Free Safeword: Rainbow by Candace Blevins Page A

name or something because I could never find an actual record of her birth. I mean, I have the one that is on file, but it doesn't appear to be an accurate statement of where or when or to whom she was born. Anyway, she was a good mom, a great mom, but she was killed when I was eleven years old. Since there were no relatives, I went into the foster care system. I had three sets of foster parents in seven years, and only one set of them was really bad, so I guess I had it pretty good, compared to what other kids have experienced in the foster care program."
    "And David is the closest thing you have to family, right?"
    "Yeah. I first met your brother in college. I had a full scholarship as part of the foster care program. Kids in the foster care program who have at least a 3.0 GPA when they graduate high school get a full scholarship to a pretty decent list of colleges in the state as long as they keep their GPA above certain points at each semester. I wanted to do what my mom had done, so I used my mom as a reference point and managed to get someone at the CIA to tell me what classes I should take if I wanted to work for them. It seems Mac had received similar advice from the FBI and we were signed up for many of the same classes. Mac and I met on the first day of school and we've been close every since. That first year, when he realized I didn't have family to go home to for Christmas, he invited me to go home with him. You were still in high school but had been invited somewhere overseas as part of an exchange program or something. It's funny, I've been around your house a lot in the last fourteen years, but I've never seen you. I guess you've been off at school doing your own thing, but I've spent enough time around your dad that I've got a lot of affection for him."
    "And you are willing to risk that friendship with David to see where things might go with me?"
    "I told you, I went back looking for you. For three years I've wished I'd found out your real name, or something about you that could lead me to you. I even, ummm, kind of found a way into the member files at the club, but they don't list aliases and there was no way to figure out which file belonged to someone who called herself Katrina out on the floor. And Ron wasn't working there anymore either. I found information about him, but he and his wife were both listed as living on a ship on some sort of research grant when I went looking, and then six months later when I looked him up they were at the South Pole on an expedition. I realize now that should have been a hint that if you were friends with him then maybe you did that kind of thing, too. And that would have led me to the University. Ah well, hindsight."
    He was quiet a moment and then said, "I should tell you that when I left the message in the drop for Mac to let him know we're okay, I told him it seemed I'd finally found the girl from New Hampshire from three years ago. It occurred to me that it might be better to let him have some time to think it over. I've learned a bit about his Irish temper, sometimes it's better to let it have a chance to cool off before you actually see him."
    "I'm surprised he hasn't come flying in the door at us."
    "He can't, not without endangering you. We have to have complete silence between us. If this asshole is monitoring communications then we'll give ourselves away. The internet box I'm using is secure, we're both going through a series of proxies to get there, plus we're using some pretty intense encryption. That's the only way we can talk, and even for that we need to keep it short."
    "But, if this guy is going to wait around until I show up then this might take awhile. Weren't you going to be flying out to an interview in a few days?"
    "More than a few days, it's almost a week away. We'll have to figure out something. With any luck this will be over by then. I miss having all of the toys that I used to have at my disposal. I guess I hadn't realized how much I've come to