“Yeah, okay. But I would be kinder,” I glared at Savi, “if you gave me something on her.” Frank closed his eyes before he spent the next three minutes giving a tiny rundown of who she was to him.
I headed outside and started to jog down the pathway. The cold wind made me hunch my shoulders. Winter was quickly taking over the crisp nights of autumn. We were warned this winter was going to be harsh, and nights like this proved it.
Once I got to the steps, I swallowed back the urge to turn and head back up to my peak and ignore the rest of the world. It was my little oasis, and no one could touch or take away from me.
The last twenty-four hours had been shit, and the idea of discussing it with some citified- privileged lawyer didn’t sound like a good time.
With a deep breath that felt cold in the lungs, I knocked on the door.
“Come in,” a muffled voice called.
I stepped inside to see a woman bent over a box. I closed the door, and when I turned back around, she was balancing a stack of files.
Wait?
I looked around, confused at who I was seeing.
“I’m here to see Sloane Harlow.” I jolted forward to grab the papers just as they began to slip off the top stack. Slipping my arms under hers, I took the stack and put them on the table.
“Thank you.” She pushed her hair off her face, and I couldn’t help but stare. Her indigo blue eyes latched on to mine. She was shorter than I was, and if she removed her heels, she’d probably only come up to my shoulder.
“Agent Black?”
“Yes, and you are?
“Sloane Harlow.”
“Son of a bitch,” flew from my lips. Fucking Mark.
“Are you calling my mother a bitch?”
“No.” My eyes popped out of my head at the realization that it sounded like I had insulted her.
She smirked playfully. “Good.”
“It’s just, Mark said you were…” I stopped myself again. Why was I talking out loud about this?
“I was what?”
“Just, ah,” I stumbled and felt like an ass. “Nothing. Sorry. He’s just a—”
“A son of a bitch,” she finished for me with a chuckle.
“Yeah,” I chuckled.
“Now that we have that cleared up, why don’t you take a seat?”
“Sounds good.”
Oh, yeah, that was a great first impression. Savi will have a field day with this.
I couldn’t believe that in all the time I’d known Mia, she never once mentioned Sloane. A friend of the family, Frank had said. I wished I’d been prepared for how friggin’ gorgeous she was. What was the catch here? Maybe she was married? I moved my attention to her hand, but there was no a ring.
Divorced? Maybe that was it.
She pulled out a notepad and recorder and started to look around for a pen. Her long, dark, glossy hair brushed across her silky gray blouse, one that was unbuttoned seriously low on her chest. I wondered if it was intentionally that low or if it had come undone. Given her lack of order and the way she was tossing through things, I guessed the latter. I’d bet Frank had thrown this at her pretty quickly. When she bent back over the box, I couldn’t help but notice how tight her skirt was and how it hugged her slim hips.
“Sorry.” She held up the pen. “I promise once I get settled, I’ll be a lot more prepared.”
“No doubt.”
Stop staring at her eyes. Look away. Damn, she was pretty. She was so hot, not just classic gorgeous lawyer hot, but foreign hot. She was a mix of something I wanted to ask, but she beat me to it.
“Hungarian and Latino.”
“Really?” I smiled happily, entertained she had guessed my thoughts. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to stare.”
“It’s fine. I get it a lot.” She shrugged like it was normal and settled into her chair. “Do you mind?” She pointed to the recorder, and I nodded for her to go ahead. She leaned forward, and my eyes moved to her slender neck with its thin gold necklace that sparkled in the light. Such a simple piece of jewelry that was incredibly sexy.
“October twelfth, North Dakota, with Recon John Black.” I noticed she didn’t say our actual location, which was a sign she was good at her job, and Frank clearly gave her a crash course on what location we often use as a cover. Info like that would be the end of Shadows if anyone ever got their hands on those tapes. “May I call you John?” I nodded. “Why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself?”
I shifted uncomfortably, but when her eyes moved to meet mine again, I eased up slightly.
“Ah, I joined the Army when I was seventeen, three tours in Afghanistan, joined the Green Berets, and then was recruited to Blackstone.”
“Seventeen?”
“Yes. I graduated early and joined as soon as I could.”
She scribbled on her notepad and brushed her long bangs out of her eyes. “How long have you been here at Shadows?”
“Um,” I thought for a moment, “seven years.”
Her pen stopped moving. “You moved up in the ranks pretty quickly.”
“A lot of us have,” I said.
She pulled out a file and started to flip through some papers. “So, you were here when Savannah Miller first came to the house?”
“Yes.” I wasn’t aware she would know something like that.
“Interesting.”
“Why?”
“Nothing.” She shook her head. “Umm, tell me about what happened on your last trip to Mexico.”
“It was a trip.” I slipped into my habit of not sharing anything.
“Okay,” she pressed her lips together, “I see here Blackstone got a distress call to leave at zero five hundred hours, and you touched down at zero nine hundred. Were you in contact with Sergeant First Class Chamness the entire time?”
“No.”
She kept her head down but moved her eyes from the paper to mine.
“When did you hear from him, from the time you left to the time you arrived at your location?”
“Right before we rappelled down.”
“How did he seem?”
“Stressed.”
She flipped through some papers before she leaned back with a heavy sigh.
“I’m not going to pretend I understand anything that goes on when you leave for a mission. But I’m here to help, and from what Frank has shared with me, something isn’t right, and I have a feeling you feel it too or you wouldn’t have gone back after calling in your location at the diner. I know Blackstone has a reputation for keeping things close, and I fully respect that,” she leaned forward, “so if you don’t want to share anything, you don’t have to. I was just hoping for a little more understanding so I know what I’m supposed to be looking for.”
I cleared my throat and tried to push away the uneasy feeling of breaking my brotherhood oath.
“We’re trained to turn that side of us off. It’s not easy for me to sit here and speak to a stranger who isn’t even our JAG and share the details of a mission.”
“I understand that. I’m just trying to help.”
“What makes you think you can help? You’re not part of the military. You just said you have no idea what it’s like on our missions, so how can you have any hope of finding something at all, especially when you have no clue what you’re looking for?” I challenged.