Harry was in a foul mood. All this mess with Robert Westhouse got on his nerves. It was one thing to prevent terrorist attacks, to protect Queen and Country. It was quite another to be running about providing excessive bodyguard services to a millionaire. Oh Westhouse was vital to the nation's oil production and to the stability of Nigeria and the region, and Harry knew it, but Christ it did get under his skin that one man could be the sole focus of his team for days.

Meeting Westhouse didn't make it any easier. The man had arrogance that came from wealth and power in a manner Harry never liked. He and Lucas had their eyes open as the security team showed off the Westhouse compound. Harry took particular notice of Westhouse's wife. She just carried on with her day as a wealthy woman of leisure with her golf lessons and tennis games and visits to other rich ladies. Did she know what her husband was involved in? Did she know about the threat to his life and perhaps even to her own? Or was she blissfully ignorant of his world, content to just carry on with her own trivial engagements?

If he let himself really think about it, that was the heart of Harry's sour feelings. He had been confronted face to face with a marriage—something that did not happen often in his life nowadays—and it made him recall how terribly he'd behaved in his first marriage and how terrified he was about his second. He had loved Jane, for a time. He had wanted to do the right thing and marry her and raise a family. His attention and devotion, however, were placed in the Service and not in his home life. Harry knew his inattention caused his wife and children to suffer for it. Jane with her depression and bitterness. Catherine with her savior complex and near single-minded focus to be as far from London as she could manage most of the time. Graham with his drug addiction. It was all Harry's fault. And though Jane had found a new husband to love her and treat her as a husband should and Catherine had forgiven him enough to let him correspond with her over email and phone calls now and again, Harry so very much did not want Ruth to suffer the same neglect. Things would be different this time. He knew that, of course. Ruth was different. And she was in this world with him and understood his work better than anyone else ever could. But seeing Mr. and Mrs. Westhouse live presumably happy lives but wholly apart from each other in the way the people of that class tended to do, Harry was just left feeling disappointed about the whole thing.

And when Ruth called while he was looking over Westhouse's flight records, Harry had been curt with her and threw her silly rule back in her face. She wanted to keep work and personal things separate, so be it. They'd have their work and when they were alone at his house or in her flat, they'd enjoy the personal. He didn't want it that way, but she did, and he'd respect it. Even if he did feel the need to behave like a petulant child about it all.

They were only just more than a week into their engagement, and maybe these growing pains and adjustments were to be expected. They did have a lot to sort out. Harry really had been trying to be patient and understanding and to give Ruth the time she needed, but he was getting frustrated with the whole thing. He'd gotten a taste of happiness with her and it made him greedy. She was all he wanted and sod the rest.

Of course, he couldn't just sod the rest. He wouldn't even think to do such a thing, even if he did want to sometimes. It was just that it was somehow easier to face when Ruth was with him. And he was alone in his office trying to work through his brooding.

The next day did not fare much better. When Harry arrived at the Grid, he called for a meeting to check and recheck everything. Ruth was hard at work with the hotel guests, and Lucas and Dimitri were going to arrange a way to listen in at Westhouse's compound. Tariq built a bug, and Lucas checked with James Vine's wife while it was being arranged. Everyone was coordinated so Lucas could plant the bug undetected, and Ruth simultaneously looked into getting a recording off Vine's phone from when he was on with his wife during the shooting. Harry observed from afar, and he was pleased with how his team functioned together.

When Lucas returned, he took Beth to go talk to Chapman again. They needed to find Vine's phone. Something had happened, something they were missing. There was something more than met the eye in this situation. Just like everything with Robert Westhouse, it seemed.

"Harry, we have a problem."

He looked up to see Ruth walk into his office. "What is it this time?" he asked wearily. He wanted to be glad to see her, but all this mess going on had taken away even the pleasure of getting to sit across the desk from his fiancée.

"I got the call off Vine's phone from his mobile company." She played the recording for him, and they both listened intently. Vine speaking to his wife. The spray of bullets. And then voices.

"Spanish?" Harry recognized in surprise.

Ruth nodded. "Two men. The one is asking the other 'Is she dead?' And so I rechecked my guest list for the hotel to look for anyone with Spanish or South American connections. Nothing. So I talked to the hotel directly, and I found…well…" She showed the false passports of the shooters who had booked a room at the hotel. "These men weren't on my list. Someone deleted them from my computer."

"How is that possible?" Things were going from bad to worse. All these twists and turns, none of the members of his team knowing which way was up. Christ, maybe he should have insisted on retiring when he'd first told the Home Secretary. Maybe he shouldn't have let Ruth convince him to stay.

"I think I have an idea," Ruth answered. She then showed the real identities of the shooters that she'd found with her brilliant skills. And then she explained the connection.

Beth.

Harry positively seethed with rage. It had been a long time since he'd had an officer go off half-cocked and conceal personal and yet vital information from him. Ros had done so on occasion. Tom was perhaps the worst culprit of such things. And Harry didn't like it one bit. Now they had Beth, brand new to the team and coming along quite nicely. Only she'd been lying to them all and trying to hide things and she was interfering with operations. If Harry didn't possess the kind of experienced self-control that he needed for this job, he'd go strangle Beth Bailey himself right now.

"Get Lucas in here," he ordered.

Ruth stood up to go fetch Lucas, but Harry's mind shifted gears quickly. "No, I'll call him. Just a moment."

She sat back down.

He took a slow breath, calming himself down and putting the Beth issue aside for just a moment. He couldn't let this opportunity pass without saying, "You and I need to talk later. Tonight, perhaps. I'll not break your rule, but I would like for us to address some things. Soon." Because the fact of the matter was that he and Ruth needed to figure things out. They kept saying they would. They kept talking about finding a way to be together at home and on the Grid, making their engagement public knowledge and sorting out their living situation and everything before they started planning the wedding. They kept talking about how they needed to do it, but they hadn't actually done it. They needed to make the time for it, because the opportunity was never going to present itself otherwise. Yet another thing Harry had figured out in this last week of his engagement to Ruth. They had to make their own timing.

Ruth looked at him with those beautiful stormy blue eyes of hers and nodded. "Yes, alright," she said softly. She seemed to understand what he meant. Or she at least had an inkling that there was a problem—neither of them could deny that—and they'd have to sort it out.

"Good," he answered curtly. "Let me get Lucas." He picked up the phone and returned his attention to the task at hand.