‘Okay, let’s go,’ he said, and she spun on her heel to make for his car.
* * *
‘Okay, Susan,’Nick gritted out into his phone, still pacing the length of his bedroom, ‘take me through this again. You agreed not to tell me – your employer – that one of my staff was there under false pretences. The member of staff in question is not actually a receptionist at all, she’s … well, I don’t bloody know what she is, but she’s certainly not a goddamn receptionist. Am I right?’
‘Well, Nick,’ Susan said, her nervous voice shaking down the line, ‘you see, you had gotten rid of the last two sets of protection officers assigned to you. Everyone just thought that maybe if you didn’t know you were being followed, you wouldn’t get so annoyed by it, and then your father –’
‘Dad?’ Nick exploded, his temper on a knife-edge. ‘Dad knew I was being followed by some crazy woman?’
‘Well … your father doesn’t actually know who’s providing the protection, only that it’s being sorted, and those government chaps really were quite insistent that –’
‘Fine, Susan.’ Nick cut her off, pinching the bridge of his nose and huffing out a breath in frustration. He couldn’t really blame her if his father was involved. Dad may not have worked at the company for the last ten years but he was still considered The Big Cheese, and it wasn’t as though anyone would have felt able to refuse a request from him, least of all Susan. She was still bumbling on to him down the phone when he tapped it off and shoved it into his back pocket.
‘Right,’ he said as he pushed through the door from his bedroom out into the vast living space of his flat. His interior designer had wanted to go ultra-modern with acres of granite and hard, gleaming floor tiles, but Nick asked for something to remind him of home; hence the wide, oak floorboards, squashy, beaten-up leather sofas and Shaker-style kitchen. ‘Now that I’ve established that you are not random deranged psychopaths, would you mind very much telling mewhoyou are and whatthe fuckis going on.’
Lucinda turned to face him from her position at the floor-to-ceiling glass windows. She had totally dropped the fake smile now, and for once the rest of her face matched her eyes. Although Nick had always sensed the smile was a front, the difference in her appearance without it was quite startling. She looked hardened, cold, and had a strange air of being in total control of herself and the world around her. Nick was beginning to realize the extent of her acting skills. The dark colours she sported now were a stark contrast to her usual pinks and purples. He also remembered her voice. In her guise as Receptionist Lucinda, she had spoken with a Worsel Gummidge, country bumpkin accent. The voice she used in the alleyway and out on the street was nothing like it. If anything she sounded slightly Russian. Lying at her feet was the massive dog. Its head had been resting on its paws, but as Nick burst back into the living space it came up and both ears swivelled forward.
After agreeing to go with his newly discovered security detail, Nick and Lila had been hustled to his car, at which point it became clear Lucinda intended to travel with him, complete with the hair-shedding dog. The information that his upholstery was Italian leather and might not be the best surface for a huge and no-doubt-unwashed dog was met with stony silence from Lucinda and a brief display of sharp teeth from the dog, so he decided to grin and bear it.
Lila, having come down from her adrenaline rush of fear in the alley and realizing that her potential date with Nick was not going to go the way she had planned, asked to be dropped at her own flat. Lucinda told her that ‘would not be advisable’ in a tone that suggested it wasnotgoing to happen, and so they’d all driven straight to Nick’s underground car park, trailed by the other man, who was driving Lucinda’s car (yes, it turned out that Lucinda did have a car, and much to Nick’s annoyance it was one he recognized from frequent sightings over the last month – she had, evidently, been following him for some time).
‘My name is Goodie,’ she told him. ‘And this is Sam Clifton.’
‘Right …’ Nick paused to take a deep breath and run his hands through his hair as he let it out. ‘Okay.’
He walked across the room until he was standing in front of ‘Goodie’ and she was looking up at him with those cold eyes, her arms crossed over her chest. Nick could feel the animosity pouring off her but didn’t back away. ‘I’ll start by saying thank you.’
Goodie blinked and for a nanosecond her face registered surprise before she masked it.
‘Thank you for saving my life in that alleyway.’
She held his eyes for a moment, a small frown of confusion pulling her brows together; then she nodded, and after another few seconds she took a step back. Her dog followed her, and both female and canine eyes watched him with their heads cocked slightly to the side. Nick smiled at her, causing more confusion to cloud her features, but she remained silent. It would seem that this woman was a lot less chatty than his receptionist of the last month.
‘Right,’ he said, turning back to the rest of the room. ‘Now that we’ve got that out of the way my next question is: who do you work for?’
‘I run the security company your father hired with my partner Rob Davis. Our offices are based in Wales but take jobs all over the world,’ Sam told him. ‘Most of our operatives are ex-Special Forces. I believe that since MI6 took an interest in your protection they referred your father to us.’
‘So you work for him?’ Nick asked Goodie, who rolled her eyes but kept her mouth shut.
‘Goodie’s freelance,’ Sam said. ‘She works for herself.’
‘If you were concerned: Mr Southern is secure, sir,’ Lucinda a.k.a. Goodie cut in.
Nick rubbed the back of his neck mumbling, ‘Right, yeah, great.’ How had he forgotten about poor Ed? ‘Can I ask you both to stop calling mesirby the way?’ he asked as he crossed the room to his open-plan kitchen area. He took down a crystal glass, reached up for his brandy on the top shelf, and poured himself a healthy measure.
‘No problem, Mr Chambers,’ Sam said from the sofa. Nick glared over at him, then slammed back the shot before stalking over to the living area.
‘It’s Nick, okay; everyone calls me Nick. Mr Chambers is my father.’ Sam took another sip of tea and didn’t respond either way. Nick sighed. ‘So can you both tell me what your roles are? Is it just the two of you or are there more?’
‘I’m your close protection officer,’ Goodie told him. ‘Sam is the far guard. He does most of the route planning, IED checks, counter-sniping monitoring. We have another team for background checks and research.’
Nick sat down heavily in one of the armchairs and his mouth fell open.
‘Right, Nicky darling,’ Lila said, putting her cup of tea down on the coffee table and pushing up from the sofa. Nick started slightly – he’d forgotten she was even there. ‘I think that talk of IED checks might be my cue to go.’
‘I’ll take you home,’ Nick said, getting up from the chair.
‘No,’ Lila practically shouted, her eyes wide. ‘I mean …’ she continued in a more measured tone, ‘those nice police detectives from earlier are meeting me downstairs. They’ll take me. Then I need to start booking in all the therapy I’ll need to get over this.’
