Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 71110 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 356(@200wpm)___ 284(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71110 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 356(@200wpm)___ 284(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
Daphne’s eyes flared slightly, and then she was nodding. “Thank you. Again, I’m so…”
“It’s no problem.” MaeBe was suddenly moving behind him. She slipped out of the door and put a hand on Lou’s shoulder. “You ready, kiddo? I think you’re going to like the gulag.”
“Uh, isn’t that a Russian prison?” Lou asked, but there was nothing but a grin on her face.
“Oh, yes. The big boss’s kids all speak Russian, and they have a twisted sense of humor. Well, the girls do. The boys run around and do dumb boy stuff. Like all boys.” MaeBe wrinkled her nose his way. “Even that one. Did you know that once he fell down an elevator shaft to save a cat?” She started to lead Lou toward the elevator. “I would have actually gotten in the elevator and tried to figure out what floor the cat was on, but Boomer panicked.”
“He fell into an elevator shaft?” Lou sounded like she wanted to hear that story.
Boomer glanced back in and Puddles and Sprinkles were both happily chewing on their dental bones while the cat he’d nearly died for was sunning herself near the balcony window. Molly was in her cage after having the run of the apartment all morning. They would be fine until the dogwalker came by at noon to take them around the block and make sure all the animals were okay. He settled his backpack and grabbed his keys, locking the door behind him. “It wasn’t that bad. Mae is a great storyteller, but she likes to exaggerate. Says it’s for dramatic effect.”
“So you didn’t fall down an elevator shaft?”
“Oh, I did, but it was only like two floors,” he replied. “Once I fell off a whole building, but that was during active duty. I’d escaped from the enemy camp, and I thought I could do that thing where you jump from one building to the next, but I’m not as good a jumper as I think I am. Luckily there were all these like drape things over the buildings, and they broke my fall.”
“Awnings. They’re called awnings.” Daphne carried a big tote bag emblazoned with Daphne’s Delights: Let Us Delight You on the side. She followed him toward the elevator. “You have a lot of crazy stories.”
He’d had some good times. “Well, I was Special Forces for a while, and then on a CIA team, so I’ve got a lot to work with.”
“You were CIA? Seriously? You’re joking, right?” Daphne sounded like she didn’t believe him.
Not a lot of people did. He supposed they heard CIA and thought supercool, highly intelligent James Bond type. “I wasn’t a spy. I was the dude who shot people. I was good at that.”
“Oh, I didn’t…”
“It’s cool. Most people don’t know how it really works.” He shouldn’t be hurt. He should be like his friends who would shrug and laugh it off, but no, he had to have all the feelings. “Not everyone’s a spy. Every army has its cannon fodder.”
“Hey.” She put a hand on his arm, and he stopped immediately. Her eyes were steady on him. “I’m sorry. Do you want to know why I didn’t think you could possibly be a CIA agent?”
“I think I probably know.”
“Because despite what the movies show you, spies need to blend in, and you don’t do that,” she said quietly. “You stand out, Boomer. When you walk in a room, I would bet every eye is on you.”
She’d flushed, like she’d admitted something she would rather have kept private. It would have been easy for her to shrug it off, but she’d made herself vulnerable.
“That’s because I’m so tall.” He wanted to see how far she would go with this.
Her eyes rolled, and her lips curled up slightly. “Yeah, it’s the tall thing not the stunningly gorgeous thing. Silly man.”
She strode away from him, catching up to MaeBe and Lou.
And he knew he had a shot.
Two hours later, Boomer sat in the conference room as Alex McKay went over the latest cases they had open.
“So we’ll be closing up the Sinclair file, and Hutch will be doing a training class for their cybersecurity team,” Alex was saying.
“I’m going to need him to look at some aspects of the Underwood Corporation case, too.” Michael Malone sat at the table, Theo Taggart on one side and Liam O’Donnell on the other. “Unless we’re letting Mae get back to her usual duties.”
“She’s in training.” Erin Taggart sat across from her husband, her hair up in its usual neat bun. “Consider her part time for a while. The physical aspect of training is going to take a good couple of months.”
“I also want her to keep a low profile,” Big Tag added. “Especially on corporate cases, since we never know exactly who’s watching.”
There was a general consensus that Tag was right and that Julia Ennis and her group had eyes everywhere.