"So six altogether, counting you and me."

"You think more?"

"No, six should be plenty, at least for tonight."

They both looked at me.

"Dandy," I told them.

Dan considered my lack of enthusiasm, then said, "I'll go check on Tasha, make sure she's comfortable."

He left the room, shutting the door behind him.

Natalie and I stared at each other. After a couple of seconds of silence, I said, "I'm not sure it's safe to leave the two of you alone. I'm thinking I'll come back to find a gaggle of little red-haired Russian thugs-to-be shaking down the nearest kindergarten."

"He's Georgian, not Russian."

"He's also got a nineteen-year-old son behind a rifle in a tree house outside. Talk about a motivated family."

Natalie grinned, but then it froze. She shook her head slightly. She didn't want to banter, she didn't want the jokes. I didn't blame her. There was a lot of history between us, history that stretched back to a time and a place where we had been very different people. Her father, Elliot Trent, and his company, Sentinel Guards, was the be-all and end-all of security firms in Manhattan. She'd left his company to form a new one with me. She'd turned her back on her father and his Secret Service connections and his five hundred employees and the corporate accounts, and instead thrown her lot in with me when we hadn't stood a chance in hell of surviving.

It was the way she was, always looking to pursue a challenge, maybe because it would have been so very easy for her to live a life with no challenges in it at all. She was beautiful, she was smart, and Elliot Trent was a wealthy man. He hadn't even wanted her to join Sentinel, and when she'd gone into business with me, he'd all but disowned her. As far as Elliot Trent was concerned, I was a danger not just to myself and others, but to the profession as well. If anyone had told him that my profession seemed to have changed recently, he would have taken it as proof confirming all of his worst suspicions.