“Daddy.” She paused at the first step and stared back at him intently. “Do you love me?”
A frown darkened his brow. “Don’t pull that on me, Emily. It’s beneath you.”
“Do you love me, Daddy?”
“You know I do.” He glowered back at her.
“Then you won’t make any threats or demands, will you?”
His frown darkened. “I never make threats.”
“No demands or ultimatums, or the next time you try to put a bodyguard in my home, I’ll call the police. Are we clear?”
His jaw flexed in frustration. “We’re clear.”
“Good.” She nodded sharply, praying that the shaking in her knees couldn’t be seen. “I’ll take care of the party then. We’ll talk again before I leave.”
She heard his irritated grunt as she moved unhurriedly up the stairs. Reaching the landing, she stared back down at him for long seconds before walking to her bedroom, entering and closing the door behind her.
There, she breathed out roughly and pressed her hand tightly to her stomach. She was starting to think she might have been better off staying at home after all.
KELL RESTRAINED HIS SMILE AS the senator turned a dark look on him. The admiral’s lips were twitching, if he wasn’t mistaken, and his hazel eyes were alight with mirth.
“Lieutenant Krieger, consider yourself at home in this house.” The admiral nodded to Kell’s “at ease” stance.
“This is my home, Sam,” the senator growled. “You don’t have that authority.”
“I outrank you,” the admiral reminded him in amusement.
“My home!” the senator pushed out between clenched teeth.
Sam Holloran shook his head with a smirk. “Look at it this way.” He indicated Kell’s neck. “She can give better than she gets. Stop acting like a momma bear with a cub, Richard. She’s a woman, not a teenybopper.”
Richard’s face flushed as he glared back at Kell.
“I intend to marry her, Richard.” Kell kept his voice carefully low, but no less firm. It wouldn’t do for Emily to hear him.
Both men stared back at him in surprise now.
“You do?” the senator asked with wary hope. “Does she know that?”
“No. She doesn’t. And I’d prefer she didn’t know until the time’s right.”
There was no sense in keeping her father’s pride inflamed by holding back the information from him. She was still his daughter, and Kell could imagine how he would have felt if a man had dared to so blatantly touch his daughter without the benefit of an engagement or wedding band. Hell, come to think of it, Kell barely managed to restrain his wince. It would be hard to see such a mark on his daughter’s neck if she were married. If he had a daughter.
The senator and admiral exchanged concerned looks.
“Into my office.” Richard Stanton turned on his heel and led the way to the open office doors. “If we’re going to discuss this, then I’ll be damned if I want her to hear it. I didn’t like that look in her eye.” He muttered the last sentence with an edge of confusion. “That girl has never talked to me like that.”
“She’s growing up, Richard.” The admiral’s gaze was approving as he gave Kell a small nod.
“She’s learning bad habits,” the senator snapped back, before leveling a piercing look at Kell. “And I have a feeling it’s your fault.”
“I don’t doubt it a bit, Senator,” Kell agreed with no small amount of pride.
Hell yes, it was his fault. He didn’t want a woman too scared of her own shadow to survive while he was on a mission. Nor did he want a woman who couldn’t add a measure of common sense and precaution to her own defense.
Emily would always have resources to fall back on, but he wanted to be certain she could get to those friends if trouble arose and he was out of the country.
It wouldn’t be easy, working the senator to a place where he understood that his daughter was never going to allow them to wrap her in cotton batting and place her on a shelf.
He wanted her to be strong. He needed her to be strong. For his own sanity.
He stood silently now as Emily’s father closed the office doors carefully behind them, then turned to stare at Kell with narrow-eyed intent as the admiral walked to the wet bar on the other side of the room.
“You think you can make her marry you?” Stanton asked in disbelief.
“I won’t have to make her, Richard.”
The senator shook his head. “You obviously don’t know Emily well enough. I told you, you should have spent more time here at the house with us.”
Kell considered, for the briefest second, pulling his punches with the other man. But it was obvious the senator had no intentions of doing the same.
“No, Richard, it’s obvious you don’t know your daughter,” he said instead. “She’s not a timid little girl. If you don’t loosen the reins she’ll get herself killed trying to have her freedom and satisfy you as well. Give her what she needs and she’ll settle down. She’ll think about her safety rather than making certain you don’t catch her having a little fun.”
“A little fun?” The senator growled ominously. “You mean, the kind of fun that found her in a strip club, giving some strange man a lap dance?”
“I don’t consider myself that strange,” he said as he crossed his arms over his chest and let his comment sink in.
It didn’t take long.
“You were there?” Anger vibrated in the tone.
“I was getting the lap dance. And she was damned cautious for a woman who’d paid a nice little chunk of change out of a bank account that was also riding damned low from feeding your goons. She was careful. And the men who got their little bonus for keeping the area clear while she was in there made damned certain she wasn’t touched. She watches her back.”
“It was a lap dance,” the senator snarled.
“It was her business,” Kell reminded him. “Not yours. And I would think about this while you’re getting ready to see just how many pieces of my ass you can chew while we’re in here. I’m not Charlie Benson. And you don’t have the power to strip my rank or my position on my team. So don’t bother trying to find leverage there. When it comes to political clout, I won’t mind a bit pulling in what’s owed to me to protect Emily. From your enemies, or from you.”
He couldn’t blame the senator for the look of amazement that swiftly crossed his face before he could hide it. Richard knew exactly what kind of clout Kell could pull if he wanted to. Just as he knew Kell had never threatened to use that clout once in the fifteen years they had known each other. “Richard, you found one you can’t intimidate,” the admiral drawled from the bar where he was nursing a glass of whiskey. “Leave the boy alone. We have other, more important matters to discuss.”
Kell stared back at the admiral, seeing the flash of anger that glittered momentarily in his hazel eyes.
“Has something happened?” Kell’s gaze sliced to the senator before returning to the admiral.
“Our Fuentes contact sent another message. The order to kidnap Emily has gone out, but they sent an assassin rather than a kidnapper. He left the Fuentes base last night, heading here to D.C. We need to capture that assassin, Lieutenant Krieger.”
The implication of that statement nearly staggered Kell. He stared at the admiral, then turned to Stanton as his body tightened in fury.
They were endangering Emily by allowing this party to go forward and that just pissed him off.
“I wasn’t informed of this.”
He should have been told the moment they heard. Protection for Emily should have been increased. Hell, she should be placed in a undisclosed safe house until this was over.
“That was my fault, Lieutenant.” The admiral’s voice hardened. “We can’t allow the Fuentes mole to know we’re receiving this information. We have to carry on as is. You and Ian will protect her, along with the security we’re putting in place at the Dunmore mansion. There was no need to relay this inf
ormation before you arrived and upset Emily further.”
Upset Emily further? Kell stared at the two men, and felt like shaking both of them furiously. Forget the fact that they were both superior officers; they were holding back pertinent information that could endanger her life.
“Sir, might I remind you that I am in charge of her security,” he gritted out. “This was information I should have had.”
“And you have it now.” Richard sighed. “The time delay wouldn’t have mattered one way or the other.”
“The party should have been canceled. It should be canceled now.”
“And if we cancel we won’t have a hope in hell of catching the kidnapper and/or assassin Fuentes is sending after my daughter,” Richard stated, fear flashing in his eyes then. “That’s my only child, Krieger. She’s my life. Do you think I like this any more than you do?”
“I don’t know, Senator, perhaps you thrive on the elements of danger. One thing is for damned sure. She needs to be out of D.C. now. She has no business being here.”
“And then she runs for the rest of her life?” Richard yelled back, the anger brewing inside him showing for the first time. “We have a time and place now. If we change our movements, Fuentes will change his. If we can catch the assassin then we have the chance of gaining the information we need on that damned spy that bargained with Fuentes for this hit. It’s our only chance.”
“So you keep me in the dark about the additional threat, and on top of that, you draw her straight into an assassin’s bullet?” Kell heard his own voice rising, felt the anger brewing inside him with a force he had never had to deal with before. “Are you forgetting, Senator, that her protection depends on my knowing even the tiniest hint of danger coming her way?”
“You have the information,” Stanton snarled in reply. “You have it in plenty of time for Durango Team to protect her. I do not take unnecessary risks with my daughter, Lieutenant.”
“That’s exactly what you’re doing, Richard,” Kell stated harshly. “Taking unnecessary risks. By not telling me the extent of the threat involved once she reached D.C. She will not be attending that party. Period.”
“Says who?”
Kell swung around to face Emily as she stepped into the office.
“Your voices carried.” She lifted her chin and her eyes glittered with defiance as she stepped into the room.
Her auburn hair gleamed beneath the overhead lights and her blue eyes glittered with challenge as she looked first at her father, then Kell.
“Emily, this doesn’t involve you, sweetheart.” Her father cleared his voice, giving her a smile normally reserved for an infant.
“Really?” Her brow arched, but the tone of voice had Kell wincing. He knew women. He knew that little drawl wasn’t a safe sound.
“Kell and I will take care of this, honey.”
“I don’t think so.” She turned her gaze to Kell. “Is this one of those times when I’m supposed to follow you without question?”
Her expression and her tone assured him that it better not be.
“I could hope.” But he doubted it.
“Keep hoping,” she suggested sarcastically before turning to her father. “And you can stop patronizing me anytime now. This isn’t one of your attempts to acquire a son-in-law. If I’m really in danger then you can tell me what the hell is going on. Because I won’t cooperate another second without it.”
Thirteen
EMILY WALKED AWAY FROM THE meeting with her father, Kell, and the admiral with a sense of unreality. For years she had done her best to maintain her relationship with her father in a way that would ease his mind.
She had pushed back her own needs, tried to confine them, continually telling herself that eventually, one day soon, he would see her as an adult rather than a child. That he would realize that the training he had given her as a teenager gave her an edge against his fears. That the self-defense training she had kept up had only sharpened those earlier skills.
She had let him have the illusion of protecting her while she hid her own needs and tried to still the hunger for them with the brief escapades that drove her bodyguards insane.
She had made a mistake. She saw that as she listened to her father and the man she called Uncle Sam explain what had been going on without her knowledge.
The extent of the threat from Fuentes, the danger she was in now that she was in D.C.
And he hadn’t intended to tell her. As she listened, asking questions here and there, and watched each man’s expression, she felt a sense of grief well up inside her.
This was how little her father knew or understood her. He had wanted to protect her. He didn’t want to worry her. He would have preferred she went into this blind and trusted the team brought in for security to make certain she wasn’t harmed.
She glanced at Kell, watching as he sat lazily in the chair he had taken, his green eyes never leaving her face. As though he were analyzing something, taking everything in to go over later.
He sat with his elbow on the arm of the chair, his finger brushing over his bottom lip thoughtfully. It was sensual, distracting. And she had a feeling it was deliberate.
“Kell will get all the particulars of the party tonight from his commanding officer,” her father finished, his gaze probing as he watched her.
“Then he better intend to include me in the meeting,” she informed him.
“Emily, this isn’t necessary, honey. I’ll take care of everything.” That soothing “daddy” tone was back. She wasn’t playing the game this time.
“I’m sure you will take care of everything.” She nodded as she rose to her feet and glanced back at the admiral and Kell as they rose as well. “But I’ll help you a little bit this time.” She smiled tightly. “Please inform Commander Chavez that I’m to be apprised of what’s going on, and when it’s going on. Until then, I need to let Fay know if you will be in for dinner with the rest of us.”
His gaze narrowed on her. “I’m not one of your students, Emily Paige,” he informed her broodingly as he rose from his seat as well. “Don’t talk to me like one.”
“Neither am I, Dad,” she said with careful composure. “And I’m tired of being treated like a child anyway. It stops here. And it stops now.”
She watched his eyes darken, watched the pain that filled them a second before he turned from her. It pierced her heart. For a moment, she was five again, seeing that look in his eyes seconds before he had to tell her her mother was gone, and his tears followed.
“We can discuss that later,” he said roughly, clearing his throat before he turned to Kell again. “I’ll be returning to the hotel in about an hour. Chavez, McIntyre, and Macey should be completing the security measures they are putting in place out back and through the rest of the house soon. They’ll be leaving with me, but I know your commander wanted to talk to you before he left.”
Kell nodded sharply, his gaze leaving her for only the second that was required.
“When you attend that meeting, you’ll make certain I’m with you of course,” she said with brittle politeness.
“No. I won’t. I’ll make certain you receive all the information you need though.”
Emily felt the anger surging closer to the surface now, frustration and impotent fury combining as she drew in a deep, hard breath.
“That isn’t acceptable.”
“It will have to be.” His gaze was penetrating, watchful. “The commander won’t have time for your questions, but you can ask me once I relay the information to you. There’s no reason for you to be there and it will only cut into what little time I’ll have to get my information.”
She pressed her lips together tightly. He had already proved his willingness to allow her to know what was going on. He wouldn’t hide the information from her.
Breathing out harshly, she nodded in reply before turning to her father. “Before I head home, we’re going to talk.”
“I don’t like that tone, Emily.
“Then I’m sorry, Dad. But right now, it’s the best I can do. And we will talk. We’ll talk or you can take your bodyguards and shove them clear to Timbuktu for all I care. Because there won’t be a single one leaving with me otherwise. I do know how to hire my own protection.”
“Does that include Lieutenant Krieger?” His voice was smooth, but she detected the edge of mockery in it, the knowledge that her relationship with Kell went far beyond that of other bodyguards.
Kell’s lips twitched as his eyes gleamed back at her. She had a feeling he’d be right behind her no matter what she decided.
“Kell is another case entirely,” she assured her father as she turned back to him. “But I don’t think you want to push that subject. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have things to do.”
She nodded to her father, turned, and forced herself to walk sedately to the door. She wanted to scream. She wanted to rage at him. She wanted to rage at herself.
It was her own fault it had come to this, and she knew it. She should have fought him sooner. She should have stood her ground years ago and made him face the fact that she couldn’t tolerate the control he wanted to place on her. That she needed adventure. She needed excitement. She needed to live, despite his fears.
And why did she have a feeling Kell wasn’t going to be as easygoing about this whole “working with her” thing as he pretended to be? She had heard his tone of voice when he demanded the party be canceled. It was rough, deep, filled with arrogant demand.
That lazy attitude hadn’t fooled her.
He was like a panther, watching, stalking, waiting. When he struck, it would be with devastating results.
She had already made up her mind that she wasn’t running. As she spoke to her father, listened to the reluctantly given information, she had begun making her own plans. Her own decisions. It would begin today. At the moment she stood outside the office and listened to her father’s and Kell’s raised voices, she had decided she was no longer allowing others to make decisions for her.
She was an adult, and she had been making decisions for herself for years. She could do it. She knew how. And she would let both men know, in no uncertain terms, that she would begin exercising her right to do just that.