone else did the same thing when they met someone new, they just weren’t always aware of it like I was.
Darius saw me first and held out his hand. “Oliver, I’m Darius. Sterling told me you’d be in. May I present Quinn Sullivan, owner of Cipher Security.”
“Thanks for meeting me,” I said as I shook both guys’ hands. Darius hit the elevator button to hold it. “You have my number,” he said to me, then shifted his gaze to Quinn and said, “And I’m available if you want me to take a look at his place.”
“I’ll let you know after Mr. Curran and I speak.” Quinn’s voice was deep and sure, and he gave the impression that he was in total control of himself and everything around him. The guy wore king-of-the-world as confidently as he wore his custom-tailored suit. “Right this way,” Quinn said, gesturing for me to walk with him.
The office setup was unexpected and reminded me of the Google campus in Palo Alto, or maybe the Snapchat offices in Venice Beach. There seemed to be private offices for those who wanted them, but there were also people working in various conference rooms and open spaces without a carpeted cubicle divider in sight.
“This place looks nothing like any security firm I could have imagined. It’s way more like something a creative director designed,” I said appreciatively.
“My Director of Information Technologies is married to a psychiatrist, and she gave me a long lecture about work environments and their effect on happiness and productivity,” he said wryly.
I nodded. “Oh yeah, I worked in a room full of cubicles once. Each one of them was decorated like a museum to all the fun things people used to do, before they worked in cubicles. When I started my company I tried to do one big space, but you can’t hire a bunch of gamers and expect office-hours productivity.” I chuckled. “I ended up letting a lot of people work from home, and it was a shock to exactly no one how much work got done at one in the morning.”
A striking white woman with long chestnut hair walked by with a cool waxed-canvas photojournalist’s bag slung over one shoulder. “Nice bag,” I called out to her.
“Thanks, it’s my boyfriend’s,” she said with a gorgeous smile.
“Too bad,” I said, the wry grin showing my disappointment. I wasn’t really disappointed, but it was part of the game, and she knew it too, because she chuckled as she walked away.
Quinn’s mouth twitched in what might have been a smirk, but since he was all hardwood and leather, it was hard to tell. “The biggest factor to the success of what we do here,” he continued as if I’d never spoken to the hot brunette, “is collaboration, and while our agents are able to work from home, most prefer to come in for the water cooler conversation.” He nodded over at an Asian man and a woman whose ethnicity could have been indigenous to North or South America sitting on low sofas with a long coffee table running between them. “Or the coffee table talk.”
The woman looked up as we passed, and I stopped in my tracks.
What the fuck? “You.”
Quinn must have sensed the tension in me, because his cold calm dropped to something arctic.
“Dallas, would you join us, please?”
The woman he’d called Dallas tore her eyes from me and met Quinn’s implacable gaze. “Sure,” she said, flipping the notebook in front of her shut. She closed a bag of spiced fruit and nut mix that stood open next to the notebook. I frowned, grabbed them from the coffee table without thinking, and held them tightly.