Page 79 of License to Kill

“Why are you looking at me like that, little vixen? Is it that unbelievable I might actually be so vocal about something like this?”

“Yes,” I replied, and I hoped he heard the skepticism in my voice.

“Deserved,” he replied. “Trust can’t be earned just from backpedaling a little and permitting change, babe. She may never respect either one of us again, and that would be deserved. And she definitely can’t begin learning to respect Jake again as long as we’re hovering and making even more of a mess. As such, I’ve taken some steps.”

“Steps?” Pauline asked, and she crossed her arms over her chest.

“Steps. I am evicting these two troublemakers for a while, putting them into the care of someone qualified, and refusing to permit them back into our territory until I receive a satisfactory report regarding their progress. I have recruited several capable people for this purpose. One of them hates you almost as much as our daughter-in-law does. If that doesn’t tip you off on what’s going on, I’ll wait for you to figure it out.”

“You called her, didn’t you?”

Her? I twisted in Jake’s hold and stared up at him.

“Don’t look at me, Karma. I have no idea what he’s talking about, either.”

“Amelia,” Jake’s father announced. “She’ll be an excellent grounding influence for your mate, Jake, and I’ve told her she can tenderize you as often as she wants if she feels you’re stepping out of line. Amelia comes with a second individual, one who can provide counseling. I went over your head on this, Pauline, because your psychologist of choice only managed to barely salvage the situation, where my choice might actually do something positive about it.”

Jake’s father had called Amelia? I frowned. On one hand, I liked her a lot—and she was the only one who’d believed, without a doubt, Jake was supposed to be mine.

No, that wasn’t right, either. Mellisa believed it, too.

“You called her, too?” Pauline demanded, her tone exasperated.

“Of course I called her. Who else would I call? This isn’t about us or our wishes. She understands Karma better than the rest of us, and Karma doesn’t need what we want for her. She needs what’s best for her, and Mellisa has a knack for that sort of thing. We don’t, as is obvious from our current situation.”

The world had taken a sharp left turn on me, and I wasn’t sure what to think about the drastic changes in Jake’s father. “Has your father been kidnapped and replaced with a doppelgänger, Jake?”

“I suspect so.”

“Jake,” his mother warned.

“To them, they have good reason to believe such a thing. Don’t rebuke them for their skepticism. We’ve earned it. So, this can work one of two ways, Pauline. You can go along with my idea, clean up your attitude, and work towards earning Karma’s trust again, or you can wage a war with our son over his woman—and we will not be the winners of that war. He tried to ride both horses once, and he almost lost her as a consequence—and there’s no guarantees he won’t lose her due to our foolish pride. He knows that. You know it. I know it. I recommend you take the route of attitude adjustment, book time with a psychologist of my choice, and figure out where you’ve gone wrong and how you can go about fixing what you’ve broken.”

“And what about you?”

“I’ll pay the consequences of my actions as she sees fit. My attitude has already been adjusted, and I’m taking the appropriate steps to find a solution to this problem. I’m sure Karma will come up with some heinous way to make me pay for my crimes. I might start with providing her with an unlimited supply of keys she can practice kicking out of my hands, unloaded and broken guns she can pistol whip me with, and generally allow her to use me as a combat dummy to get back into physical shape. In her current condition, it could be half a year before she’s ready to even apply to rejoin the FBI in an active duty role as a special agent.” Sebastian’s attention focused on me. “I have made arrangements for some interior work that’s blended with minimal field work for you, Karma. Jake will maintain his active status as a special agent, and he will be armed at all times. You’ll have to deal without a firearm unless you happen to venture into an open carry state or can be bothered with any licensing you need. This interior work may come with a private investigator’s license to give you some freedom while you’re checking into things.”

I didn’t want to be a private investigator. Private investigators annoyed me on a good day; they insisted on poking their noses into organized investigations, and they sometimes neglected to maintain evidence in a way that made it viable for court. I’d seen too many cases where an idiot private investigator had polluted a crime scene, rendering potential good evidence inadmissible to court because of their lack of care. “A what license?”

Jake snickered. “She likely did a mental review of every case we had screwed up on us thanks to a private investigator’s lack of proper training and neglect, reached ten, and had her frayed temper snap. I should let her go so she can beat you. It’ll be good for her.”

Mason chuckled, dared to enter my personal space, and ruffled my hair. “We all get pissy over the private investigators, even us interior mules. You’ll be the first private investigator we actively like and would willingly work with. It’s an honored position. You even get your own FBI slave to follow you around and serve as grunt labor.”

I snapped my teeth at his hand, which did nothing to discourage him. “Being an unarmed private investigator sounds like my personal hell.”

“You’ll be all right. View it as a warmup for coming back to active duty. It’ll give you something useful to do, give you time to get back on your feet, and will help augment our efforts. It was my idea. You’re the type.”

“The type?”

“The needing to be doing something useful and physical type.”

“It’s true.” Jake chuckled, and he kissed the top of my head. “It’s probably just to sniff out leads the FBI deemed not strong enough to justify sending a pair for. You know how you hate when they can’t send people to check leads that could become important—and then they forget to ask local law enforcement to look.”

“Inefficiency,” I spat.

As I hadn’t pushed him away, Jake pulled me close, wrapped both of his arms around me, and tested his luck with a kiss to my cheek. “Yes, yes. I know. You can be a good little investigator, properly record and gather evidence, and work out what’s important and what isn’t. If you’re not happy with the work, then we’ll find something you are happy with. It’s worth a try. I’ll be armed and on duty, so that can work, and if you wanted to use your private investigator license to help the defense, well, I certainly can’t stop you.”

Hmm. I considered that, and as the negotiations could benefit me, I tolerated his advances. “Sometimes, I wish we’d been able to go to bat more often for the defense,” I confessed. “Especially those shit cases where we were pretty certain the accused was innocent, but we hadn’t found sufficient evidence to prove it because we’d closed our end of the case up to management’s satisfaction.” It happened more often than I liked, as the FBI preferred to get cases wrapped to free agents for the latest critical situation. The idea of sending the wrong person to prison hadn’t sat well with me then and wouldn’t in the future.