Now You See It (26 page)

Chapter Twenty-One

“
Zips?”
Gemma asked as soon
as the tape came off her mouth. The big man with the huge gun and black body
armor had been amazingly gentle as he removed the duct tape from Gemma’s face
and arms, but her lips hurt when she spoke. She could only imagine how painful
Brady’s had to be.

“Never mind,” Brady said.

“Yeah,” said their rescuer, “I’d like to see you explain that
one to the lady.”

“Dude, I’m not even going to try. Hand me my pants, will you?”
He caught them in midair and added, as he dressed himself with total aplomb,
“Gemma, meet Casimir Kovashvili. And we won’t go into his handle, at all.”

Caz laughed and bent over Doug’s body. “Nice grouping. Three in
the ten ring. Not bad for a spook.”

“Who is this guy?” Gemma asked.

“If he told you...” Caz let it trail off.

Gemma rolled her eyes.

“The rest of my guys are outside, and the corpsmen,” he
said.

“Don’t need ’em.” Brady answered.

Caz lifted Gemma to her feet. “You gotta stay here ’til the
cops come, Brady. He’s a crime scene,” he said with a tip of his head toward the
body on the floor.

“Yeah, I figured. Gemma, you okay? You want a ride to the
hospital?”

“No. I want to stay right here. And I want some explanations.”
She pressed her lips together and put her fists on her hips.

He goggled at her. “Now? Ow!” He reached up to touch a raw spot
on his mouth. “About what?”

“How did you know about the ginger in my fridge?”

“What?”

Neither of them noticed Caz ducking out of the line of
fire.

“That day I nearly passed out—” Gemma yelled.

“Is
that
what this is all
about?”

“And I told you Nikki could be shoved into a closet by a
burglar. And sure enough, the very next day, there she was, stuffed into a
closet while the house was ransacked. What was I supposed to think?”

“Maybe about how many people you’ve told that stupid anecdote
to besides me,” he raged back at her.

Even as she opened her mouth to protest the injustice of it
all, she remembered saying those exact words at a party last Christmas. Her
angry retort died unspoken.

“And I saw the fucking ginger when you got the milk out of the
fridge—which saved my life, as I remember, since you put it in what you were
laughingly calling ‘tea.’”

Their eyes met, and they started laughing.

Gemma grew serious. “You still haven’t explained the file.”

“It’s a phony. It seemed like such a great idea when the Agency
guys dreamed it up. Who’d have guessed there was a bad-ass in Asia with almost
my same name? Close enough, at any rate, that the file just sort of happened,
without a lot of fuss and hoo-hah. And it worked just the way it was supposed
to. Only then the damn thing was supposed to go away, not keep popping up like
something out of a bad ghost movie.”

“I knew you’d find me. I was only afraid it wouldn’t be in
time.”

“Thank your brother. He got the warehouse images, before he got
too stoned. Then he started singing. Leave it to the Irish. I bet your Mom used
to sing ‘All Bound for Morning Town’ to you guys as a lullaby, am I right?”

“How’d you know that? Oh. Mike.”

“Yeah. He got the ‘Hammer’ part of the name, too.”

“Hammerschmidt and Mornington.” She gave him a proud smile.
“You guys are awesome.”

“The human mind on drugs is a fearsome thing.”

“Yeah, I get that. Now do I get
that
?” she asked, nodding at the ring box he had lifted off the
table. “Never mind,” she said, and twinkled a slanted look at him as the ring
blinked onto her finger.

He pulled her into his arms and winced as a grin broke through.
“About those lessons, Grasshopper....”

* * * * *

About the Author

Cáit has been writing stories since she could hold a crayon to a wall. Her first novel,
Scheresade—
written as Ronit Lèvy and published in 2009 by The Wild Rose Press—started its life on an empty paper grocery bag and knocked around for years, written somewhere between raising a family and following the wandering life of a grant-funded academic. Along the way, Cáit flipped burgers, worked as a translator, a professional musician, manager of three multi-college distance learning consortia, dean of an extension campus and freelance evaluation consultant. When she’s not writing, she studies languages—Norwegian and Irish Gaelic make numbers eighteen and nineteen—and listens to Mozart and Faroese metal.

She wrangles a team of gifted techs at work, and two cats and an Alaskan malamute at home. Cáit is a PRO member of the Greater Seattle chapter of Romance Writers of America, and also belongs to the Kiss of Death and Futuristic, Fantasy and Paranormal online chapter. She’s a
Firefly
Browncoat, an obsessed
Outlander
fan and a blue card member of the Society for Creative Anachronism. She wears her “Nerd” T-shirts with great pride and insists she isn’t
really
ADD—just multifaceted. (That sound you just heard was the Norns laughing.)

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ISBN: 978-14268-9458-9

Copyright © 2012 by Caitlín Donnelly

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