Third Strike

picture, weigh all the options. React to a high-threat situation—not just fast but smart, too.”

Here it comes … .

There was a hollow panic rising under my rib cage. I swallowed it down along with my pride, and admitted, “I do recognize that what I did this morning probably didn’t exactly qualify as smart.”

For a moment Parker regarded me with eyes that seemed kindly, but missed nothing and forgave less.

“No,” he said. “It wasn’t.”

I waited, heart rate beginning to pick up, for the blade to fall.

Then he smiled.

“But I’ll bet it was damned funny,” he said.

My shoulders dropped a fraction.

“Well … yes,” I said faintly. “Yes, I suppose it was.”

The smile broadened so that his whole face joined in, and slipped into a chuckle that he attempted to dilute with another mouthful of coffee.

“Nick’s a nice guy, but he’s a wanna-be,” Parker said. “Always dropping hints about how he’d be a good guy for me to have on the team. I guess now he’s seen what a real pro can do, he’ll shut the hell up about it and I’ll finally get some peace.”

I sat there, blankly, wondering if I’d really just done what I thought I’d done. Got away with it.

“What about my assessment?” I said, still looking for the catch. “I didn’t finish it and—”

“Charlie,” Parker cut in, shaking his head. “Way I heard it, you just threw a guy nearly twice your size and weight halfway across a room. I think it’s safe to say you’re fit enough to get back to work, don’t you?”

I still hadn’t come up with a suitable reply when there was a perfunctory knock on the door. It opened without waiting for permission and I knew without turning around who’d just walked in.

Parker looked over my shoulder at the new visitor and his face lit up again.

“Hey, Sean,” he said. “Come on in. I was just telling Charlie she’s all out of excuses.”

“Mm,” Sean said, “I would have thought she is.”

I turned then, alerted by the coolness in his tone, and found Sean watching me closely. I knew him, on every kind of level, better than I’d known anyone, but at times like these I didn’t know him at all. He was impossible to second-guess. I felt that near-black gaze like liquid on my skin.

Even years after he’d first terrified me as the toughest instructor on the Special Forces training course I’d crashed out of in such spectacular fashion, he still thoroughly unnerved and unsettled me.

Deliberately, I turned away, just in time to see Parker’s eyes flicking speculatively between the two of us. He knew we had a relationship outside work—of course he did—but he’d never asked questions and we’d never given him cause to. A state of affairs I didn’t intend to disturb.

“She needs a further assessment,” Sean said now.

“Sean, I’m okay.”

“Physically, yes,” he agreed evenly.

“Yes,” Parker said, regarding me carefully. “I get what you mean.”

Sean crossed the office floor, making almost no noise on the tiles. He leaned his shoulder against the window reveal to Parker’s left and folded his arms. Like Parker, he was wearing a dark suit and looked as at home in it as he once had in army camouflage. There was probably only ten years between them, but at that moment they could almost have been father and son. Both men eyed me silently, as though I was suddenly going to crack open for them to read.

“Well, would somebody mind spelling it out for me?” I said with a touch of bite. “What? You think I’m going to run away the next time someone points a gun at me?”

“No,” Sean said. “I think you’re more likely to make sure they don’t get the chance.”

“Overreact, you mean?”

“It’s a possibility.” He gave a negligent lift of one of those wide shoulders. Sometimes, for a thug, Sean could be very elegant. “We have to be sure—and so do you.”

My father’s words were suddenly loud and mocking inside my head. You’ve already proved you can’t be trusted to do a job without injuring yourself and others. What possible use could they have for you?

“There’s one way to find out,” I said, as calmly as I could manage, chin rising to meet the challenge. “Put me back out there. You’ll soon know if I’m up to it.”

“Hey, whoa,” Parker said, holding his right hand straight up, side on, and tapping his left flat across the top of it to form a T. “Time out, guys.” He didn’t raise his voice, but he rarely had to.

“For starters,” he went on, glancing at me, “there’s no way I’m going to use any of our clients to find out if you’re gunshy, Charlie. Not that I think for a moment that you are, but it would a real stupid move on my part, okay?”

I made a conscious effort to let my hackles subside.

“Okay,” I agreed meekly.

“You’ve been doing great behind the scenes these last few months. Bill tells me the guys reckon nobody runs a team like you do. You’re terrific on logistics. You don’t sweat the small stuff, but you don’t overlook anything, either. And you always remember to feed them.”

The praise surprised me, not least because of its source. “But I don’t want to be—”

“—stuck behind a desk all day,” Parker finished for me. He indicated the office we were in with a sweep of his hand. “Trust me,” he said wryly. “I know all about that one.”

“There’s a course coming up in Minneapolis next month,” Sean said, drawing our eyes back to him. “Stress Under Fire. I’ve already booked you a place on it.”

“You got her in?” Parker said. “Good work. They’re usually pretty full.”

Sean allowed himself a smile. “Ah well, I booked it a month or so ago.”

“Stress Under Fire?” I queried, still processing the double-edged information of Sean’s faith and lack of it.

“Does exactly what it says on the can,” he said. “Checks out your reactions. What decisions you make and the way you make them when you’re in the thick of it. It’s tough. You pass that, nobody will question whether you’re ready to get back out there.”

“A liability to those around you,” my father had said. “You know as well as I do that they’ll never quite trust you again.”

“And if I fail?”

Sean said nothing.

Parker smiled again, the action crinkling the corners of those watchful eyes.

“You won’t,” he said.

“So, do you think I’ll fail?” I asked.

It was later. Much later. We were home in the apartment we’d rented on the Upper East Side. The minimal view of Central Park should have been enough to ensure the cost of it was stratospheric, but one of Parker’s relations owned the building. Parker had abused the family connection to squeeze the rent down to a level that was merely exorbitant, as part of a tempting relocation package.

“Of course not,” Sean said.

His face was in shadow, but in my mind he spoke too quick, too easy. I tried to acknowledge that I was just being touchy. That I would have taken any pause as a sign of hesitation rather than due consideration of the question.

As if he’d heard my thoughts, he sighed, his chest rising and falling beneath my cheekbone. I could hear his heart beating strong and steady under me. Incomplete assessment or no, we were both more than fit enough for our pulse rates to quickly drop back to a slow rhythm after exertion.

“If I thought that, I wouldn’t send you,” he said, his hand skimming lazily along my upper arm. “I trained you, after all. You cock it up and it makes me look bad.”

It was dark outside, in as much as New York ever gets dark. The lights in the apartment were out but we hadn’t drawn the window blinds and the rattle and glimmer of the city slipped in through the open glass like a slow- footed thief. For the first six weeks or so, the unaccustomed bursts of noise had woken me constantly during the