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If so, she wanted to know. “What was this Gary guy doing? Why walk in and risk giving himself away?”
Ben shrugged. “More than likely checking us out.”
“Then we should be fine.” One business guy against all of them. Add in Pax and Davis, and Jocelyn tried to imagine how quickly Gary would go down. Then she noticed the three of the guys in question staring at her...waiting. “Oh, come on. This team is scary. What sane person would take you all on?”
Joel burst out laughing. “Thank you, I think.”
“Let’s go through the blueprints, construction grids, anything that could connect these two buildings in physical ways.” The usual stern thread moved through Connor’s voice but the look on his face came off suspiciously like a smile. “Anything on the bank security tapes?”
Joel shook his head. “All wiped clean. The most recent is from three weeks ago.”
“What did Ed and Kent say about that?” Ben said as he took the seat next to her.
“They can’t explain it.”
In a few moves, they all shifted into their regular chairs, her next to Ben and Connor at the head. It was so natural that she wondered if they secretly practiced the maneuver.
With the head seat came the power, and Connor immediately stepped into the role. “Maybe this Gary person can.”
“You think he’s planning a bank robbery?” she asked, because she still couldn’t wrap her head around the attacks being separate from the pile of money that sat in the bank safe.
“He’s next door to the bank, which appears to be the epicenter of whatever’s happening there.” Ben punctuated each word with a thump of his finger against the table. “I’m willing to bet that balcony leads to Worldwide somehow.”
Joel paged through the papers and flipped the blueprints out and on top. “Not that I could see.”
“What do we know about him or the company?” Ben asked Joel.
“Wealthy financial guy. High-end brokerage. Lost his wife to cancer and a brother in a freak accident overseas. There’s no one else as far as I can tell.”
“So, we’ve got a guy with nothing to lose. That’s the worst kind.” Connor snatched a folder off the desk behind him and opened it. “We missed something. I want it found in the next thirty minutes. Call Davis and Pax and get them in on this by video conference.”
Ben was too busy swearing under his breath to look at anything. “Fine, but in thirty-one minutes I’m taking Jocelyn to the garage.”
“Sounds dirty,” Joel said without lifting his head from the blueprint study.
As if they had an extra few minutes to check out a car. But when no one explained, Jocelyn went searching for one. “Uh, why?”
Ben’s head came around and he stared at her. “Gun practice.”
The intense look shot right through her. His mood shifted to serious and the heat in his eyes told her not to argue. This wasn’t sexual, as Joel joked. This was more like an order. For the first in a long time, the tone didn’t make her throw up a solid emotional wall in defense.
“We’re going to shoot cars?” she asked when he didn’t cough up another answer. Leave it to Ben to go quiet all of a sudden, just when she needed more information.
“It’s not really a garage.”
Again he stopped and again she had to poke him until he said something helpful. “What is it?”
“A weapons depot of sorts—and you’re not going to shoot. We’d need a range and we can’t get to one without further endangering you. The plan is to work on aim, show you how the weapons work, get you comfortable holding one.” Ben laid it all out, then leaned back in his chair.
It was as if he waited for her to scream or have a fit. She half expected those feelings to rush up on her, but they didn’t. Anxiety bubbled inside her as it always did but the overwhelming need to flee didn’t hit her. She chalked that up to progress.
Probably also had something to do with the emotional free fall she’d been in for more than a week. That had one source—Ben. He smiled, he frowned, he spoke to her in a quiet whisper or he clenched his jaw, like he was doing now, and her heart performed a happy little spin.
He’d gone from potential date to bodyguard and now to the man she wanted in her life. The change smacked into her as her breath whooshed out. This was more than a free fall—it was a falling-for-him kind of thing.
She shoved back from the table and almost put her head between her knees. Would have if she didn’t have an audience.
When he frowned at her, she knew she wasn’t hiding the realization all that well but suspected he thought she got nauseous at the idea of guns. Not at all. She got it now. Sometimes the good guys needed to be armed.
