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The old-fashioned bell clanged and the tram rattled off, leaving them on the busy sidewalk. “Wow.” Emma looked up at him. “I’m sorry for that last minute warning. I didn’t mean to make you scramble.”
He was still holding on to her arm. “No problem,” he said, his voice gentle. “You have a lot on your mind. I could see you chewing your way through it. So. Where do we go now?”
She looked around, momentarily disoriented. She’d never actually been to Heaven, had just had it pointed out to her one afternoon when she and Toby had had lunch at the Castro. They’d gone to that Somali lunch bar and had passed by this wildly funky umbrella shop.
“There. I remember that.” She pointed across the street. Then, with an inward curse, pulled out her cell. It was a sign of how upset she was that she hadn’t immediately used GPS. She pulled up Heaven’s website, stylishly minimal, with the area map. She stared at the map, looked up and looked back at the screen.
“May I?” Raul stood with his hand out.
She nodded and handed him her cell. Normally she was good with tech but GPS defeated her. She had a lousy sense of direction and found GPS hard to use in cities. In the countryside, too.
He focused on the screen, looked up, and took her elbow. “That way.”
“Okay. I’ll definitely take your word for it. I’m hopeless at reading maps. I imagine you guys were taught map reading skills.”
“Hmm.” He’d established a pace that was not too slow but not too fast for her in her heels. A Goldilocks pace. “Have you thought about how we’re going to get some intel once we’re inside Heaven?”
“No, actually.” It just now occurred to her that as the Toby-expert on their team, she had to come up with a finding-Toby strategy. But she was coming up a blank. “I don’t know. Ask someone?”
“Definitely. But we need a cover. I was thinking I could pose as Toby’s friend. I need to track him down.”
Emma smiled, refraining from looking at Raul head to toe, but she had already looked her fill. He was like a walking billboard for masculinity. “I don’t know, Raul. I don’t think you can pass as gay.”
He cocked his head. “I don’t need to. I can be a friend who’s worried. I have plenty of gay friends. A friend is a friend. Sexual orientation has nothing to do with it. Or I can be asking for my brother, who is a really good friend of Toby’s. I’ll see which story works best.”
She nodded. “Okay. That makes sense. I don’t think I’d ask the right questions and I think you would. Undercover missions are not in my wheelhouse but I imagine they are in yours. I’m a math and data nerd. Things either are or they are not. If the data seems ambiguous, it’s because you’re not interpreting it right.”
Somehow they were walking slowly, her hand on his arm, his hand over hers. He was watching her face with focus, but he often looked up and around then refocused on her. It wasn’t the looking around people often did to see if there was someone more interesting around, and he definitely wasn’t looking at other women. He seemed intensely focused on her. But he was very aware of his surroundings. Probably looking for possible danger.
Emma didn’t think there was possible danger but she was glad of his presence just the same. At bottom, what they were looking at was probably financial malpractice, maybe financial crimes. Serious, but not deadly.
Her sector, the financial sector, simply offered too many opportunities to make a lot of money, particularly if you were willing to cut corners. And the more you cut corners, the more you were rewarded. You had to have a strong moral core, or be basically indifferent to wealth not to be tempted. Emma was fairly indifferent. She earned well, her grandmother had left her some money together with her furniture, she was doing fine. She certainly wasn’t prepared to break the law for more money.
But in the end, it was only money. That’s all it was. Not that big a deal. Though there was a lot of money in play.
And then there was Toby. Toby’s absence was an anomaly, an outlier.
Which was why it was comforting to walk so closely to Raul, to feel his muscled arm under her hand and to feel his big hand over hers.
She’d just carried herself back a thousand generations of evolution. Where they’d be living in a cave and he carried a big club.
“I’ve been undercover, yeah,” Raul said and she was jolted out of her thoughts. She’d been down another rabbit-hole. “It’s not always a lot of fun. But my buddy Pierce has spent half his career undercover. Sometimes he’d dive so deep into the role he almost lost himself. Not lost his sense of mission, he’d never identify with the enemy, but he’d lose his sense of self.”
“That’s your good friend, right? Hope told me you guys went through a hard time together.”
And that handsome face just closed up tighter than a fist. Amazing to watch someone switch personality in a second.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice tight. His arm under her hand tensed.
Emma was really sorry. She hadn’t been thinking. She heard the story from Hope who’d heard it from her fiancée, Luke. Raul and Pierce were buddies who worked well together, had each other’s back. And then they’d had the commanding officer from hell. A psychopath who loved killing innocent civilians for target practice. But he was a psychopath whose uncle was a Senator, and head of the Senate Armed Forces Committee, so the psychopath was untouchable. Raul and Pierce had reported him anyway and had paid a heavy price.
Emma understood that, down to the bone. She, Felicity, Hope and Riley had worked for the Boss from Hell at the NSA. He hadn’t used civilians for target practice, but he was as toxic as they came and the four of them had had to band together in self-defense. The NSA was an institution that was top heavy with weird men and reporting a harassing boss had only gotten them demotions and warnings.
“It’s over now,” Raul said and she nodded. A good way of dealing with things – turn the page and start over. “And right now, we’re both where we want to be.” He turned his head and looked at her while squeezing her hand.
Well.
Her heart gave a thump at that.
