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“Exactly who the fuck are you?” the second guy asked him.
Noah let out a long, weary sigh. “Special Agent Noah Temple. FBI’s White-Collar Crimes Unit,” he said. “And you’re both under arrest for firing on a federal agent.”
“What did you say?”
Noah didn’t dare turn around, but did catch a quick glimpse of Alyssa in the full-length mirrored doors of the closet. And she looked like she wanted to tear him apart with her bare hands.
CHAPTER 8
Going against everything she knew about herself, Alyssa sat in absolute stillness. And waited.
Perched on the edge of the blue velvet chair, quietly absorbing the activity around her, she impressed the hell out of herself. Waiting was, as a rule, not something she did well. Patience never had been her strong suit.
The two big, scary bad guys, Milo Simms and Gordon French, had been taken away by a pair of uniformed officers with the Manhattan Beach Police Department. Turned out they never were the hired guns of Bastian Pharmaceuticals. Instead, they were private investigators, licensed to carry firearms, who’d been retained by the federal prosecutor, Kyle Houston, to keep tabs on Charles Rolston. When she and the guy she’d believed to be Charles Rolston had run, Simms and French had wrongly assumed they were trying to give them the slip in order to avoid testifying at the criminal trial.
She’d overheard the detective from MBPD say Simms would be free to go, but there was still the issue of French firing on a federal agent. French claimed said federal agent had fired first, but she knew that was a line of crap. Even if she’d bothered to open her mouth on the subject, she still had a feeling the charges against French would eventually be dropped.
Still, if the big lug hadn’t fired at them in the first place, they might have discovered much sooner that they were essentially on the same team. But then nothing about the last eighteen hours had gone as it should have, starting with her assuming sexier-than-sin Special Agent Noah Temple was Rolston.
She should’ve trusted her instincts. She’d known he didn’t look like a Charles. He wasn’t a Chas or a Chuck either. He was Noah Temple, a special agent from the FBI’s White-Collar Crimes Unit based in Quantico, Virginia.
And he was the worst kind of liar.
Too bad for him, she now hated the name Noah, too.
With their small hotel room packed to the gills with law enforcement personnel, she hadn’t had a chance to tell him what she really thought of him. But she could wait.
From what she’d gleaned from the various conversations going on around her, she might be waiting until God knew when to give the man a piece of her mind because the situation was a jurisdictional nightmare. There were two Los Angeles County Sheriff’s investigators, a detective from the Manhattan Beach Police Department, along with three uniforms and one sergeant from his department. A supervisory agent from the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office had been called in, as had someone from the federal prosecutor’s office. In addition, the local FBI had notified Homeland Security.
In her opinion, the whole mess was nothing more than a macho pissing match that she wanted no part of. In fact, the sooner she got the hell o
ut of there, the happier she’d be. Sort of. Only problem was, she wasn’t going anywhere until she had a word or two with Whatshisname.
She didn’t care if she was pregnant. After she ripped him a new one, she never wanted to see Whatshisname again. In fact, never again would be too soon for her.
She hurt. Her heart hurt and during the ensuing chaos, she’d had moments when her chest ached so much she couldn’t draw her next breath. Telling herself the pain would eventually subside did little to alleviate her hurt, or the anger simmering inside her. With him. With herself. With whatever Fate had thrown them together.
The women in her family were destined to be alone. Her Granny Belle had been shunned by her family after she’d discovered she was pregnant, two days after she’d received word that her fiancé had died in the Pacific during World War II. Her own mother, who’d died from leukemia when Alyssa was only ten years old, had never recovered emotionally after her husband had been killed by a drunk driver not two months after they’d been married. And now, here she sat in a blue velvet chair, with a pain in her chest that had nothing to do with heart disease, wondering if she was destined to follow in the footsteps of prior generations.
Her pride had taken a hit. A bad one. But that’s all it could be because she sure as hell wasn’t in love with a man she didn’t even know. Her mother and grandmother had both believed in love at first sight and what had it gotten them? Nothing but a broken heart.
She looked up at the rat bastard in question and for just one moment she wished he’d been honest with her. She didn’t like feeling this way. Didn’t like feeling—lost.
Another person entered the room, this one a hotel employee carrying their bags, which she’d thrown over to the balcony next to theirs when she’d thought they would be running for their lives. He set the bags next to the dresser and left without waiting for a tip.
She considered picking up her bag and quietly slipping from the room, escaping down to the lobby where she’d have the night clerk call her a cab. It could be hours before she’d have any time alone with Whatshisname.
What good would reading him the riot act do anyway? All she’d end up doing was maybe leave him with a few choice words to choke on, and then she’d be on her way. Home. Alone. To nurse—what? A broken heart?
Hardly.
In order to have a broken heart, she’d have to have feelings for him. She hadn’t known him long enough to care. She hadn’t known him long enough to have sex with him, either, but that hadn’t stopped her. One sultry glance from his get-lost-in-me green eyes and she’d spread her legs like a cat in heat. She was hopeless.
She looked around the room and found him with his back to her, talking to the other FBI agent. Just as quietly as she’d been sitting in the chair for the past two hours, she picked up her bag and exited the room.
She made it to the elevator undetected. She even stood in the lobby for a full fifteen minutes undisturbed. And then she slipped into the backseat of a taxi, gave the driver her address, and never once looked back.
Noah had resisted the urge to panic once he’d noticed that Alyssa had left. He’d been in a heated conversation with the federal prosecutor, essentially telling the guy he was a jackass and should be disbarred for hiring a couple of gun-toting henchmen. The supervisory agent from the L.A. field office had stepped in and Noah had walked away, disgusted by the entire mess. It had taken him half a minute to realize Alyssa was decidedly absent. He didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out she’d probably gone home.
