the flight flirting with the woman in the seat next to mine.”
Shocked, Josie squeaked, “Flirting?”
“Part of my cover, but she was a nice-looking woman. Oriental. Tiny thing, with a voice as soft as an angel’s. Gave me her phone number. She only lives about twenty minutes from my house here. Can you believe that?”
She couldn’t believe any of it, but before she could think of a way to phrase such a statement diplomatically, Daniel asked, “How did you know the Society of New American Patriots was responsible for the bombing?”
“The man who runs the background checks on my students discovered a connection between a soldier who’d been in my January training camp and one that had just taken the early summer training. He had just figured out that they both were involved in this stupid-ass white supremacist organization when the compound got blown up.”
“You knew you had somebody after you, and you didn’t say anything?” Josie asked, much more dismayed by this revelation than by her father’s apparent attraction to a woman for the first time in her memory.
“I didn’t know they were after me. I only knew I’d been training domestic terrorists. I was deciding what I wanted to do about it when they tried to kill me.”
“You didn’t tell me about it,” Daniel said.
“It was my problem. They came through the camp before you bought in to it.”
“I’m your partner. All problems related to the school are mine, too.” There was no give in Daniel’s voice, but then she hadn’t thought that argument was going to hold water with him.
“Hell, Nitro, you’ve got enough trouble on your hands courting my daughter. Any idiot could see that.”
“He’s not courting me, Dad. I swear, sometimes you talk like you were born two centuries ago, not a few decades before the new millennium.”
Her dad snorted. “Doesn’t matter when I was born. Call it what you like. Courting is courting, and I wasn’t born yesterday. I can see what’s going on right in front of my face.”
“You’re more perceptive than Josie is. She thought I didn’t like her.” Daniel sounded amused, and she glared at the back of his head.
Was this some kind of guy thing or just another case of her dad and Daniel being alike? How was she supposed to know that glaring, brooding and general cranky behavior was the male mating call for the modern-day warrior?
Her dad turned around to face her. “I guess you’ve worked it out different by now?”
“Yes,” she clipped, still irritated with both of them for acting so superior.
She didn’t repeat the assertion that Daniel wasn’t courting her because he hadn’t denied it.
There were only a couple of reasons she could think of for that, and the first one she already knew to be false—that he really was interested in marrying her. She remembered what Daniel had said about how her dad had been warning men off of her since she was young. As his new partner, her mercenary lover probably didn’t want to start his new working relationship with a huge fight over his desire to bed but not wed the other man’s daughter.
Since she wasn’t up to a big argument with her dad either, she understood where Daniel was coming from. She didn’t know if his present silence on the truth was going to help anything in the long run, however.
“I’m glad you finally got smart,” her dad said. “I thought Nitro was going to self-destruct the way you ignored what he felt for you.”
“I didn’t realize you were aware of it to that extent,” Daniel said, his voice now laced with chagrin. “I’m not usually so easily read.”
“I notice everything related to my daughter.”
He hadn’t noticed she craved some level of normal domesticity in her life, but then even the best parents were blind to some things about their children.
Tyler’s plane had arrived late evening, so it was dark when Daniel and Josie drove him back to his house. He was tired and wanted to get working on the mission strategy, so they left him and continued to the hotel.
They returned the next morning after breakfast.
Tyler made coffee and served it on the brick patio, having pulled some chairs out of the storage area attached to the back of the house.
“I noticed you didn’t stay here while I was gone,” he said as he took his seat next to Josie. “I wouldn’t have minded.”
Josie smiled, looking so sweet Daniel wanted to lick her lips like a lollipop. “We knew that, but we thought staying at a hotel would be better.”
“The bed was more comfortable. She’d have had to sleep on top of me in yours,” Daniel added, winking at Josie and enjoying the way she choked on her coffee.
She was damn cute when she got embarrassed.
“You’ve staked a claim on my daughter.”
“Yes, sir, I have.”
The look Josie gave him was enigmatic, and Daniel wished he knew what she was thinking. She’d said she loved him and given him one of the most amazing experiences of his life, but he didn’t know how she felt about the fact he hadn’t repeated the words. He couldn’t.
He didn’t equate the way he felt about her with the way his mother had been devoted to his father in the face of her own compromised safety. He sure as hell didn’t see what his father called love as having anything to do with the way Daniel reacted to Josie. He wasn’t sure what he did feel about her, except that he had no intention of letting her go.
“So what are your plans for taking the target?” Josie asked in the silence that had stretched after his declaration of intent.
Tyler looked from Daniel to his daughter as if he was trying to gauge what was going on between them. Daniel wished him luck.
With a small frown, the older man shrugged and focused on Josie. “I figured a small force of four to six soldiers would have the best chance of pulling it off. We go in at night when they’ve got two sentries patrolling the perimeter. The soldiers guarding the compound are pretty much weekend warriors, despite what they might think —even the four that have been through my training camps. They rely heavily on their not-so-incredible security system.”
“So, we disarm the system, neutralize the sentries and follow through on our objective uninterrupted? It sounds too easy.” And Daniel didn’t trust easy on a mission.
“It shouldn’t be, but sons of bitches stupid enough to think they can use my training camp to develop domestic terrorism techniques are stupid enough to be brought down without a five-star effort.”
Maybe his business partner was right, but Daniel planned to call Wolf and Hotwire in to be two on the team. He wanted the best with him because he knew Josie was going to insist on coming along, and he wasn’t going to let her get hurt if he had to stop a bullet with his body.
She was the other half of his soul, and somehow he was going to have to come to terms with that truth, whatever it meant.
“I’m not sure about your plan to disarm them.” Josie wrinkled her nose as if she’d smelled something bad. “That doesn’t seem like a simple objective with an organization like this one.”
“The armory is kept in an underground storage facility. We weld the doors shut, and it will be days before they can get the supplies in necessary to cut through the two-inch-thick metal. They’re a real live-off-the-land type of group, and their transportation in and out of the compound is pretty rudimentary.”
“But what about their personal weapons?”
Tyler grimaced. “That’s going to take more doing. Everyone in the compound is armed, but they store their weapons in communal rooms when they aren’t using them, and as far as I can tell, only the sentries take firearms with them at night. We have to infiltrate the rooms and take out the arms.”
“The easiest thing to do would be to put them in the armory before we weld it shut,” Josie said musingly as Daniel became more convinced this was one mission she should not go on.
Tyler nodded. “I think so, too.”
But Daniel shook his head. “No way.”
“Why not?” Josie asked.
