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She flinched. Couldn’t help it. Having to collaborate with the man who’d killed her husband was the worst thing she’d ever experienced. Every second near him had turned her stomach. But she couldn’t tell Kyle that. Not without blowing her cover. She blinked back unwanted tears and squared her shoulders. She didn’t owe this man anything. Any loyalty she had once felt toward him had died that day in DC when he’d called the FBI on her—willingly turning her over to what would be, as far as he knew, brutal interrogation. He’d proven that he didn’t give a damn about her, which meant she’d have to make sure she was just as indifferent to him.
He didn’t say another word. Neither did she. They just stared at each other across the span of a few feet, divided by hurt and grief and differing loyalties—their own silent standoff smack dab in the middle of Double D’s.
But then the door to the bar slammed open and voices grew louder in the hall. One she recognized—the bar manager—the other she didn’t. The conversation was muffled, but the manager’s ending words were clear as a bell. “Come into my office, and we’ll discuss it.” Footsteps moved closer to the tiny storage room. “I don’t remember leaving the lights on in there.” The door handle jiggled. “Have a seat. I’m just gonna grab my keys and turn those off.”
“Dammit!” Natalie hissed.
“Crap!” Kyle said at the same time.
His gaze darted toward the door before returning to her. “We need to get out of here.”
Natalie made a quick decision. Kyle might be a pain in her butt at this particular moment, but he wasn’t a traitor. Most likely they were on the same side. Sort of. She cocked her head toward the corner behind the file cabinet. “There’s a secret entrance over there. I’ll get the door open. You pull the file cabinet back into place after we get inside, all right?”
They both startled at the manager’s key pushing into the lock, and Kyle shoved her farther into the shadows, clicking on the safety and holstering his weapon. “Fine. Hop to it.”
Natalie ducked down and darted toward the half door leading into the secret closet behind the storage room, slipping inside while Kyle silently moved the massive file cabinet back into place. Kyle soon squeezed in beside her, his index finger pressed to his lips—as if she needed a reminder to keep silent.
Outside, the manager kept talking to whoever was waiting for him in his office. The light in the storage room went off, and they waited in the darkness until the door to the hallway closed again. In the tight confines, their mingled breath sounded harsh and the heat of Kyle’s body scorched through her clothes. His scent—soap and musk and clean man—took her back to the days she’d spent on the Matthews family farm in Virginia. Such happy times, before tragedy struck.
Finally, Kyle fumbled between them and tugged on the string hanging from the ceiling. One bare bulb illuminated the cramped space. Thank God there was a small window up near the corner of the closet for their escape. Otherwise, she would’ve seriously gone into panic mode.
“You okay?” Kyle whispered, and she nodded, swallowing hard and looking away from him. She wasnotgoing to focus on how close he was. No, she was going to do her job, like the highly trained agent she was. And that job was to track down Arrieta and bring him in. To do that, though, she needed to find the damned laptop that was supposedly stashed here. A whole team of techs were waiting back at the Agency to hack into its hard drive to see if they could locate a copy of his purported virus and find a way to counteract it.
But how the hell was she supposed to retrieve the laptop while maintaining her cover and convincing Kyle that she was nothing more than hired help at the bar?
“You can drop the act, you know,” Kyle said.
“Act?”
He rolled his eyes. “The ‘I’m just a sweet, helpless little waitress’ bullshit you pulled on my brother. I might have bought it in the past, but I know better now. I know what you really are.”
Natalie sighed. “If this is about Becks…”
“No, this is about you being a CIA agent,” he said coolly, freezing her in her tracks.
“Wh-what?” she stammered. “I… Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Wow, you’re a shitty liar.” He frowned, as if genuinely troubled by the thought. “They let you take undercover assignments when you’re this bad at it? How have you not gotten yourself killed?”
“I amnota shitty liar!” she shot back automatically, her pride stung. “I’ve been working undercoversince before we even met,and you never had any idea, so don’t you dare tell me I don’t know how to do my job!”
“Given the fact that you just admitted you’re an agent, I’d say it’s pretty clear youdon’tknow how to do your job.”
Damn, that was a rookie mistake. She knew better. Shewasbetter. But something about Kyle got under all her defenses.
“You watch too many spy movies,” she scoffed, fighting to regain her poise. “Why on earth would you think I was a CIA agent?”
“The fact that Coran Williams named you as such in sworn testimony as part of his plea deal.” Kyle looked as calm as if he was giving her a weather report rather than tearing apart the cover she’d risked her life to maintain. “He also said that you were on the take, but your handler cleared that up on the official record, confirming that you were on a long-term assignment to unravel Williams’s network of informants.”
“Coran said…wait, plea deal? He’s been arrested?”
“Yes. By me and my team.”
“But that can’t be true,” Natalie argued. “Why wouldn’t I have heard about it?” Surely it would have been on the news. And even if the intelligence community had kept the arrest under wraps for security reasons, her handler would have told her.
“It’s true.” Kyle sounded bored. “I don’t know why your people wouldn’t have kept you in the loop. Maybe they don’t trust you very much.”
She winced. That…wasn’t entirely off base. She knew there had been some whispers about whether she was the right person to keep on this assignment after Nick had been killed. People thought she was too overwrought to get the job done. It didn’t help that her longtime handler, the one who had recruited her all those years ago, had recently retired, leaving her working with someone new. They didn’t have abadrelationship, per se, but the trust wasn’t really there yet. It took time to build.
