“I didn’t. I’m working for Grey Wolfe Security.”
The same company Jack had planned to work for when he was discharged. It means doing similarly dangerous work under a similar shroud of secrecy with similar levels of security clearance, for about five times the pay. Jack had planned to go into contractor work with Keenan, until he’d come home with the shakes. She wanted to make that right for Jack, the way she’d made right their parents’ divorce, their father’s abrupt departures, their mother’s drinking. But this was something a sister couldn’t fix. Whatever he’d survived in the Navy was so far beyond her ken, all she could do was just sit with him while he trembled.
And he still didn’t talk about it. She barely knew anything about Keenan, but he looked even less likely than Jack to talk about his feelings.
He mistook her silence for petulance. “If there’s an emergency, of course you can use it,” he said reluctantly. “A real emergency. Like someone dies, or something burns to the ground.”
“It really wouldn’t do me much good,” she admitted. “I need access to the network to do much of anything, and the I.T. department would skin me alive if I tried to VPN in over your phone. They’re beyond anal about data getting stolen.”
“Can we just buy you a phone tomorrow?”
“Same problem with the VPN,” she said. “I need my data, my security access, and the trip’s booked almost to the minute. I’m not going to ask Grannie to cool her heels while I try to deal with this when I know they’ll have my ass if I use an unsecured phone to work. I am so fucked.”
“Didn’t you tell your boss you were going to be out of the country for two weeks?”
She heaved an inhale, then immediately regretted it. The air smelled faintly of furniture polish and heavily of the scent of the skin of Keenan’s forearm, bared by his sleeves pushed to his elbows. The hair dusting the skin was golden brown, lightened by the sun as it tanned the skin, and did nothing to obscure the shift of muscles and veins as he stroked the condensation on his glass of beer. She’d always had a thing for hands. Workingman hands, elegant cellist hands, short, stubby fingers or long, deft, callused ones, it didn’t matter. What mattered was the way the delicate framework of bones and muscles worked together to convey competence. Even better was the sense that they could delicately twine wires together or clench into a fist hard enough to shatter a jaw.
Keenan’s hands looked like his mouth. Delicate and brutal, all at once. The thought set off a slow burn low in her belly.
I did not know that about myself.
They say travel opens you up to new places, faces, cultures, ideas. She’d been in Turkey less than twelve hours and her entire nervous system was being rewired.
“I told him,” she said. “But I also told them I’d be available.”
He just huffed out a soft laugh that told her he knew all about making promises and breaking them. “You want a drink?”
That wasn’t a good idea. “Are you having another?” she equivocated.
The laugh softened into a smile, patiently waiting for her to make up her own mind.
“Red wine,” she said.
He got up and went to the bar, returning with a bottle of beer for himself and a small bottle of red wine for her. “Jack told me you’d be like this,” he said as he twisted the top off the bottle.
She didn’t even pretend to not know what he meant. She’d taken on their alcoholic mother’s job to ensure Jack had a reasonable facsimile of a normal childhood. If he found it amusing, not a source of guilt because he got to be the carefree younger sibling, then she’d done well. But the truth of the matter was, Jack was different now, and she had no idea how to help him. In fact, she’d planned on using this trip to spend time with Grannie, and with her radically altered younger brother. “Jack told me all kinds of things about you,” she said, watching him over the rim of her glass.
“What did he say?”
That Keenan was the best badass on a team of badasses. Rose smiled. “He said you’d take good care of us.”
Keenan’s smile tightened imperceptibly. “I will,” he said. “So what’s with the obsession about work?”