“I can’t stay here,” she said, taking a seat. “We both know it. Callie won’t like it, but I won’t put her or the baby in danger.”
“The chances of anyone coming after you are low,” he replied. A half-hearted statement at best.
“But there is a chance. I don’t think they’ll find me, and even if they did, silencing me won’t net them any advantage. They’d be stupid not to think I haven’t already given their description to someone. Still, the chance isn’t zero, and it’s not one I want to take.”
“You going to stay at the club?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I have a friend who has a cabin up here. On the east side of the lake. She doesn’t use it often, and before you start protesting about being so far from town and out on my own, my friend is Harper Miller.”
He blinked. “You and Harper Miller are friends?”
She nodded. “Instead of texting the personal security firm I usually use when needed, I reached out to her. Her cabin is secure, but she agreed that the HICC people can come out and have a look. If they think anything else is needed, she’s given me the go-ahead to have it installed.”
He stared. “How do you know Harper Miller?”
Daphne chuckled. Harper was a famous recluse—the only child of a couple who’d made billions in the early days of the computer industry. She’d become a household name at the age of nine when four men abducted her on her way to school. It had taken two weeks to find her, but they’d found her—in a hole in a cave deep in the desert of Arizona. Three of the four men died in the altercation that led up to her discovery, and the fourth was still in jail. And would be for the rest of his life. Harper and her parents disappeared from public life after that, and other than the occasional “where are they now?” podcast or show, very few people spoke their names anymore.
Only that wasn’t entirely true. Daphne had met Harper fifteen years ago at the first writing retreat she ever attended—both of them there to explore, to potentially foster, their urge to createsomething.
Now Harper published under the name Peter Ramsey, her paternal grandfather’s first name and her mother’s last name, while Daphne published under the name DL Callahan, Daphne Louise Callahan, the last name a nod to the grandparents she’d loved so much. Neither she nor Harper had known then where the journey would take them, but they’d stayed in touch since that first retreat, cheering each other on with late-night phone calls, sending flowers and champagne and chocolates for every success as well as every release that hit snags. They’d only seen each other a dozen or so times since that first meeting, but sometimes, friendship didn’t need physical proximity.
“I just do,” she said, protecting her friend as she answered Gabe’s question. He wouldn’t breathe a word, but trust was fragile, and she wouldn’t break what she and Harper had.
Gabe rolled his eyes but didn’t press. “And she has a cabin nearby?”
Daphne nodded. “I can grab my stuff from my rental and head out there tomorrow night. That will give Callie’s HICC colleagues a chance to do what they need to before I move in.”
His lips twitched. “I don’t think I want to be around when you tell Callie you aren’t staying here.”
Daphne laughed. No, it would not be a pretty conversation. “Coward.”
“Definitely.”
Her laughter faded. “I’ll spend as much time with her, with both of you, as we’re able, but I won’t sleep here. It’s when we’re most vulnerable.”
“I could ask some of the guys to stay, too,” Gabe offered. “Maybe beef up my own security.”
“Where? You have three bedrooms, but one is an office. And the work you’re planning to finish the walk-out basement hasn’tstarted yet. Besides, with HICC on the job and every one of the Falcons on the lookout, I don’t think it will be long before you either figure out why those two guys were hired to kill Lovell, or they try again and get caught.”
Gabe tilted his head. “You really don’t think Daisy is involved?”
She shrugged, repeating what she’d told Callie earlier. “To be fair, though, the odds of him having two people who want him dead are pretty small, so maybe I’m off base.”
“You’re not going to go down the rabbit hole of it being some conspiracy from his—from our—past? From when we were all serving?”
Now it was her turn to roll her eyes. “How long has he been out? Six years? Not after all this time and not only him. If he’s being targeted for something back then, then my guess is at least one of the rest of you would be, too. Didn’t you all serve together at one point or another?”
He nodded. “Not all fifteen of us at the same time, but yeah, Lovell was on the same team as Superman, Wesson, and Einstein. The rest of us all worked with him at some point as they rotated our deployments and missions.”
“So it’s unlikely something from his time in the military.” She paused, then exhaled. “Occam’s razor says it should be Daisy. My writer brain might be getting away from me.”
“We’ll see,” he said, rising. “Callie has a load of clothes ready to go in the laundry room. Why don’t you change, and I can throw your stuff in with it and start it tonight.”
She smiled and rose, too. “I don’t care what my sister says, you are a prince among men.”
CHAPTER SIX
Lovell, Mantis, and Wesson followed Chad, the head of HICC’s West Coast division, into the main HICC building late the next morning. They could have exchanged information over the phone, but Mantis and Charley needed to meet with Chad and Sabina about their upcoming wedding. The affair would be small, but word had gotten out that the former president’s granddaughter was getting married, and the press was already making a fuss. No one wanted the day disturbed by anyone not specifically invited, so HICC was upping security around the venue—William Warwick’s home. He had Secret Service, of course, but a few of HICC’s finest would help keep the private event private.
