Page 179

Her eyes were still huge as she stared at him. “The who? What are you talking about?”

Matt looked devastated. “We had evidence that pointed to you being involved with a terrorist organization and we needed to find out if that was true, so someone needed to find out. I volunteered. To begin with, I thought MacLaine was a man. When you were a woman, I had to change tactics.”

“Those tactics included sleeping with me?”

She could feel the burn of tears at the back of her eyes. She couldn’t handle this conversation much longer without falling to the floor and sobbing. And what was worse? She wanted Matt to be the one to pick her up, hold her and tell her everything was going to be all right.

“I need you to leave the room while I pack,” she whispered.

“I can’t do that, Lainey. I can’t let you go thinking that everything I’ve said, everything I’ve done, is a lie. Because it wasn’t. I love you. I’ve meant every word I’ve said to you. Yeah, finding out things about you started out as a mission, but falling in love with you brought me back to life. It wasn’t a lie; I swear to you.”

She shook her head sadly. “But it was the fruit from the poisonous tree, wasn’t it? It doesn’t matter how it ended up. It started from lies, so it has a foundation that’s rotten to the core. It would never work. I should have known this was too good to be true. Things like this never happen to me.”

“You’re looking at this all wrong,” Matt said desperately.

“I’m begging you, Matt. Not as the man who professes to love me, but as the man who took an oath to our country. Just leave me alone for an hour so I can pack and call an Uber and leave.”

“Where are you going to go?”

“Somehow, I’m going to get a flight out of South Carolina and go home. Then I’m going to get Xena out of doggie jail and she and I will talk about how all men are crud-buckets. So, will you leave? Please?”

Matt nodded. He lifted his hand as if to touch her cheek and then dropped it. “This isn’t the end, Lainey.”

“Yes, it is,” she disagreed.

He walked to the bedroom door and opened it. “In your heart, you know it can’t be the end. I’ll give you this time, for now. But what we have together is too good to be thrown away. I love you, mi Corazón.”

She looked at the closed door for long minutes after Matt walked out. It was only fitting that he called her his heart, since he was taking her heart with him.

Matt got his car from the valet after tipping him fifty bucks to set it aside in the shadows so he could easily follow Lainey’s Uber when it showed up. He followed her all the way to the Holiday Inn next to the airport, and from his vantage point could see her check in and head toward the elevators. After that, he parked his rental in the hotel lot and called Kostya.

“Mateo, a heads-up would have been nice,” his lieutenant growled.

“I was trying to fix things with Lainey.”

Mateo was met with silence. Damn it, he hated it when Kostya did that. He always won.

“She said she can never forgive me.”

“You ended up falling for her, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” he whispered.

“Goddammit, Brax sure called that one.”

“He told you?”

Kostya sighed. “Yeah, he did. He told Gideon and me, it was a bad idea for you to be the one to be assigned to MacLaine as soon as we found out she was a Lainey who adopted a three-legged rescue dog.”

“Well, you all were wrong. Meeting her was the best thing that ever happened in my life.”

“And Captain Hale blew your cover by calling you Aranda, right?”

“That about sums it up.”

“Mateo, we still can’t be a hundred percent positive that she isn’t working for the Kraken. There is still the problem with the⁠—”

“I know how she got the gold. Her grandmother left her the contents of her safe deposit box. It contained jewels and gold. Because it was a safe deposit box, which her grandmother had her co-sign on when she was eighteen, there was nothing mentioned in a will. I found out about that yesterday when she was wearing her grandmother’s earrings and her mother went apeshit.”