“Galatasaray.” At her blank stare he elaborated, “Soccer team in Istanbul. My uncle used to play for them.”
“Oh. Right.” Her face heated as she turned to scan the walls beside the entrance. At times Oz’s dry, flat tone made her feel so stupid. She had to get over that. Immediately.
“This should be easy.” She nodded to the wall left of the doorframe. “How about we move the Swedish flag up three inches, the Gala-whatever—”
“Galatasaray,” he repeated.
“We move that one down three inches, and put the panel in between.”
“Fine.”
“Good. That’s the last one. I’ll tell Darryl.”
She was on her way down the hall when Oz grabbed her arm. She pivoted, lungs tight, breaths rasping, not because of what he might say but because his loose touch seared through her polyester suit jacket, heating her arm from fingertips to shoulder blade.
Her jaw slackened as she sought the dark depths of his eyes, looking for some sign that he felt that, too.
She found none.
Her ears heated as his hand dropped, his expression impassive. What was wrong with her? He wasn’t her type at all. He was too skinny, too brainy, and if the contents of the study were any indication, too nerdy to ever pique her interest.
She snapped mental fingers to halt her wandering thoughts. The complication of romantic interest was the last thing she needed. Laster than last, even. So far down her list of priorities for her newish, old-ish, ex-Army life, it wasn’t even in the same notebook. She couldn’t start crossing things off until she took care of the first item at the very top: Figure out who you are.
And right below it: Decide who you want to be.
Neither one ended in: with a man at your side. That was the whole point. She wasn’t Kate the Soldier anymore, she was sick of being Kate the One-Night Stand or Kate the Fuck Buddy and she’d never even met Kate the Girlfriend.
She was done hiding behind versions of herself that gave other people control—her commanding officers, her erstwhile lovers. She had to answer these questions on her own, make her own decisions, finally pick her own path and sprint all the way down it.
“So?” Oz prompted, ripping her out of her thoughts. “Anything?”
“Sorry, what?”
“Yesterday you said you’d look through my social-media stuff to see if anything jumped out as a credible threat. What did you think?”
“Sure, yeah, I had a look last night.” She exhaled. “I’ll be honest, my expertise is physical security—alarms, response teams, bodyguards. I won’t pretend to know anything about the psychology of stalking or cyber bullying. In general you seem to have a lot of admirers, and most of what I read was really positive. Then there’s the streak of stupid, over-the-top racism that seems to be just part of the Internet, which I wouldn’t consider credibly threatening. On the other hand, there was one comment that kept appearing—”
“Ausonius seventy,” he filled in.
“Exactly. What is that?”
“John Ausonius was a Swedish gunman. In the early nineties he targeted immigrants in Stockholm, shooting them using a laser sight. Luckily he was a terrible shot, so most of them survived.”
“Charming. And seventy?”
“My house number.”
Kate paused, digesting this information, careful not to let the shrill warning siren whining behind her eyes show in her expression. “Well, that’s creepy.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Maybe we should price out bulletproof glass,” she murmured, foolishly thinking out loud.
That set him off, shattering the accord she’d worked so hard to build over the last two hours.
“Stop.” He held up his palms, speaking quickly and forcefully, his clipped accent becoming more pronounced as his agitation grew. “Let me make something absolutely clear. I agreed to basic security measures. Basic. An alarm system, beams in the yard, a couple of motion lights. Not ideal, but I’ll live with it. Anything else is a step too far, an admission of fear that I’m not willing to make. First, there’s no way you’re replacing the glass in this house. Second, I don’t want any visible changes to the outside. I’m not building a fence, or stringing barbed wire, or installing bars on the windows—”
“Of course not, bars won’t stop a bullet.”
That shut him up.
“I’m not trying to scare you,” she told him, keeping her voice calm and reasonable. “Probably someone’s just being provocative, throwing in Ausonius’s name. Your job is to shrug it off and keep living your life. My job, though, is to be overcautious and paranoid and respond to the slightest perceived threat. We won’t make any additional changes today, but I have to think about the best way to respond to the mention of a long-range gunman.”
Oz’s tight jaw and thinned lips illustrated his unhappiness with her answer. She braced for another argument when a crash resonated from the kitchen. Oz was past her and racing down the stairs before she could say his name.
She should chase after him, she thought, be ready to smooth over whatever catastrophe had occurred. She should shield the poor technician who was probably already on the receiving end of Oz’s misdirected anger. She should fix this situation. She should own it.
Instead she drifted to the window and gazed over the front yard.
Oz’s house was beautiful. His life was beautiful. He had more money than he needed, more space than he needed, more cars than any single man needed. He was a professional athlete, paid ridiculous sums to play a game, and not even a particularly popular game. According to his Instagram, he had friends, family, and plenty of time to take exotic vacations.
Why was he so pissed off?
Her vision focused on the mailbox at the end of the lush lawn. He’d clearly made an effort to remove the graffiti—a desperate effort, leaving rough scrape marks from what she guessed was steel wool. It hadn’t worked. Though some of the interior of each stroke had disappeared, the outline of the swastika was unmistakable.
She imagined Oz bent over the mailbox in the evening twilight, scrubbing futilely at the awful symbol while his neighbors slowed their cars as they drove past. Despite everything, her heart tugged.
She jogged down the stairs, grateful for the website which had informed her Oz was five-foot-eleven—only three inches taller than her—and as such gave her permission to never, ever wear heels in his company. She found the left-back by the sink, examining a superhero-printed coffee mug.
Bryce, the youngest of the workmen, raised his hands to her in innocence. “It fell into the sink and made a racket but it’s not broken, I swear.”
She winked at the nineteen-year-old, then spoke in a commanding tone. “How about you quit throwing this man’s possessions around and do something useful. There should be some solvent and scrub brushes in the truck, go outside and fix that mailbox.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Kate watched Bryce scurry out of the room, and when she looked back, Oz’s gaze was on her. His expression had changed very slightly—softened, warmed. She dared a fleeting a smile, but got nothing in return.
Maybe she was seeing things.
“I thought of something,” he said, his tone unreadable. “There’s one more room I spend a lot of time in, where it might be hard to hear the alarm or get to a panel quickly.”
“Which one?”
“The