as he watched her.
Everything about her spelled delicacy, from the fine collarbones, to the slender graceful hands, with that small knob at the wrists. She would have looked like a child dressed in an adult’s clothes if it weren’t for the intelligence blazing out of those green eyes. Someone wanted to hurt this smart and pretty young woman and that really pissed him off.
She’d been bone white when she sat down but the hot tea was putting a little color in her cheeks. Good. She was beginning to realize it was time to fight back and that she had people on her side. He didn’t know much about her background, except for the fact that Felicity had said she was alone in the world. No family and no boyfriend. Which was odd, considering how incredibly pretty she was.
She was so attractive it was a distraction. When Luke was in work mode nothing distracted him, ever. He was intensely focused when on the job. He was here to protect an innocent young woman and that kind of thing was what he was born to do. There was a long line of Reynolds men behind him who had been cops and firefighters and warriors and it was in his DNA to fight to protect.
How could someone so smart and so pretty be so freaking alone?
Never mind. She had him now and behind him was a solid wall of good guy badasses with resources up the wazoo.
Now she not only had some color in her cheeks, but instead of sitting ramrod straight, she was relaxing back into the cushions. When she put the teacup back in its saucer on the coffee table and sat back, he knew it was time.
“So, do you want to talk about it?”
“The trouble I’m in? Yeah.” She sketched a smile. “But I think I’m going to have to start from way way back. Is that ok?”
Luke took another sip of the Talisker, watching her carefully. “We have all the time in the world. Start anywhere you want. Actually, the more intel I have the better. So you can start from the Pleistocene as far as I’m concerned.”
He wasn’t taking notes on this first run through. It would stop her flow. They’d go over it again and again. Later, he’d take meticulous notes and pass them on to Felicity, who’d intercept them anyhow if he didn’t send them to her, and then on to the ASI operators. But he was team leader on this and he’d be the one to judge who and how many to call in. Some problems were single-operator problems. Some required a lot of heavy hitters.
Whatever Hope needed, she’d get.
Luke was prepared for anything. She’d worked for the NSA. She was a female computer nerd and he knew they ruled the world. Felicity even had a sign above her workplace computer stating Who run the world? Girls!
It was clear to Luke that he and the guys back in the office were essentially muscle. Well-trained and lethal, sure, but muscle. The smarts were with people like Felicity and Hope, who were the ones who really ran things.
He was ready to hear about any kind of far-reaching conspiracy, massive fraud or theft in the upper reaches of government, treason, a possible EMP device coming to America’s shores, killer viruses, the zombie apocalypse … anything.
But he was taken completely by surprise by the next thing she said.
“I never got on with my parents.”
At any other time, Hope might have broken out in laughter at the look on Luke’s face. She wasn’t in a laughing mood but oh, boy. He was doing his very best to keep a perfectly bland expression on his face but it was as if he’d reached for a stick and picked up a rattlesnake instead.
Not what he was expecting.
Still, it all started from there — from her family. From what she thought had been her family.
She’d always felt something was wrong.
In her mid teens, she realized that she was scary good with computers. When she also realized she felt absolutely nothing for her parents, it occurred to her that it could mean she was somewhere on the spectrum. She wasn’t — she knew that now. But for a while she made it a point to read social cues and facial expressions to convince herself she could.
Her self-directed course on human behavior led her to hack into the FBI’s course on body language and she’d studied it thoroughly, paying particular attention to microexpressions, which meant