Tonya Macalino’s SPECTRE OF INTENTION: 11 Straight 5-Star Reviews, Just $2.99!

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CHAPTER ONE

 

Who was it who ran away like this?

 

Lady Liberty never said, “Give me your social outcasts, your criminals, your bored, your adrenaline junkies.” But that was because she was scripted with poetry, colored with hope.

 

So who was it really who ran away like this?

 

I had been all those things Lady Liberty never said she collected, but would I have ever considered this?

 

The gray ribbon dangled from the center of a perfect blue sky; its slender length held up by nothing, having no beginning, only an ending here on the gleaming white platform where I stood. I tilted my head back, the infinitesimal sway of the great cruise ship leaving me floating, feeling as though I could reach up into that sky and grasp hold of that ribbon, as though I could give in to its seductive song: Come away, come away with me. Leave this all behind and begin again. This time it will be right. This time it will be real. No more lies, just a pure, new beginning.

 

My hand floated up, but I lowered it back to the textured blue-gray silk of my skirt, dried the sweat from my palm. I had tried that before, the running.  As desperate as I had been, as terrified as I was now, I didn’t think that would have driven me here.

 

Pioneer’s Port.

 

No, I definitely didn’t have the stuff of a pioneer. To be frozen, canned, raised up this elevator ribbon to the glittering emptiness of space, packaged neatly in a voyager, and shot off toward a promising-looking speck of light whose only name was a meaningless jumble of numbers and letters.

 

I felt the familiar pull, warm and gentle behind me, long before his large hand settled on my shoulder.

 

“Kaitlin.” My boss and mentor, Jessie Broadbent, squeezed my shoulder.

 

I sighed and smiled, comforted despite myself.

 

He kept his deep, rich voice low. “We’ve gotten this far. Everything’s going to be fine.”

 

“Five years isn’t so long ago and this isn’t some playboy’s mansion or a corporate fortress with a little hole that needs patching.” I turned to face him and his hand slid away across the back of my suit jacket. “This is international security, a long-term, high-profile contract. They’re going to look. They’re going to find out.”

 

A smile creased Jessie’s tanned, outdoorsman face, framing his bright green eyes with the beginnings of crow’s feet. “If they were going to say something, they would have done it by now. We won this contract thanks to your sales expertise. No more cold feet. Kaitlin Osgood doesn’t get cold feet.”

 

No, but Ashley Porter sure as hell did. Especially when my signature at the bottom of that contract could be the last nail they needed for my coffin…if they knew. I took a deep breath, slid Ashley Porter back into her windowed closet where she was allowed to look out at the life we lived, but where her commentary would remain-after all these years-largely silenced. As my spine straightened and the worry slid from my face, Kaitlin settled back into place. I saw the satisfaction in Jessie’s eyes.

 

I inclined my head. “Shall we go sign the contracts, Mr. Broadbent?”

 

Jessie gestured for me to lead the way. Always the gentleman.

 

#

 

The operations side of the ship gave the impression of a neatly labeled rat maze, winding in on itself and tricking you from reaching your goal with endless sameness. Little cash had been put into softening the laboratory look of the halls and offices with their sharp right angles, shiny institutional flooring, and blinding white walls. More than abovedecks I itched for the sunglasses I’d left in my cabin.

 

By the time we reached conference room 5-F, I knew that if gremlins came along and removed all the small block-lettered signs along the hallway, Jessie and I would never find our way out again. Well, Jessie might, but by this point I was thoroughly turned around. The narrow meeting room we had been assigned even had laboratory-style mirrored observation windows down either side. Creepy. I glanced back at Jessie, but his hero mode had already been replaced with hardened security professional. I jerked Kaitlin over me a little tighter as he reached past me and opened the door.

 

White laminate conference table; cushionless, velcro-to-your-nylons blue upholstery on the chairs. Better than stainless steel with floor drains, I guessed.

 

A chair scraped as we entered the room: the don of the Pioneer Port Authority, William Nye.  His perfectly tailored suit and elegantly sculpted white hair matched the steady, focused push I felt radiating off of him. Not a cold or fiery push of negative intent, but that relentless forward energy that said he was already half way through this meeting and onto his next billion-dollar decision.

 

Seated to his right, J.C. Brands, Port Operations Manager, looked up at William. He seemed to consider rising as well, then sent us a vague smile and returned to reading whatever was on his workpad. No negative intent there either, just the swirl of warm thrill and frustrated fire of a man focused on untangling the kind of problems he loved. I smiled at J.C.’s thinning pate and strode across the room to shake William’s hand.

 

“Mr. Nye, I would like to introduce my boss and CEO of Countermeasures International, Jessie Broadbent. Jessie, Mr. William Nye.”

 

“Will, please,” Mr. Nye corrected as I stepped aside so the two men could shake hands. “Please have a seat. Mr. Glaswell, our Director of Port Security, will join us in a moment.”

 

Jessie looked to me. I smiled and gave a small shake of my head, got an I-told-you-so look in return. No, if the calling out was going to come, it was going to come from the man who belonged in the empty chair next to J.C. So that’s where I sat, directly in front of that empty chair.

And hoped. Hoped that it wouldn’t be him. Anybody but him.

 

The silence stretched. Logistically, it should have been my role to start up the conversation. My mind stayed stubbornly blank.

 

So Will, with his impeccable manners, set up the play.

 

“I’m counting on you and your team to test my staff during your stay. We expect to take our first prospective clients aboard in six months. Any of the restaurants, fitness facilities, hotel staff, spa, recreation-it’s all free while you’re here if you fill out the comment screen at the end of each day.”

 

Spa. If I survived this meeting, I was headed straight over.

 

“Thank you, Will. I’ll be sure to inform the rest of my team of your generous offer,” Jessie replied.

 

“I’m serious about this. I expect four-star service out of my people and there’s only one way to find out if they are going to give it.”

 

“Understood, sir.”

 

Nope. Jessie was not going to pick up that ball for me. I was definitely going to have to run with it myself.

 

“So, Will-”

 

The door popped behind me. I nearly popped out of my seat. I did end up coming  up out of my chair, just to see, just to finally know what was coming at me. As I turned, it grabbed me-a jerk of intention directed so forcefully at me personally that it had me hanging on to the back of my chair for balance. Bright blue eyes, shimmering with vitality. That sharp pull tightened, our first meeting in the flesh, the recognition in his fresh, vivid face, reflecting back the curiosity I knew he saw in mine. For a year we had worked together only as voices-a fast, well-matched rhythm, a pair of clever minds. For a year, I had known him without knowing him. Now here he was with the power to destroy my life.

 

He shifted the stack of workpads onto one arm to push back a short sweep of sandy, sun-bleached hair.

 

The movement broke the moment.

 

His intention shifted abruptly into a snarl of hot and cold, push and pull. Completely unreadable. Oh, shit.

 

Inside my brain, Ashley slammed open the closet door, “The perfect hair, the perfect blue dress shirt with the perfect tie. Don’t trust this guy. Get away! Get the fucking hell away!” Kaitlin grabbed that ragged old me and shoved her back inside, held the door closed against her hysteria. Kaitlin thought the man in that perfect blue shirt was the most beautiful, most dangerous thing she had ever seen.

 

I watched Camden Glaswell circle the sharp corners of the table followed by his two lieutenants. In my business, in my past, I had known a myriad of different types of law enforcement professionals. Protect and serve. Some embraced different faces of the protector: the tough guy; the righteous soldier…or the unfortunate bureaucrat with a badge.  For others it was the chance to play war games. Camden Glaswell came to it to help. Pure and simple. That much was in his face.  That much made me want to let Ashley take the helm and run. But more important was what made Kaitlin nervous:  the way his easy smile-as it crept up to fill those all too intelligent eyes-bore no trace of his disjointed emotional focus.

 

None of that stopped me from reaching out to take his offered hand, from letting that tingle of contact creep slowly up my arm.

 

“Nice to finally meet you, Cam.”

 

“How was the trip, Kaitlin? Any problems getting your sea legs?”

 

He looked so concerned; I smiled just to reassure him. “Barely noticeable.”

 

God, what were those eyes trying to see? I forced myself to relax under his scrutiny.

 

Finally, Cam released me to shake Jessie’s hand. “And the trip, Mr. Broadbent?”

 

“It was a smooth ride. Thank you, Mr. Glaswell.”

 

On that, I had to shoot Jessie a wry grin. A four-hour flight from Miami to Ecuador, a quick three-hour hop over to the Enchanted Islands, followed by a twelve-hour boat ride from the Galapagos to this unknown point in the Pacific. It would probably be exactly that many days more until my brain realigned with my body. Jessie was, of course, fine.

 

As Cam passed out the workpads with the contracts, I settled back into my chair. So I couldn’t read him. Then time to try the lieutenants. I introduced myself to each of them to give me the excuse to focus on them directly. The first woman was dark, maybe part African, part Hispanic. Ms. Davina Soto, Operations Security. Everything coming off of her said we were not her pick to receive the contract.  Her negativity focused more on Cam and Will with a little left over for Jessie and me. And then came the grinning redhead: Mr. Arlen McEnnis, Hospitality Security. Who was pretty much exclusively thinking about nailing me against the wall.

 

Okay, next!

 

I pulled the contract verification cards from my shoulder bag and handed one to Jessie. He looked at me for confirmation, but I could only shrug my eyebrows. I wanted to be reassured. Davina and Arlen seemed to have no knowledge. Will and J.C. didn’t seem to know. I couldn’t believe that Cam would have kept that kind of information from his boss or the managers he’d brought with him to the face-off. I should have been reassured…but alone, in my self-imposed exile, I just couldn’t read intentions like I used to. I couldn’t see what people wanted to do. I could only guess by feel-and that would always leave so much room for misunderstanding.

 

Time to take the leap.

 

Jessie and I passed the cards our lawyer had prepared for us over the workpad’s reader.

 

After a moment, the card flashed green with confirmation that no unapproved changes had been detected. I navigated through the signature screens, then laid my hand over the screen just as Will, Jessie, and Cam did.

 

Bio-signature one confirmed.

 

Raise pad for bio-signature two.

 

I aligned the marks on the screen with my eyes.

 

Bio-signature two confirmed.

 

Signed contract being transmitted.

 

Transmission complete.

 

Receipt of contract confirmed by:

Miller, Kohlson, and Associates.

3:00 p.m. EDT

May 13, 2048

 

It was done.

 

Nobody was pulling out badges. Or guns. Or handcuffs.

 

I probed out across the table. Cam’s frenetic, unintelligible emotional state remained unchanged.

 

Could I really have gotten away with it?

 

Ashley wasn’t buying it. In any other moment, the force of her distrust could have cracked that closet door, set her free. In any other moment. In this moment, Kaitlin struggled to keep a very unprofessional foolish grin off my face.

 

I glanced over at Jessie, the adrenaline of relief pounding through me so hard, I had to tuck my hands beneath the table. Jessie rose and Mr. Nye got to his feet as well. The two men shook hands vigorously. I dried my cold palms as Cam pushed up from his chair. Our turn. As his hand caught mine, he gave a little pull, drawing me forward over the table.

 

Beneath the congratulations of the other men, he murmured, “Are you alright, Kaitlin?”

 

Even Kaitlin couldn’t suppress a slight blush at that. Was it that obvious? With my hidden little ability, I’d long ago become damn good at hiding my reactions to the things I shouldn’t know. Cam gave my hand a little rub. I looked down.

 

Ah, the cold hands, I realized.

 

“I’m fine. Just tired.” I looked up into all that concern. “Thank you for all your help through this. Now I guess we’ll find out how well you hold up during deployment. If we are both still alive, I’ll buy you a beer on November 1st.”

 

He laughed at that. “So you’re trying to get out of the one you said you’d buy me at the end of the contracts.”

 

I shot him a sly grin and pulled my hand free.

 

I exchanged nods with J.C. and the lieutenants, handshakes with Mr. Nye. I turned to pack our legal confirmation cards away when Mr. Nye cleared his throat.

 

“Camden here feels that your company has the best mastery of the kind of security technology this port requires. And I trust him.”

 

I heard a “but” coming and straightened, turning. Ashley tensed.

 

Mr. Nye gave Jessie, then me a pointed stare.

 

Then it came.

 

“But, I believe in learning from history’s mistakes. As my people know, I see this port as the launching point for pioneers, pilgrims looking for better lives and new beginnings. Those original Pilgrims, the ones that first sailed for America, they trusted, too.”

 

Will settled his briefcase on the table top like a podium. Ashley had a death grip on my bag’s handle that I couldn’t release. Trust, he kept saying. Where was he going with this?

 

“The Pilgrims put their lives and their fortunes in the hands of Captain Reynolds and the crew of the Speedwell. Have you heard of the Speedwell?”

 

I shook my head, saw Jessie nod. Ashley had one eye on the door. As if there were somewhere to run, out here in the middle of the Pacific. Kaitlin double-checked the expression of polite interest on my face, made sure it matched the rest of the room’s occupants. I tried to feed from the press of their boredom and suspended impatience, but an underlying frisson of discomfort skittered across my arm from the other side of the table…Arlen, maybe Davina. Not the time to look. Not when Will had decided to focus his speech directly on me now.

 

“Two ships were to have sailed to the New World, Miss Osgood. The Mayflower and the Speedwell. But you rarely hear of the Speedwell. That’s because this Captain Reynolds used their trust to commit sabotage. He had the boat refitted with masts that were too tall, putting too much torque on the hull. The pressure caused gaps between the planks and the ship began to take on water. Our clever Captain Reynolds purposely put the Pilgrims out one ship, a quarter of their people, and likely a good bit of critical cargo as well. All to save himself a long, treacherous voyage and to placate the officials of a treacherous Dutch government.”

 

Trust. Treacherous. Betrayal. Is that what he thought? I never hid Ashley to betray anyone. Far, far from it. Will smiled as he lifted his briefcase from the table and nudged his chair back out of the way.

 

“Human trust is fallible and I don’t want my team caught second-guessing each other, waiting to become the next elevator to succumb to a terrorist attack from within. I want hope to be the focus here, not fear. So before this ship takes on a single passenger, I will expect everyone affiliated with this project to be thoroughly screened by this intention detection technology of yours with its statistically impossible two percent error rate. Myself and yourselves included. There will be no one exempt. There will be no Captain Reynolds here.”

 

“Yes, sir,” I nodded and Jessie echoed me.

 

Then Jessie and I turned and slipped out the door.

 

We walked in silence through the length of the rat’s maze.

 

We passed through the simple security between operations and hospitality.

 

We made it twenty feet down the plush carpeted hall to the elevator.

 

I burst into hysterical laughter.

 

“Oh, my god, he had me there at the end. He really had me. God, I think I’m going to faint.”

 

Jessie shook his head, but took my arm just in case.

 

“No faith. Come on, Osgood. Time to go do a little celebrating.”

 

Celebrating. Kaitlin wanted to throw confetti at the stars. But deep in the corner of her darkness, Ashley whispered about the inevitable sunrise, the dawn that would bring this long masquerade to an end.

 

And I chose to ignore her.

 

 

CHAPTER TWO

 

“Hey, my favorite pair of suits!”

 

Gerard swung us into the ship’s tiny sports pub with a gigantic pint of beer in his hand. And immediately began to chug down what appeared to be a good strong Guinness for long enough that I started holding my breath, wondering how much longer he could possibly keep going. He slammed down the empty glass next to Paula’s workpad. She jumped and Gerard tossed back his head in laughter.

 

“To our first billion!”

 

Jessie lifted the brimming glass Gerard handed him. “To our first billion.” He took a short drag from beneath the foam.

 

Gerard slapped a hand to his own chest in melodramatic disappointment.

 

“Come on, man, if I’m gonna keep your pace, you’re gonna have to buy me a replacement. Step this way to the buffet, my friend.”

 

I laughed, still too giddy to settle in for a long-overdue meal. Gerard, lean and pretty-faced, dragged his bulkier partner over to a table loaded with bar food and shouted for another Guiness. I leaned against the dark buttery wood of the table where Paula tapped furiously away at her screen in the dim light and watched the owners of Countermeasures International fall backwards in time through the portal of a beer glass.

 

I couldn’t really follow their friendship. Jessie was serious and steady, brilliant and ruthless, and a hero to the core of his gold heart. Gerard was the guy who ends up dead by the middle of the military buddy movie-the reckless “kid” full of joie de vivre, but missing the real reasons for being here. If at that critical moment five years ago, I had reached out to Gerard instead of Jessie, I would be pregnant and back on the street by now. Fortunately, I was better at reading people than your average refugee.

 

Jessie should have bored Gerard; Gerard should have tested the strength of Jessie’s last nerve. Instead, they seemed to balance each other. They divided tasks naturally between their strengths and weaknesses. I opened doors; they wordlessly took control of buildings. They had served in the Army together; they took what they had learned there, kept right on fighting. And now I was a part of it.

 

“Would you stop that?”

 

I laughed down at Paula. “What?”

 

“If Gerard sees you looking over there with all that hero-worship in your eyes, he’s going to walk over here and try to find a way to get laid and I’m going to have to sit through it.”

Whoops, time to put Ashley back away.

 

“Which is precisely why I don’t let him within ten feet of me. He can go buy himself a blow-up doll if he’s that horny.” Not a very Kaitlin thing to say, or maybe it was. Anyway, time to change the subject. I pushed at Paula’s pad. “What are you working on? Why aren’t you over there getting drunk?”

 

Paula ruffled her sleek mahogany hair, then tried to rub the life back into her petite, pale face.

 

“I was flipping through the micro-expressions database and came up with an idea I want to try.”

 

“Let me see.” I reached for the workpad and suddenly Jessie was right in front of us. He pushed the pad back to Paula.

 

“Not for you.”

 

Ignoring the sting of that parental wrist slap took the focus of every cell in my body, but Kaitlin didn’t take things like that personally. She didn’t wince with hurt. She just smiled and shook her hair back. Jessie stared me down, making sure his point had been taken. With a reinforcing tap on the table, he turned away and returned to Gerard and his dreams of what to do with his share of the billion. I glanced back at Paula, but she wouldn’t meet my gaze.

 

With a sigh, I pushed off the table and wandered toward the bar and the man doomed to wait on our tiny celebration. Above his head, flashes of a hockey game shared space with baseball, basketball, and soccer.

 

“Champagne for the lady?”

 

With the readiness of a well-trained host, the bartender held the glass out for me. I smiled and thanked him, turned back toward the room, only then realized that left me standing with a glass of champagne in my hand. I didn’t need to look to feel the yank of concern from Jessie. I gazed down at the golden liquid effervescing inches from my lips. One little sip; how bad could it be? Kaitlin would drink champagne to celebrate a moment like this.

 

I raised the glass to my lips.

 

Just one little sip.

 

Wine splashed over my tongue, tart and tingly, freeing. Freeing, granting Ashley full control of my brain and body. She wanted it all. She wanted it NOW.

 

No.

 

I breathed through it, willed Kaitlin back in control. Kaitlin set that glass back down. Kaitlin walked away from that bar. Kaitlin met the reproach in Jessie’s eyes with indifference.

 

“I think I’m more exhausted than I thought. I’m going to head up for a hot bath and some room service. I’ll see you boys and girls in the morning.”

 

Kaitlin spared Paula a nod, then walked away.

 

#

 

I got myself to the elevator. I reached for the ninth floor button, but met with resistance. I wasn’t ready yet to be caged up in my room. By god, I’d just signed a billion-dollar contract, a contract I’d spearheaded! My finger hovered over the button for the entertainment deck, then the deck advertising a park; passed the pools and the spa; settled on a set of decks that held “observation decks.”  I chose one at random and settled back for the ride.

 

The alcohol-lust still churned in my gut, but my mind was so full, it was easy to find something else to distract me.

 

Cam.

 

He was so different from what I’d expected. I’d looked forward to meeting him. Our working relationship had been filled with the light, short banter that made the day go faster-simple fun. So I’d expected, apparently foolishly, more of the same once I came onboard. But Cam in person, god, those eyes. And that mind, there was nothing simple about that mind.

 

Even if he knew nothing…

 

I caught myself tapping out my nerves on the railing.

 

Even if he knew nothing, I was in trouble in more ways than one.

 

The elevator door opened and I laughed to myself.

 

I stepped out into another hallway. This one was old-fashioned with real wood wainscoting on the walls, a richly patterned velvet-style wallpaper on the upper half of the walls. The fixtures were ornate brass, the floors, wood with an embedded carpet runner down the center. I followed the signs to the observation deck.

 

Brocade wing-back chairs studded the rear of the room. I passed them by, running my fingers along the ridges of the cool, satiny fabric. I followed a rail down to the floor-to-ceiling window that should have overlooked the elevator launch pad. But hours had bled into one another and it was dark now. The deck lights which, in just a couple months would illuminate the ribbon of nanotubes and its elevator climber, waited dormant for the ship’s less utilitarian occupancy.

 

So I was left looking out at blackness, most of the stars flooded out by the boat’s safety lights. The sliver of moon served as the primary reminder of the heavens this vessel promised. I looked down. At the base of the window, in heavy gold script lay the title of the room: The Dream.

 

I glanced around the walls of the observation deck and realized that I had missed the artwork, images from a dozen ancient cultures framed in gold and richly stained woods. Curious, I strode to the first.

 

Done in the stylistic strokes of old Chinese art, the image depicted a thinly bearded man in the heavy layers of his finery sitting atop a floating chair, one hand raised to the moon, a flock of cranes sailing by on a lazy breeze. I read the placard next to the picture.

 

“According to legend, Wan Hu, a minor official of the Ming dynasty, circa mid-1500s, attempted to become the first pioneer of space travel. Seating himself upon a chair mounted with forty-seven rockets, he gave the command and his forty-seven servants lit one fuse each. There followed a great billow of smoke and a terrible rumble.  When the air had cleared, both chair and pioneer were gone. A crater on the far side of the moon now bears his name.”

 

I laughed-a little too loudly for such an empty space. So that’s who did it. It wasn’t the wildly desperate or the wildly bored. It was the abject lunatics.

 

I wandered down the row, saw images from an ancient Persian epic, another throne pointed toward the heavens, this time propelled by great clawed eagles. The next portrait, a black and white of a five-thousand-year-old seal from Babylonia, the raised edges nearly erased by time, but there it was again, the mind of man reaching for the moon and stars, this time forgoing the throne, being borne aloft by a magnificent bird.

 

I stopped when I had come full circle, looked up again at the shine of that perfect crescent hanging in the sky. I laid my hand on the window, over that silvery light. The Dream. It should have been impossible, but our ancestors kept trying, kept fighting and dying over a chance to realize that dream, to become a part of the magic of the heavens. Sometimes my own simpler dream felt that impossible. Sometimes I felt like an abject lunatic for trying. But maybe, just maybe my fighting was done, too. Maybe I could stop looking over my shoulder and start looking forward.

 

Even as I thought that, a seeping warmth bloomed at the back of my head, my heart, my stomach. Him. Trying to take over.

 

I shook my head, shook out my limbs. The sensation fled. So pathetic. Out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the only part of my past here to haunt me…was me.

 

And only if I let it.

 

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the sweep of a flashlight in the dimly lit hall. How small an action to change the comfort of solitude into the chill of isolation. I reached into my bag and palmed a small spritzer of perfume, then turned my purposeful stride up the ramp. I could feel the hot anger coming toward me, knew it would hit me full on once the bearer of all that good will rounded the corner.

 

The guard and I saw each other at the same time. He lowered his flashlight and for a second I thought I saw something I hadn’t seen in a half a decade: the energy of his intention become corporeal. Ghosting ahead of his own body, a raging image of the man raised his transparent fist and took a swing at me.

 

I couldn’t stop myself from dodging. His intention scrambled as he stared at me like I was crazy. The ghost image vanished. Probably never even there.

 

Abject lunatic was right.

 

I kept my face blank, kept walking right past him, listened for his footsteps behind me. Didn’t hear them.

 

Caucasian male; six-foot one; two hundred pounds; short wavy black hair; large brown eyes; pronounced cheek bones; heavy on the stubble potential; large hands with cornered thumbs; size 14 shoe, slight turn out on right foot.

 

When it came time to vet the staff, that guy was going on a growing list of people who hated me. He’d be on the first boat back to shore.

 

Tough shit.

 

I hit the elevator. The perfume didn’t slide back into my bag until I saw the doors close over the vacant, antique hallway.

 

#

 

I breathed out the last of my adrenaline against the evacuation instructions on the back of my cabin door. I reached over my left shoulder and secured the door bolt. Sometimes I wondered if knowing what I knew was entirely fair. Maybe the guard was just pissed that some dumb blonde had set off the alarm and interrupted his poker game. That didn’t make him a sociopath. Of course, wanting to beat her face in over it kind of did.

 

If what I’d seen had been a real incarnation of his intent in the first place.

 

With a sigh, I tossed my bag in the middle of the bed’s bronze coverlet, checked the wall pad for any messages. Cam had scheduled our first meeting for ten o’clock the next morning. I chuckled. How thoughtful of him to plan some time for hangover recovery.

 

I kicked off my heels. My hamstrings screamed even as my soles sighed down into the soothing softness of the white carpet. I flung my jacket over my bag and stretched out the rest of my cramped body.

 

I wandered over to the mirrored closet facing my bed. Time to let Ashley out. I lowered my guard, lowered my body to the floor. Here was the street rat’s longest con: Kaitlin Osgood, Senior VP, Sales and Project Management for Countermeasures International. Seeing my own face in the mirror no longer gave me a jolt. Jessie and I had taken away the street rat’s kinky brown hair, replaced it with a stylish gold-blonde, shoulder-length swing. We’d dyed the brown eyes a serious shade of blue-gray. Hours at the gym had peeled away the roundness of fast food; the simple passage of years had transitioned a soft child’s face into the sculpted lines of a woman who knew exactly what she wanted, but could still laugh about it.

 

Kaitlin Osgood.

 

Ashley reached out and touched the lines of Kaitlin’s face, traced her hair with more than a bit of wonder. Who might I have become if I’d never met Jessie? Ashley tried to place an image of herself over the blonde executive in the mirror.

 

She wanted the gentle image of my mother, the nurse.

 

She could con anyone, but me.

 

I corrected her idyllic portrait:

 

Hard sunken lines framing a hard mouth and yet harder eyes. Anger, suspicion, and the restlessness of addiction. Rough hair, rough skin with the perpetual pink stain of alcohol. A worn wardrobe that could never keep up with the weight gain.

 

She could con anyone, but me.

 

The wall pad behind me beeped. Ashley slid without protest back into her closet.

I rose from the floor, feeling long and light on my feet after spending that little moment without the mask. I touched the screen and Cam’s face appeared. That was unusual. He was a voice-only kind of guy. I turned on the video from my end with a smile.

 

Surprise flashed over his face. I reached up to toy with my necklace and realized why. The lacy cream-colored camisole from my suit probably looked a whole lot like lingerie from the camera’s perspective.

 

“Ah, am I calling too late?” he asked.

 

I laughed. “No, I just got to my room. What’s on your mind?”

 

“Well, I just got out of my last meeting and I thought I’d see if you wanted to go celebrate.”

 

This was a really dumb idea. I was so exhausted that I was seeing things and the man who probably knew too much wanted me to go play mental chess with him.

 

But god, those eyes.

 

“I’d love to. Give me about twenty minutes to wash the day off. Where do I meet you?”

 

“At the Parkside Café. See you in twenty.”

 

He signed off with a victorious grin.

 

As I moved in the direction of the shower, I acknowledged that this wasn’t going to be dinner between business associates. Ethical or not, I was being courted. And now I had to decide if I was ready to give Kaitlin a boyfriend.

 

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