“The part where we made out.”
I raised my eyebrows. “That was one hell of a kiss last night, but I’m not sure I’d call it making out.”
“Well, since I can take my coffee for the road, I find myself with about five extra minutes of time on my hands. How about we rectify that?”
She pushed me against the fridge. Since she’d done the same last night, I took it as a sign the lady liked to be in charge of the physical side of a relationship. Or a fling. As long as she was open to the occasional request, I was totally down with that. I pulled her tightly against me, and if she had any questions about whether I was on board with her plan, my erection pressing against her belly answered it. We shared one slow, deep kiss.
“You’re sure you can only stay for five minutes?” I asked.
“Positive,” she said, kissing me again. “But I’ll make it up to you another time.”
I ran my hands down her back and nibbled her neck until she shivered. “How about tonight?”
CHAPTER 14
KAT
Icould pinpoint the exact minute that X had read Pasco’s daily report with the picture of Gage and me in it because that was the timestamp on the text she’d sent me. It was short and far from sweet.
REMEMBER LYING LOW? Local HQ, 0900 hours. Do not be late.
I kept my car parked in a garage two blocks from my apartment building, so I strapped Mr. Whiskerbottom Fuzzypants into the back seat and drove us to HQ. I’d taken my HEAT-required, intensive-driving training course on the German autobahn, so maneuvering through Manhattan gridlock and traveling ten miles west of the city was a fluffy piece of cake. I arrived fifteen minutes early, hoping to win brownie points with X. I was well aware I might immediately lose them when she realized my backpack was stuffed full of a grumpy cat.
I stepped inside the HEAT building and stopped. The first floor was a wide-open gym space—operatives needed to stay in peak physical condition—with IT and operations rooms along the left wall, a kitchen and lounge along the back wall, and a team leader office and unclassified conference room on the right. I’d never seen any of our facilities so eerily quiet. There might have been operatives on other floors in the building, like the additional offices, medical bay, and classified conference room on the second floor, but there was no one on the first floor, except—
“In here,” X called from the conference room.
She sat on one side of the long table with her laptop open and file folders spread out around her. X never took an office, preferring to leave them open in case an operations team needed to take over the facility. She was prickly as hell, and with her black hair pulled into a tight bun and her all-black business suits, she gave off a very aloof vibe. Her dirty little secret was that she loved her people and had the utmost respect for us and the dangerous work we did every day. One of the ways she showed that respect was by giving us a lot of leeway and all the space we needed to run our operations.
I pulled Mr. Whiskerbottom Fuzzypants off my back and settled him in his carrier on one of the conference chairs across from her. I sat down beside him.
X glanced at the backpack, then did a double take. She stared at me, frowning, with one eyebrow raised.
“My foster cat, Mr. Whiskerbottom Fuzzypants,” I said. “He has separation anxiety.”
“He’s acat.”
Mr. Whiskerbottom Fuzzypants growled.
“Tense people upset him,” I said.
X closed her laptop and the manila folder in front of her and let out a long, exaggerated breath. “I run a black-budget covert agency that reports directly to a senate subcommittee. There’s never a moment when none of my agents are in harm’s way, and at least one of my agents has recently put herself at severe risk. It has a way of making one tense. Mr. Fuzzybottom will have to forgive me.”
He growled again. I opened my mouth to correct her about his name, and then her words about severe risk sank in.
“I’m sorry,” I said. Shewasmy boss, and Icouldbe a little less insubordinate. I decided to try that for a while. Adjusting on the ground, that’s what we field agents do. “I couldn’t make other arrangements, and I didn’t want to push our meeting. It sounded urgent.”
She leaned back in her chair as if relaxing, but I knew her well enough to know she never relaxed. “Yes, the messages you’ve left for me this weekhavesounded urgent. When I didn’t immediately respond, you did something to get my attention. Now you have it.”
The way she was calmly staring at me like she was looking for my weakness made me wish I hadn’t invited her scrutiny. I cleared my throat. “Thank you. I need to know—”
“Youdon’tneed to know, Kat. I put you in position for a future operation, and now you’ve put that at risk because you decided youdeserveto know.”
“So HEATisinterested in the Gage Halifax, Roxy Energy relationship. Is he under suspicion or in danger?”
“He was neither until you pulled that stunt last night. Now I’ve assigned Jensen and Pasco both to monitoring chatter, and just as I feared, Roxy Energy has contracted with a foreign agency to run street cam footage from last night.” X clasped her hands together and leaned forward on the table. “How long do you think it will take their facial recognition programs to match your image with the woman who slipped out of Moscow with a Russian oligarch’s deep, dark secrets? That agency will say to hell with Roxy Energy’s request and sell that intel straight to the Russian himself.”
“You believe they have something to compare it to?” That had been my cover name, and a natural-looking, short blonde wig and brown contact lenses had hidden a few of my most notable physical identifiers. But bone structure doesn’t lie.
