Tara stepped up onto the raised white-tiled floor and took the room in quickly with a single, sweeping gaze. She hadn’t really had any expectations, but somehow, the room still threw her. It looked a lot like one of the basement labs the mechanical engineering grad student that Tara had once dated had shown her.
“Okay, then,” she said, edging out of the way to let the others in behind her. “You’re like some kind of secret group of...what? Because I’ve got nothing.”
Luke and Annie stepped past her, Luke flopping down into one of the nicer desk chairs while Annie grabbed a silk robe and slithered out of the towel and into the robe before taking her seat near a third man who seemed vaguely familiar to Tara. The man didn’t even look up from his computer screen to acknowledge Annie or anyone else. Luke and Annie were soon immersed in the text flowing across their screens, ignoring Tara as if she were irrelevant.
Which, to them, she probably was.
“We’re the people who’re called when something with a little more subtlety than a platoon of Marines or a mob hit is required,” Chay said.
She threw a glance over her shoulder at him. He’d let go of the door, and it was swinging shut under the power of an automatic safety closer.
Shutting her in. But shutting him in, too.
He’d let go of her elbow when he’s stopped to open the door. Up until that moment, she’d almost felt completely like her old self again, the panther driven into the far reaches of her brain. It was back now, pacing at the edges of her awareness. Deciding when to pounce.
“Computer stuff,” she guessed to distract herself. “Like hacking?”
“I prefer to call it intrusion engineering,” he said, a dark smile playing around his lips. “We’re black hat and white hat and every hat in between.”
“My mother got a purple hat when she turned fifty,” Tara said reflexively under her breath, then shook her head. More loudly, she added, “I don’t think that’s quite the same, but...cool, I guess. I thought you were like some kind of super undercover agency or something.”
“I am the freest agent there ever was,” Chay said, sitting at one of the chairs and resting his feet on the desk, legs crossed at the ankles. “And this is where I spend most of my time most days.”
“When you aren’t off rescuing women from Air Force bases. Or was it kidnapping?” Tara couldn’t help that small challenge.
“Depends on who you ask, but I’d definitely call it a rescue.” He raised his eyebrows. “Wouldn’t you?”
Tara gave a little giggle, and she realized as she relaxed that it was the first laugh she’d had that wasn’t tinged by hysteria since she’d gotten to Chay’s Black Mesa. Whatever this place was, it definitely looked a lot less like a jail cell than her first set of rooms. “I guess we’ll see. Not that I’m not glad to be out of that room, but why the hell am I here?”
“So I can keep an eye on you. Without the cameras. That’s what you wanted, right?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said, but he’d already said that it couldn’t be quite that simple. “When I go to sleep...?” She trailed off.
“Unless you want to crash on the couch out here, you’ll need to have video feed live for that,” he said. “Sorry.”
“All right,” she said. “I guess I can handle that. But in the bathroom—no video.” It was a demand, not a question.
“As long as you take an escort when you shower,” he said.
“Not you,” she said flatly, crossing her arms across her chest even as she felt the flush creep up her cheeks. Dammit, but she wished she was immune to him. Or rather, she wished that she wished that she was immune to him, because she couldn’t even wish the first. She had a flash of an image in her head—his mouth on hers, his hands on her body, in her body—
She bit off a groan.
Humor glinted in his dark eyes, humor and a sharper light that made her think that maybe he guessed what was going through her head only too well. “Good idea. Annie can escort you. Or you can ask for another woman. Don’t worry—she won’t have to be in the shower with you. Just the same room is good enough.”
“You can stop volunteering me for dealing with your psychotic panther lover at any point, thank you,” Annie said in a singsong voice from across the room.
Tara turned to shoot her back a withering look. “I’ll work something out.”
“Take a seat,” Chay said, probably to distract her. He started to reach for the nearest rolling chair, then hesitated. Instead, stood up and offered the chair he’d been sitting in—the sorriest, most battered chair out of the bunch.
Tara gave the chair a skeptical look. It had a visible butt grove in the cheap fake leather, which was cracked to reveal the fabric backing below. Silver duct tape kept part of one rubber arm rest in place.
“It’s mine,” Chay said by way of explanation.
Was it? That was interesting. Tara sat, too aware of the fact that the groove her rear was settling into had been created by his narrower hips and ass.
Chay quickly bent next to her, so close that she could have leaned against the length of his torso, and began to type on one of the keyboards, navigating through the menus so fast that she couldn’t follow.
“I’ve ordered you a bed,” he said. “And a chair of your own. Your clothes, too.”
Bed. The word conjured up way too many inappropriate thoughts with his body so close to hers. Dammit, the panther in her had screwed with her head in a permanent way, because she could smell him in a way that she never could before. It wasn’t the products that he used—in fact, as far as that was concerned, she could only smell the faint, sharp scent of plain castile soap. It was him, and the scent of him, his flesh, his body itself, that was making her insides go to jelly like she was a stupid sixteen-year-old.
“All right,” he said, pulling back and taking the chair next to hers. She repressed her disappointment. “So you’ve already met Annie Liu and Luke Ford. That’s Liam Mansfield over there.”
Liam grunted in acknowledgement.
“I think I recognize him,” Tara said.
“He was with the group who came and got you,” Chay said. “He’s got two brothers, Niall and Seamus, and they don’t talk much more than he does.”
“I talk whenever I have anything to say,” Liam rumbled.
“There are about a dozen people who work in the spook shop regularly,” Chay continued. “The rest of my A-team aren’t spooks. They join us in the rec room, but they don’t have much of a reason to be here.”
“Spooks,” she repeated, unfamiliar with the word.
“People who work in signals intelligence,” he clarified. “And the technical support for them. Spooks are the techies. The rest are...field agents of different sorts. Spooks and spies, you know?”
“Okay,” she said, as if she did. “So what do I do here?”
Chay chuckled. “Like Solitaire? Angry Birds? Candy Crush?”
She swiveled her chair with one toe to glare at him squarely. She hadn’t missed the slight note of condescension in his tone. “I’m more useful than that.”
“Of course you will be,” he assured her. “Just as soon as you have your shifting under control. Until then, that’s your only job.”
He started typing rapidly on the keyboard in front of him, and one of the monitors in front of her blanked for a second. Then her name appeared with a button below inviting her to log on.
“No password. Go ahead. Sign in,” Chay urged.
Distrustfully, she clicked the button, and the screen switched swiftly to a desktop view with a handful of simple icons in it.
“You’ve got almost as many movies as Netflix here, a library of tens of thousands of songs here, and bunch of games over here,” Chay said, tapping the various icons on her screen. “There’s an app with a few thousand books—every USA Today and New York Times bestseller for the last twenty years, along with all the classics. Oh, and a few hundred games on the Steam account right there.”
“So I’ve got an electronic babysitter,” she said. Her face felt hot again but for a far different reason. She felt like a child being fed a video while the grownups went away and did the work, and she wasn’t accustomed to being useless.
But Chay didn’t respond to her tone. Instead, he pushed away from the table hard enough to shoot his rolling chair across the aisle to one of the white tables in the middle of the room.
“I’m giving you something to do,” he said mildly, digging among the clutter on the table until he snagged a pair of headphones. Another shove sent him skating back again. “Here you go,” he said, holding them out to her.
Tara pressed her lips together briefly before she took the headphones. “Okay then. You guys will watch me not turn into a panther, and I’ll watch...I don’t know, reruns of NCIS or something.”
“That’s about right,” Chay said evenly. “And when you don’t turn into a panther for long enough, then we’ll reassess.”
“And then I’ll go home?” she asked. She hadn’t even spoken to her mother since that terrible incident in her lecture. How long had it been now? Two days? Three? Her mom would be beside herself after what had happened at the school.
“That’s another thing that will be reassessed,” Chay said calmly.
Tara looked at him for a long moment, studying his face for any meaning behind those words. But his expression was perfectly bland—too bland, but it didn’t help her understand what he meant any better for that.
Her head was hurting, she realized, not the panther kind of ache but the tired kind, and her eyes felt gritty.
Finally, she sighed. “Actually, I’m really tired. I don’t know what time it is, and considering how much time I’ve spend knocked out recently—and thanks for your part in that, by the way—you’d think I wouldn’t be, but somehow, apparently, it’s not the same as sleeping.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Chay admitted. “You’ve got your choice of places to crash, though. Bedroom with video feed or couch without.”
She gave the couch in the corner of the room a long, hard look. She’d slept on far worse in her year of traveling, but a real mattress with real sheets and a real pillow were far more attractive right now—even if it did come paired with being recorded. “I’ll take the bedroom.”
“Right this way,” he said, standing up and leading the way to the only other door in the room.
Tara followed. There wasn’t anything else to do.