Count Backwards From Ten

If there’d ever been a gift dropped in his lap like a golden goose, it was this one. Luc knew that Ingrid didn’t share his sentiment, she was looking at that goose like it was about to leave elephant sized turds all over the office floor when he’d turned up to collect her for their trip. He’d tried to keep up a blank, professional expression, but the moment Ingrid had started to apologise, like he was that goose, it had cracked, and the smile was tugging at his lips. He hadn’t leaned in and told her it wouldn’t be so bad, but the temptation was right there. Catching sight of the town car pulling up outside, Luc had swept back into professional mode, holding the door open for Ingrid to pass through before he inched ahead of her again, his gaze constantly moving, making sure the street and car were both safe before he held the car door open for her.

The smirk had returned as the car had pulled away from the curb, but he might as well have been crossing his eyes and sticking his tongue out for all the attention it had drawn from Ingrid. She’d gone into statue mode, almost pretending he didn’t exist. When her gaze had caught him it was ice cold, the sort of thing that once would’ve had him shivering, but he felt Ingrid warm too many times to believe she was the ice maiden she pretended to be.

Sighing eventually, Luc had settled in for the ride. It was hours to the meeting, the route rural to say the least. With a less competent driver the trip could’ve been longer, more torturous than it had been. He delivered them in a decent time, hovering somewhere close by while Ingrid had walked into the meeting with her suited guard dog at her shoulder. With clients in front of them the impression he’d offered up had been one of impeccable professionality. Hands clasped in front of him, the line of the weapon he carried in a holster beneath his arm obvious with his jacket unbuttoned.

By the time, seemingly, every single detail in the contract discussed at nauseum. Finally Ingrid had risen and he’d aimed a civil smile at the client, only rolling his eyes towards the ceiling in relief as they were heading for the door. ”After you,” Luc murmured, waving the driver off to open the rear door of the car for Ingrid. By the looks of things the ride back would be just as silent. As Ingrid extracted her tablet and got to working, he looked out the window, occasionally half turning at the flash of something in the rear view mirror – just in case.

He wouldn’t admit it, but by the time the shudder ran through the frame of the car, he’d begun to lose focus. There hadn’t even been a team with them, someone who would talk at least enough to break the tedium. Luc instantly snapped to alert, sliding forward on the seat to tug aside the privacy screen. ”It’s the engine,” he muttered, cursing under his breath. The car rolled slowly onto the shoulder, smoke drifting up from under the hood.

Climbing out, Luc waved Ingrid back. He glanced both ways, eyes sweeping the trees that clustered close to the road here. It was rural, isolated, but that was what you wanted if you were looking to set up an ambush. ”Stay inside,” he warned her before he shut the car door. ”What happened? The vehicle was meant to be checked before we left.” The driver promised that it had been, but the engine had failed all the same, the smoke that thickened as the hood was lifted proof that they were very much screwed.

By the time they conceded defeat, it was growing dark. The sun peeked between the trees, highlighting Ingrid’s hair as she stepped out and sighed, like they had inconvenienced her with what he assumed she’d see as their shared incompetence. The driver was smart enough not to try and argue it, but if Ingrid started to question his skill, Luc wasn’t going to keep his mouth shut. He raised his brows, the smirk making its return to tug at his lips as he looked Ingrid up and down. ”You’re going to walk all the way in those?” he asked, glancing down at her heels. He sighed, suspecting it would only last as far as it took them to get out of sight of the car.

He hadn’t been wrong. They silently reached the first curve and then Ingrid was shifting, fluttering up into the sky. She was lucky that it was full dark now and the anybody who saw two giant flying beasts would imagine they’d hit happy hour a little too hard. Landing, Luc scrambled back into his clothing, carried carefully in one claw, offering Ingrid’s up to her without making a big deal of it. ”They have things called cabs these days, you know,” he said acerbically, walking to the corner to study the motel. ”This doesn’t exactly look like your sort of place.” Compared to the Grey Haven hotel, it was practically a hovel. The clerk looked up when he held the door open for Ingrid to step inside though, instantly alert.

”Hi there. Room for two?” Not if Ingrid had her way, although he certainly had no plans to sleep in the hallway just to make sure she was safe for the night.

Tagged: INGRID NILSEN * Word Count: 916

Blame would undoubtedly be blasted back in his direction with a shotgun like ferocity, or a rush of heat only their kind was truly capable of. Somehow it would be his fault that the vehicle he hadn’t laid a hand on had broken down, his fault that he had been scheduled to this by Ingrid’s current favoured one, his fault that what they were wouldn’t allow them to transform and come back from it fully clothed. Luc felt the pressure of it between his shoulder blades, like Ingrid was already picking out the spot where she’d deliver that roasting later.

This part had to gall her as much as anything. Luc politely averted his eyes as he handed Ingrid’s clothing back over to her – oh, she’d known he’d be a good little servant and would transport it for her so she didn’t stroll into that motel office naked as a jay bird. He knew exactly what she looked like as she dressed though, it had been his view dozens, hundreds of times, from the berth in her captain’s quarters before he’d looked that gift horse in the mouth and laid down the terms she would never have accepted.

He peered around the rocky outcropping, at the motel, glad that the angle would hide his grin from Ingrid. No good would come out of letting her know that all of this was amusing him. ”I told you to wait in comfort,” he shot back. ”The town car’s practically palatial.” Now it would be their driver waiting in it for hours, his low spot on the ladder meaning that he was always going to have to do the hard work with it all, while his superiors flapped away to somewhere that might provide running water and a bed that was bug free. Perhaps by morning he’d be heading back to town, exhausted and fully aware that tonight’s trouble would be talked over until he wanted to tear his own ears off. There had been a failure somewhere in their little system and Ingrid would discover what it was before she made sure none of them were capable of making the same mistake again.

Turning back to her as she approached, her heels back on - her battle armour when she was in boss form. Luc smirked, offering the arm he knew she would refuse to take before he started towards the motel. ”Can I request no complaints if it won’t? I’m not taking off again to try and find somewhere better.” Ingrid was going to have to slum it for the night. As long as they had two free rooms she wouldn’t have to put up with him for much longer. She could get a, well, it wasn’t going to be a good one, night’s sleep, and he’d hover in that state between sleeping and waking, an ear always listening out for the sort of trouble he doubted would find them here.

Like a good little bodyguard, he swept his gaze around them, as he held the motel office door open for Ingrid to step past him. The place was as shabby as he’d believed, the clerk behind the desk was friendly though. Ingrid was already batting their question back, making it very clear that they weren’t what they might first have appeared to be. ”She’s the boss,” Luc quipped lightly. There was apology already filtering over the clerk’s face though. Oh, they better not have stumbled across the only motel in the state that was fully booked.

”Only got the one room free, sorry folks,” the man murmured. He tapped at the keyboard of his computer, the wince only growing. ”A double. That gonna do you any good?”

Nope. They weren’t heading out to strip down again. They probably could’ve been back at the Grey Haven in an hour or so, maybe less depending on how much cover they could get, but he wasn’t playing that game. Luc smiled at the man, all slick charm that he knew would be like acid on Ingrid’s nerves. ”We’ll take it. We can always make do, hmm?” That grin was turned on Ingrid as he pushed his credit card across the counter. Each tap of the man’s fingers on the keyboard was probably another twist to Ingrid’s gut. After a moment the card and key were pushed back across the desk.

”Room 14, right down at the end. Not got breakfast on offer but there’s a restaurant about three miles that-a-way, easy enough to find if you carry on drivin’ right past.”

Driving. Yikes. Luc grimaced and started back towards the office door. If they were lucky.

Tagged: INGRID NILSEN * Word Count: 773

The quiet chuckle slipped out of Luc before he could bite it back. God forbid the woman take a single evening off, especially under such awkward circumstances. If they’d stayed in the car she might have been forced to actually talk to him for five minutes. That had never been their issue before, not once he’d melted the ice queen’s heart and been allowed into her bed. He’d managed to destroy all of that with his demands though. Ingrid was still in punishment mode with him, making him work for every civil word out of her mouth.

He hummed, shaking his head as he looked back at her, finding that she’d dressed even as she’d batted away his suggestion that they could’ve saved themselves all of this trouble. ”You don’t trust Rowan to handle it all for you, hmm? I’m sure she would’ve stepped up if there was something that couldn’t possibly wait until morning.” In fact the woman probably already was. Her phone would’ve rung and like a good little soldier Rowan would’ve bounded straight out to bed to deal with it. Attempts made to find them somewhere decent to stay for the night, a new car sorted for the morning – one that had been thoroughly checked before it was allowed out of the garage, a pink slip already handed over to whoever had failed to make sure that the vehicle they’d taken was sound.

One look at this place and Rowan probably would’ve been hopping in a vehicle herself, calculating speeds and times to save Ingrid from this sort of indignity. He hadn’t spent the last couple of years luxuriating in a suite at the Grey Haven, but even his relative comfort was a thousand steps above this place. Not commenting on Ingrid’s huffy brush past him, Luc following her inside. Glancing around it, he winced faintly. If the office was like this, lord only knew what the rooms themselves would be like. The best they had was probably home to just a half dozen cockroaches.

Did some part of him find satisfaction in tossing the whole mess in Ingrid’s court? Absolutely. If anyone could wring multiple rooms out of the clerk, it would be her. Or it should’ve been. ”Surely there’s another,” he grumbled, stepping back so he could see out of the door and into the parking lot. There hadn’t seemed to be that many vehicles outside. Luc frowned. Perhaps he could talk one of them into leaving…

As he looked back Ingrid was already pushing her card across the counter, taking the keys in return. ”You didn’t even try and bargain,” Luc complained with a sigh. If the idea of spending hours in the car with him had been bad enough that Ingrid had preferred to fly here, then sharing a double for the night with him was going to bed worse.

Still scowling, Luc took off after her as she started up the stairs, pointedly avoiding the elevator. He held the door for her as they emerged onto their floor, looking back ways, just in case. Ingrid handled the door of the room, although he was through it close behind her – before she got the idea to make him sleep out in the corridor, on guard. Huffing out a breath that was vaguely amused, Luc swept past her. ”You read my mind,” he snorted. ”You’d have had a fight on your hands. Do I get to share the bed or is this going to be a case of making me sleep on the floor … perhaps just inside the door, in case anybody decides to pay a little visit in the night.” Once upon a time there’d have been no question. They’d shared beds in dozens of inns in the years he’d spent slowly thawing her heart, not always with him obviously walking into them afterwards – it was none of the business of the rest of the crew after all.

Tagged: INGRID NILSEN * Word Count: 656

Reading between the lines had rarely worked out well with Ingrid. She was a woman who didn’t like to be second guessed and those that did suggest that perhaps someone else knew better probably weren’t fated to draw breath for much longer. Luc knew that he’d stepped over the line with her often enough that doing it again wasn’t the wisest move – especially if those lines included her current second-in-command. The two women had seemed more than just employer and employee, which made the decision all the dicier.

Luc held his hands up, like he was warding off the glare that might’ve had him surrounded with flames if Ingrid decided to add some real heat to it. ”Under the circumstances, it might’ve been easier for both of you if she could. I’m not saying she should.” The insistence that Ingrid had to be somewhere other than the comfortable backseat of the town car to do her work had definitely been a ploy to avoid waiting there all night. If the work really was an emergency, Rowan would’ve taken it off her hands – just as he would’ve done. He’d tried to end up doing what Ingrid needed as second nature, moving before she had even asked for something, but that some of partnership had burned to ashes when he’d walked away.

Undoubtedly fate had decided to try and either burn it to the ground again – proving that he never should’ve tried to come back – or to force new life back into that blackened ground. Leave it to the universe to do that by forcing them to squeeze into a room together for the night, though. It didn’t matter how much money was available on the card that was slid across the counter, it wasn’t going to have another room sprouting out of the side of the building for him to sleep in. Luc smiled sourly at the clerk as they filed out of the office.

They stepped into the room – the tiny room with its one bed – and the situation only grew worse. Luc didn’t know why he bothered to do a check of the room. If this whole thing had been someone’s evil plan to get Ingrid into a vulnerable position then they were either a genius or an idiot, it would’ve been hard to tell which with the ludicrousness of it. He smiled sweetly at Ingrid as he tested the mattress with the bounce of a palm against it. ”You’re right, the chair doesn’t look too bad. Perhaps you should let the person watching your back have the comfortable spot. You’ll be up late working anyway, and you want me well rested don’t you?” Oh, he was risking her burning down the whole room with that suggestion.

Standing his ground, Luc sank down on the edge of the bed – facing the door, of course. They hadn’t had any issues sharing a bed once upon a time. Admittedly it hadn’t been like they were playing house, going to bed together every night. It had been more a matter of the two of them sleeping together and happening to sleep afterwards. He’d presumed that one day it would become more than that, but he’d screwed that up. ”Do you want me to call or some sort of room service? If they have anything more than a vending machine that is.” If not then it was going to be a case of surviving on peanut butter crackers or Twinkies until a car came to pick them up in the morning. Neither one sounded anymore appealing to him than sleeping in the chair had.

Tagged: INGRID NILSEN * Word Count: 601