“Katie? Kate Thompson?”
I turned, suddenly on alert, tugging Kate behind me. But then my eyes fell on a face I never thought I would see again.
Amanda Graham.
Her eyes widened when she recognized me at about the same moment I recognized her.
“Donovan Pritchard?”
“Hello, Amanda.”
She stared at me for a long moment, making me wonder what was going through her mind. The last time I’d seen her…well, it wasn’t a pleasant moment.
She’d come to the hospital with a group of kids from the graduation party who got word of what’d happened. She came into the emergency room just in time to watch them roll him out of the trauma room to rush him up to surgery. And the screams that issued from her lips…I’d had to grab her around her waist to keep her from following him onto the elevator.
But then Amanda smiled and reached up to kiss my cheek.
“It’s so lovely to see you. I heard you went into the military.”
“I did. I was given an honorable discharge two years ago.”
Amanda nodded, a smile on her lips that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “You should have looked me up when you came back.”
“Do you live in the area?”
She shook her head. “I’ve been in San Francisco for several years now, working at Daddy’s tech company up there.”
“Really?”
“Computers were always my thing. You know that.”
I did know that. She and I had half a dozen classes together our senior year, including advanced computer programming. I was happy to hear she’d continued on with it. When I knew her last, she still hadn’t decided what she wanted to do with her life, just that she wanted to be with Joshua.
She and Joshua were closer than any couple I’d known in high school. It was as if they knew they were meant to be together from the first moment she walked into our sophomore English class, a transfer from some high school in Chicago when her father decided he wanted to move the headquarters of his massive conglomerate to the Santa Monica area. From that moment on I was a perpetual third wheel to their almost sickening romance.
“So you work for your dad?”
“I run the company. His name is just on the door.”
“That’s awesome, Amanda.”
She smiled as she tilted her head in acknowledgement. “I’ve actually been talking to Kate about doing business with her bank. We have quite a few telecommuters from this area, and it would be convenient to have a local bank we can work with them through.”
“We have,” Kate said.
Amanda shifted, hiding her face a little behind a curtain of her long, dark hair. There was something about the movement that bothered me. But then Kate stepped forward and kissed her bare cheek and they started talking about dividends and something I didn’t quite catch and I was suddenly lost.
I’d been very careful since coming to the Santa Monica area to join Gray Wolf to avoid people I knew from the past. But this was…not as bad as I’d thought it would be.
I guess it is true, what they say.
Time heals all wounds.
Chapter 19
At the Compound
“Mind your business,” David muttered under his breath as he watched Kate Thompson reach up and kiss Donovan. “Do they really think they’re fooling anyone?”
He’d seen a lot, sitting here watching the monitors day in and day out, but watching Donovan fall for his childhood sweetheart had to be the most interesting thing he’d seen in a while. Watching Kirkland charm his targets was one thing, but this…there was actually some plot to it. It was like the difference between a porn movie and a chic flick.
“Let’s not get distracted,” Ash’s voice announced.
David glanced at the monitor that showed his brother standing just inside the entrance of the ballroom. He didn’t get what was going on with him. Did he not want happiness for Donovan? The man survived an IED attack, for Christ’s sake! Why shouldn’t he find something beyond the drudgery of this job?
But again, Ash had been a different person since Alexi disappeared. It was as if something inside of him just evaporated. He left the Army and drifted for a long time, just moving from place to place with no real purpose. And then when Mom and Dad died a little over two years ago…David knew he came back for him. He hadn’t asked him to, but Ash never did anything anyone asked. Then he started this company and brought in all these buff military guys—it was almost a relief when he brought in petite little Joss until David saw what she could do…he would never mess with her!—and tried to build something like a family again. But David knew he hadn’t forgotten Alexi. He knew about the file in Ash’s desk.
David knew that if Alexi suddenly showed up on the front doorstep, something that was missing in Ash would come back. But David suspected that would never happen.