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“I said, I’m not hungry.”
“Fine. You can sit and watch me eat.”
“I won’t do any such thing.”
“Yes,” he said grimly, “you will. You’ll sit when I sit, walk when I walk, do what I do or I’ll take the easy way out, tie you up, stash you here and inactivate the exit button. It’s called a safe room,” he said, reading the question in her eyes. “Come to think of it, maybe it’s where I should keep you on general principle.”
“On second thought,” she said, her words dipped in acid, “I might be a bit hungry.”
“Yeah,” he said with a thin smile, “that’s what I thought.”
There was a formal dining room off the kitchen, but Matthew said they’d eat in the breakfast nook.
The king, Mia thought coldly, playing at being humble before his subjects… although Evalina seemed to treat him without any formality.
She was a round, cheerful woman who babbled incessantly as she prepared and served their meal.
Mia could only understand some of what she said. She’d taken two years of Spanish in college and a crash course before she went to work for Douglas in Colombia, but what people spoke in the sophisticated restaurants and offices of Cartagena had little in common with Evalina’s Indian dialect.
Matthew, on the other hand, slipped into it easily. He grinned and laughed, and Evalina blushed with delight each time he did.
It was easy to see she had a crush on him.
If only she knew what he was really like, Mia thought as she ate. And she did eat, despite what she’d said. The food was wonderful, and she was famished. All she’d had since last night was coffee.
And now, night was closing in again.
She breathed a sigh of relief. Thank God for Evalina. Knowing the housekeeper was sleeping under the same roof would surely keep Matthew from—from—
What was the woman doing?
“Evalina?” Mia’s fork clattered against her plate. “Evalina, wait…” Too late. A cheerful wave and the housekeeper slipped out the kitchen door. Mia stared at Matthew. “Where did she go?”
“Home.”
He was mopping up the last of his sancocho with a chunk of arepa, as if the beef stew and corn meal biscuits were all he had on his mind.
“Doesn’t she live here?”
“She lives in a village a couple of miles away.”
“But I thought—”
“I know what you thought.” He put down his fork, patted his lips with his napkin and flashed the kind of smile that turned her spine icy. “Sorry to disappoint you, baby, but you and I get to spend the night alone.”
The man who’d joked with Evalina, complimented her on her cooking, was gone. He’d been replaced by the stranger who’d abducted her hours ago, a lifetime ago, from a dingy room in a nameless town.
Mia forced herself to look directly at him.
“If you try anything,” she said, “I’ll kill you.”
A lazy grin curved his lips. “With what? Your bare hands?”
If she were a real agent, she could. Agents learned things like that. But she’d been trained in less than two weeks, snatched from her quiet secretarial desk in Intelligence and dropped into a nightmare.
Still, you didn’t have to be a spy to know that backing away from a challenge was almost always a mistake.
“I’ll do whatever I have to,” she said, with what she thought was admirable coolness.
