“Josh?”
“Yeah?”
“You OK?”
“Do you want an honest answer?”
There was a long silence, and then Colin spoke. “No.” Sensing something odd about the room, he spun, glanced around, and then huffed in surprise. They were totally alone. Their security detail had slipped out the door after depositing their luggage. He turned to Joshua, who met his eyes, his own wide with surprise.
“Wherearethey?”
Colin tilted his head toward the door. “Probably have a station set up right outside.”
“My god, Colin, suddenly it feelsweirdnot to have armed guards hovering around us!”
Colin’s shoulders lifted in a shrug.
“And now we go back to work?”
Colin glanced at his watch and sighed. “For a while, yeah. Then they’ll bring us back here.”
“It feels like it should be midnight.”
“It’s just past 11:00 in the morning,” Colin told him, his voice weary. He took Joshua’s arm and stood, his suit jacket, shirt, and tie draped over his arm. “C’mon, bud. Let’s get back to our offices. Let this damned day end. Then we can crash.” He leaned toward Joshua and kissed his cheek. “I know we need to talk about all this.”
Joshua heaved a huge sigh as he grabbed his work clothes from the couch.“We also need to unpack. This is, evidently, going to be our new home for a while.”
“Not for long, I hope.”
“I suppose that’s up to Lexi Moreno.”
“I prefer to think it’s up to Charlottesville law enforcement.”
Joshua scoffed out a laugh. “I wish I had as much faith in them as you do.”
Colin led Joshua to the door and opened it. Outside their door, a small desk had been set up, and two of their securityteam were bent over it, studying a printout of the Omni Hotel’s floor plan. Several locations on the map had been marked with a large red ‘X,’ and Colin pointed at one of them. “I take it we won’t be going outthere.”
“Those exits are too exposed and difficult to protect, so no. We won’t be going out there.” She glanced at Colin, and her brows narrowed. “Where’s your Kevlar?”
“On the goddamn floor, and that’s where it’s staying.”
She heaved a sigh and waved in dismissal. “Fine! It’s not worth the fight. Are you two ready to go?”
“We are,” Colin told her. “What time will you pick us up?”
“Pick you up? That suggests we’ll be dropping you off, and we won’t. We’ll be with you every minute, so it’s more a matter of whenyouchoose to leave.”
Colin nodded, and Sarah motioned them toward a door marked ‘Private.’ “Through there,” she instructed. “Emily’s waiting. The Suburban’s ready to go.”
The door led to a corridor adjacent to the freight elevator, and in minutes, they were on the hotel’s ground floor and moving toward the black Chevy. As they climbed into the vehicle, Sarah turned to Joshua. “Emily will stay with you at the clinic. We’ve asked your supervisor to switch you to an interior office… temporarily.”
Joshua reared back in surprise. “What?! You did…what?”
Sarah shot him a look. “Josh, your office has four big windows, two of which face the goddamn parking lot. None of them are bulletproof. If someone wanted to put a bullet in your brain, they’d have a clear shot from six different locations. I’m not giving them that opportunity.”
Colin clutched his arm. “She’s right, baby.”
“You don’t have a choice, Josh. You’ve already been moved.”
