Dance With Me - By Hayden Braeburn Page 0,18

minutes from discovery and rolled to his feet. He didn't want to explain himself, especially since he had been watching the house for hours, finding no evidence of children, endangered or otherwise. He chose his steps carefully, contemplating his assignment as he did. For a few moments, he allowed himself to feel embarrassed about being played as he made his way through the heavily wooded area, always cognizant of the other man on his heels. If there were no children in danger, then there was only one reason Priscilla would have sent him out here, and he didn't like it. He was the distraction. Now, he just had to make it right, and the best way to do that was to stay right where he was.

Sean turned the corner, not sure what he would find. He sure as hell wasn't prepared for what he did see—a man almost as tall as himself lounging against a tall oak tree, dressed head to toe in black. “Expecting me?”

Dylan laughed, his teeth flashing white through his short-cropped beard. “I knew you were comin', and you knew I was here.”

“True enough,” Sean answered with an incline of his head. Taking note of the binoculars around the other man's neck, he asked, “Surveillance only?”

“Not originally, but that's what I chose to do.” He pushed off the tree. “Turns out I'm here just to distract you.”

He'd been tracking him all morning, so it had worked. “From what?” Alec had Kat secured in the house, but Sean wasn't feeling threatened by this man. If anything he felt a certain familiarity with this man who had had been one step ahead of him for hours, and he was interested in what he had to say.

“She wants Everett.”

“No shit,” Sean remarked. Giving the man a once over, he said, “You don't seem like someone who'd work for a crazy woman.”

He wished he weren't. “She contracted me to insure the safety of her children.”

Sean brows shot up. “She told you there were children involved?”

“She wanted to kill the woman. When I refused, she gave me a sob story about her children, and like an idiot I believed her.”

“We all have a soft spot for children,” Sean conceded.

Especially him, but that wasn't important now. Shaking off his idiocy, he addressed the bigger problem at hand. “Look, Everett is in danger.”

This was new. “What's she planning?”

Dylan thought on that for a second, his golden eyes narrowed. “Where is Everett now?”

Rethinking the entire assignment, Sean asked, “No one's trying to kill Kat at all, are they?”

Honestly, he didn't know. “She might have duped someone else, hired someone else...” He hit the tree. “Leave your other man with her, and let me help you. I swear, I'm on the up-and-up.”

“I'm supposed to believe you?”

He wouldn't trust him, either. “'Course not, but I can help.”

Sean assessed the man offering to go turncoat just like that. If he was telling the truth and he'd been manipulated into this job, he'd likely want to make things right. It was obvious he had skills, considering the way he'd been lounging against the tree. Hell, if this man had wanted to kill him, he could easily have shot him before Sean laid eyes on him. He needed to know more, but he was inclined to believe him. “If we're going to work together, I need a name.”

“Dylan Black,” he introduced, extending his right hand.

“Sean O'Dell,” Sean reciprocated, finding the handshake strong. He hoped this man would turn out to be a useful ally and not a fearsome adversary.

~*~

Kat didn't like Alec's expression one little bit as he spoke on his cell and keyed commands into his laptop. His handsome face was equal parts worried and perplexed, his mouth set into a hard line. She wondered who this Dylan Black was he was running checks on, and hated the implications of checking anyone out—Sean had been walking the perimeter this morning, so if he had Alec running a name, he'd found someone out there.

She waited until he'd placed his phone on the desk to ask, “What happened?”

“Sean and this Dylan Black are headed to check on Mason,” Alec began. Seeing the worry on her face, he assured, “It's a precaution.”

Kat was not a loud woman, but she was close to yelling now. “A precaution? This week I was arrested because Priscilla wanted me out of the way. You and Sean are here to keep her from having me killed. Now you're telling me Sean and some man who presumably was