Karin Kallmaker - Above Temptation

“I’m glad I came along, then.”

“You and me both. Dinner is on the house the moment he gets back.”

Kip turned to see the waitress—name tag Sherry—blinking back tears. She was willing to bet the young woman hadn’t had a moment of self-defense training. “I’ll show you how to do that, plus a couple of Let Go defense moves.”

“That would be so great. My dad will make me quit if he finds out I got hassled, but I need the money. And Shorty’s good to work for. You want coffee?”

Kip hopped up on a bar stool and accepted the steaming cup.

“Time of day and location don’t really have much to do with getting harassed. Sad fact of life.”

Sherry nodded and her skin lost some of its pallor. “Haven’t seen you in here before, but I just started a few months ago.”

“The old waitress, she’s okay?” Kip sipped, then added cream.

“Oh sure. Got a baby on the way, didn’t want to work nights.”

The back door of the diner slammed. Sherry called out,

“Shorty! Filet, medium-rare. With shrooms and onions.”

Kip grinned. “I’m really not that hungry.”

“You can take it with you—be dandy for breakfast. No pecan pie today, but there’s apple. I think we’ve got some caramel ice cream.”

“Okay, now that’s sounding very appealing.”

“You drive here from Seattle tonight? Kind of late, isn’t it?”

The question was asked as if Seattle were on the other side of the planet, not just two hours by road.

“At least there’s no traffic once you’re south of Tacoma.

Olympia had already rolled up the sidewalks when I went through. I had a late meeting. Work, you know.”

“Yeah, can’t live with it and can’t eat without it.” Sherry busied 26

herself at the carousel where homemade pies were gleaming with sugar and glazes.

“We have a few minutes. Let me show you a basic move to break someone’s grip on your arm.”

Sherry was a quick learner. Kip enjoyed their impromptu lesson. Enjoyed, too, the warm human contact, especially with a woman. Hopping up onto her bar stool again when her dinner was served, she admitted that her batteries were just about run dry, and her social life had to be a wasteland when putting a chokehold on Sherry was the closest thing to a hug she’d had in months. And there was little hope that would change.

Fall mornings dawned crisp and clean on the Olympic Peninsula. Seventy-foot pines swayed in the light wind, and the thin roar greeted Kip as she opened her eyes. It could almost be the sea. She could almost be on vacation. No work, no ex-girlfriends, no regrets.

She rolled out of the loft bed and pulled on her robe and socks. The wood floor was cold and she knew from experience that it was hard to climb down the ladder from the loft if she was shivering. Had she not arrived so late last night she’d have left a fire banked in the stove to help take some of the chill off. Instead, she’d only managed to get the groceries and boxes brought in before crashing.

The sky outside was dotted with puffed clouds against the blue, but the light was darkening. Rain later, perhaps. Now was the perfect time for the hike she couldn’t afford to take. She felt the urge to pummel something. Sure she was flattered by Tamara Sterling’s request, but a day she’d planned to spend in the dogged pursuit of nothing at all was now wall-to-wall work.

She loved her job. There was no job she’d rather have. Well, no job she’d rather have that she could have. Secret Service and its simulators be damned.

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Pulling on an old sweatshirt and jeans, she went outside for wood. The cold morning air snapped her awake better than any coffee ever could. After reheated filet for breakfast she decided that work or no work, there was not enough split wood ready for winter visits.

She felt a lot better after a half hour of swinging an ax. The rhythmic thump of ax into wood, punctuated with the crack of splitting pine, became its own kind of music. She pictured the face of the supervisor who had told her she could either take a routine Justice Department job or resign the Service altogether.

He’d just been delivering the news. It wasn’t his policy. No final score on the simulator, no career.

She drove the ax into the image of his face and grimaced.

After all these years, it still hurt, apparently. Tamara Sterling’s questions had poked the scar.

Breathing hard, she stopped to stack for a while, letting the ache in her shoulders ease. She was out of shape from a job that had too much time at a desk.

She did love her work. The bigger the investigation, though, the more paperwork. Preparing for testimony was time-consuming. Few people thought about the painstaking effort it took to catalog work papers and itemize evidentiary statements.

Sure, a trainee could do part of it, but it was still a big pain in the ass. She pictured her boss’s face on the next log as she prepared to swing the ax. She liked Emilio, a lot. It felt really good to chop him to bits.

Too much paper. Too much documenting.

Not enough thinking, puzzling, solving.

Not enough laughing, not enough fun, not enough jogging, sailing or tae kwon do. She was dull. Dull and boring. A bad friend, most of the time. A bad daughter, a distant sibling—well, that wasn’t entirely her fault.

And lonely. She pushed that unwelcome thought away.

She pictured Tamara Sterling’s face, the woman who had ruined her first weekend off in months. What an arresting, 28

intriguing, dominating, driven, self-assured, brilliant, annoying woman. She planted the image of that chiseled face on the log and drove the ax into it as hard as she could, splitting the chunk of pine evenly in two.

Showered and sated with peanut butter and jelly, which tasted all the better for the exercise and mountain air, Kip unpacked the first of the boxes from her trunk. In short order the small dining area was covered with folders and paperwork. She gave the sofa a longing look. It was positioned perfectly for reading, dozing and gazing out the window at the forest. The tartan throw folded on one end had been a fine nap companion more than once. But not today.

Okay, she had to hand it to Sterling. The worksheet she’d started was plain as day as to where she’d left off and what accounts she’d already checked. Kip had to check them herself again, but the paperwork was tagged and arranged by the SFI book, making the task easier.

Rain dripped, then drummed on the shingle roof as the laptop’s drive spun on. She’d timed her outdoor chores well.

Some people would no doubt think it strange that she was in the remote woods, listening to the rain and working on a laptop computer no heftier than a magazine. It wasn’t the first time, though. She was grateful for the technology that let her work so far from home. Of course that same technology made the very crimes she tracked down all the easier to commit.

Win some, lose some, she thought. Meanwhile, the solitude of the trees, the steady patter of the rain...it felt very, very good.

The cabin had no phone land line, and with a delicious sense of being bad, she switched off her cell phone and didn’t launch her e-mail program. There. Alone at last.

With a regretful sigh, she opened her electronic diary and made a few summary comments about the assignment, the times and places she’d met her client—Sterling was just another client—

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and recorded the paperwork she’d received. Keeping such a log was an SFI requirement and she was making a concerted effort to treat this assignment like any other. Her summary made, she turned to the actual work. First she had to discern the scope of the problem. Then she’d work on ETO—eliminating the obvious.