“Then I’ll call the Agency and I’ll admit that I’m alive and inform them of what I think is happening. I’ll agree to go into custody but only if they give you protection.”
He was good at putting her in a corner. She loved Stef and Jen, but they had a pretty full house between the two of them, their newborn son, his father, Sebastian, and stepmom, Stella. There was a housekeeper, too. Jen and Stella would ask her all sorts of questions. Stef would push her to talk to a therapist. They would all mean well.
She wanted to be in her cabin. She wanted some quiet.
She had an idea. “If I hire a bodyguard, will you let me stay here?”
He stood in front of her, suspicion plain on his face. “It can’t be Irene. I know she says she can build a circle of protection around people, but all that salt and chanting will not stop a bullet.”
Did he think she was foolish? “The circle of protection is spiritual, and no, it doesn’t work since she put one on me a long time ago and we’re in this situation. I was thinking of someone else.”
“Who?”
“I should talk to him first.” She didn’t want Henry to put pressure on the poor man. He’d been through enough, and if he didn’t want to do it, she could ask Irene. Irene, while she was a spiritual jack-of-all-trades, also worked at the Dairy Queen in Del Norte and knew a surprising number of interesting people. Or she could use someone Henry might be more comfortable with. “If it doesn’t work out, we can call Seth. He certainly has contacts.”
“You’ll accept a bodyguard?”
She wasn’t going to be the character who was too stupid to live. “Yes. But I need to be home. I need the comfort and peace I find here.”
“All right, but I get to interview this person.”
She wasn’t sure that interview would go well. “I’ll go and talk to him.”
Henry frowned. “You’re going up the mountain, aren’t you? I don’t know about that. He’s…different.”
“There is nothing wrong with being different. He had his heart broken. I think he’ll be perfect.”
“He has to take a shower,” Henry complained.
This new Henry was on the judgmental side. “His cabin doesn’t have running water.”
“Once I spent three months in a desert waiting for a bombmaker to make a dead drop. I never smelled as bad as Michael Novack.”
Yes, very judgmental. And she didn’t want to know about the bombmaker and the desert. Not at all. “Nevertheless, I’m going to hire him. He used to be a US marshal. Protecting people was his job.”
“And now his job is growing facial hair and drinking whiskey.” Henry groaned. “Fine. But I’m going to drive. There’s barely a road to where he lives.”
She got her purse. She hoped Michael Novack liked tofu.
* * * *
Henry parked the Jeep outside the…would he call it a cabin? At one point it probably had been, but now it was more of a shack, and there was another tiny shack outside. The man had an outhouse.
Michael Novack had shown up roughly a year ago when he’d been on assignment to protect Alexei Markov. He’d come to town with his partner, a woman named Jessica, who hadn’t bothered to mention to her lover that she was on some bad guy’s payroll. She’d died trying to kill Alexei, Holly, and Caleb, but only after drugging her partner so he couldn’t stop her.
Novack had not taken the news well.
“I think it’s charming.” Nell always saw the sunny side of things, including the rundown shack in front of them.
Henry thought it was a menace, but she likely didn’t want to hear that from him. “I think you should let me go talk to him first.”
“Why?” She looked so pretty sitting next to him in her cotton skirt and shirt. Her belly had the slightest swell that he wanted to touch and cup and protect. It wasn’t that pregnancy had made his wife more beautiful. She was always beautiful. It was that pregnancy had reminded him of how delicate and precious life could be, how much he treasured every moment with her.
“Because a wounded animal can be a dangerous one.” He didn’t want her to even get out of the Jeep. The ground wasn’t close to level. It was late summer, so there could be any number of animals out and about. Then there was the man himself.
The door opened and Michael Novack proved Henry’s point by walking out on the rickety porch wearing nothing but a pair of sweatpants, his big muscular chest on display, and one hand holding a rifle at his side.
Nell merely opened the door and waved the man’s way. “Good afternoon, Michael. I hope you’re having a lovely day.”
Henry scrambled to get out of his side. He should have brought his own gun, but he hadn’t wanted to upset Nell. It was the first time in days that she’d been willing to go somewhere with him, and he wasn’t taking any chances.
Except this was all one big chance. He was trying to hire a bodyguard so he could go on one last mission.
Would Nell be upset if he died, or would it all be a relief?
“I’m having the same day I’ve had for a year,” Novack admitted.
The man needed a shave. His beard was growing a beard. “We’d like to talk to you, but if this is a bad time we can come back later.”
If he could put this off, maybe he should. It occurred to him that this man could be dangerous on a lot of levels. After all, his partner had kept secrets from him, too. The idea of the remarkably fit man watching over a woman as wounded as he was sounded like the plot for one of Nell’s books. In this case, Henry was the
