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“Waiting a few minutes to start the comparison won’t change the outcome.” She reaches for me again. This time I lean on her and let her help me inside the library to one of the thick, upholstered chairs. I fall into it and rest my head against the high back, closing my eyes to pull in my focus. “Did you get a look at his eyes?”
I open mine and look at her. “I was a little busy trying not to get stabbed.”
She laughs softly and nods at my wound. “How’d that work out for you?”
I close my eyes again and ignore the question.
“Do you want me to call Bob? Or one of your other men?”
“No,” I growl and open my eyes again. “I don’t want word to get out what happened here tonight. Something like this will spread like wildfire on its own, and I want to catch this asshole before that happens.” I cringe when another wave of pain grips me. There’s something going on here beyond a knife wound, I’m thinking.
Jo apparently thinks the same thing. “I’m calling the on-call, get you checked out.”
“That’s not necessary.” I don’t know the doc the second-tier family uses, but I don’t need him, no matter how dizzy I feel.
“It is, and you know it.” Jo pulls out her phone and talks into it quickly and tersely, as she stalks across the room to the bar. She ends the call and very quickly thereafter, returns with two Jamesons. She offers one to me. “You know,” she comments after several seconds. “Having the guy break into my house is a bold move. Bold, and not very bright, given that you were on the premises.”
I take a long, long drink and savor the burn as it descends. The whiskey mixes with my blood and relaxes me just enough for me to unclench my jaw. “I don’t think he expected to find me here.”
She nods, her spine straightening. “Agreed. You caught him by surprise, and you shouldn’t have. Most of the second-tier houses have figured out we’re tracking down the mole. And most of them had their best people at tonight’s party.”
“Most, yes.”
“Which narrows our list of houses significantly,” she says with a grin. “Our mole just made a huge mistake. With him isolating himself like this, he’s made it even easier to flush him out of a crowd.”
I nod and take another pull off my Jameson. Something is still bothering me, something that’s been nagging at me the instant I spotted him in the house. “So how’d he get in? You have a front entrance, back entrance, and a basement entrance, all of them secured with your fancy equipment. How’d he bypass all that?”
She shakes her head. “I’ll have to check my—”
“No, dammit. Stop relying on your data. It’ll only tell you what it recorded and only after the event. You need to be more proactive instead of reactive.”
Jo stands and spikes her eyebrow, a look I’ve seen often enough to know I’ve just pushed a button. Good. “How about you embrace your methods, and I’ll embrace mine,” she says tartly.
“That’s not good enough. This isn’t about methods. It’s about keeping you safe. If I hadn’t been here—” I stop as my gut twists at the thought of what could have happened had the intruder pulled the knife on Jo instead of me. I could have lost her tonight. The pain from the knife wound is nothing compared to the pain now racking my body, tightening every muscle.
“I can take care of myself, Quinn. I’ve been doing it for a long time.”
I glance up at her. As much as I want to be pissed, yell at her to stop relying on her precious data, it’s who she is. I can’t change that. What I can do is promise to never leave her side again. She’s mine, I decide then and there, and not just for now. She’s mine from this day forward. She’s been mine since that day I first spotted her at the pub. She’s mine, and I protect what’s mine.
No matter how well she can do it…I can do it better.
Another wave of queasiness passes through me, and I grimace. I can do it better as soon as I figure out what the hell was on that knife, anyway.
