Keeper's Reach (9 page)

Colin.

Emma closed her eyes and imagined him, felt him close to her, heard his laughter.

“Emma Sharpe, I’m madly in love with you, and I want to be with you forever.”

His words to her on that rainy November night in Dublin when he’d asked her to marry him, and she’d said yes.

She brought herself back to the present, the effects of the choke hold easing. She risked a deeper breath, inhaling to the count of four, holding for four, exhaling for eight...

First things first, she told herself.

Right now, her job was to stay alive.

10

Boston,
Massachusetts
Thursday, 7:00 p.m., EST

Colin took a cab from the airport straight to the HIT offices in an unobtrusive brick building on the Boston waterfront. He wasn’t surprised to find Sam Padgett in the open-layout area in the center of the main floor, outside the individual offices. He had a laptop and two monitors arranged on U-shaped tables, with his scuffed boots up on one of the tables. He was HIT’s newest member, in his midthirties, dark, an ultra-fit type and a hard-ass with a sense of humor. He made no secret he preferred his native Texas. He’d started griping about New England winters at the first snowflake.

“Good flight?” he asked, not glancing up from his laptop.

“Uneventful,” Colin said.

“Best kind. I heard our favorite art thief has been in touch. When are we going to nail his ass?”

“Probably never.”

“Is Oliver York the wrong man or the right man for the thefts?”

“Right man.”

“Then we could find a way to nail him if we wanted to. That means we don’t want to.”

Colin didn’t disagree.

Padgett tilted back in his chair. “At least it’s another chapter in the annals of Sharpe Fine Art Recovery closed.”

“Closing, maybe.”

“Old Wendell must be happy.”

“He’s happy the stolen art is being returned intact. We all are.”

Padgett dropped his feet to the floor and shut his laptop. He was blunt and consistent about not getting Emma’s role with HIT or the value of her expertise in art crimes. He never would have recruited her for the FBI in the first place, never mind handpicked her for an elite team. Her family’s work in art recovery and her grandfather’s status as one of the foremost private art detectives in the world would have disqualified her if Padgett had been doing the disqualifying. And art crimes mystified him.

“What are you working on?” Colin asked.

“Numbers.”

Padgett was as good with numbers as he was with firearms. Colin had seen him take enormous pleasure in catching people in their own stereotypes since he didn’t look like the classic numbers guy.

“Give me two minutes,” he said. “I’ve got some info for you on your brother’s friends.”

He snapped up straight in his chair, reopened his laptop and tapped a few keys on his keyboard, back into his work.

Colin entered an empty conference room. Before he’d boarded his flight, he had given Padgett the names he had from Mike. He felt only mildly guilty that he hadn’t asked his brother for more information, but Oliver York’s call to Emma mentioning the possible sighting of an FBI agent on his tail was too coincidental for Colin not to take a closer look. Best-case scenario still was a London stockbroker.

Boston Harbor was glasslike, reflecting the city lights. He’d texted Emma when he’d landed at Logan, but she hadn’t responded. He didn’t know what the sisters’ rituals were in the evening. Dinner, cleanup, reading, games, vespers. He’d been to the convent and could picture its stone buildings, a renovated nineteenth-century estate on its own small peninsula overlooking the Atlantic. Mother Linden, who had been friends with Wendell Sharpe in his younger years, had transformed the run-down property when she’d founded the Sisters of the Joyful Heart decades ago.

Padgett entered the conference room without notes or a laptop. “Let’s start with Ted Kavanagh,” he said. “He’s an active agent. He’s forty-four, divorced, two kids in college, and he’s supposed to be in a hammock on a beach.”

“He’s on vacation?”

“He’s supposed to be taking an overdue break to decompress after wrapping up a difficult investigation into money launderers—guys he started chasing when he was assigned to Afghanistan a few years ago. They hooked up with local drug lords. One of those tangled webs. You can identify.”

Colin nodded without comment.

“Kavanagh should have taken a break two months ago, but he stuck around, pissed people off and finally got told to take a break.”

“I can identify with that, too,” Colin said.

“He packed his suitcase and said he was going to the beach. I’d have assumed he meant sand and eighty degrees, not ice and—what was it this morning in Maine? Two?”

“A balmy twenty degrees.”

“I’ll have to get out my swim trunks.” Padgett stood at the window and glanced at the glittering harbor. “Reed Cooper is an army captain turned private contractor. He worked with one of the big outfits until going out on his own in October. Cooper Global Security is still a fledgling company. He’s taking his time pulling the right people together. He has family money. He has a solid reputation and a breadth of operational and logistical experience.”

“No alarms yet,” Colin said. “What else?”

“Cooper, Naomi MacBride and Buddy Whidmore are all Tennesseans. Cooper is from Belle Meade, MacBride from a small town east of Nashville, Whidmore from Memphis. Cooper and MacBride are Vanderbilt grads. Buddy dropped out his sophomore year—one of those guys too smart for college. They were all there at different times. MacBride is a security and crisis management consultant who used to be an intelligence analyst for the State Department. She’s based in Nashville. Whidmore is a freelance tech guy. He’s based twenty miles southwest of Nashville. Nashville—not coincidentally, I’m sure—is where Cooper decided to open his offices for Cooper Global Security.”

And now, Colin thought, they all were on their way to see Mike in Maine.

“I can do more digging,” Padgett said, “but it looks to me as if these are key relationships formed at a tough, dangerous time. As far as I can see, this thing at the Plum Tree is a big old spook and soldier reunion in the wilds of Maine. With Cooper’s new outfit, he’ll want to do some networking and recruiting with people he knows and trusts.”

“I won’t try to explain that the Plum Tree Inn isn’t in the wilds,” Colin said.

Padgett grinned. “I’ll have to get up to Maine when the weather warms up, if it ever does.”

“Depends on how you define
warm
.” Colin nodded toward the door. “Come on. Let’s get out of here. I’ll buy you a beer and listen to you bitch about the cold weather.”

“Done.”

While Padgett put away his laptop and monitors, Colin checked his phone again. Still no response from Emma. He hadn’t expected one, and the last thing he wanted was to bug her while she was on her retreat. He debated texting her that he wouldn’t text her again, but it would be another interruption—assuming she even had her phone turned on.

Forget it
.

Let her enjoy her time with the sisters.

* * *

Colin and Padgett walked to a waterfront restaurant crowded with people who weren’t in law enforcement. Padgett refused to sit by a table overlooking the harbor. “Too damn cold,” he said, agreeing instead to a table by a gaslit fire. He grinned at Colin as they sat down. “I’m not warming up to the frozen north, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“Helps to be on Yank’s team.”

“So far it’s been interesting, I’ll say that.”

They had burgers and beer and watched some of a Bruins game on the television above the bar. Padgett was clearly preoccupied with whatever numbers rabbit trail he had been following. Colin left him to coffee and headed out for the short walk to Emma’s waterfront apartment. It was small for the two of them but at least reasonably roach-free. She had rented it last March when she arrived in Boston to join Yank’s team. Colin had been posing as an arms buyer then, deep inside the network of a Russian now in prison in California.

He pictured Emma when they’d met in September on the grounds of her former convent.

She’d been all set to shoot him.

He smiled, trying to picture her now, in the convent where she had once expected to live out her life. Sometimes he had no trouble imagining her as Sister Brigid. Other times he couldn’t imagine it at all.

Tonight would be one of those other times.

The wind kicked up, and he was cold when he arrived at the apartment. He had never stayed there without Emma. It still felt like her space, not their space, but that was fine with him. He tossed aside his jacket and got a beer out of the refrigerator—his six-pack one of the signs that he did, in fact, also live here.

He debated getting in touch with Mike. Was his brother still in Rock Point or had he gone to the Plum Tree? Or had he decided not to bother with his old friends and gone back up to the Bold Coast?

Colin remembered the day Mike had given him the keys to his cabin.
If I get eaten by a whale on the high seas, I need someone to burn down my cabin. You’re it, Colin.

He hadn’t known if Mike had meant literally he wanted his brother to burn his cabin in the event of his demise, and he hadn’t asked.

Mike lived simply and worked hard. He would be taking advantage of winter to get things done that he couldn’t during summer. Refurbishing gear, painting, fixing, oiling. It was a life Colin knew, if not to the degree Mike did, but hadn’t chosen for himself.

In some ways, he wasn’t sure Mike had chosen his life as a guide and outfitter, either. It was more as if he had fallen into it after the army because he hadn’t known what else to do, and because it allowed him to be something of a loner and keep family and friends at a distance.

Colin understood the drive toward solitude and isolation. Mike had never talked much about his years in the army, but they had to have taken a toll. It had taken Colin some time to recognize that his work as a deep-cover agent had taken its own kind of toll.

Maybe, he thought, Emma’s decision to spend this time at her old convent was driven in part by her own need for solitude and isolation. Maybe the recent months of change and violence in her life had taken a toll that she was only now beginning to recognize and deal with.

Would it occur to her to talk to him about it?

It hadn’t occurred to him to talk to her about the dangers he’d faced.

He sat on the couch with his beer. On his last visit with Mike on the Bold Coast a couple of summers ago, they had split a six-pack on the porch and watched kayakers in the cove. Mike hadn’t said much. He seldom did. Colin had been on a short break in an undercover mission. His family had believed he worked at a desk at FBI headquarters in Washington.

Pretended
to believe was more accurate, especially for Mike.

Colin’s life had changed considerably since that last visit. For one thing, he was engaged to Emma. When he had been drinking beer with Mike, he hadn’t even known she existed. Yet she had grown up in Heron’s Cove, a few miles south of Rock Point, and was a Sharpe, a family of art detectives not unknown to the Donovans.

Although he had met her over the murder of a nun, he hadn’t guessed she was herself a former novice with the Sisters of the Joyful Heart.

He hadn’t planned to be in Rock Point this weekend, but he would head up there in the morning and satisfy himself that Mike’s friends weren’t going to be a problem.

He didn’t finish his beer. The apartment wasn’t as nunlike as when he’d first slept there, pillows lined up between them on the bed to create a barrier.

No barriers now, he thought, entering the tiny bedroom.

11

Rock Point,
Maine
Thursday, 10:30 p.m., EST

The scraggly fishing village of Rock Point, Maine, was just as Naomi imagined it would be. Fog, lobster boats and Donovans. Darkness had settled over New England but the stubborn fog that gripped the coast had turned everything gray. Even the white snow was streaked with gray shadows.

Freaking bleak was what it was.

Her driver pulled in front of a sprawling house out from the village center but still, technically, on the harbor. Made sense since the house—supposedly a former sea captain’s house, complete with a widow’s walk—was now the Rock Point Harbor Inn. According to its website, the innkeepers were Rosemary and Frank Donovan. There was no photo of the couple, so Naomi wasn’t positive they were related to Mike. But what were the odds?

Booking a room in Rock Point had seemed like a good idea at Heathrow.

Flying to Boston and driving up to Maine instead of flying to Nashville and driving to her favorite bar for barbecue and bourbon hadn’t seemed like such a great idea, but Reed had convinced her to join him at the Plum Tree tomorrow. They weren’t prepared to receive guests tonight, and shaving off a flight had seemed pragmatic at midday British Standard Time.

The five-hour time difference between England and Maine was making for a very long day.

Of course, she could have booked a room at an airport hotel and driven up from Boston in the morning. Reed had offered to pay for changing her flight from Nashville, but she had declined. She hadn’t been 100 percent certain that she would go to Maine until he was out of sight, dropping off his car and heading to his own flight.
You’ll be there
, he had told her.

Annoying as that comment had been, he was right. She
would
be there.

Too late to change her mind now, she thought as she tipped her driver, grabbed her suitcase and headed up a shoveled, sanded but nonetheless treacherous-looking walk.

She’d hired a car only because she was too tired to make the almost two-hour drive herself. She wouldn’t need a car once she was at the Plum Tree.

She managed to hit a small ice patch and almost fall.
Almost
being key because it meant she didn’t fall. An image flashed of her holding her broken wrist, explaining to a Donovan or Donovan friend who she was as they waited for an ambulance to take her to the ER. She wasn’t hiding her identity. She just didn’t want to fall in front of these people.

She mounted the steps to a wraparound porch and took a moment to get her heartbeat back to normal after her almost-fall. She finished the bottle of water her driver had provided. It didn’t eliminate jet lag and travel fatigue, but it helped. She didn’t need to check her email. She had checked it a billion times at Heathrow, in Boston and in the car. She’d had the sense not to try to email Mike. She’d looked him up on the internet, though. He had a terse website for people who wanted to book his services as a Maine outfitter and wilderness guide. There was one photo of him standing next to a red canoe on a rocky beach.

He had always told her he would be going back to Maine after the army.

The porch light came on.

Someone must have noted her arrival. She slipped her empty water bottle into a sleeve on her compact, cleverly designed suitcase. It didn’t have wheels and fit everything she needed for a typical business trip. She didn’t quite know what this trip was. Business? Personal? Both?

Right now, she needed a warm bed and sleep. The driver had told her about his passion for downhill skiing. She hadn’t had the heart to tell him she had been on a plane for hours and hours, after breakfast with a suspicious FBI agent, after helping an injured Brit who worked for a mysterious international art thief
and
after finding out she was supposed to go to Maine, where she would likely see an ex-soldier she had hoped never to see again—and who hoped never to see her again, either.

And now she was
in
Maine.

Not only in Maine, but in said ex-soldier’s hometown, thanks to her bright idea as she had waited in the lounge at Heathrow.

Then he opened the door to the inn and she thought she was hallucinating. Seriously. Jet lag and sleep deprivation could do strange things to people.

So could being face-to-face with Mike Donovan.

“Hello, Naomi.”

“Mike.”

His blue eyes steadied on her. “I didn’t expect you to show up here.”

If anything, he was more hard-edged than she remembered. “I didn’t expect it myself. It seemed like a good idea in England. You’re catching me at a disadvantage. I’m on London time.”

He stepped back from the door, allowing her to enter a cheerful, tidy entryway. He had his arms crossed on his chest, and the overhead light caught the angles of his face.

Naomi’s step faltered, but she didn’t berate herself.

No one took her breath away like Mike did.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

He knew why. She could see it in his eyes. “Reed’s been in touch, hasn’t he?”

“Yesterday.”

“He didn’t tell me about his plans until this morning.”

“He was in England?”

She nodded. “Are you going to join him at the Plum Tree?”

“Maybe.”

There was no
maybe
with Mike. He was black-and-white. Yes or no. Go or don’t go. But Naomi didn’t press him for an answer. She shivered, more for effect than because she was actually shivering. “I swear there are icicles in the air.”

“Ocean effect.”

“I’m not home in Nashville, am I?”

“My folks own this place. They’ve turned in for the night. I’ll get you settled. Leave your suitcase here for now.” Again that steely-eyed gaze. “You can tell me what you’ve been up to since I saw you last.”

Last
being the helicopter ride after he had rescued her from some very nasty people on what had turned out to be her final day in Afghanistan. When the helicopter landed, Mike had looked at her in her stretcher.
Never again, Naomi
, he’d said, then hopped off the helicopter, leaving her to the paramedics and her fate.

“Did you come down from the Bold Coast today?” she asked, easing the thick strap off her shoulder and letting her suitcase drop onto the floor by the front door.

A nod as he started down the hall ahead of her.

She gathered she was to follow him. “It’s a long drive here, isn’t it? I looked it up on the internet.” She went down the hall, wondering about her boots; but she saw he was wearing boots, too. Not city boots like hers. L.L.Bean, probably. “Did you come by boat? I get seasick. I used to go canoeing once in a while. I don’t think I like the water.”

Mike stopped in the doorway to a big country kitchen and turned to her. “I came by truck.”

“Got it. I feel like I’m about to start babbling. Or is it too late? Am I already babbling?”

He didn’t smile. Not a lot of a sense of humor there. He turned and entered the kitchen. She hesitated, but realized she had few choices. Middle of the night. Fog. Cold. Maine. A suspicious Mike Donovan.

“What prompted you to come here?” he asked.

“I told you, because Reed—”

“Rock Point.”

She shrugged. “I thought I’d take a look. I couldn’t see much on the drive in since it’s dark and foggy. Maine is beautiful, isn’t it? I’m looking forward to seeing the coast in daylight.” She eased off her Barbour jacket. It provided some warmth, but a down parka would have been better. “I’m not here to cause trouble for you, Mike.”

“That doesn’t mean you won’t.”

It was the old dance between them. He didn’t trust her not to cause trouble. He had come to believe it was the way she was wired. It didn’t matter that she’d saved his damn life, discovering important details after he and his team had been deployed on a dangerous mission, alerting them—unwittingly putting herself at risk as a result.

That had held no water with Mike. He’d known her actions would come back to haunt her, and they had, two months later. He’d had to pluck her out of harm’s way, and that was that. She’d become a magnet for trouble. Reckless. A bad-luck charm.

Two mad nights together in Washington in between the screwed-up mission and her rescue hadn’t affected his attitude toward her, at least not for the good. Falling into bed had addressed the simmering tension between them through sex instead of a shared six-pack, a game of darts or pistols at dawn, but it had resolved nothing.

Then no sooner had she arrived back in Afghanistan, she was snatched out of a restaurant and threatened with certain death. Mike had rescued her, but the incident had confirmed his suspicions about her.

It was hard to argue with him once he had his mind made up, and he had it made up about her.

That she’d saved his life didn’t count for much when her actions—in his view—had endangered her own life.

As far as she was concerned, they were even. She’d saved him. He’d saved her.

Assuming they were keeping score.

“I’m not here to regain your trust,” she told him now, in the Maine hometown he had missed so much.

He glanced at her. “That’s good.”

She reminded herself she was the one who had decided to come here.

His eyes were narrowed on her. She hadn’t experienced such open suspicion and skepticism in a long time. “Hungry?” he asked.

Her breakfast in the Cotswolds seemed like a dream. How many hours ago had she sat across from Ted Kavanagh with her porridge, fruit, yogurt and croissant with York farm gooseberry jam? She’d only picked at her meal on the plane.

“I am hungry, actually, but don’t go to any trouble.”

“Too late.” He gave her a quick wink, if only to take the edge off his words. “We’ve got fish chowder and pie. Would that suit you?”

“Sounds great. What kind of pie?”

“Wild blueberry.”

“Did you pick the blueberries yourself?”

“My mother did.”

A reminder that this was his home, his family. Naomi grimaced inwardly, regretting her impulsive decision to come to Rock Point, but there was nothing to be done about it now. She didn’t even have her own car. Did they have cabs in this little town? Where else would she go this late at night? She supposed she could show up at the Plum Tree and see if she could come early. But she was exhausted and she was here, about to have chowder and pie. Might as well get seeing Mike again out of the way, before the meetings with Reed and his crew.

“What’s the difference between fish chowder and clam chowder?” she asked, sitting at a square table with a vase of realistic-looking faux daffodils in the middle.

Mike pulled open the refrigerator. “One’s made with fish and one’s made with clams.”

“Got it. I didn’t know if
fish
covered everything that swims.” She smiled. “Fish chowder and wild blueberry pie. Can’t get much more Maine than that.”

He made no comment as he withdrew a glass container. Even if she had a mind to, Naomi was too beat to offer to help, and Mike seemed comfortable and self-assured in the inn’s kitchen. He scooped the chowder into a bowl and microwaved it while he got out the pie and sliced a piece onto a plate.

Drooping as she was with jet lag and fatigue, Naomi still managed to relish the chowder and pie, her first meal in Maine and perfect. She wished she could talk to Mike like an old friend. They could chat about Rock Point and his family, and what Ted Kavanagh and Reed Cooper were up to—and what it had to do with him, or, for that matter, with Oliver York and his farm in the Cotswolds. She thought of the man she had helped that morning—had it only been that morning?—and hoped he was all right. She hadn’t thought of asking him for his contact information until she was well on her way to Heathrow with Reed Cooper. She had no way to get in touch with the injured Englishman, particularly if she didn’t want to draw attention to herself. Head injuries were notoriously deceptive. She hoped he had seen the wisdom of visiting a doctor.

“I remember you have three younger brothers,” she said, dragging herself out of her wandering thoughts. “Do they all live in Rock Point?”

“More or less.”

“One is an FBI agent, as I recall, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“He’s not based in Maine, though, is he?”

Mike leaned back against the kitchen counter. “Are you asking because you don’t know or because you don’t want me to know you know?”

His suspicion irritated her, but she pushed it aside. “Just making conversation.”

“Sure, Naomi.”

“You mentioned your brothers when we knew each other in Afghanistan.”

By
knew each other
she included
slept with each other
, which Mike obviously got. He looked at her. “I remember.”

His tone, his deep blue eyes, his stance communicated where his mind was—on their nights together in Washington. It was three years ago but time seemed irrelevant. She could have been in his arms yesterday, or that morning. There was no explaining what she felt now.

“What are your plans for tomorrow?” he asked.

The pragmatic question broke through her fog of memory and feelings best forgotten. She pushed her pie plate to one side. “I don’t have a car, obviously, so I’ll have to figure out how to get to the Plum Tree. I wanted to swing through Heron’s Cove on my way.”