Donovan Kincaid watched his tail take the corner just the right distance behind him. They were good, but he’d been expecting them. Bryn was determined and she was smart. She’d figured it out before him. He’d been so busy worrying about Prudence, he’d quit thinking. Only one other time that had happened, and Prudence had been the result. How often had he told his men to forget feeling and focus on thinking? It had seemed so simple when he had no ties, no daughter to feel connected to.

Maybe he’d always known that ties were, well, ties. He’d tried to avoid them. He was a soldier, a man on the move. Then he’d met Prudence’s mother. She’d been beautiful, and he couldn’t think of anything but her. For two weeks she’d belonged to him. He thought it would be forever, until the morning he woke up, and she was gone. He’d tracked her down, found out she was married. That’s when he went overseas. It had been a dark time for him. He’d done some things he wasn’t proud of, but he’d never crossed a line he couldn’t cross back over. When his head cleared, he came back to the states. He hadn’t meant to look her up or even keep track of her, but he was curious. Maybe he’d wondered if she was sorry. Maybe he wasn’t as over her as he’d thought. Whatever the reason, it had been a shock to find out she’d died not long after giving birth to a daughter.

It wasn’t hard to do the math and figure out she was his daughter, not John Knight’s. He’d kept track of her through the years. Eventually she finished school and went to work for Knight. He’d kicked around some more, then started working in DC, where he’d met Bryn. He hadn’t tried to seek out Pru, as he called her in his mind, but as his reputation as a security consultant grew, he moved closer to her, until the day Hamilton Merryweather came to him. He should have stayed away, but the compulsion to connect with her had been stronger than his common sense.

It had been part pleasure and a lot of pain to be so close to his little girl. John Knight was a cold, unfeeling man who lived only for his work. Donovan thought he’d crushed the life out of her until she gave him the slip the first time he was following her. Since he couldn’t talk to her, he started photographing her. When she was going wherever it was she went, there was a look in her eyes that told him the fire she’d gotten from her real father was burning inside her.

A hundred times he almost told her. A hundred times he didn’t. He told himself he did it for her, but it wasn’t true. He held back because he was afraid of being rejected, of losing the right to at least see her. It didn’t help that she had herself wrapped in an air of reserve that turned him mute every time he was within ten feet of her. He’d been all over the world, talked with kings and leaders without fear or favor, and here he was afraid to talk to his own daughter.

And now he might not get the chance. Who had her? They had Shield and if they had Pru, how long would it take them to find out it wasn’t ready? And what would they do when they did? John Knight had thought he was so clever, hiding it all in her head. He’d just made it easy for someone to take him out and put Pru at risk. And somehow, he had put her at risk, too. Someone had smoked out his interest in her and was planning what? They already had Shield, so what else could they want that he could deliver?

Whoever it was had seriously underestimated him, and he had an idea of just who that might be. He’d known when he met Grady O’Brien that he was a dangerous man. That’s why he hadn’t gone back to that camp. Even that small contact appeared to have given O'Brien ideas.

He looked in his rear view mirror. Time to lose the tail. Then he needed to do a little recon of Grady’s camp. Grady wasn’t the only person who could come up with a plan and execute it.