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He stretched forward and showed me an antique cigarette case: I remembered him having it in the woods, now. “My dad used to carry this thing. My granddaddy before him. Both of them served. Neither of them ever disobeyed orders or went AWOL.” He sighed and shook his head. “If you’d told me a few days ago I’d go against JD, go against the team, I’d have called you crazy.”
I wondered what it must be like, to have that feeling of loyalty to something. I was used to allegiances shifting like the wind. “We’re doing the right thing,” I told him gently. “This CIA guy, Steward: he’s the traitor, not you.”
“I know,” he said quietly. He flipped the cigarette case over and I saw the Stars and Stripes engraved on one side. He rubbed his thumb across the lines of it. “Just…I swore an oath, y’know?”
I met his eyes in the rear view mirror. “If we don’t stop this thing,” I told him firmly, “in twenty-four hours, there might not be a United States.”
He grudgingly lay down and fell into a fitful sleep, mumbling to himself and twitching. Without really thinking about what I was doing, I reached behind me with one hand and put it on his sleeping shoulder and, after a few minutes, he seemed to relax and sleep soundly. I smiled. Then I caught myself and jerked my hand back. What am I doing? I’d never been like that with Lev. I’d loved him but I’d never been tender: it just wasn’t in either of our natures. Colton brought out a side of me I wasn’t used to. I hadn’t even known it existed.
I glanced at him in the rear view mirror. My eyes tracked down from that gorgeous face, peaceful now in sleep. Then to his bicep, the swell of it pushing out the fabric of his sweatshirt, and his forearm, deliciously thick and weighty, reassuringly solid. His arm was across his chest and I knew that if I gently slowed and pulled off the road, I could slip into the back seat without him even waking. I could burrow under that arm and let it slip around my waist, put my head on the warm curve of his pec and just lie there, snug and protected.
I snapped my eyes back to the road and shook my head, silently cursing myself in Russian. Weak, selfish suka! Lev was dead. I didn’t deserve Colton, or anyone. I couldn’t give in to these feelings. I shouldn’t even be having them.
The road’s white center line went blurry. See? This is what happened when I let someone past all the ice.
I savagely blinked my tears away and drove on into the night.
I woke Colton by waving a cup of coffee from a drive-thru under his nose. He frowned, grunted, then sat up and rubbed his eyes with his fists. I kept my face expressionless but, inside, I was melting. Chyort, but he really was just a big teddy bear! I pressed the coffee cup into one of his hands and a bacon, egg and cheese muffin wrapped in greasy paper into the other, then climbed into the back seat next to him and closed the door so that we could talk while we ate.
Colton looked around, blinking. When he’d fallen asleep, we’d been on the highway. Now we were in the heart of a city. “Where are we?”
“DC.” I sipped my coffee and nodded to a beautiful old townhouse a few doors down the street. “That’s Steward’s house. I got his address from his credit card company, via a hacker friend of mine back home. We’ll tail him from here and follow him until he goes to this meet at 2pm. Then we’ll know which country’s behind this.”
We finished the food and moved into the front seats to wait. At just before eight, a black SUV pulled up outside Steward’s house and a couple of guys whose posture screamed former military knocked on his door. Steward came out and—
I leaned forward in my seat. “What’s that he’s carrying?”
“A suit,” shrugged Colton.
“No…” I strained my eyes, trying to see the detail through the plastic garment bag. “It’s a tuxedo!”
Steward and his entourage climbed into the SUV and it drove off. Colton followed at a distance. “Maybe he’s going to an event tonight, straight from work,” he said.
“Maybe,” I muttered, worried. I already had my phone out and was frantically searching through lists of DC social events. After a few minutes, I cursed. “Got it. There’s a party today, 1pm to 4pm, some kind of charity fundraiser. Lots of DC power players seem to go…and there’s a picture of Steward there from last year.”
“So he’s meeting someone at the party.” Colton slowed the car and pulled over by the side of the road, letting Steward disappear off into the distance. There was no point tailing him now. “Shit!” Colton thumped the dashboard. “His contact could be anyone at that party. We’ll have no idea who he speaks to!”
