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Then my brother hugged him.
Jackson accepted it, then turned away without a word and left.
What was that about? Why did he need comforting?
There was more to my incident tonight than met the eye. And I suspected that the missing factor wasn’t anything to do with me.
Chapter 5
Jackson
Outside the tower, I crunched the gravel under my boots, stomping back to my car, the black Toyota Hilux pickup my refuge.
Ben caught up with me. “Wait up.”
Embarrassment washed over me. Raphael had already informed me that my trauma was showing. I’d snapped at Ariel, jumped to conclusions, and he’d instantly known I wasn’t okay.
And the reason why.
Now my boss was presumably going to order me to fix my head as well.
I wheeled around. “I know how this looks. At my interview, ye made the point about me overreacting when it came to the safety of women. I swear I’ve got this.”
Ben furrowed his brow, his dark-blond hair messy where he’d been running his hands through it. He had a few years on me but was a thousand times steadier.
I wanted his respect and to keep this job.
“Is that why ye thought I came after ye? It isn’t. I agree that we should be treating this as a worst-case scenario, even if Ariel doesn’t want to hear it.”
I closed my mouth, relieved that it wasn’t just me.
Ben offered a grim smile. “In that respect, I consider your instincts to be your superpower. I employed ye because of them. I trust that history won’t cloud your judgement and only came out to say I want timely updates. Daisy’s mixed up in this, too.”
My embarrassment lifted. “We should do more. Get a list of exes from Ariel. Anyone with a grudge. She needs a protection protocol. We should organise a patrol.”
He held up a hand. “Leave that with me. You seemed to get her back up with your questioning.” He tilted his head. “Did the two of ye have a fight?”
If only. I would never reveal the real reason. “No.”
“Huh.” Ben accepted my answer and moved on. “I’ll go back upstairs and get that list, though my money is on our previous suspect. Raphael’s talking to the police, and we’ll have a couple of people drive around tonight to keep an eye on things. Go get to work.”
He clapped me on the shoulder then returned to the tower. Valentine passed him at the door and jerked his chin at me.
“Heading back to the hangar?”
Valentine and I had recently both started living in the bunkhouse—a space made out of huge, metal shipping containers that had been constructed under the cover of the aircraft hangar and made into a temporary home. It provided comfortable, if a little chilly in February, accommodation for us, the pilots who were training at the helicopter school, and the occasional overnight mountain rescue team member. In the days we’d been staying there, though, it had been just us.
I confirmed my destination, and the two of us drove convoy out along the river, passing the second castle on the estate, and through the forest to the open moor where the wide aircraft hangar sat, bright lights marking its presence in the landscape.
The drone of a helicopter returning to base and the clunk of something mechanical within the structure had become familiar now, just as the scent of engine oil was my homecoming.
Before I left my car, I downloaded the dashcam footage from earlier, then sent a quick message to Leo’s father-in-law, Gordain, to ask him to do the same from Leo’s car which had been ahead of mine. I didn’t want to disturb the rock star himself. He and Viola had better things to do, like looking after a newborn.
Armed with one set of footage on my phone and the other on its way, I travelled through to the bodyguard team office, waving greetings to the folk still working around the huge open-fronted building. Valentine kept pace with me.
The big man drew up a chair next to mine and pulled at the band that kept his hair tied back. I uploaded the video to our data storage then cued it up on a monitor, talking him through the process. He’d barely been here a week and had a military background, rather than any protection experience. I’d worked with Ben on Daisy’s case but barely had more than that myself. Clearly Ben, and the service owner, Gordain, had seen something in us they liked.
Onscreen, my headlights picked up the car ahead and the dark road, the early fall of night hampering visibility. I spooled through, recognising when we turned onto the loch road by the occasional glint coming off the water.
