Special Ops Affair (7 page)

He sent her a dubious look. “Maybe not in your work, but your personal life…now that’s a different story.”

“I just don’t want to get involved with someone who could get killed. What’s so bad about that?”

He glanced derisively at her and faced forward again. “Let’s just drop it. Stay focused on the job. Keep it professional. Can you do that?”

“Yes.” But she wondered if that was true. Would her heart overrule that better judgment? Kissing him had made her feel something she hadn’t felt since Sage. And that more than disconcerted her.

While her spirits fell, she looked down at the laptop screen and was glad to report a change. “Friese is heading toward Interstate 81.”

“Looks like we’re going on a road trip.”

Great. Just what she needed, more time alone with him. She watched the laptop screen, but her mind kept wandering to that kiss. It had broken something loose, something she was good at keeping buried, until now.

Staring through the passenger window, she didn’t really see the passing landscape. The last day she’d seen Sage descended upon her as if it had happened yesterday. He had stood in their foyer smiling as he held her.

“Two months isn’t that long,” he’d said.

“It will seem like forever.” She’d looped her arms around his big shoulders, rising onto her toes to bring her mouth up to his. She’d been barefoot and wearing one of his button-down shirts and nothing else. They’d made love the night before and again that morning, but she could never get enough. And he was leaving.

“I don’t want you to go,” she’d told him, covering his face with kisses.

He’d put his hands on each side of her head. “I’ll be back before you know it.”

She’d shaken her head. “Don’t go. Don’t do it anymore. Find another job.”

He’d chuckled. “You know this is what I do. There isn’t anything else I want to do.”

She’d kissed his mouth, wanting to convince him to stay.

“When I get home, I’ll spend every second with you until I have to leave again. Maybe we’ll take a trip somewhere. The Caribbean or something.”

She’d held on to that thought. Seeing him again. Two months. She could do it. Just two months….

Three weeks later they’d come knocking on the front door.

That was the one memory she wished she could forget. Usually she was pretty good at pushing it back where it belonged, in the dark shadows of her mind, far away from her conscience. But kissing Jag had brought it all back.

She’d opened the door and saw them in uniform. Two men. And she’d known.

“We’re very sorry to tell you…”

She hadn’t heard any more. She’d screamed and had kept screaming. Time had lost all order after that. Her mother had arrived. A doctor had given her a sedative. She’d spent two months at home. Well, most of the time that was where she’d been. She’d sat on the couch, ridden in her mother’s car, sat outside. But she’d been in a daze. Numb. Dying inside. She’d nearly died from a broken heart. Her. Odelia Frank. Anyone who knew her now would never guess.

When she couldn’t take it anymore, she’d convinced her mother that she was better and needed some time alone. But she was anything but better. She’d vanished in the Caribbean and would never have returned—lying listlessly in a secluded bungalow where no one was around. Death didn’t scare her. It would relieve her of the pain.

As it turned out, her mother had told Cullen where she was, and he’d come to find her. He was looking for a good intelligence officer and had gotten her name from someone he knew, some government type who knew her father. He’d found her in the bungalow, skinny as a rail, uninterested in life.

“You okay?”

Odie flinched, her awareness returning to Jag. Feeling wetness on her cheek, she briskly wiped the tears, mortified that she’d allowed her thoughts to run away the way they had, and that they’d affected her like this.

“Fine.”

Jag kept looking at her, glancing from the road to her.

“What the hell are you looking at?” she snapped.

“Why are you crying?”

“I’m not crying.” Those few dribbles didn’t count.

“I think I know when someone’s crying.”

“I wasn’t crying. Crying is wailing and getting a stuffy nose. My eyes watered, that’s all. Not that it’s any of your damn business.”

He glanced at her again but didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. He was the first person since Cullen had found her crumbling under the weight of grief to see her one vulnerability. Sage and her love for him. And because of that, love in general.

Well, good. Great. Lovely. Now he knew why she couldn’t get involved with him. She never wanted to feel like that again.

Chapter 5

H
ours later, Jag drove the rental through the Monongahela National Forest near Harman, West Virginia. The tracker display showed Calan turning off the highway. It stopped moving a short distance up a dirt road.

Jag pulled to the side of the road at a long driveway leading up to a beautiful log home. Slipping on a pair of thin leather gloves, he pulled out a gun from his boot and opened the driver’s door.

Odie opened the passenger door and followed him into the woods. The cabin came into view through a maze of tree trunks. The white truck was parked in the gravel drive in front of a garage.

Jag stopped. “Wait here.”

“No. I’m going with you.”

“You don’t have a gun. I’ve been meaning to ask you why, too, by the way. Weren’t you some kind of hotshot markswoman or something?”

Yes, but that was before Sage. “I don’t need a gun.” She started hiking again.

“No, you just need your mouth.”

His teasing tone made her smile.

Moving ahead of her, Jag reached the sliding glass door in the back of the cabin. Odie heard the sound of a truck starting. Calan’s? Was he leaving? Already?

She shared a glance with Jag.

He slid open the unlocked door and stepped inside. Odie searched the great room containing leather furniture and a huge fireplace. Tall windows offered a view of mountains from the back. There were no windows around the front door, but it was open a crack.

The cabin was quiet.

Odie’s heart began to beat faster. This didn’t feel right. The front door was open. Calan had just fled. And it was too quiet.

There were dishes piled in the kitchen sink and papers on the kitchen table. An empty bottle of beer sat on the coffee table before the fireplace. A throw blanket was crumpled on the couch. Someone was staying here.

She looked out the front window. Calan’s white truck was gone. She moved to the garage door and opened it. There was a white Lexus inside. On the other side of the garage was a motorcycle.

“Jag?”

He came up behind her.

“Jesus,” he muttered.

“Where is he?” If the man who’d come to Kate’s funeral on that motorcycle—and followed them in that Lexus—was here, where was he now and why had Calan come to see him?

Jag turned and headed down a hallway across from the living area, moving slowly and looking out the windows. She followed, instinctively knowing what they’d find. At the first door, he stopped. Odie peered inside. It was an office. The computer was on and the screensaver hadn’t kicked in yet. On the floor a body of an older man lay facedown, blood staining the carpet around his head. Fresh blood. Whoever he was, he had just been killed. And it appeared as if Calan Friese had just done it.

“Damn it,” Jag swore, going to the body. With his gloved hands, he rolled the man over.

Odie couldn’t stop her sharp inhale. It was the man in the second picture she’d seen.

Jag glanced back at her and she tried to cover her alarm, but he was so astute when it came to observing her that she didn’t doubt he’d picked up on something.

“You know him?”

She shook her head.

“Odie…”

“I swear I don’t know him.”

Anger tightened the line of his mouth. He glowered at her a moment longer and then began searching the body.

She turned to the computer, plucking a tissue from a box and putting it over the mouse. With a shaky hand, she maneuvered quickly, scanning files. Nothing unusual. On the desktop, she brought up the start menu and saw a link to a folder. Frasier Darby, it said. She went to the control panel and brought up the system window. Under computer name was Frasier Darby again.

“Anything?”

Realizing Jag stood behind her, she glanced back. “His name is Frasier Darby.”

“I know, I have his driver’s license.”

Tucking the tissue into her pocket, she left the room ahead of him. They searched the rest of the house. Odie let Jag do most the touching since he wore gloves. After about twenty minutes, nothing significant turned up.

“Come on. Let’s go,” Jag said, and she followed him through the front door, leaving it open a crack as it was when Friese had left. She jogged with Jag to their rental.

Inside, she put the laptop on her thighs and checked the monitor. “Friese went left.”

“He’s probably heading back to D.C.,” Jag said.

“Let’s not follow him. I want to be able to talk to him again.”

“Don’t you mean
we?
”

She sent him an impatient look while she used her satellite phone to call 911 and anonymously report the murder.

Just as she finished, the road led into a steeper grade. When Jag pressed the brakes, they didn’t slow. He drove fast into a curve in the road.

“What’s wrong?”

“Brakes aren’t working.”

Had someone punctured the line?

“Someone doesn’t want to be followed,” he said, shifting into Low.

The car slowed, but Jag had to steer hard to correct the direction of the car as it sailed out of the turn. The car swerved.

Odie saw the tree and shut her eyes as they hit it. Airbags exploded. She was disoriented for a second or two.

“You okay?” Jag asked as everything went still. The car engine sputtered and died.

“Yes.”

Odie got out and stood under the branches of poplar trees. She looked over at Jag, who’d gotten out, too. She couldn’t hear anything other than the sounds of wilderness carrying on as if they’d never come. She tipped her head back. There was a chill in the air and the sun was setting. She turned toward the road. It was desolate and full of deepening shadows. That didn’t scare her. She knew self-defense and she was with one of TES’s finest.

“I’ll call Cullen. He can have someone arrange transportation, but it’ll probably take them a while.”

“I saw a turnoff to some cabins up the road,” she offered.

“Works for me. Going to get dark soon.” He bent into the rental and pulled out a duffel bag. She didn’t have to see its contents to know it contained the essentials. His precaution didn’t surprise her. Men like him were never caught unprepared.

She walked to the opposite rear door and opened it, grabbed her leather jacket and tote, seeing he’d also grabbed the laptop. Slinging the tote over one shoulder and draping the jacket over the other, she started walking up the road. Jag caught up to her in two or three easy strides.

“You think Friese killed that man?” she asked.

“Looks that way to me.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t hear a gunshot.”

“He could have used a silencer.”

“And then punctured our brake line?” Unless someone else had gotten there ahead of Friese, that’s what had likely happened.

“We’ll go with that for now.”

She nodded. “But let’s not discount other possibilities. Friese would have had to have killed that man really fast.”

“Gone in and pulled the trigger. Yep.”

It hadn’t looked as if the man had struggled. Shot in the back of the head.

She looked to her side at the darkening forest, where rhododendron and mountain laurel spread beneath the canopy, and then ahead at the dirt road that curved into the trees and disappeared. Her father had been killed on a road like that.

Now that the excitement of the afternoon had passed, and all he had to occupy his mind was a long walk in the dark with Odie, Jag couldn’t stop his thoughts from wandering back to that kiss. He still couldn’t figure out what had made him do it. It hadn’t even mattered that they were in a busy restaurant, either. She refused to tell him everything she knew about her father’s murder and that made her seem shady. He didn’t think she was keeping anything from him about Friese, but if she did learn something he doubted she’d share it without him prying it out of her.

Though he couldn’t deny his growing attraction to her, he had to consider the worst. If what she was hiding was related to Hersch, it wouldn’t paint her in very favor able light. Had her father been involved in something unscrupulous before he was killed? Or had he discovered something bigger than he could handle? The way Odie was behaving, he’d go with the former. But would she hinder a TES investigation for personal reasons? He had a hard time imagining her willing to do such a thing. But then, it might be her father’s reputation on the line. How far would she go to protect it?

He checked Odie to see how she was holding up. They’d walked about ten miles so far. She didn’t seem bothered. And then he felt silly for thinking she couldn’t keep up with him. He had to admit, that part about her appealed to him. He’d never met anyone like her. She was tough and capable, and then there was a softer side he doubted very few people ever saw.

“Are you going to tell me why you don’t carry a gun?” he asked. It was a good way to lead into other questions he had for her.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to.”

She was like a guy that way. Brief and to the point. Very little emotion. Always logical and on the mark. Not that every guy was like that, but those who worked for TES were. “Do you have any guns at your house?”

“No.”

“Keep any at TES headquarters?”

“Nope.”

He turned to see her. She kept her profile to him and her face void of reaction. “Is it because your husband was killed in action?”

Abruptly, she stopped. He was slower to do the same. Bingo.

“How do you do that?” she asked.

“Do what?”

“Guess everything.”

He shrugged. “Common sense.”

“It’s annoying.”

He smiled, unable to help it. Other than the loss of her husband, she said whatever was on her mind and didn’t waste much time tiptoeing around feelings. He didn’t realize how much he liked that in a woman until now. If only that extended to the connection between Hersch and her father.

She started walking again and he fell in step beside her.

“How long ago did he die?”

“Your common sense is faltering.”

He did his own math. “You’ve been with TES what…almost six years now?”

She stopped walking again, this time folding her arms, her dark eyes beaming with challenge.

So, her husband had died about six years ago. “That’s a long time.”

Her brow lifted. He ignored it. She needed to be pushed every once in a while.

“Was that engineer the first man you’ve been with since then?”

“And this is your business…how?”

“I’m just curious. You don’t have to answer.”

“I’ve dated other men over the last couple of years.”

So for four of those years she hadn’t been interested in anyone. “But no operatives.”

“I dated a couple of those, too. At first.”

Was that why she’d cried in the car earlier? Had she been thinking of her husband? What had made her think of him? Being with an operative again? Kissing one and liking it?

Had she felt it that much? He sure as hell had.

He caught himself. “You’re right. It’s none of my business.” He started walking again. He didn’t want to desire a woman who kept secrets, especially one with Odelia Frank’s background. She could be dangerous. Why did it matter what she thought of him? It didn’t. At least, it shouldn’t.

She caught up to him, her long, dark hair shiny and thick and swinging with her movement. She didn’t wear makeup but her dark eyes were striking on her smooth, proportioned face. She’d put on her leather jacket. One hand swung free at her side and she had her work tote hanging from her other shoulder. She had great thighs, long and toned in those faded jeans. She always wore hiking boots, too. He’d like to see her in high heels.

Catching himself again, he looked ahead.

It was a still night. No clouds. The stars were far away, not as bright as they were in Roaring Creek. The elevation here was so much lower.

“Don’t take it personally,” she said.

What did she think he was thinking? “Take what personally?”

“I just don’t like talking about him, that’s all.”

“That’s okay, I don’t like talking about my ex-wife, either.”

“You were married?”

He saw her surprise. “Do you think every man in my profession isn’t marriage material?”

“No. Not if they work for TES. There must be something in the water in Roaring Creek.”

“So, there
is
hope for you.”

“I drink bottled water.”

He chuckled. Damn, he liked her mind. He walked without saying anything for a while, but he could tell she wanted to know more.

“When did you get divorced?” she asked.

“Three years ago.” He really didn’t want to talk about this. Maybe he should have avoided the topic of her husband.

“What happened? She get tired of you always being gone?”

“No.” But he’d bet that’s what she hadn’t liked about her marriage.

“What then? Is she the one who portrayed herself as someone she wasn’t?”

He contemplated not answering. Out of fairness, he did. “She was arrested for a hit-and-run.”

Odie whistled and looked at him with incredulous eyes. “She ran from an accident?”

“One that killed a woman and her son. She went to prison for it.”

“Oh, my God, that’s terrible.”

“She was also into drugs. I didn’t know any of that until after I married her. I didn’t know about the accident or her drug dealings. Not until the cops came knocking one day.”

“Didn’t you spend enough time to get to know her?”

“She told me she was an English teacher who’d just moved to the East Coast and was looking for a job. She said her parents were killed in a car wreck and she didn’t have any siblings. The truth was her mother was a hooker who couldn’t identify daddy without a DNA test. She grew up in a poor suburb of Detroit. Her first husband abused her and was unfaithful. That’s when she got into drugs. I didn’t even know she’d been married before. She was running from the law when I met her. But of course, she didn’t tell me that.”

“How long were you married?”

“Six months.”

“I won’t ask anything stupid, like, did you love her.”

Figures, she’d have to say something smart. “Thanks.”

She smiled.

And it lifted his mood.