“Sorry, Miss Rose,” both David and Donovan muttered, their hands properly tucked into their laps.
Ash hid a chuckle behind a cough. Somedays he didn’t know what he’d do without Rose. He’d hired her to be the office manager, to take care of the administrative crap he didn’t have the patience to deal with, but she’d become something more than that, almost like a mother figure to this rag tag band of misfits.
“Okay, people. You have your assignments. Go do your jobs and don’t get dead.”
Ash watched them leave, then he went to his own desk, his thoughts going to the same place they always seemed to go to on quiet mornings. Or busy mornings. Or lazy afternoons. It really didn’t seem to be any particular time. She was always on his mind.
He pulled a file folder out of his desk drawer, one that was so thick and so worn at the edges that it was obvious it was opened often. The top sheet was a picture that he shouldn’t have, one that wasn’t supposed to exist. Her name was Alexandra, but she liked to be called Alexi. She thought it sounded exotic. And exotic went a long way toward describing her. Despite a mundane Midwestern upbringing, she’d reinvented herself in the military. She was a lot like Joss, tough but feminine, strong but gentle. Tall, with dark hair and haunting, golden-brown eyes, she was beyond words. Ash tried to describe her, but he always failed. There was just something about her that wormed its way under his walls and made him feel things he never thought he would.
She was his fiancée. Only no one knew it but the two of them.
Alexi was CIA. They worked multiple missions together in Afghanistan. The last was a recon on a corrupt politician that went wrong. They got separated. He made it to the extraction. She didn’t.
It was two years now that she’d been missing. He’d gone over their plan, over all the things that could have happened to her, but every lead died out. As far as the United States government was concerned, Alexi was dead. However, Ash couldn’t believe that. He knew how talented she was. He knew what she was capable of. For her to have been killed on that mission, her body never found, someone had to have gotten her unawares and taken advantage of her distraction. And that just didn’t happen with Alexi. She was not distractible.
He knew in his gut that she was still alive.
He was going to find her. He didn’t know how or when, but he was going to find her.
“Ash, phone,” Rose called.
He sighed, closed the file, and placed it carefully back in the drawer of his desk.
Time to get to work.
Chapter 2
Donovan
“It’s your lucky day,” Ash said when he came to my desk and told me he had a case for me. However, he wouldn’t say a damn thing about it on the long ride from the office to the UCLA Medical Center.
“Are you going to tell me what this is about?” I finally asked, as we boarded an elevator.
“A new case.”
“I got that. What’s the case?”
Ash handed me a piece of paper that was a computer printout of a news story that was on the Daily News website that morning. I’d glanced at it but didn’t really read it.
Bank Security Guard Gunned Down, the headline read.
“This isn’t really our thing, is it? I mean, there wasn’t some executive involved was there?”
“No. But there was a witness, and her father has hired us to stay with her until the police get everything figured out.”
“A witness?”
“A young loan officer who works at the bank. Apparently, she was on her way out when the attack occurred.”
That caught my interest. I actually knew—or once knew—a woman who currently worked at a bank downtown. I’d caught sight of her a few times…Kate Thompson. We had history that was complicated. But again, life is often complicated, especially when you leave your hometown for eight years in the military and then come home again with no intention of rekindling old friendships. Needless to say, I kept to myself when I wasn’t on the job.
I scanned the article, but it didn’t say anything about a witness. Just that the security guard appeared to have been blindsided while doing a walk around, shot in the chest during a possible attempt to get inside the bank. However, a passerby reported the shots and police arrived within minutes. No one, as far as they could tell, made it inside the bank.
“This seems pretty open and shut for the cops,” I said, as the elevator doors opened and Ash strode into the hallway.
“Then it should be an easy one for you. Just a couple of days.”
That sounded good. I had a trip planned to Vegas. Nothing fancy. A hotel room, some cash for the blackjack tables. Maybe drag Kirkland along, see if standing next to the Louisiana charmer might rub off on me a little. It’d been a while. Not a lot of time to date when I was following around wealthy execs who’d pissed off the wrong employee or the wrong ex one too many times.
“You said that the father requested me specifically?”
Ash nodded, not even pausing as he moved quickly down the long maze of corridors. “Didn’t say why.”