Author’s Note: Today I woke with a sore neck, which kind of threw off my day. I didn’t get started on writing right away, and when I did, it was a side funny scene/flashback that might have no place in the collaboration. I tried to do a meaningful back story piece after that, but I didn’t like it, so I cut it. Then I wrote a couple more pieces, and trying to get two taciturn types talking about meaningful things… Yeah. That was interesting.

So then it was rather late when I tried to shift gears from one story to the other and pick up where I’d left off. It didn’t really happen, not at first.

I just started writing to write something, and I ended up with a piece that wanted to kill the whole story. Then it was pointed out to me what needed to be done, and I decided backtracking was in order. So I went back. Midway through backtracking, about ten fifty or so tonight, I realized: I know what it’s all about. I know who’s after Nolan and why.

And that was a relief, I have to say.

---

Back to Teasing and Snuggly Toys

He wasn’t dead.

Not yet, anyway. He was still struggling to understand why this was all coming up now—it would have made more sense if he’d been dealing with all this before he got shot, maybe even right after, when he’d been at his most vulnerable—physically speaking, that was, there were lots of times when he’d been emotionally vulnerable, where he’d been kicked when he was down—but now? Other than the possibility of a takeover, things were stable. The firm was doing well, they had plenty of satisfied clients, and he’d recovered from his wounds. They’d taken a vacation and enjoyed themselves without any adverse effects, and it didn’t make sense that someone would target him now.

He’d gone through his records again while Shaelynn was contemplating killing him for the Grable comparison, not finding any notification from any penal system that someone he should be worried about had been released. None of the cult members who’d been arrested had managed to get out yet—it would seem they remained true believers and seemed like threats to the community because at least a couple of them had qualified for parole—not in Nolan’s opinion but in the court’s—yet they hadn’t gotten it.

Nora wouldn’t have kept something like that from him—she was already worried before this threat showed up, and if she’d seen release paperwork, she’d have gone into a full panic. No, it hadn’t been something either of them had overlooked.

“We can contact whoever we need to and make sure that they’re all still in there,” Shaelynn said, leaning over his shoulder. He tried not to flinch. He didn’t like being watched, and her father had an extremely creepy way of walking up behind everyone like that. He’d never pointed out that she did the same thing because he hadn’t wanted to hurt her, but he should have—she would have stopped doing it long before this.

“Going to have to, though if the cops are that intent on investigating what happened to my car, they’ll do the same,” he said. He let out a breath. “I don’t know. Maybe I should have gone into law enforcement. I’d have more resources of my own.”

“You seem to do all right most times.”

“Most times, it isn’t a matter of life or death—and it’s never about me,” he said, and she put her hand on his shoulder. He reached up to squeeze it. “I don’t know that I was ever good at that whole compartmentalization thing that people in those fields do. I can’t always shut it out, can’t keep focused on the task at hand. The mission. Whatever it is. I can’t do this with my own life being threatened. It should be easier than this. I never thought I cared about it that much.”

“Don’t ever say that in front of your sister.”

Nolan shrugged. He didn’t say a lot of things in front of Nora. Shaelynn knew him better than that, better than his sister or anyone else in the world. Some might say she had the right to, given what they’d gone through, but it wasn’t just that—he was comfortable enough with her to slip over and over again into old patterns—to where he felt like he could tell her anything.

“You do compartmentalize more than you realize,” she told him. “That way you shed skins—personalities—one minute high priced consultant the next a rebel waiting for a cause then over to a stand up comic—you have acts that deal with the moment, and maybe they’re not compartments for the big picture, but they work.”

He grimaced. “I don’t think I like that assessment.”

“That’s because you’re working without any of those pretenses at the moment. You’re vulnerable without one, and you hate that, but you can get through this without one.”

“I think we’ve said enough about this subject,” Nolan said, running a hand over his face. “What else can be done before morning or someone calls us back?”

“I was considering taking a visit to the source—the man who is trying for the takeover—but that’s something that I’ll do in the morning. Did Nora say she’d figured out the lawyer she wants to use against the magazine?”

“I told her we’re not suing.”

Shaelynn rolled her eyes. “I know you’re not. That would just fuel the fire you didn’t want burning in the first place. That’s not what I meant. I figure the threat of the suit is all you need. Your lawyer rattles the magazine’s cages, and we see what scurries out. There are libel laws for a reason.”

“They didn’t actually say anything bad about me or the firm. Nora was right—they didn’t say much about me at all. Just that one paragraph near the middle of the article,” Nolan said. He’d just about memorized it by now.

Many consultants have a list of diplomas and an area of expertise. Some of them are more self-taught and less specialized. Nolan Sheppard, founder of the firm Sheppard and Sheppard, featured on the cover, has done work across a variety of fields and doesn’t boast the same amount of degrees as most of his competition. He brought with him a reputation forged in fire—as a teen, he led a group of children to escape from a cult, and that same determination and ingenuity now guides him in the corporate world.

“I think they almost insulted you by suggesting you weren’t as good because you didn’t go to school for this crap.”

Nolan snorted. “Oh, I went to a school for this crap. It’s just that most people call it a cult.”

---

“We’ve done everything we can for the night,” Shaelynn said, nudging Nolan and trying to get him out of his seat. He’d been in a mood since they got back, and she couldn’t fault him for it, but she also couldn’t let him start avoiding sleep again. He would have a hard time doing it with all that had happened—that feeling at lunch, the vandalism to his car, the threat, the magazine, and all the memories this was digging up for him. “Come on. You need to give this up and get some rest. You may as well let sleep take care of those last few hours before we can do the real work.”

He looked up at her. “I think I’d rather pass. I know I’m trying to get back on a sleep schedule, but I don’t feel like waking up screaming tonight—and you’d hate it if I did that to you again—so we’ll spare both of us the trouble, and I will just not bother tonight.”

“Not an option.”

He studied her for a long moment, and then his lips split into a wide, devious grin. “Does that mean I get to have the snuggly toy?”

She stared at him for a long moment. She knew he was kidding—the smirk assured of that—but she couldn’t believe he’d asked her that. They were well past those days, and he shouldn’t have brought it up again after that thing with Shaw.

“No.”

Nolan shook his head. “Then forget it. There’s no way I’m going to sleep now. We know someone’s really after me. This isn’t paranoia anymore. It’s not PTSD. It’s not something in my head. It’s not me cracking under pressure or something. Someone set me up. They got my picture in a national magazine. Someone—possibly a different someone—vandalized my car. It looks like it should be something from my past—a past we both know was hell. It’s looking a lot like someone wants me dead, and how exactly do you expect me to sleep with those thoughts going around in my head?”

She didn’t know. She couldn’t really think of why he might be able to, not when she hadn’t figured she’d get any sleep, and it wasn’t her life that had been threatened. This was Nolan, though, and he was just about all she had. She was worried—but she was also determined not to let whoever it was that wanted him get anywhere near him.

Nolan was not dying. That was not going to happen.

“Why do you have four cats if not to make one of them the snuggly toy?”

“They make excellent purrboxes,” he said, and she gave him a look. That had come to him way too fast, and he was a bit too smug about it, too. “They’re soft and fluffy and cute. They purr, and that can make this place seem less empty. They’re not the same as what I used to have, though.”

She grimaced. “I’m not a ‘purrbox.’ You can’t compare me to the cats. Or to what Nora used to have when you were kids.”

“I would never do that,” Nolan said, a look in his eyes that she wanted to ignore. That one was too close to too much. “You were my best friend. My safety and my security. Nothing has ever given me that feeling since you left.”

“Ambrose would tell you that was what your gun was for.”

Nolan’s eyes darkened, but he didn’t flinch. He shrugged. “Yeah, well, I tried sleeping with a gun again for a while. It didn’t help.”

She felt her stomach twist. Nolan didn’t do that. That wasn’t who he was. He’d hated his gun. The only reason he’d slept with one nearby was because of her. “Damn it.”

“I was willing to try anything before Nora called you,” he admitted. “That wasn’t a solution, and I’m glad it wasn’t. I don’t think I want to become that person.”

She sometimes wished she wasn’t. “I still have a permit to carry concealed.”

“He damaged you more than he did me,” Nolan said, and she frowned. He laughed. “Did you honestly think I didn’t know? You didn’t carry it yesterday or today, not when the threat wasn’t obvious, but you went for it after we got back here. You’ve got it now. It’s habit. It’s comfort. I wasn’t going to take that from you.”

She closed her eyes. “Sometimes I wish I’d been more like you, able to resist all this crap.”

“I don’t think you want to be like me,” he said. “We both broke back then—don’t tell Nora I said that; I told her earlier that I didn’t break—but we did it in different ways.”

“I hate him so much, Nolan.”

“Me, too.” He wrapped his arms around her. She should shove him away, but sometimes this was nice and worth allowing herself the moment of weakness. “Can I please have the snuggly toy tonight?”

She didn’t think she’d get any sleep if she didn’t agree, and they both needed to be ready for the morning. She would have thought about enforcing shifts for sleep, but Nolan had to be rested. Someone could use that distraction against him—she had—and that was dangerous. No, she was going to get him through the night—and she’d save him tomorrow.

“Fine. You get the snuggly toy.”

---

Author’s Note: So I don’t talk much about my other job. I don’t really want to get fired.

That said, it had a real impact on my productivity today. I wouldn’t even care so much about the shift itself if it wasn’t for the the drain of my emotional and mental faculties.

Yet… I managed 2,039 words… Mostly because I got a bit reference silly at the end of the second scene. I’m tired and brain dead. I might have gotten a bit silly/loopy.

---

Nolan Gets an Unpleasant Surprise

“You still want to say this has nothing to do with our past?”

Nolan studied the ugly red-orange paint that marked his car in seven hateful letters almost seared on the side of it, the anger of the writer visible in every line. He wasn’t sure if he was staring at it to try and make the paint and word disappear or if he was trying to convince himself it said something else, or if he just needed time to accept that it was what he thought he saw.

Nora’s words would make it that. Shaelynn hadn’t said anything, not since she joined him in staring at the word. In a way, it accused her, too, but he didn’t think they’d be after her, not here. She didn’t live here, she didn’t work here, and she was only standing by him because Nora somehow managed to convince her that Nolan needed her.

He swallowed, his eyes going to Shaelynn. “You… You didn’t think it was about the past, did you?”

“Would she really have told you if she did?” Nora asked, and he glared at his sister. She shrugged, unrepentant.

Shaelynn shook her head. “Cyril told me no one was interested. I accepted that for what it was and focused my efforts elsewhere. I thought the past was a distraction, nothing more. It’s hard not to jump to the conclusion that it was about that all along, but we still don’t know that it is.”

Nora snorted, pointing over at the car. “They painted traitor on his car, Shaelynn. How can you say that has nothing to do with the past? Someone’s sentence must be up, and they’re finally free to come after him.”

“Cyril said my father gave orders not to go after Nolan. He… Boath still thinks he can bring Nolan back into the fold.”

That twisted his stomach up, making him want to vomit. That wasn’t happening, now or ever. “He’s an idiot. I was never part of the fold. I don’t really want to think about what kind of prophecy he’d tangle up to make it seem like it was all supposed to be like that, or what he might paint me as if he got his hands on me again, but he is not getting me back into that hellhole.”

“The hellhole doesn’t exist,” Shaelynn said, letting out a breath. “It was basically razed when the feds arrested everyone, remember?”

“Mr. Sheppard?”

Nolan turned toward the cop who’d spoken, forcing a smile. “Did you need anything else from us? Statements—did that. Fingerprints for elimination, maybe?”

“They want to take the car in to do some testing.”

“I didn’t know I ranked high enough to get forensics done on a bit of vandalism,” he said, frowning. That didn’t quite make sense. He could see the fingerprint comparison, maybe, but to have the paint chips analyzed or anything else—that had to be wrong, didn’t it? “Has there been a lot of vandalism in the area?”

“Or is there something worse like a bomb on the car or something?” Nora demanded. “Did they try and kill him, too?”

Nolan shook his head. “Nora, there’s no point in coming after me now. Even if one of Boath’s lieutenants got out, he’s still in there and won’t get out before he dies. They can’t rebuild his sick little empire, and trying to get me is stupid—he brought that whole thing on himself by ‘marrying’ all those underage girls and ‘dealing’ with unbelievers.”

“Still,” the cop said. “You are that Nolan Sheppard. There really could be people after you. This could be a lot worse than a word on your car.”

“Maybe, if I’d gotten other threats or if it was actually confirmed that one of them was out. I should have been notified if they were, and so at this point, we’re looking at a weird conspiracy where Ambrose or Coman isn’t dead, and yeah, that’s not something I’ll buy.”

Shaelynn almost suppressed a shudder. “That’s not possible.”

He wasn’t going to argue with that, though Nora looked like she might. He didn’t believe the feds would have lied about that, and he didn’t think either Ambrose or Coman would have ever cooperated with the authorities, which was about the only way that he could see the feds being willing to say they were dead if they were could have happened. Besides, why would the feds need more than what they had? The testimony of the women—the girls, mostly—that had been there and even the children was pretty much enough on its own. Nolan’s part in trial had been pretty small, truthfully, and he didn’t think that what he’d gone through had half as much merit as the story of even one of Boath’s wives.

“Since when am I a notable figure again?”

“That was what I came to tell you about,” Nora said. She shook her head. “They can’t quite smear campaign you, but those people who want to take your company? I’m pretty sure they’re the ones behind this article.”

Nolan took the magazine she held out to him. “How could these people do a profile on us without talking to us?”

“We’re a bit of a footnote in the actual article.”

“That doesn’t really matter when they put Nolan’s face on the damned cover,” Shaelynn said. He met her eyes, and she let out a breath. “Cyril told me no one knew where you were. Now they do. These people just made you a target.”

---

“You haven’t said anything since we left your car behind.”

Nolan shrugged, not lifting his eyes from his window. Shaelynn didn’t mind the window-gazing so much—she did it herself, often—but she did have an issue with him ignoring all of his cats. Even Patchwork had come out of hiding to try and comfort him, but he hadn’t seemed to notice or care that they were mewing at him or swatting his pants.

This was what would have worried her if she’d been the one needing to make the call, but Nora had seen something even before he hit this point. Of course, they had more reason for concern now. They all tried not to think about it, but there were plenty of people that wanted Nolan dead. Some of the wives had been true believers, some broke and went crazy when they were with Boath, some had Stockholm syndrome, and they weren’t happy about their husband or prophet being locked away. Then there was the army that Boath was creating and some of his children—Shaelynn’s half-brothers or sisters that were just as dangerous as the adults if not more so.

She knew it was too easy to believe that the remnants of the cult would want Nolan dead. That was why she’d called Cyril first. She hadn’t entirely ruled out that as a possibility, but she had wanted to believe this was about a hostile takeover and not something from their past. She was no more ready to confront that than he was.

“Did you like it?”

“What?”

“Your car. Some people get quite attached to them, you know. They name them, treat them like children or members of the family, that sort of thing.”

“It was functional,” he said, shrugging again. “It never mattered more than that. I never found it easy to be attached to objects, you know. Growing up in the tenement, we never had a lot, and so I made do with out it. Anything that could be sold usually was, so it was better not to be attached at all. Then in the cult, you didn’t get a lot in the way of material possessions unless you were Boath or one of his favorites, and I wasn’t a good enough liar to be one of them. Nora pulls in possessions like threads, the ones she thinks will sew up the broken places in her soul, but me? I’m well-beyond those kinds of band-aids, and I can’t get myself to believe in them.”

She nodded. She’d never had much growing up, and she’d found herself sticking to that sort of sparse lifestyle years after their escape. “So Nora picked the car.”

“It went with the firm’s image. I honestly didn’t care what I drove.”

“I think you need someone else to help you pick. You could get attached to something more suited to you and not to the image the firm supposedly needs.”

His eyes met hers in the reflection of the glass. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. I don’t feel like getting attached to anything.”

“It doesn’t always get taken from you.”

“No, sometimes it leaves.”

She frowned. “This about me leaving again? How much resentment have you been bottling up over that, anyway? How long have you hated me for it?”

“Oh, too long. Thirteen years, off and on,” he said, reaching up to rub his neck. He tried to stretch and groaned when he hit some of his tense muscles. “Damn.”

“What? You didn’t want to admit that? It’s past time it’s out, isn’t it?”

He snorted. “Is this because you think that I should be confessing before my time is over? I’ve been set out as bait, offered up on a platter—probably because someone wants my company, and they’re not shy about how they get it, but maybe someone there doesn’t really want me with it, they just want me dead. It would be easy to get rid of me if the right people knew where I was. I know I’m not exactly hiding, but I didn’t go advertising it, either. Taking back the name I was born with instead of the name Boath tried to give us when he married Mom was supposed to help with that.”

“I don’t expect you to confess, and it makes me angry—the idea of anyone stringing you out there like that—” She bit that off, uncurled her fists. “You already went through enough crap in your life, and they don’t get to screw with the one thing in your life that went right.”

“Thirty years and all I’ve got is a consulting firm. It’s a wonderful thing to show for my life,” he muttered, shaking his head.

“Come on, Nolan. Most people would be envious of what you built from scratch, and it is a good firm, so much so that someone wants to take it from you by force. They’re that jealous or that scared. Take your pick. You have good in your life, you know.”

“I never thought I didn’t. I just—I really wanted the one thing in my life that went right to be something a lot different.”

She let out a breath. Sometimes she wondered about him, about what he’d be if he hadn’t gotten stuck in the life he had. All that kindness and vulnerability that he hid in acts and obscured with sarcasm or deflected with self-depreciation, the fact that he was just so fundamentally good—he should have been out there running a charity or being a teacher or something that gave back, something that didn’t keep him at a distance and never getting attached. He would have that so-called American dream. He’d have a house and kids… and a real wife.

“I need a key to your place,” she said, and he frowned at her. She met his gaze, keeping her eyes hard until he stopped looking confused. “I’m staying here, remember? You’re going to have to put up with me—and you might even have to consider me your bodyguard.”

“Can I call you Betty?”

She gave him a look. “That depends entirely on the Betty you mean.”

“If I say Boop, will you do their work for them?”

“Yes.”

“Then I didn’t say Boop.”

“Nolan—”

“Grable! I’m saying Grable,” he said, and Shaelynn found herself frowning for a different reason. Who the hell was Betty Grable? She knew of a few Betties—well, too, Bette Davis and that Betty from the comic book, and Betty Boop, but Grable wasn’t on that list.

“What did this Betty do?”

“Well, she had nice legs… and so do you.”

“You’re still a dead man.”

---

Author’s Note: So today I thought I had a good handle on where to go. Nolan’s argument with Nora led into Shaelynn’s return, and then they were eating lunch.

Well, the lunch scene got weird, the scene afterward had them arguing, and then I got almost stuck. Okay, I got stuck. So I wrote a flashback that I’d told myself I wasn’t going to write because I’d told myself scenes from their childhood were forbidden as it was a very messed up one, and even though that moment’s not all that messed up, it’s kind of cute, I didn’t want to write it.

I did.

Now I’m stuck again. I’m ahead of the recommended schedule with Nano, but I’m going to need something to get unstuck soon, or I’ll be in trouble.

---

To the Stumbling Block

“And we’ll wrap this up next week,” Nolan said, opening the door to the office a moment before Shaelynn was about to reach for it. She stepped back, letting his clients pass, trying to tell herself she didn’t care what he’d been discussing with them. Whatever he did when he consulted was his business, not hers. She wasn’t a part of the firm—she wasn’t going to be, either, all teasing aside.

He looked her over and laughed, getting his clients to look back, but he gave them a reassuring smile and wave before drawing her inside the office by the arm. “You know, I know you know how to dress like you belong here—as a client or an employee—and yet I think you’re doing this on purpose just to see my reaction.”

She glanced at her jeans and back at him. “If I was going to do that, I’d have an I’m with Stupid shirt to wear every time I was in your office.”

“I’ll buy you one.”

“I think you’re doing enough for her already,” Nora said, glaring out at them from her doorway, and Shaelynn frowned. She knew her relationship with Nora was not the greatest—they’d agreed to tolerate each other back when she’d been “married” to Nolan because they had to get along—and they would never be friends—their interests were too different, and their personalities didn’t mesh well, but she hadn’t thought the whole key prank would upset the other woman that much. She used to mess with Nolan all the time with things like that when they were younger, before, during, and after their “marriage.”

“Nora thinks I should charge rent,” Nolan said, though the glare he sent his sister’s way counteracted the easy tone of his joke. He held out a hand. “My keys?”

“You’re slipping.”

He nodded. “I noticed. Not comfortable with it, but it happens. I suppose I haven’t been myself since I got shot. I didn’t realize how far that went. Thought I had. Haven’t. I don’t know, though, is it really bad to lose all that tension and paranoia I used to live with? I spent my childhood worrying about Mom—her drugs, her drug dealer, her ‘clients’—and then I got to worry about Ambrose trying to kill me with each training session, Boath throwing Mom out or deciding Nora was old enough to be a bride, had to live with the fear that I couldn’t fake my ‘faith’ enough to survive, and then I got to worry about all it meant to be the head of one of the ‘houses’—oh, and they married me off so I had to remember that my actions affected you, too—”

“And you were only a kid. You didn’t deserve that,” Nora said. Her eyes went to Shaelynn, and she stiffened—was it time to get accused of being a part of her father’s sickness? To be judged for his sins?

“We were never children,” she said, quiet but not pulling back that punch. She didn’t care how much she upset Nora now. That had always been Nolan’s fear, not hers. Shaelynn should probably admit it—half the reason she didn’t get along with Nora was that Nolan had protected her from all of it. She was still able to be a child, to carry some innocence out of there, and her brother had traded his for it in more ways than Nora seemed to realize. He’d been turned into a soldier and a patriarch and they’d wanted him to be a father all before he turned eighteen, not that their mother was any better in making her son the most responsible one in their house at—what, six? Yeah, Shaelynn was pretty sure it was six—making him the one that had to find a way to feed them, to keep the house clean, to keep her alive, and to stop the creeps she let in their house from doing anything to either him or his sister. No, Nolan’s childhood had died before his mother ever met her father.

“What are you talking about?” Nolan asked and then snorted. “I’m still a child.”

His words managed to make them all laugh, and the tension of the moment passed. He lifted up his keys with a grin, tossing them in the air, and catching them with one of his smug grins. “Got it back.”

She nodded. He was more like himself now, yes, and not just because he’d managed to get his keys out of her pocket without her noticing. Times like this, she wanted to forget all of the parts of the past that were warped almost beyond belief and just be… them. She had no desire to try and raise a sunken ship, but she sometimes thought she wanted all the things that her childhood had denied her and that he almost stood for—family and friends and all that came with having those things.

She was raised a soldier. What did she need stupid things like hugs for, anyway? She wasn’t about to give him one now.

“I think it’s lunch time.”

“I know you think with your stomach,” she told him, “but don’t you think it’s still a bit early for lunch? It was only nine when I left to go to the hotel.”

“Yes, but you took the time to shower and change and move your things across town, and I had two meetings, a shower, and a fight with Nora in the meantime. It’s lunch time,” he said. “Though I think if I went to my usual lunch hangout, they’d kick you right out the door with a laugh. Not a jeans joint, that one.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Whatever happened to yours? The suit thing—it doesn’t work for you.”

He glanced down at his suit, lifting up his tie. “You don’t think I look good? I paid a lot of money for this suit. It was not off-the-rack, and it was not on sale, but I was told I looked good.”

“By a salesgirl with a cute smile who wanted a quick commission.”

“Actually, the salesgirl was a salesman,” he corrected. Then he grinned. “My last girlfriend liked it a lot. Made me wonder if she had some kind of condition that made her drool like that…”

Shaelynn rolled her eyes. “No woman would drool over you.”

“That,” he said, getting into her personal space and making her tense, old muscle memories fighting to surface and react, ready to make him pay for the implied threat, “is what you say. I’ll have you know that there are plenty of women that find me very attractive.”

“Then why are you still single?”

“Oh, that,” he stepped back and shrugged. “The cats didn’t like them.”

---

Nolan knew something was wrong about two bites into his lunch. He’d ordered his usual, his favorite, and it was just as good as always, so it wasn’t the food. He set down his food, took a drink of his water, and frowned. Something was off—not the lights, they seemed to be about the usual for this place, though he wasn’t quite sure about that since he’d never memorized the lighting scheme or the ambiance. He just knew it was comfortable, and he’d been trying to untrain himself from obsessive surveillance of his surroundings. He hadn’t needed to learn every detail of the places he went—he wanted to be able to have things to notice when he visited somewhere for the second or third time, he wanted to be surprised by things instead of worrying about the possible outcomes of every possible contingency.

He was just a man. He hadn’t been able to be a child, but he was going to enjoy himself at least a little. Comics, cats, cartoons—he was going to have as much of those as he wanted, and he was also going to enjoy dining out without looking for threats.

He saw Shaelynn do it when they went for drinks. She’d done it today, too, and found nothing, so why was he feeling that annoying sensation of being watched now? He was fine. No one was after him. This whole stupid thing was about the takeover, wasn’t it?

“You didn’t see Kaplan or that jerk Shaw, did you?”

Shaelynn frowned, her fingers going toward her knife. “Why do you think that they’d be here? You assuming she lied to you about the case?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t think so. I didn’t get that impression from her, but you know I’ve been a little off my game lately. Still… I don’t remember you being bothered by what she told you, and even if I’m not at my best, you seem to be doing fine. What five paintings are on the wall behind you?”

“A sunset, a winter snow, a waterfall, a mountain, a lake, and I hate you,” she said, glaring at him. “I don’t like that game any more than you do. Why did you have me do that?”

“I saw you surveying the room when we walked in. Proves you’re still sharp, doesn’t it?” He shrugged. She set her jaw, still angry. “You didn’t think Kaplan was lying. I think we both agree she wasn’t, so…”

“So…?”

“Something feels wrong,” he admitted. He looked at the paintings, knowing the décor wasn’t the issue. Even if it had been in poor taste—and it wasn’t; he liked comfortable places—that had never bothered him enough to set off that feeling. He’d grown up in a crappy tenement until they were locked away in that cult compound, and he’d put up with some terrible surroundings in both places, even a few of the rooms he’d had after they were free were bad, so he could endure them if he had to.

The restaurant was a favorite. He came here often. He wouldn’t do that if anything about it bothered him, so why was he being such an idiot about this? It wasn’t the restaurant, which he’d known when he asked if Shaelynn had seen Kaplan.

He closed his eyes, letting out a breath. “Do you see anyone that sets off your warning bells?”

“Other than you?”

“Funny,” he muttered, looking over at her. “Not really appropriate at the moment, though.”

She nodded. “I know. Still, don’t you think if someone was setting off my ‘spider sense’ that I would have said something by now? I would have asked you, but I think if someone is setting off your sense, then it’s someone I have no reason to see as a threat—only you do.”

He grimaced. “That’s not helpful. I’m the one that’s running on no sleep and possible excess paranoia, not you.”

“You did sleep last night, and if this is a threat to you, then you know better what it is. If someone’s watching you—and I’d say it has to be a someone and not a something because you wouldn’t have wanted to eat here otherwise—you’d be better at recognizing them than me.”

“Unless it was someone from the past. You knew all of them better than I did.”

“I thought we all agreed that it wasn’t anyone from the past. It’s not about the cult. Not everything is, and this is one of those things that isn’t. I don’t want to be told that it is. That is—it’s not all that our lives were.”

“And yet we say that so much it feels false, doesn’t it?”

He pursed his lips. “Maybe what our lives are really about is—No, that can’t be it. Let’s just assume that our lives are about cats. You see—that’s the secret truth, we’re all here to serve the cats when they take over the world. We only think we’re in charge.”

She smiled. “You know what I’ve always liked about you? Your ability to make jokes in situations like this. I don’t know why—it wasn’t like it should have been a good thing, but we’d be thinking we couldn’t get up after Ambrose’s latest ‘exercise,’ and then all of a sudden you’d roll over, groan, and say something like, ‘I think the stars I saw were really aliens that abducted the cuckoo birds from last time.’ Completely ridiculous, but you made us all laugh anyway, and we managed to get up and go on.”

“I never said anything like that. Where do you get your delusions?”

“My father.”

He winced. “Sorry. That question was in poor taste. I just—that’s weird. I don’t think I feel it anymore. Either I freaked out for nothing—”

“Or they’re gone.”

“Or that.”

---

“I’m still trying to figure out what happened back there.”

Shaelynn gave him a look. “You don’t think maybe you have a stalker?”

“A stalker? Why would anyone stalk me?”

“Maybe it’s one of those women that drool over you,” she offered, getting another look from him. She shrugged. “You were the one that insisted they existed. If they exist, then why wouldn’t one of them think to stalk you? Maybe she didn’t want to accept the cats’ decision about her marriageability. Maybe she figures she can get rid of the cats and convince you that you’re the love of her life.”

“Impossible. I know the love of my life.”

Shaelynn stiffened, looking over at him. “You do?”

He nodded. “Of course. She’s kind of thin, very graceful—very athletic, actually. She can jump high, always manages to roll with the punches, can be temperamental but also very sweet. She’s beautiful, has the most keen eyes I’ve ever seen. She is playful and funny. I love her nose. It’s adorable.”

Shaelynn shook her head. “First I thought you were talking about me, and I would have had to smack you. Then I thought it was Nora. Now I am thinking you’re making all that up.”

“No. She exists. You even met her, but you weren’t paying attention, though.”

“Patchwork? You’re talking about your cat?”

“You have a problem with her being the love of my life?”

“Other than the fact that you’re insane?” Shaelynn didn’t know if she should smack him or laugh. Nolan was a funny man—she did like the way he managed to find something to joke about regardless of the horrible circumstances around them—but he could infuriate her with that same humor because she sometimes thought it was as much a lie as any of her father’s. Nolan hid the pain well. He always had. Either he was deadpan or he was joking. He didn’t have a lot of mid-ground, and when he slipped, it was that much more of a shock. She hadn’t figured on him falling apart at lunch. She didn’t like it, either. He should have been stable—they’d identified the likely cause of his uneasiness, she’d agreed to stay and help until they’d fought off the takeover, and they almost had a plan. He shouldn’t have faltered like that. It wasn’t him. “Are you sure that you haven’t been dealing with a lot of PTSD?”

He frowned. “Why is it I have to be off my rocker to enjoy the company of my cats?”

“Careful how you phrase that. If you combine that sentiment with you saying that Patchwork is the love of your life—”

“That’s sick and wrong.”

“You said it, not me.”

He glared at her. “I didn’t say it the way you interpreted it. You’re the one that twisted it. I just mean that… Well, I’m not planning on marrying again. I have a good life, and I have my cats, and that’s enough. I’m content.”

“Contentment isn’t happiness.”

He stepped into her, invading her space again. “And are you happy, Shaelynn? Does that cubicle of yours give you a sense of fulfillment? Is your empty apartment warm and cozy at night? Are you happy with what you’ve chosen or will you ever admit that all you’ve done since you got free of your father is run or hide? You’re not living. You’re existing, and barely that. Tell me about the other friends you have besides me and Nora. Tell me about the men in your life. Tell me about your hobbies. What do you do in your spare time?”

“Nolan, stop it. You’re being—”

“Right. I’m being right. And that infuriates you because you have nothing. You’re still letting him win, damn it. You’re so afraid of doing what he said you would that you do nothing at all. You push papers in an office you hate with people you don’t know or don’t like, and the few people you ever gave a damn about have to get shot to hear from you. Oh, yeah, you have a great life.”

“Snapping at me because you don’t want to admit you’re suffering from PTSD doesn’t help anything.”

His shook his head. “It’s not because of the PTSD. I don’t remember denying that I had it to some degree. I’m angry because you turned your back on me thirteen years ago. Nora said you’d do it again, and I don’t want to believe that, but I don’t want to be a fool, either.”

She folded her arms over her chest. “I did not turn my back on you. I needed time to sort out how I felt after my father’s trial, and you just told me yesterday that you understood that.”

“Understood, maybe. Accepted? No. I’m not that good of a person. I didn’t just say, ‘oh, that’s fine. I understand she needs time, and she can have as much as she needs and it doesn’t matter that she didn’t even so much as leave a note.’ I was hurt, I was angry—no, I was pissed—and I even hated you for a while.” He looked away from her. “I know you didn’t want to marry me, and ours wasn’t really a marriage, but I did think we were friends. I thought I deserved better from you than that.”

She closed her eyes, let out a breath. “I needed to be sure that the reason I was around you was because I wanted to be—not because of my father’s orders or vows that weren’t legal. We accepted what we were when we there because we had to. Because neither of us could have gone against my father and won. Direct confrontation with him was suicide. He wouldn’t have killed us—he’d let Ambrose do that—but he would have made sure it happened. He didn’t tolerate nonbelievers. We were forced into a partnership, and if we hadn’t been, things would have been different.”

“Why did you come back? Why did what Nora said to you matter at all?”

“Just because I don’t want to live near you doesn’t mean that you don’t matter to me.”

He started to walk away from her, and she had that feeling that if this were some kind of movie like the ones he used to try and tell her about when they were training, he’d have been shot the moment that he walked away.

She hurried after him, telling herself she was the one being paranoid now.

---

“Nolan, wake up.”

“Hmm… No. Comfortable here, and I’m not going to school today. There’s no point in school, you know. Mom went to school, and now she’s just an addict. She can’t even count her hits right—and her drug dealer rips her off. No, sleeping is better,” he said, tightening his grip on Shaelynn. “Wait. When did I get a—that’s not a stuffed animal.”

“No, it’s not.”

He winced as he sat back. “Sorry, Shaelynn. I didn’t realize—I didn’t know I’d—I know we were supposed to try sharing the bed since they expect us to, but I didn’t realize I’d hog it or crowd you like that. Nora was too young to tell me, and Mom wouldn’t have noticed.”

Shaelynn nodded, not really wanting to think about what it was like in his arms. Her mother used to hug her years ago, but that was all gone, and she didn’t want any hugs from her father. He disgusted her. All of the men here did. The only one she kind of liked was Nolan.

She was lucky. She’d been afraid they were going to marry her off to Ambrose, and she’d be his third wife—his third dead wife—and that was a prospect too horrible to dwell on. She just wished she hadn’t had to get married at all.

“I had dreams about strawberries. Must have been because I was close enough to smell your shampoo,” he said, smiling at her. “Thanks for that. I’m glad I didn’t have that one again.”

“Me, too,” she told him, thinking about the way he’d come out of it screaming, waking her, making her think they were being attacked. He was just struggling, though. Nolan had a heart, a rare thing in this place, and he paid for that. He cared, and that was dangerous.

It was kind of nice, too. He was good to her, made sure she had what she wanted as much as he could, and he hadn’t taken advantage of this whole thing like she knew someone else would have.

“You are a very good pillow.”

She frowned at him. He hadn’t been using her as a pillow. He was next to her, holding her, maybe even squeezing her, not sleeping on her. “Pillow?”

He shrugged. “I figured you’d hit me if I said snuggly toy.”

She stared at him, not sure if she was going to laugh or do as he suggested and hit him. “Snuggly toy? What is a snuggly toy?”

“Nora used to have one when she was young. It was ugly—I think they meant it to look like a stuffed bunny, but it didn’t look much like a rabbit, more like a sock of vomit or something, but Nora loved that thing. She’d carry it around with her everywhere and snuggle with it. It made her feel safe and secure, and she couldn’t sleep without it.”

“You think I look like an ugly vomit sock?”

“No,” he said, brushing back a bit of her hair. “I won’t say you’re pretty because you’d hit me for that, but you’re not a sock. You’re the rabbit in all its soft and wonderful glory.”

“I am?”

He moved closer to her, drawing her into his arms. She stiffened, but she didn’t pull away because they were supposed to do stuff like this, to be comfortable with each other, and if they weren’t—Ambrose might get her after all. “What you really are is safe and secure. Thank you for letting me skip that nightmare for once.”

“You’re welcome, but I see to my own safety,” she said, pushing away from him. “And my own security. You don’t have to do that.”

He grimaced. “I kind of do with this whole weird head of the house thing, but I meant that you made me safe and secure. I wouldn’t suggest that I did that for you.”

She found herself smiling. Nolan was such a sweetheart, really, and he did not belong here. “Well, then you’re welcome for that, too.”

He smiled back. “Are you really ready to get up now? We are supposed to be able to sleep in on the weekend, and I think I’d like to try that for once.”

She wasn’t in any hurry to get up, and it wasn’t too bright in here to where she couldn’t go back to sleep. She probably wouldn’t, but she could stay here for a bit longer. “I could try it, too.”

He coaxed her back into his arms. “Night, Shaelynn.”

“It’s not night, and you don’t have to hold me now.”

“Sure I do. What’s a wife for if not to be a snuggly toy?”

She couldn’t say why, but she laughed.

---

Author’s Note: So I am typing this with a cat on my shoulder half keeping one of my arms from moving like it would were I typing normally. He’s purring. He claimed me. He’s Arthur; he can do that.

Besides, I was gone last night, so he’s all miffed at me for that and is now claiming this human as his all over again. While it’s annoying because I was trying to get more writing in before bed, I do love my cats.

Nolan really likes his cats, too, even if he doesn’t name them as well as we have. Well, Moof might object to that statement, but can you really beat Uther Pendragon, better known as Arthur?

---

Cats and Invitations

“You look exhausted,” Shaelynn said, watching Nolan across the couch. His eyes were closed, and he had the black one with white paws in his lap, running his fingers through the cat’s fur, but the fatigue still showed in all those old places she knew so well. He’d changed since he was seventeen and she first memorized him during those long nights planning their escape. Having that to focus on took away from the awkwardness of their “marriage,” and they had somehow managed to stay friends then and now—though he was right—it had been too long.

“You say that because you want to sleep.”

She kicked him. “Come on. I found what’s been bothering you, didn’t I? You have a plan now—well, your plan is letting me make the plan—so you can stop worrying and relax. Go to sleep.”

“Don’t kick Boots. He doesn’t like that.”

“Boots? You named that cat Boots?”

“Yes. Socks would have been too mundane and ordinary with those feet, I refused to do anything that called him ‘Paws,’ and he took offense to Booties.”

She blinked. That was another example of his kind of messed up logic, but she knew she was going to end up smiling about it, maybe even laughing. She shook her head. “Boots and Creamsicle—I’m not sure I want to know the others’ names.”

“I already introduced you to them. You weren’t paying attention.” He nudged her with his foot. “I guess I can see why the others haven’t come around you. They are extremely disappointed in you. You can’t even take the time to learn their names. Do you know what colors they are? Do you know what they look like at all?”

She rolled her eyes. “Yes. One is a calico and the other is gray.”

“Boots and I agree—you are no longer welcome. You have to go. If you cannot show proper respect for the cats in this house, you just can’t stay here. We can’t allow such an obvious cat-hater in our midst. You must go. Now.”

She shook her head. “It was gray. Stop acting like an idiot. If I could lift you, I’d just carry you back into your bed because this is ridiculous. You need to sleep already. I’d drug you, but it is not worth it. I also don’t feel like allowing you to drink again.”

“The cat is not gray,” Nolan said, reaching down to lift the cat into his arms. “See? He’s hazel. Hazelnut, actually, and before you insult that name, Nora gave it to him—before her building changed policies and said no pets and she gave him to me.”

“Hazel.”

“Yes,” Nolan said, and the cat started to purr. Shaelynn shook her head. Sometimes he was so ridiculous. “Hazelnut may choose to forgive you, but I haven’t yet. As for Patchwork, you won’t see her until Hazelnut has forgiven you.”

Shaelynn set Creamsicle to the side and rose. “There has to be more to this not sleeping business than you’ve been saying. You are actively avoiding sleep now, and if you are exhausted but won’t sleep—and you are exhausted—you’re not just having trouble sleeping. You’re scared to sleep. Why?”

“You remember those nightmares I used to get?”

She nodded. She hadn’t ever managed to forget the way he’d wake her with them. Nolan hadn’t been raised to their life like she had, he wasn’t the cult leader’s child, wasn’t indoctrinated from birth. She’d had nagging senses here and there that what they were doing was wrong, but Nolan had known enough of the real world to know how far her father had skewed reality, had bent the rules of right and wrong and twisted their morality to where fighting for him was right, to where they would be willing to take lives for his sake. Nolan had never been able to accept that, and she’d found voice for her own doubts in him.

He still carried those doubts, those ones that had tormented him in the night. Ambrose had made a fighter out of him, had made a soldier—in all that Nolan had all the skills and the techniques he needed, a poker face that made it seem like he didn’t have a problem doing it—but Nolan had never shed his conscience, and that guilt gave him nightmares.

“Why would they be back?” She didn’t know why he’d bring that back up again, even in his subconscious, because he’d spent the last thirteen years proving that he wasn’t that person.

“You know that keyed up sensation you feel when you know you have to fight? That nerves-on-fire agitation that can be pure adrenaline after that paranoia sets in?”

She could pinpoint the last time she’d felt that—when Nora called her to say he’d been shot. She’d been running on that until she got to the hospital and saw he was alive with her own eyes, and it didn’t end until he was out of the hospital and back on his feet. “Yes.”

“I have this feeling like maybe a fight is coming. I don’t want it to come, and I don’t know that it’s just this takeover because that is… it’s corporate. It’s not dangerous. Even if they took the firm, I’d just leave. They can’t force me to work for them, to be their mouthpiece or selling point. I’m not that worried about it.”

She wasn’t sure she believed that. “We’ll see how you feel after we have a real plan in place. If that is what’s bothering you, it’ll pass. If not, we’ll find something else.”

He looked at her. “Why? Why does there have to be something else and why should we even bother looking for it?”

“That’s a dumb question.”

“Is it?”

She lifted Hazelnut out of his arms. “Yes, it is, and you know why it is, so I’m not going to bother explaining it. I’m just going to shove you in that bed and keep you there until you sleep.”

“That’s quite the threat.”

She almost laughed. She didn’t really like it, but she had a feeling that if she stayed with him this time, he’d be able to sleep, maybe even without a nightmare. That had worked before. She’d been better than a security blanket or a stuffed animal could ever have been for him. She ignored the memory that tried to surface, his teasing voice—what is a wife for if not to be a snuggly toy?—and pushed him into his bedroom. “Sleep. Now.”

---

“I think you will regret this for the rest of the day.”

Shaelynn’s eyes opened, and Nolan grinned down at her, not wanting to think too much about the fact that he’d finally been able to sleep last night. He didn’t want to acknowledge the obvious reason for that, the one sitting in the chair by the window.

“That chair isn’t very comfortable. I’ve fallen asleep in it before, and it is not worth suffering through the day after.”

She blinked. “Worse than after one of Ambrose’s training sessions?”

He considered that, had to shake his head almost immediately. Ambrose’s methods were brutal. Ambrose was brutal. He’d made sure that training hurt every time, and while it was supposedly in the name of making better soldiers, Nolan had always figured that man enjoyed it way too much. “No, so I guess you’ll live.”

“I think so,” she told him, pushing him away with her foot. She stood, stretching, and Nolan tried not to watch her. She still kept to part of the morning ritual they’d all been told to use—for her, he supposed it made sense. She had been raised with it, and it wasn’t as life-altering and offensive as it had been for him.

He rubbed his back. He probably could use some stretches himself, but he would not do it. He had sworn off that routine and as much of Ambrose’s teachings as he could. “Next time, get me to fall asleep and then go back to your hotel room.”

“Where’s your nobility?”

He turned, frowning at her. “My what?”

She smiled. “You’re not acting like much of a gentleman, are you? I could make a few jokes about the way you were raised—I could make hundreds of them—but that doesn’t change the fact that you should at least have suggested I get the couch. You could have offered the bed and you’d take the couch. Or maybe you just should offer to pay me a consultant’s fee to cover that hotel room even if I’m not using it at the moment.”

He felt Boots bumping him in the leg and bent down to pick him up. “I have another bedroom, but I didn’t figure you’d care for any of those offers. You never have before. Then again, you are here for longer than usual, so now would be the time to use it. You want to?”

“To share an apartment with you and your four cats?”

He glanced at Boots and shook his head. “No, I take it back. You can’t. Patchwork hasn’t forgiven you, and neither have I.”

She laughed. “If I wanted to stay here, no over exaggerated offense to your cat would stop me.”

“Oh, so you’d just force your way in, would you? You’d break the door or pick the lock and make yourself at home, would you?”

“It wouldn’t even take that much effort.”

“Excuse me? I have a secure home and an army of attack cats. They only look cute and fluffy. They’re real terrors, I tell you. Ambrose trained me, and I trained them and—”

Shaelynn kissed his cheek, and he stiffened, staring at her. She smiled. “Can I stay?”

“Yes.”

“See?” She smirked and walked—no, she practically pranced, and Shaelynn did not prance—out of the room. He stared at where she’d been, knowing he’d just had one of the most surreal moments of his life. Not only was she never affectionate, but she didn’t tease like that. Never. Even when they were “married,” they’d been awkward at showing any kind of “affection,” at the most being able to hold hands—maybe one hug, that was it—and this was not something he would ever have expected from her. Forget what ever had supposedly unsettled him before—she did that. She’d thrown him completely off, and he needed more than a minute to wrap his head around that.

Boots hit him on the chest with a paw, and Nolan looked down at him. “You don’t want her to stay. We don’t. None of us.”

The cat blinked. He bit back a curse, shaking his head. “You’re saying that we do? All of us?”

Boots started purring. Nolan did curse, rather loudly, and he had to hope she hadn’t heard him because she would be laughing.

---

“You are insane. Tell me you didn’t honestly offer her the other room in your apartment,” Nora said, and Nolan frowned, looking behind her. She rolled her eyes, and he shrugged. She didn’t always shut the door when she wanted to throw these kinds of fits, and he wasn’t about to continue this conversation where Shaelynn might hear it.

“Why are you now so outraged? You’re the one that called her, aren’t you? If you didn’t want to have her around, why call her? That is such screwed up logic, and I can’t even begin to start unraveling that one. I’m not going to. You are on your own with that,” he told her, leaning back in his chair and trying to remember what he’d done with the Allens file. He hadn’t given it to Shaelynn—it was a case from after the trip, and he’d considered it none of her concern anyway.

She’d be angry about that, but she was still not going to get it from him.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Nora said, folding her arms over her chest. “You know what I mean. I’m talking about something you’ve been denying since you were maybe… fourteen. You are and always have been in—”

“Stop right there. Even if that allegation was true, that is not what the offer was about. I was just… She offered to help us fight off that damned takeover, and I said fine. So she is probably going to be around for a while. I made an off-hand comment, and she twisted it. I didn’t actually think she meant it. She doesn’t. She’s just using this to get under your skin and mine.”

Nora shook her head. “No, she isn’t. She just left to collect her stuff from her hotel and take it over to your place. She was going to ask for a spare key, but then she so conveniently remembered that she’d palmed yours.”

He reached down to pat his pockets, frowning as he did. He was missing his keys, and he’d never noticed that until now. He was slipping, badly, and while he’d like to excuse that on it being Shaelynn and all the past she brought with her, she wasn’t the only one who’d gotten past him lately, and there shouldn’t be any excuse for this. He had been the one that trained her to pickpocket, not Ambrose.

“She is already running circles around you. She manipulates you, and you let her. I can’t believe I thought calling her was a good idea.”

He shrugged. “She did manage to get me to sleep last night, so I suppose that’s something, but I don’t know that it makes as much of a difference as you’d hoped.”

Nora sighed. “I wanted her to fix you.”

“I know that.”

“I don’t want her breaking you again.”

He focused a harsh glare on his sister, not holding back the anger. “She has never broken me. No one broke me, not Boath for all his cult leader psychobabble, not Coman for all his attempts to please Boath by making more converts, and not Ambrose with all his drill sergeant tactics. Definitely not Shaelynn. I won’t say it didn’t hurt when she turned her back on the partnership and left, but she did not break me then, and she won’t do it now.”

“And when she leaves again after building up your hopes again? She is never going to stay. That would be like admitting her father was right to marry her off to you, and she won’t do that.”

Nolan found himself studying his hands. Truth was, he’d figured Ambrose was going to get Shaelynn when she got old enough, and Nolan had to do a lot of fast talking to convince Boath that she was a better choice for him than one of Boath’s wives that he felt like discarding, that they could have a house of soldiers and not necessarily one with a lot of children.

He felt that familiar disgust wash over him again, and he forced himself up from the desk. “She doesn’t have to stay. I have never asked her to, I won’t force her to, and I won’t be that bothered if she goes. Now if you will excuse me, that wonderful dose of memories you pulled up requires a very long, very hot shower. Damn it.”

“Nolan—”

He held up a hand. “Don’t. There is nothing you can say about what happened when we were younger that will make it okay. We all know that. What Boath did to us ruined us forever.”

“I thought you said he didn’t break you.”

Nolan almost laughed. “Something doesn’t have to be broken to be ruined, you know. Bent, stained, tarnished, torn… All of those work as well.”

“I think you need an office cat. You’re not as… frightening with them around. You even smile. Right now, I’m not sure you’re not going to kill yourself in the shower.”

“I’d make a comment about you standing guard, but you are not doing that to me. Ever.”

“I’ll check on you every five minutes. You better answer me.”

---

Author’s Note: So in between errands and babysitting, I was mostly working on back and forth editing with Liana Mir today. I’d written some things last night that needed… tweaking to fit with her characters and backstory and then I felt my characters needed to say some things and act differently after hers did, so it went back and forth.

In the end, I didn’t get a lot done on Nano today. And I say that like it’s so terrible that all I managed was two scenes and 1,735 words. Not my best Nano day ever, but not my worst, either.

---

Getting Closer to the Problem

“This one.”

Nolan accepted it with a frown, flipping through the papers and then looking up at her. “Why this one? I don’t know why you pulled that one out of the dozens I worked before vacation. Oh, wait. You’re not jealous, are you?”

Shaelynn kicked him from the other side of the couch, glaring at him. “If either of us is jealous, it would be you, or have you forgotten what you pulled with Shaw earlier? For all your ship sunk talk, you are the one that still acts like you’re seventeen and obeying the rules of that farce.”

He kicked her back. “That was an isolated incident. You don’t see me picking cases that bother me based on what the client looks like. I’m not discriminatory—see? I worked for a beautiful woman once. Just because I only did it once doesn’t mean I’m prejudiced.”

“You have a thing against beautiful women?”

“Nora hates competition.”

Shaelynn snorted, leaning back. Sometimes he was impossible to work with. She had the hardest time trying to get him to focus, and back when they were kids, she used to think it was just him being difficult and stupid, but now she knew when he was avoiding things. “If this case didn’t bother you, why are you trying to distract me?”

“It’s not the case. Not the client, either. Incidentally, I am pretty sure most of that was fake, and I’ve got no interest in plastic women. Nora said if I wanted plastic, she’d buy me one from Mattel, and so there is a boxed special edition of Catwoman in my office.”

“She knows you so well.”

“She’s a decent sister sometimes. Why does this case bother you? It was rather mundane.”

Shaelynn shook her head. She wouldn’t call it mundane. She almost thought she’d been reading over the summary of some cheesy film noir story, and that femme fatale should have stabbed Nolan in the back before now. She didn’t like it, and she wouldn’t like it. “Was this woman some kind of actress?”

“Might have wanted to be one, but as far as I knew, no. I don’t see what is so important about her. She asked about where to start looking for something that had been stolen from her family. I looked over the case because it amused me, not because I believed her. I didn’t. I’m pretty sure she wanted to capitalize on someone else’s theft, but that’s in the notes, isn’t it?”

She shook her head. “It says here you helped her.”

“Oh. Nora. She must have typed the notes on that meeting and left some of the details out. Not a big deal at all. Quit getting all suspicious on me.”

“Isn’t that what I’m here for?”

“You mean you’re not here to pet my cats and look pretty?”

She hadn’t quite registered that she had Creamsicle in her lap again. She must have been petting the kitten for longer than she’d realized. “Did you really call me pretty?”

He snorted. “I’m not that crazy, and I don’t have that much of a death wish. No one calls you pretty and gets away with it.”

She laughed. “How do you come up with this stuff, anyway?”

“I told you—I’m your kind of crazy. It just comes naturally. Always has, from the first time I made you crack a smile when we were supposed to be doing a speed drill on how to put together our guns. ‘Excuse me, is this the firing pin? It looks kind of… odd.’”

“It was the grip, and I knew you were faking it, but you managed to stand there with a straight face for long enough that I gave in and laughed so that you would finally stop.”

“No, you smiled, called me an idiot, and then when I told Ambrose I wanted to know if there was a homeschool option for that class, then you laughed.”

She shrugged. She didn’t know that the details mattered. All that did was that they got along almost from the beginning. “Next file.”

He reached for it, opened it, and tensed. “Not that one.”

“Are you kidding? After that reaction?” She shook her head. “Tell me about that case. Now.”

“No.”

---

“Nolan, if this thing bothers you that much, then it has to be the answer to all of this. You can talk me through it and by the time that you’re done, we’ll have pinpointed the problem and you’ll be able to sleep,” Shaelynn said, coming up behind him.

He kept his eyes on the window. He didn’t feel like discussing that—any part of it—and he hated to admit that he found it that humiliating. He should have pulled it from the files to avoid this conversation. He didn’t know why he hadn’t. “It’s more embarrassing than anything. I don’t know why I left that in there for you to see. You must have enjoyed that too much.”

She touched his arm. “Since when did I enjoy anyone’s humiliation? That was Ambrose, not me. Or maybe the other one. What was his name?”

Nolan shook his head. She hadn’t forgotten the name. She wouldn’t have. None of them could forget him or the way he’d followed her father around. “Coman.”

“Yeah, him. He might have liked seeing people humiliated.”

“Anyone but your father, maybe. That guy really drank the Kool-Aid.” Nolan looked back at her. “You don’t think it’s the least bit humiliating that I didn’t catch on to the fact that the guy worked for my competition the entire time? That I had to have that jerk come in and gloat about it to realize what happened?”

“A bit,” she said, her hands on his neck again. “Not quite enough to get this reaction from you. Come on. There’s more to this than that. Talk to me. There’s never been any kind of… judgment between us. Awkwardness, yes, lots of it, and some pain, but laughter most of the time, and understand the rest of it. We know each other, even when we don’t want to.”

He looked back at her, considering what he might say to that, things he hadn’t said in thirteen years and didn’t know that he could say them now, either, even if she was here again. “That’s not true. We barely talk.”

“Tell me. You know you will, so just do it now. Spare yourself the trouble.”

“Why is it, do you think, that I always give in to you?”

“Deep down, you’re too honorable to hit a girl.”

That made him laugh. He had missed her. He didn’t think he’d laughed like this since he got shot. She’d always been good at that, and he loved her for it. He leaned against the wall, studying her as he did. “Shouldn’t you be insulted? Someone’s implying you’re a girl.”

“That someone is me. I get a pass,” she said, shrugging. “Spill, or I will use what Ambrose taught me about torture.”

He let out a breath. “They’ve been trying for a hostile takeover since I got shot. Consider that their opening volley. I don’t have time to deal with their crap, and I don’t want to work for anyone else. I don’t see why anyone thinks I’m that valuable a commodity. I’m a one-man operation, more or less. Sure, Nora handles a few things. She screens the cases, but for the most part, her role in this partnership is doing the bookkeeping and the paperwork, scheduling and the rest.”

“Then why is it Sheppard and Sheppard on the door and the letterhead?”

“Nora insisted on it.”

Shaelynn gave him a look. “You are a terrible liar. You always were. I don’t know how Ambrose or any of the others believed you.”

Nolan grunted. “They never knew me like you do. They assumed I told the truth because they wanted me to. And if you really must know, it was because I did actually think we’d be working together. You didn’t tell me you were leaving until you’d already gone. Can’t blame you for that, not really, but it does prove I didn’t know you as well as I thought I did.”

“I needed time.”

Thirteen years was too damn much, he thought, but he didn’t bother saying it. “I still don’t see why I am worth taking over. I can’t possibly interfere with that much of their business—I’m one person. I don’t have enough time to do that kind of damage.”

“You don’t need time. You just need the right weapon.”

He nodded tightly, not wanting to point out that she’d quoted Ambrose at him. “I suppose. I can do enough damage with a fast turnaround—sometimes it doesn’t take much to see what’s going on—or in a more professional assessment than they’ve gotten before, but these people are global. They don’t need me. They have plenty of staff.”

“They might want a monopoly, not a staff. It might be such a thing where they want no competition, even if it’s ‘small.’ Or they just plain want you.”

He blinked. “That’s disconcerting. Perhaps even sickening.”

She forced a smile, not much of one, and quickly let it fall. “Not that, you goofball. You don’t use it, you hate it, but you have a reputation. You have an image. You’re marketable. You’re the guy who took down a cult at seventeen. A hero. They could take that and ride to town on it even if you don’t and never would.”

Nolan’s stomach twisted with those words. He forced his eyes back to the window, kept his voice almost calm when he spoke. “I am not going to be sold.”

“No, you’re not,” she agreed. “You have any strategy in place against them?”

“Does getting very angry count?”

“Only if you’re the Hulk.”

He grinned. “I knew it. You do want to see my comic collection, don’t you?”

She rolled her eyes, and he waited. She let out a breath and maybe a few curses before she cleared her throat. “Only if it means you’re going to let me help you fight off this takeover.”

That was almost too easy. He shouldn’t let it be, shouldn’t pounce on the offer like it was some damned life preserver, but a part of him felt like that was what it was. He gave her another shrug, fighting a smile.

“Maybe.”

---

Author’s Note: So I told myself today I’d be good and clean. I’d also finish my other story before doing too much Nano. Well… I couldn’t come up with anything but an “everyone dies at the end” solution for the other story, and cleaning came to a halt when the kitchen sink backed up. I woke with an iffy stomach this morning, and the sink made me queasy. My stomach took forever to settle after that.

So I got plenty of Nano done before happily being sidetracked into yet a third story, the collaboration with Liana Mir.

I should mention that Kaplan, who first cameoed in the last section and reappears here, is a character from another story, one as yet unpublished, and I’m not sure if she has more of a role in this yet. I did write a possible ending that involved her and more characters from her original story, and it was a fun thing to do, so I may revisit that or extend it.

---

The Past, Unfortunately, Remains Present

“Shaelynn, wait.”

“Why the hell should I?”

“Because I was acting like the overprotective jackass that I am when I saw him ogling you, and I would never have brought up the whole farce of a marriage we got forced into back then if I hadn’t been so bothered by him looking at you like that and because I swear I didn’t know they were feds when I agreed to take the consultation with them. This was only the preliminary meeting, and they would have gotten the same answer I just gave them—I can’t help them,” Nolan said, catching her arm. Shaelynn looked at his hand and considered twisting it off, but she didn’t like obeying knee-jerk reactions, not when they meant getting violent. That wasn’t her. It was what they’d tried to make her, a perfect soldier, but it wasn’t her.

She looked into Nolan’s eyes, taking a breath and letting it out as she realized he’d been stripped clean of all acts. This was him, raw and exposed, and the discomfort on his face told her he’d just noticed the same thing.

He let go of her arm. “I’m sorry. Old patterns, habits… You know that I did what I did so Nora didn’t end up your father’s twenty-first wife, and it wasn’t like he was the only one who seemed to be impatient for her to get old enough to marry off or even that looked at you when we were ‘married.’ Back then it was my responsibility to make them answer for that. It sickens me that I still think it’s my place to do it. I don’t want to live by his rules. I never did, but we had to survive—”

“I know.” She cut him off, wanting to stop talking about any of this. She didn’t want to remember, none of them did. They could almost function as friends if they didn’t think about that one aspect of things, but if they let that part get in, it became awkward. They had worked well together—that was their problem. She should have turned him in when he admitted his clumsy tactics with the gun—holding it in a way to look cool rather than control it—was about not using it like he was expected to, but she hadn’t. Somehow covering that up meant covering up more things, and they were a strange team before she hit a “marriageable” age and was handed off to Nolan like a damn prize.

Nolan looked away for a moment, and when he turned back, he was all business again. “I have to update another client in about an hour, but I have time to discuss those files you wanted to go over now since the feds won’t be staying.”

“You think they’ll accept no for an answer?”

“Honestly, what can anyone expect me to tell them now? That was thirteen years ago, and we worked on escaping from the inside out. I didn’t storm any compounds, and we didn’t confront your father directly. I’m not an expert, and I can’t prevent another Waco, not that they’d even expect that.”

Shaelynn nodded. She hadn’t expected him to say anything different, not when it was true. When it first happened, he’d been considered a hero for what he’d done to get as many of the kids out as possible, but he hadn’t done it to be a hero or a leader. He’d just done it for his sister. Their mother had fallen for her father’s lies and trapped them. Nolan got them out. That was all it was.

“I overreacted,” she said. “When I saw them, I thought… I thought all kinds of things I had no right to think. Even if they were true, I don’t have the right to judge you for working with them. It might even be good if you could help them get others out without standoffs. My father was prepared to make it the Alamo, not a mass suicide, but that fell apart when we wrecked the fence and took the kids.”

“Again, another reason why I can’t help them. There isn’t some kid from the streets full of resentment and never buying one ounce of the guy’s lies, never drinking the Kool-Aid in most of those groups. Most of the internal conflict there is the second or lieutenant thinking he wants the place as the leader. Not the case with us. That guy was sickeningly loyal to your father.”

She swallowed. “Subject change. Now.”

“You had six things you wanted to ask me about. Ask.”

“Seven, actually. I didn’t know you were such a cat person.”

“Who says I’m a cat person?”

“You wouldn’t work for a company that made inferior cat food when they asked for help reorganizing their company and remaking their image.”

He grimaced. “Yeah, well, the cult didn’t allow us to have pets, but back in the days of our crappy apartment, I befriended a cat or two over the years, only pets I ever had, but they were good for keeping me company when I wanted to pretend I didn’t know what my mother was doing—good for distracting Nora, too.”

She did curse then. “Why is it we can’t ever get away from that? I ask about cats and you mention it—and even if you hadn’t pointed out why I didn’t know about your affection for cats, that memory was painful. It’s like a field of land mines with us, isn’t it?”

“We could always try sticking to the weather.”

She snorted. “Very funny.”

“I know. That wasn’t much of an attempt there,” he said, putting his hands in his pockets. “This is going to be awkward no matter what I say now. That’s why you really stay away and why you working with me would be a bad idea and why we don’t even call each other on the phone most of the time. Too much past. It’s impossible to talk like this. We just bring up old horrors that need to stay buried.”

“Are you holding something back?”

He turned to her with a frown. “What?”

“You couldn’t sleep for almost a month before we stole the bus,” she reminded him. “You went over everything, obsessed over the details, and that’s what Nora thinks has put you back there. The sleeplessness. You have something going on that you’re not telling either of us?”

“An operation like that? No. I don’t—just because the feds came today doesn’t mean I had anything like that going on. I don’t. I wasn’t the one that was good at strategy—that was you. I got all the credit for it, but you were the one that made that plan work. I knew a few things from the streets, knew the stuff those militia drill instructors taught us, but I didn’t ever want to think strategy. The most strategy I ever had was knowing I could have eaten my own gun if I didn’t have Nora to protect.”

Shaelynn shook her head. “You were stronger than that.”

“Says you. I don’t believe it, and neither do the worms on my chest.”

She considered hitting him. She didn’t. She almost thought he wanted that. “You were having trouble sleeping before the trip, so we need to look closer at something you started working on before you left.”

“You have the files.”

“I know.” She put a hand on his arm. “Have Nora reschedule everything you were supposed to do today. You’re going home.”

“Excuse me?”

She smiled. “You have to introduce me to your cats. Well, and you need to sleep.”

He blinked. “How do you know I have a cat? I don’t have cats.”

“You have at least three.”

“Fine, I have four, but that’s only because one of them needed a kitten,” Nolan said, defensive. She looked at him. “He kept escaping.”

“So you got him a kitten?”

“Yes.”

“That kind of warped logic could only belong to you.”

“Thanks.”

---

Shaelynn stopped to scoop the kitten up into her hands as she watched Nolan try to get comfortable. The other three cats had claimed spots around him or on top of him, and she knew that she would never have been able to sleep like that, but he did seem comforted by the act of running his fingers through the black one’s fur, tangling in and out of it the way he used to do with Nora’s hair or even Shaelynn’s at times. She should have known he was a cat person.

She moved the orange fuzz onto her shoulder and reached for the door handle, pulling it shut behind her. She had said no to the slumber party, but maybe this was what he needed—to have someone around when he was trying to sleep. Maybe that was why the trip let him sleep, not the jet-lag. He’d had Nora nearby, and that was enough to get him through the night. His cats, while almost an army, were not enough.

She reached up to grab Creamsicle off her shoulder, shaking her head again at Nolan’s choice of name—it could have been worse, he’d said he considered naming the kitten after one of his worms, and she’d refused to let him tell her what he’d named his scars. “If I were you, I’d worry about getting eaten.”

The kitten blinked, starting to purr again, and she gave it a pat on the head before crossing back to where the files were. She was going to prioritize which ones she felt like asking him about, and maybe she’d let the kitten help with that.

She sat down on the couch, putting her feet on the table and the cat in her lap as she flipped open the file. “Brokerage firm?”

The purr stopped. She almost laughed. Yeah, she hadn’t thought much of that possibility herself. She’d held onto it because there was a lot of money involved, and money was almost always a good motive. She set the file to the side, picking up the next one. This one she liked more—if only because the guy involved seemed like slime—nothing in the file said he was, but he gave her that impression anyway—so she might start with that one, find out what Nolan thought of that.

The doorbell stopped her from consulting the next file. She got a bit of a squeak out of Creamsicle as she rose, and she pet him, calming him as she went to answer it. She frowned. “Kaplan.”

“I wanted to speak to Sheppard without Shaw to clarify a few things, and I figured trying to do it at the office was a bad idea. This was never about a cult—I work missing persons, and I am looking for two teenage girls, not a cult.”

Shaelynn willed herself not to grimace. She pulled the door open further. “Come in.”

“Sheppard did some work for one of the girls’ father, but I got the sense the man lied to me about what that work was. I figured I’d go to the source. Shaw, though, he went from assuming this thing was about a serial killer to a cult of serial killers when he saw Sheppard’s background,” Kaplan went on. Shaelynn looked at her, and the agent shrugged. “He’s my first partner since I transferred, but he’s about enough of an idiot to make me quit for good. My husband and his two brothers have all offered to kick the crap out of Shaw. They’re all very overprotective.”

“You have the gun and the badge, though.”

Kaplan laughed. “So does the husband. And the brothers have guns—one’s army, the other’s navy. Shaw is either going to transfer or disappear himself by the end of the year.”

Shaelynn found herself smiling. “I’d recommend a different line of work, personally.”

“Your instincts as good as Sheppard’s?”

“Technically, my name is Sheppard, too,” Shaelynn said. She let the kitten go so she wouldn’t squeeze it as she spoke. “I took the name when Nolan and Nora went back to the name they’d been born with—I didn’t want my father’s for any reason, and for a time, I did actually think Nolan was my husband, so it made sense.”

Kaplan nodded. “It does.”

“Look, all of that is in the past. It’s supposed to stay there. Nolan reacted like it wasn’t, like he was seventeen again, and I overreacted because he’d promised me when we got out he’d never be involved in any cult—not as a deprogrammer like people were telling him he should be, not as law enforcement—they kept trying to tell us it was a good way to use the skills my father forced on us, but we never wanted those skills. The idea of using them sickens me.”

“I don’t blame you. My husband had to kill someone in the line of duty, someone that almost killed him, and it still eats at him even though he didn’t have a choice.” Kaplan reached into her jacket pocket and took out two photographs, passing them to her. “Those are the girls I’m looking for.”

“And only one of them is the daughter of the guy Nolan consulted for?”

“Supposedly. The resemblance is what made Shaw jump to serial killer, but for me, it was another warning bell.”

“You have DNA to test them and be sure they’re sisters?”

“At the lab. I’m hoping for something more like an accidental meeting and outrage over family lies that caused the girls to run off for a while—there’s a better chance of a happier end there—but I know it’s possible they’re dead because of the resemblance. Still doesn’t mean a serial killer or a cult.”

Shaelynn carried the photos over to the couch, spread out the files, and found the one she wanted. “I’d flagged this for a different reason, but I’d say that someone’s political ambitions are out the window now that everyone knows he’s got another daughter out there.”

“Politics?”

“Had his eye on being mayor then governor and on to president,” Shaelynn said. She’d been a bit ticked that Nolan had taken on that one, too, but he’d squashed the guy’s ambitions, so she was more okay with that one—she just figured that the other guy might not have taken it so well, and if it connected to these missing girls, maybe this was it, the thing that was keeping Nolan up at night.

“Spare me,” Kaplan muttered. She shook her head. “I thought I’d gotten away from most of that when I transferred out of DC.”

“Well, she should have,” Nolan said. “You should have had a warrant for what’s in that file, and Shaelynn didn’t have the right to share it with you.”

She shrugged. “You never made me sign any non-disclosure agreements when you gave me the files, and I don’t work for you. You’re supposed to be sleeping.”

“Can’t sleep with voices in the other room. You know that.” He came around to the edge of the couch. “I should tell you that the confidentiality agreement between me and Bavelier has been violated, and I could get sued if you confront him with what you learned through Shaelynn.”

“If need be, I’ll get a warrant. Was the second daughter part of why you discouraged him from office?”

“More that I knew he was a philanderer and wouldn’t admit it, even when I said he needed to disclose everything to me so that the evaluation could be made with all the variables. If he thought he could keep that sort of thing a secret, he was an idiot. I saw the way he looked at my sister.”

Kaplan’s face flickered with distaste, mostly contained, carefully controlled. “You’re not saying he likes ’em young, are you?”

“Nora may act twelve sometimes, but she’s twenty-six. She’s at least half his age, but it’s still not as bad as it could have been,” Nolan said. “I hadn’t heard his daughter went missing. I’m not surprised he has more than one, but I didn’t find her before I shut down my evaluation. It didn’t take a genius to know that he was never going to get elected. I told him that. End of consultation.”

“How’d he take that?”

Nolan laughed. “You thought he was a threat to me, Shaelynn? No. Not him. He was arrogant, so self-important that he couldn’t believe things were other that what he thought they were, but he was not dangerous. He didn’t have the connection to reality to be a threat. He assumed that I was just going to tell him what he wanted to hear. I didn’t. He said he’d convince everyone he knew not to hire me, but I haven’t seen any decline in business, so I don’t think that worked.”

Kaplan glanced between them. He shook his head. “My sister thinks I’m a screw loose or two since I got shot last year. She asked Shaelynn here to make sure I wasn’t, and when I made the mistake of mentioning my insomnia, I now have two people overreacting to it. I’m fine. I don’t think Bavelier is at all involved in my lack of sleep, and while I’m glad this had nothing to do with any cults, I know I wasn’t much help.”

“You did talk to the daughter,” Shaelynn reminded him. “What did you get out of that?”

“Other than a renewed hatred for you?”

“Yeah.”

“Not much. She hated her father, didn’t want him going into politics, and she didn’t have much use for someone she thought was helping him.”

Kaplan let out a breath. “If you think of anything else, give me a call. I’d appreciate anything that might help me find those girls.”

Nolan took the card from her with a nod. “I assure you, if I had anything I thought would help, you’d have it, confidentiality be damned. I just… don’t know anything helpful.”

Shaelynn wasn’t sure if the agent believed that. She didn’t know if she herself did, though she didn’t think he was crazy enough to try and pursue that on his own, not with his insomnia and everything else, but she didn’t know what went on in his head these days.

Kaplan started toward the door. Nolan turned the card over in his fingers. “Agent?”

“Yes?”

“Either of those brothers of your husband single? I’ve got a sister I’d love to get rid of.”

---

“You sure you don’t know anything else about her case?”

“The daughter was extremely hostile and had a colorful vocabulary, but that’s not going to help anything. It might suggest that she was more of a runaway than any kind of victim, but I don’t know that we—that she—can assume that. Kaplan’s case. Not mine. Not yours. I’d give her information if I had it, but I don’t have it. I don’t know what to tell her other than I hope she finds those girls before it’s too late.” Nolan rubbed the back of his neck as he leaned over the stove, turning on the back burner and the kettle. “I can’t believe you’d think I’d keep something from them. What do you take me for?”

“Someone who handles things his own way and always has,” Shaelynn said, walking up behind him. He tried not to jump when she put her hands on his shoulders, fingers working down into his skin. She was good at this, had done it for him before when they trained together and after, but not since the day she left the first time. They weren’t those kids anymore. “You are very tense.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t want me to work that out on the mats.”

“You haven’t slept. Nora’s right. That’s not fair, and I’m not Ambrose.”

Nolan flinched. Shaelynn let go of him and went to the counter leaning against it. “Yeah, I never managed to forget him, either. One silver lining, if you want to call it that, is knowing that he was killed in the raid on the compound.”

Nolan closed his eyes. He hadn’t found much comfort in that, though he doubted he would have found it if their trainer had lived and was locked away for the rest of his life, either. He didn’t know that he could ever get rid of that rhetoric they were shoving down them at the same time as they tried to turn them into soldiers.

“You have all those luxuries at the office, and you still make coffee over the stove?”

“I know just how I like it. None of the machines can make it like I do, no matter how ‘smart’ they are or how many features they have.” He shrugged. “Old habits, I guess. I was doing this back before I liked coffee, back with Mom before the drugs, before your father…”

“You ever think about what it would have been like if he hadn’t found her and convinced her to join him?”

Nolan grimaced. “I try not to. Things were bad enough in the cult, but she was in a bad downward spiral. Her addiction was so bad she barely functioned, and she didn’t make a lot of money like that—the time was coming when she was going to overdose. Social services could have taken us away, I guess, and that’s somehow the best outcome. I don’t want to think much about the others.”

“I had that nightmare again last month. Haven’t had it in over five years, but there it was, the one where we never got out of there… Pissed me off so bad—I am tired of it having that much hold over me—over any of us.”

He snorted. “And we’re the lucky ones. Nora never had to get married, you weren’t one of his wives because you were his daughter, and I somehow ended up the head of our ‘house’ and didn’t get executed for being a bad child soldier.”

“Dream was different this time.”

He stiffened. “I died?”

“No. You drank the Kool-Aid.”

He didn’t think it could have hurt more if he’d been shot again. Boath had tried to indoctrinate him, and Ambrose had done his best in the training to help break him as well. He’d come close a few times, close to breaking, to giving in. “I think you should go back home, Shaelynn. I’m sure I will find a way to sleep again, and it was never your concern.”

“I don’t think I ever really thought about it in those terms before—oh, everyone called you a hero when we got out, people praised you and said you were something special, and the ones that were loyal to my father hated you as the worst kind of traitor—but I never stopped and thought about how much of an impact you had on all of us.”

“Motivational speeches were never your style. What gives? If you were going to have some kind of… moment over me, shouldn’t it have been when I got shot? All of this is rather… late.”

She looked at him, shrugging. “You’re not the only one who can get philosophical, and I was never good at timing.”

“Liar. You’re trying to make me feel better after that whole Kool-Aid comment.”

“Do I get coffee?”

He looked at her. “I shouldn’t give you this because you did make that damned Kool-Aid comment in the first place, but if you and I held grudges, where the hell would we be now?”

“Dead,” she said, and he would have winced if he hadn’t known that answer before he asked the question. In a messed up way, they’d saved each other back then, and that stupid bond left them stuck together when anyone sane would have parted company the moment they were free and stayed that way. “Cups?”

He pointed to the cupboard above her head. She reached up for one, taking it down and shaking her head. “You continue to surprise me. I wouldn’t have pegged you as a guy with cartoons on his coffee mugs.”

“Shrinks said I never developed emotionally. You should see my comic collection.”

“I’ll pass.”

---

Author’s Note: So, I know what this story is about now. It’s about Nolan being threatened by something from one of his cases. Definitely a mystery/suspense type. I had been feeling things were getting a bit too much into their past, and as unpleasant as it is, it’s their past, their connection, and they wouldn’t be them without it. I just… would prefer to stay out of the details myself.

And I probably crossed a few lines already, unfortunately.

The description of their mom is Snerky’s fault. My word count has to be minus those few gems she gave me, though she wasn’t talking about the mom.

---

The Past Creeps in, as Usual

“First you tell me that you’re not coming, and then you come and get my brother drunk?”

Nolan grunted. “It takes more than a couple shots to put me down. Somewhere in me is good Irish stock, right? Well, none of us know that for sure, but that was what Mom thought when she gave us the cute almost matching names.”

“If I’d been named Nola, I would have killed myself by now,” Nora muttered, taking hold of his arm and trying to drag him into the office. Shaelynn stood back, wondering if he would let his affection as her brother dictate his response or if he had no intention of letting her fuss over him. Were this a few years back, she’d bet on the second option, but she’d seen him do too much of the first to rule it out.

“Could be worse. She could have named you after herself.”

Nora shuddered. “Oh, don’t say that. That name is like… big-haired, bedazzled-to-death, bed-hopping, white trash.”

“Close enough. She was an addict who sold herself to pay for her addiction until she met Shaelynn’s father.”

“Subject change. Now.”

Nolan nodded. “Did you know that Shaelynn knows science now? She got all smart while she was gone. Not sure how because she works in one of those soul-sucking cubicles, but she did.”

She glared at him. “Don’t make me pretend you’re a zombie. I’d enjoy it too much.”

He shrugged, walking back into the front of the office he shared with his sister, stopping in front of the table in their shared domain. “Why is it, I have to ask, that it’s always about the past? Nora thinks I’m having trouble adjusting to life after being shot, but she doesn’t assume it’s about being shot. It’s about the past, so she calls in someone from the past. You know, I am a successful businessman. I built this company up from nothing—and it was nothing, just me and Nora and that cop that threw a twenty my way when I was able to tell him how he should go about his case, so why is it that anything and everything is all about that place, that time?”

Shaelynn kept her expression as neutral as her voice. “Our past is what makes us.”

“And the future is what we make ourselves?” Nolan grimaced. “That sounds like some of the crap he used to spout at us.”

“I would never repeat anything that came from his mouth.”

Nolan sat down on the table, getting a wince out of his sister. That had to have been expensive, that chunk of wood, though why that mattered at all was beyond Shaelynn. She hadn’t thought any of them cared about money, but then Nora wasn’t much like her brother. She would have gone for comfort in things, in the price of her surroundings, as empty as they were.

He knew that there was no comfort anywhere.

“You don’t really think they’d come after me now, do you? They are all still locked up, aren’t they?”

“As far as I know,” Shaelynn said. He knew what she meant—she’d checked this morning before the flight, like she did every morning, to make sure that she hadn’t missed the notification that one of them had been paroled. She had the scheduled ends of their sentences marked in calenders and day-planners and on any electronic device she carried. She wasn’t going to be caught unprepared. None of them would be dropping in on her unannounced. She couldn’t trust them—and more than half of them were family.

“That’s what I figured.”

“You don’t check? You’re the most visible target, aren’t you?”

“And I make a good one, obviously,” he said, gesturing to his chest. She rolled her eyes and Nora glared at him. She really was scared of losing him, and Shaelynn should summon some kind of pity for that, but she had none. “The fuss about all that died off years ago, probably with the last of the trials. I’m pretty sure everyone forgot my fifteen minutes of fame. I sure did.”

“You wanted to. There are plenty that might be simmering up some grudges.”

“Same for you.”

“Not quite. Some still won’t touch me because I have that blood.” She’d rather not have it, most of the time, but she didn’t kid herself, either—being her father’s daughter had saved her from worse. “All right. Give me the stuff you’ve worked on in the past two years.”

Nolan blinked. “I didn’t realize I was asking for an audit. I’m not, incidentally. I don’t have any interest in showing you my files. I don’t need your version of ‘constructive criticism.’”

She held back the smile. “This isn’t about criticism. You say you’re not sleeping. If it’s not the past keeping you up, if this sense of hypervigilance isn’t coming from being shot, then you are looking at something you’ve been aware of recently giving you those ‘heebie jeebies.’ You know you have good instincts, and you adapt well—that’s why you were able to turn the stuff we learned into ways to help corporations or businesses instead of armies or psychopaths. I want to see your files. I want to see what’s setting you off that you haven’t become quite conscious of yet.”

“And if nothing’s there and I’m just crazy?”

“I know you’re crazy. That wasn’t the question.”

“And what is?”

Her brain ran through dozens of answers, from ones that made no sense to ones she should give because they were true, easily dismissed because he already knew the answers, and then into ones she refused to acknowledge. She leveled her gaze at him. “I suppose it’s about knowing just what kind of crazy you are.”

His lips curved into a smile. “Oh, trust me—it’s always been your kind. That’s why we got along.”

---

“You shouldn’t have given her the files.”

Nolan glanced toward his sister, eying her carefully as he tried to decide how to handle her this time. She didn’t look like she was about to explode with anger, no threat of tantrum, not yet—this was Nora’s rational face, the one she presented to their clients, passing herself off as a responsible businesswoman. She was going to start with logical arguments, which meant that he should counter in kind, but he did not much feel like it.

She really should have learned by now not to piss him off. “You’re the one that called Shaelynn in. What did you think you were calling her in for? A chat? If you say anything that suggests, even once, that it was about her ‘fixing’ me with sex—”

“Leaving aside that as your sister I have absolutely no interest in your sex life, even if I was the sort that wanted to ‘fix’ you by finding you someone to date, it wouldn’t be Shaelynn. I don’t like her, and I don’t like remembering the past she brings with her. Besides, it wouldn’t be fair to saddle any woman with you. You have more issues than Time magazine.”

“Thanks for that. Get out of my office.”

“Nolan—”

“Out,” he repeated, letting his voice get colder as he did. He had never appreciated his sister interfering in his life, and he’d become even less tolerant of it after he got shot. He’d call it overprotective if that was even close to what it was. She was the younger one, and he’d protected her for years—perhaps this should have been revenge, but that was not it, either—and her interest was not protection, not unless she wanted to protect the money and the firm.

He didn’t have many illusions left, not after what he’d been through growing up, and none of those illusions applied to his sister. Nora’s experiences had turned her into someone who thought that money and things could patch the holes in her, cover them up and make them pretty again—no mistake, his sister was pretty, always had been, that was part of her problem—and she saw him as her means of continuing the lifestyle she preferred. She didn’t have to clutter it up with other people, ones she would never trust, and she’d been warped by their mother’s actions in a different way from him—she had decided she couldn’t be bought for less than a price that was too high for anyone to afford, at least so far. He’d just decided that he wasn’t going to get involved with anyone. Ever.

“The answer isn’t in the files.”

“You don’t know that.” He didn’t know it, either. He didn’t feel all that different, at least not that he could tell, but then he had started to be accustomed to his roles—the consultant, the businessman, the brother, dozens of others—that he just slipped into one and let it handle whatever was needed until it couldn’t. “You’re not afraid of what Shaelynn will find, are you? Have you been doing things you shouldn’t behind my back? Are we talking tax fraud? Embezzlement? Murder?”

Nora shook her head, body stiff, nose tilting in the air as she made the most dignified response that she could. “No. I would never jeopardize this company in any way. Besides, even with you getting shot, I know I’d never get away with trying to hide something from you. I hate that about you.”

He shrugged. He sometimes wished he didn’t notice things, but he did, he’d learned to, and he’d had to. Should have made a difference when he got shot but it hadn’t. He’d blame it on the chaos, but he knew he was just sloppy. He’d let his guard down, and it had cost him. “It’s what I do. Most of the time, at least. Sometimes I end up with worms instead of recommendations.”

She flinched. “I don’t understand why you have to keep calling your scars that, but save it for Shaelynn. She thinks it’s funny—her humor is as messed up as yours—but I don’t. I never have. It’s not a joke. You almost died.”

“I didn’t even lose consciousness until I got to the hospital. I’m fine.”

She let out a breath. “Will you let Shaelynn help you?”

“I don’t need it, not even with the job we took today, but if she wants to work it, I won’t tell her not to. Maybe she’ll finally ditch the cubicle. She’d be good at this. I don’t see why she thinks it’s so close to what we were forced into in the past—there are no guns, no knives, no weapons at all except maybe someone’s sarcasm.”

“Your sarcasm can be as bad as a weapon. She knows that better than anyone besides me.”

He smiled. She did. “Go home. I’ll lock up tonight.”

“You mean you’ll stay up all night working. Again.”

“It gets the paycheck to you sooner.”

She glared at him. “I am not just about the money. One of these days, you’ll realize that.”

---

“Daughter of the Fortunate One. It’s good to hear from you.”

“Don’t call me that,” she said, tempted to hang up even though she knew that her father’s lawyer was the only one that would twist her name that way. Shaelynn grimaced. She knew what her name was supposed to mean, and she should have changed that name, too, when she moved on, but she had never been able to adjust to being called anything else. The last name had been easy—she hadn’t wanted the other one in the first place—but she’d been Shaelynn from birth. Her few memories of her mother used that name, and she remembered those times fondly, unlike most of her childhood. She wanted to hold onto what little good there had been.

She wouldn’t admit it, but she had to figure that was why she had never fully cut ties with Nolan or Nora. They were the rest of those good times, as twisted as that was.

“I just wanted to make sure—”

“Your inheritance is still yours. They keep trying to get at the money, but it’s safe and secure—”

“I don’t want any of his money,” Shaelynn said, her stomach twisting up again. She should, she supposed, find some way of getting the weasel to tell her where the money was hidden so she could turn it over to the police or some charity—anything but in the weasel’s hands—but she hadn’t been willing to make herself ask, even for a good cause. “I just want to know if anyone’s been asking you about Nolan.”

Cyril drew in a sharp breath. “Now, you know that name is—well, it’s not exactly forbidden, but it’s not one you should go throwing out willy-nilly. Now, there’s some—and they don’t speak for all of us, but you know they’re out there—that want him to pay for his betrayal. There are others—your father included—that believe one day he will return to the fold.”

She shuddered, hating herself for reacting like she had. She didn’t want to be weak. She was not weak. She also knew Nolan. He’d never been a part of that “fold,” and he never would be. “I just want to know if anyone has been asking around, if they’ve been trying to find him.”

“You watch your connection to him. That’s dangerous.”

She found herself gritting her teeth, wanting to scream. That chauvinistic jerk. All of them were either chauvinists or misogynists, never once thinking that she’d had any part in what Nolan had done when he left, when he got Nora and the others out. Idiots, the whole lot of them. “Tell me if you’ve heard anything. Now.”

“No. Your father said he tried to contact him a few years back, tried to reconcile, but no one knows where he is these days. No one except you, maybe.”

Nolan wouldn’t be that hard to find if they wanted to, but she’d figured on them going to Cyril, to the mouthpiece, before they tried anything. She thought she could accept that answer for now. She’d go forward like none of them were the reason Nolan’s instincts were going haywire. None of them were after him.

“That’s all I needed,” she said, hanging up before Cyril could say anything else. Her eyes went to the stack of files on the dresser. If she started in on them, she’d be up all night, but she didn’t know how she could do anything else. The sooner she reassured herself that he would be fine, the sooner she could go home. She shouldn’t have let herself get drawn in, but she hadn’t expected it to be any more than Nora’s paranoia.

She rose, crossing over to the stack and taking one off the top. She frowned. Since when did Nolan put his talents to use for a cosmetics company? That didn’t sound anything like his area of expertise, but then—she should be glad that he wasn’t using his expertise.

She set the file aside. She didn’t think that the answer was in the corporate restructuring they needed. If they were under protest because of animal testing or being sued because of some kind of reaction to their products, that would be different, but they just wanted someone to blame when they trimmed the fat.

Nolan was a good scapegoat. Always had been.

She flipped open the next file, almost cursing as she did. She knew it wasn’t that simple, couldn’t be, but still, this wasn’t good. Immediate refund—this is not the sort of thing we work or will ever work. He’d underlined ever three times.

She took the file with her back to the bed, sitting down. He hadn’t written anything else in his note, but she didn’t think she’d need it. She could figure out what had made him decide not to work it or herself. Still—if his instincts had told him not to work this, then why wouldn’t he have figured this for the reason he couldn’t sleep a long time ago?

She closed her eyes. She’d figure it out in the morning. The day and the drinks had caught up to her, and all she wanted now was some sleep.

---

“When you said it would get the paycheck to us sooner, I thought you were kidding,” Nora said, folding her arms over her chest. Nolan looked at her and shrugged. If he couldn’t sleep, he might as well be working, and she didn’t have any reason for complaint. She hadn’t lost sleep, the clients were happy—they were ecstatic with that turnaround, actually—and the check was ready to be deposited in the bank. “You already met with the Johnsons and sent them on their way?”

“Yes.”

She shook her head. “Are you crazy? You can’t keep up this pace. You need to sleep.”

He leaned back in his chair. He was aware of his physical limits—getting shot did tend to make one well aware of his body and all its various complaints—and he’d learned how out of shape he’d become as well, but the physical therapy had helped with that. Still, it was undeniable—he was human and he needed rest. “I know. I considered taking a tranquilizer, but after all that drinking I did with Shaelynn, I figured that was a bad idea.”

“Yeah, it was. You should have—”

“I still have very good ideas. The full bath and closets? Very useful. The Johnsons were pleased. I’m sure they called to tell you how pleased they were, or you and I would not be having this conversation.”

“I’m clearing your schedule after lunch, and you’re going home.”

“No, I’m not.” He rose from the chair, walking around the desk. He knew he had another preliminary consultation in about fifteen minutes—they’d be early, they always were—and a meeting to update another client in an hour. Then he had a lunch meeting with an old client who thought of himself as a friend—he was more annoying than Nora’s pet Pekinese had been—who would want to send another “consultation” their way, and the afternoon was when he would be free of meetings and able to work. He was not going home.

“I don’t think you realize what you’re doing to yourself, and you know that if you were bad enough to make Shaelynn stay, then you need to stop and—Not literally, you idiot. I wasn’t supposed to hit your back.”

Nolan ignored his sister as he forced himself forward to the doorway. He had thought about teasing Shaelynn over traveling in business clothes yesterday, but nothing about her was very business-like today. She shouldn’t be allowed to own catsuits. That wasn’t fair. She looked like something out of a movie or maybe a comic or maybe a comic made into a movie—dangerous and showing it with every curve and toned part of her. Not the sort of thing he would have expected from her, but then again, she had been trained for the part she now looked ready to play.

“I thought you would be holed up with those files for a bit longer than this.”

“I didn’t need that long to make an assessment. Once I knew what they came here for, it was almost easy to determine which of them were worth further investigation and which weren’t. I narrowed it down to these six, and I want to discuss them with you. Now.”

Nolan shook his head. “Remember our conversation about the ship sailing? That teasing little number of yours? Not working. I’m not aroused or intimidated. I have clients coming in about ten minutes, and you’re going to have to wait. Nature’s calling. Again. Too much coffee.”

“Like I would tailor my wardrobe for you even one bit,” she said, giving him a thin smile. “Function over form—I figured you’d say something like that and I’d have to beat the answers I wanted out of you.”

“Shaelynn—”

“Nora, stay out of this.”

“She was only going to argue that it’s not fair because I have been up all night and I was shot so you’re going to be in better shape than me,” Nolan said. He shrugged. He hadn’t had a good workout in years, and he’d actually missed sparring with Shaelynn, as messed up as it was. Still, he hadn’t been lying about the clients. He forced a smile as they came up behind her.

She whirled, her training almost kicking in, but she forced herself to be calm when she saw the suits—no, what was under the suits. He frowned, giving Nora a glance, and she held up her hands. “No way. I wouldn’t have scheduled this if I’d known.”

He nodded, stepping forward, slipping easily into his best friendly businessman act. “Nolan Sheppard. I assume you’re Kaplan and Shaw, and can I just clarify that you’re carrying concealed because you’re government?”

Kaplan gave Shaw a dirty look before she nodded. “Yes. We are. I thought he told you that.”

“No.” Nora said, giving her opinion in a look before turning on her heel to sulk in her office.

Nolan gestured toward her. “My sister. Nora. She doesn’t like these kinds of surprises.”

“I don’t blame her.”

Nolan thought he could like Kaplan. He didn’t know about Shaw. No, he didn’t think he would, not given the way that the other man was ogling Shaelynn. He wouldn’t mind so much if the man wasn’t being so blatant about it—noticing was human, staring was perverted.

“You bastard,” Shaelynn hissed, grabbing Nolan’s arm. “I thought you swore you were never going to consult for this kind of thing.”

“I don’t know what they want, and I didn’t know that they were feds until now.”

“You know exactly what they want, and that is something you said you would never be involved in again after what happened and—”

“I’m not—”

“You are such a liar. I don’t know why I got on a plane for your sorry behind, but I can promise you that I’m not just going to beat the answers I want out of you—I’m going to make you pay for all those times you didn’t keep your word.”

Nolan shook his head. Shaelynn was being unreasonable, and that wasn’t like her, but then feds to her always meant the same thing. He knew it set her off, and he didn’t like it much himself. He had his reasons for refusing those kinds of consultations, as much as he hated the idea of leaving anyone in a place like the one they’d grew up in. He didn’t have that kind of compartmentalization in him. He couldn’t separate it out—it would be personal.

“This seems like a bad time,” Kaplan began, looking between the two of them. “You need a minute?”

“No.”

“Yes.”

Nolan shook his head. “No, we don’t. Shaelynn was just leaving, and I assume what you wanted to see me about is… urgent, unfortunately, so if you can—”

“You are not doing this, Nolan.”

“This is private,” Kaplan said, trying to push Shaw toward the door. “We’ll be back later.”

“Stay. I’m sure whatever we have to discuss is not going to take that long. I know of only one reason why the feds would want my opinion on anything, and I have to admit, I don’t like it any more than she does. Thing is, we Sheppards have a bit of a sensitivity toward that subject and toward feds, and that’s why my sister left the way she did.”

“You’re family?” Shaw looked between him and Shaelynn and shook his head. “Wouldn’t have thought that.”

Nolan almost laughed. Was the guy trying to hope Shaelynn was his sister? That wasn’t going to work. Not for a minute. He wouldn’t let it. “And here I thought we got along rather well, especially for a divorced couple.”

She glared death at him, almost repeating her words from yesterday. “We were never divorced.”

“Annulled, then.”

“We were never married.”

“There was a ceremony.”

“Performed by a self-important megalomaniac who proclaimed himself a prophet and a general and a god—damn it, we were both too young for it to be legal,” Shaelynn snapped. She balled her fists, took a breath, and pushed past Shaw, leaving the man standing there with his jaw hanging.

Nolan tried for an apologetic smile as he faced the agents. Shaw blinked like he didn’t believe what he’d just seen. Kaplan cleared her throat. “That for our benefit?”

“As a rule, I don’t touch the sort of thing you want to ask me about. Nothing to do with cults. I may have grown up in one, may have been a part of taking it down, but I don’t—can’t—consult on others. That takes me back to a place I can’t go. Same with her, though I guess she was… almost lucky.”

“Lucky?”

“The megalomaniac was her father, not her husband.” Nolan glanced toward the door. “I hate to have made you come down here for nothing, but I can’t help you. I suggest you consult your records for what you want to know of what happened back then. Excuse me.”

---

Author’s Note: Welcome. This is… well, it’s the first part of my 2013 Nano novel. I think this is a mystery, but I am not sure yet, to be honest. I don’t know much about it other than where the characters first met. I’ll see where this takes me and hopefully have more of a summary in days to come.

I am not done writing today, but as it’s day one and I’m launching site stuff, here’s the first scene. I’ll add more before I go to bed.

---

Late Night Calls… and More

“You have to fix him.”

Shaelynn groaned, rolling over in her bed and wondering what had possessed her to take the call. She was supposed to be asleep, and she didn’t work on-call. That might have made her think, somewhere in that sleepy stupor of hers, that any call at this hour had to be an emergency—not too long ago, one had been—but this one was not, and she shouldn’t have answered.

“I can’t fix your brother, Nora. That’s not how it works,” she said, her thumb moving to end the call. “These things take time, and whether you like it or not, you have to be patient.”

“This is not about patience. He’s not himself, and I don’t know how to pull him out of it,” Nora said. She cursed low under her breath and Shaelynn could hear her heels clicking across the floor. She was still in the office? At two in the morning? Why? “I’ve tried—tried giving him space and tried giving him a push and I gave it time. It’s been almost a year, and I know what happened has every right to have shaken him up—he got shot—and I am not belittling the trauma of that, but it’s… more.”

Shaelynn sighed. No argument about counseling would be enough—not that she thought either of them would agree to that after what they’d gone through—and clearly the time one hadn’t done anything, so she needed a new tactic. She sat up, combing her fingers through her hair, turning each dark strand over and studying the roots while she tried to think. “Take him on a trip.”

“A trip? That’s your solution? We’re talking about my brother. He’s a workaholic of the worst sort. He’s not the kind that takes trips.”

“You asked for a fix.”

“And you gave me a crap line about a trip,” Nora shot back. “Do you think I’d call in the middle of the night if I hadn’t already tried the trip? Not only did I fight with him for a month over it, but taking it didn’t do anything to change things. He says he had a great time like a robot. ‘Best vacation ever,’ he repeats, but it was like he wasn’t even there.”

Shaelynn turned her attention to her toes. The nails needed a trim, they were just a tad long, and the nail polish was chipping. “Then he needs therapy.”

“No, he needs you.”

She jerked the phone away, dropping it on the bed as she tried to convince herself not to throw it at the wall or scream at it. She took in another breath, let it out, and picked it back up. “It was never like that, no matter what they might have—”

“He needs you because I think it pushed him back there,” Nora said. She sighed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to ask you for this because I know how hard you’ve worked to put it past you—all of us did. I thought he had, but I haven’t seen him like this since we were there, and you were the one that made it possible for him to leave. Oh, he had ideas of his own, and he wanted to get me out of there, but they were destroying his mind and will like they did with everyone, and without you… He’d have let them win.”

“You’re exaggerating. Nolan would never have let that happen. You meant too much to him, and you still do.”

“Shaelynn, please. If you come see him and you don’t agree that there’s something wrong, you can go and forget I called. If seeing you does nothing for him, then I will make it up to you somehow, but I can’t watch my brother retreat back into what he had to become then. He’s just supposed to be a consultant. He’s not supposed to have been shot. He’s not—He’s not himself. If you could get back just a moment of that boy who laughed with you in the middle of planning to steal a bus… Let me see that’s still in him, and I swear you will have my gratitude for life.”

Shaelynn closed her eyes. She already regretted this. “I can’t fix him, and you’re wrong about what I was.”

“Your friendship was a catalyst, the right catalyst, and don’t you dare tell me I am wrong about that. Let me know what your flight is, and I’ll meet it.”

“I hate you, Nora.”

“I never liked you, either, but this isn’t about us. It’s about him.”

---

“I see she sent for re-enforcements,” Nolan said, flipping through the papers in his hands, consulting details on two pages at once, and Shaelynn stopped in the doorway, telling herself she was only watching him, not intimidated, not even a little. “I hadn’t thought she was that desperate.”

Shaelynn shrugged, sliding in against the far wall, letting herself stay there as she watched him, trying to find the signs of what Nora feared. His fingers betrayed no shakes, no twitches, and even though she had kept the details of her travel arrangements to herself, he was so relaxed that she would have sworn he knew she was coming. The suit was just his sort of rumpled, not a full mess, but enough to show that he was comfortable in it, implying that he was also comfortable doing what he did.

She felt her stomach twist, that kick of instinct that she’d started to hate when she was only a girl. Sometimes it didn’t pay to understand as much as any of them had.

He was trying too hard. Damn. Nora might be right.

“Why would Nora be desperate?”

He let the papers fall, his eyes going to her this time. She didn’t like looking him in the eyes, though she never let that show. They should have bothered Nora, those two clear signs that they didn’t have the same father, but she never seemed to react to them.

Maybe Shaelynn was more sensitive to that. She had to figure she would be.

“Did she tell you about the trip we just took? Best vacation ever.”

“She said you’d say that,” Shaelynn said, folding her arms over her chest and watching him as he set aside the file. “What did you do?”

“Went to the beach, drank mai tais, got tan—”

“That’s an obvious lie. Not that the others weren’t—you hate the beach, you don’t drink alcohol with any kind of fruit—and you are as pale as the day you were born.”

“Pencil pushing suits me,” he said, picking one up off the table and turning it around in his fingers. “Doesn’t suit you, though. I think you’ve gained weight at that stationary job of yours, and it is not flattering.”

She gave him a look. “You don’t know how to flatter a girl. Then again, you never did.”

He laughed. “If you wanted flattery, Shaelynn, you would never have let Nora even half-talk you into coming here. She’s never liked you, and you don’t like me, so why take that flight? Things that bad in your office that you think you’d rather be here? You hate your little cubicle that much? You were offered a full partnership here when we started this business, and you turned it down.”

“You said it yourself. I don’t like you.”

He nodded. “So I did. If you want a moment of fleeting pleasure, you can call Nora and tell her she missed you at the airport.”

“You found my flight information.”

“Nora did. Well, she would have, but I altered it. You shouldn’t have come. It’s not necessary. All it does is throw the past back in your face. In mine. In hers.”

“Since when did you get philosophical?”

He closed his eyes. Someone else might have let their hand slip toward the scars on his chest, might have made that unconscious gesture, but not Nolan. He never gave anything away if he could help it. “Being shot changes some things.”

She looked him over. Nora might be convinced that it was just what happened a year ago, but Shaelynn never jumped to the same conclusions. “Does it?”

“Of course. I’ve got these funny bumps on my skin where they stitched me up afterward. You’d think they’d be more like twisted flesh, but when I look at them, all I see is worms. I’d have a right to nightmares after that, right? I’ve got worms sewn into my skin.”

She shook her head, trying not to smile. He had always had a messed up sense of humor, and if she let him, he could distract her with it. She wasn’t going to let him, though. That wasn’t why she was there. “You are the worm. They should be like family to you.”

He grinned. “I have missed you, though I couldn’t say why. I’ll have to give Nora a nice bonus for calling you and getting you out here, though next time, you can just call and spare yourself the trouble and expense of a trip.”

“Where is the fun in that? Half of the reason to say anything to you is your expression.”

“What? My perfected deadpan? Are you kidding?”

“Perfect?” She almost snorted. “You have dozens of tiny little tells.”

“You just say that because you want to believe it.” He rose from the table and crossed over to her, putting himself in her personal space. “If I had tells, I couldn’t work in this business. Here is where one gets paid to be an impassive robot. You would not believe the things that people believe are important, things that people think matter, and they ask me of all people to consult on.”

“You could quit.”

“Yes, suggest that to Nora as the way you’ll ‘fix’ me. I need a new job.” Nolan tapped her on the nose like she was a child who’d said something amusing. “She tried that, too. Should have seen her when this first happened. Scared to death. Shaking in her expensive little cashmere sweater.”

“Nora’s allergic to wool.”

“Why do you remember that?”

“Better those details than the others.”

“Point well taken. Drink?”

“Yes, several.” She shrugged at his look. That was a hell of a lot easier than admitting that she’d missed him, too, something she would never do.

---

Shaelynn could have asked him if he was off his meds—letting him talk her into drinks made the assumption that he was, and time could have given her the same impression, but she knew that addiction could have explained the things that were bothering Nora. Shaelynn didn’t think they explained what little she’d noticed in him back at the office.

He’d shed office Nolan with the suit jacket he’d left on the back of his chair and the way he leaned back in his chair, arm posed on it like he owned the place. Another bit of chameleon work, another act. She hadn’t forgotten how little she liked watching him do this. If he hadn’t been good at it, he never would have survived, but that didn’t mean that she wanted the reminders.

“How is work?”

“You said it was boring.”

“Yes, but I always say your work is boring. A part of my elaborate scheme to pull you away from your office and back into mine.”

“We don’t work well together.”

“That is one of the biggest lies you have ever told, Shaelynn,” he told her, shaking his head. “And I know I’ve heard some beautiful ones from you before.”

She shrugged. She didn’t feel like rehashing any of that. She wasn’t here to debate the past. They’d all called a truce on that years ago, and that was where it stayed. Or it would if Nolan wasn’t trying to deflect. “That was different. It was necessary.”

Nolan nodded. He picked up his drink and sipped from it before stirring around the ice. “I’d always thought that I’d put the real threats behind me years before Nora and I started the firm. Getting shot wasn’t supposed to happen. It shouldn’t have.”

“Should have is crap, you know. The world we grew up in shouldn’t have existed, but it did.”

“We got out. We got past it.”

“Nora says you’re not.”

“That again? Why is it that our lives are only about that? We are more than a few years of our lives, than that hellhole we came from. Maybe I just have dreams about the worms on my chest eating their way through it. Maybe I’m already dead and rotting and I just don’t know it.”

“You think you’re a zombie?”

“No.”

“Good. I have a thing against undead. I’d have to do something about that, and you know I have the training to make sure you’d stay dead this time.”

Nolan lifted the glass to her. “If I really thought I was a zombie, you’d be the first person I’d call. Nora, she’d try and cure me like she is now. You’d just put me out of my misery.”

“That why you wanted me here?”

He shifted in his seat, laid back and dangerous, looking a bit like the rebel in a body that was too young for the mind and mentality he already had, the one he’d been when she first knew him, though he’d grown up since then, filled out and lost all the softness that he used to have. “No. I never wanted you here.”

“You said you missed me.”

“Missing you and wanting you here are two different things. You know how much past we have, all centered around things none of us want to remember, enough to drown in. That kind of nostalgia just brings a lot of pain, and it never seems to be worth it, does it?”

She nodded. Watching his hands reminded her of how she’d retaught him to hold a gun, his shamed admissions that he’d been doing it wrong on purpose, and the war she’d had with herself after that confession. Truth was, they had been fortunate to get stuck with each other, but that was just a sign of how bad things really had been in the beginning.

“Nora is right about one thing.”

“Oh?”

“I can’t sleep. Got jet-lagged enough to manage it on the trip, but since we’ve been back, I need enough alcohol or tranquilizers to put down a horse to make that happen.”

“Any particular reason?”

He shook his head. “No. Not that I can tell. I haven’t had a bunch of bad dreams, no recurring ones, and I’m not flashing back to when I got shot every night, either. I might call it hypervigilance, but it’s not like they didn’t catch the guy. What do I have to be afraid of?”

“The trial?”

“Did I say they caught him? I should have been more specific. Their bullets caught him. There’s no trial to worry about.”

“You’re not going to ask for a slumber party, are you?”

He set down his drink and leaned forward. “If you wanted me, you probably could have had me when we were kids, but that ship sailed years ago, and somewhere along the way, it hit a big damn reef and sunk in the middle of the ocean.”

“Reefs grow along the shore—in shallow water, at least.”

“Not the point. That thing’s so far down there it’s like the Titanic, and no one is raising that sucker, that’s for sure.”

“Well, that is one thing we agree on.”

“I’m glad that’s settled,” he told her, picking his drink back up. He sipped from it and smiled. “You want to get married again?”

She kicked him. “We were never married.”

---