Page 21 of Cuckoo (Kindred)

Elevating her chin, she observed her sumptuous surroundings. She lived in a huge manor house with a man who had plenty of means. Keeping her nest eggto herself in light of the turn her life had taken seemed rather selfish.

“So you’ll get it to us?” her father asked. “Has to be soon like.”

“Let me see what I can work out,” she said, and the line disconnected without any attempt at an awkward goodbye.

Her family was as broken as Brodie’s, except the fractures in her relationships with her relatives weren’t caused by death, not all of them anyway. Given the losses she’d experienced recently, she should take some time and do something about those fractures before she lost the chance for reconciliation for good. The next time her father or brother got in touch, it would probably be to tell her the other was gone.

Brodie didn’t want her out of his eye line, but he and Tuck had work to do, work that they didn’t need her for. After Brodie’s semi-assertion, she was beginning to see her role in the Kindred as more of hanger-on than as an actual useful colleague. On the plus side of that, it freed up time, so she could deal with these kind of unexpected personal issues without impacting Kindred progress. Mischa had CI to look after. Zara didn’t even have an apartment to clean.

Snatching her suitcase and tossing the strap of her purse across her body, she figured she had to make peace with the past before she could figure out the future. Kahlil and the Kindred would wait. She could be back with Brodie inside a day. Scribbling a note for him, she doubted he’d have a problem with her being independent when it was that ability to rely on herself and face problems that had attracted him to her and kept them all going in the aftermath of losing Art.

If she had her own familial demon to confront, she wasn’t going to shrink and hide, she was going to deal with it head on.

SEVEN

She’d been so damn sure about this trip that she’d ditched the man she trusted more than any other to make it. The flight was just a few hours, and it took little time to rent a car and drive to her father’s. The heat of the early evening sun joined her as she stood on the sidewalk, staring at the front door of her father’s home in the suburbs.

The house she was looking at now wasn’t the one she’d grown up in. Her brother had taken over the farm a couple of years ago, and while her father did still work in those fields, he’d moved out of what had been her childhood home in deference to her brother and his new family.

Coming here had seemed like such a good idea when she was sitting in the safety of the manor, and she’d gone on autopilot to make the journey. The moment she’d stepped out of the car and crossed the street to stand on the sidewalk where she was now, the instinct to progress disappeared. Taking in the modest home with its patch of grass out front, she watched the length of the intersecting path stretch. It wasn’t more than a few yards, but it was going to be the longest few yards of her life.

She stood frozen, with her suitcase at her back and her car parked on the other side of the street behind her. Escape was still a possibility. Settling an old conflict was a great theory, but there was a reason she’d never tried to mend her relationship with her father. Experience taught her that he was old school and didn’t understand her life choices. She wanted him to tell her that he was proud, to apologize for his behavior, and to admit that he’d loved her all along. Great dream.

Now that she was close enough to envision him in this place, she played the scenario forward. She’d walk into that house, he’d look her up and down, and assume she’d fucked everything up. He’d demand the money, show no interest in her life, and either tell her to leave or to cook him something. Her dreams could only be fulfilled by a paternal figure who wanted to love her. To get what she wanted, her father would have to be a different man, and her taking time to travel here wouldn’t change who he was.

Seeing him again would remind her of the heartache she’d gone through after losing him the first time. She’d be reminded that he was a bully who had no respect for her or what she’d been through and she’d end up hating him all over again. It had taken her a long time to get over the disappointment of leaving here without his blessing.

“Don’t go in there.”

The sound of the familiar masculine voice made her whip around. Brodie was propped against her car on the other side of the narrow street with his arms and ankles crossed. She sighed. “Jeez, you scared me,” she said because when she’d stopped here, she’d been sure she was alone, apparently she was wasn’t. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been standing here motionless staring at her father’s house, but she hadn’t heard a vehicle approach. “How did you know where I was?”

Her note had said she was going to see her father, but hadn’t said where he lived, or that she was travelling back to her home state to do it.

“You think it’s difficult for me to find you?” he asked, pushing off the car and sauntering over to stand with her on the sidewalk. “My best bud can hack any system, and when your name pops on a flight manifest, I know. Hacking the security cameras and running facial recognition takes two seconds.” Nodding at the car he’d just left, he hooked his hands in his pockets, leaving his thumbs in his belt loops. “That’s your rental car, another breadcrumb… and your phone is equipped with a GPS tracker. If you’re on this planet, I can find you. Need me to keep talking?”

If she’d just pulled up, he had to have been sitting in wait to be so hot on her tail. “How did you get here before me?”

“Means,” he said. “My cousins are chopper pilots, and I can get a jet to take me anywhere I want to go without waiting at check-in.”

Ok, so it wasn’t that amazing when he explained himself. Putting her hand on the extended handle of her suitcase that stood just behind her, she turned to face the house. “I have to do this.”

“No, you don’t,” he said, cool and quiet. He wasn’t appealing to her, he was stating what he believed to be a given fact. “You could’ve wired the ransom money and never set foot on a plane.”

Amazed that he’d known about her private conversation, she gaped. “How did you…?”

He shrugged. “I know everything.”

If he wasn’t recording her calls, he might have heard her on audio transmitters that were in the manor. She made a mental note to stop talking to herself when she thought she was alone.

“What the fuck possessed you to come down here?” he asked as she twisted to face the house again. “If you walk in there, he’ll think he was right all along, that you’ve come to grovel. You don’t have CI now, but you have us. You have the Kindred. You still feel like we don’t need you?”

Exhaling, she conceded that he deserved to know the truth. “I don’t have mad computer skills like Swift. I can barely change batteries in a remote. I’m not Falcon. I don’t have money to contribute like him, like you. I don’t have a useful degree or superior knowledge like Wren.”

He didn’t flinch. “They don’t have your legs.”

Tilting her head, she wasn’t impressed. “I’m serious,” she said, scowling at him and letting her hand slide away from the metal suitcase handle. “I’m not Premium Personnel Coordinator anymore. I’m out of CI, I can’t give you access. You own the damn building now anyway. You can get it yourself if you need it.”

“This isn’t about CI,” he said. “I don’t need dick from there, and you don’t need that place either.”

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