by Cynthia Eden
Before he could catch her checking him out again, she staggered to her feet, her clothes bunched in her arms, and scurried to the bathroom.
Once in the shower, she got a grip and returned to reality. She and Austin were in a bubble right now—a bubble of fear and uncertainty. Other than Dr. Fazal, she’d never had a protective male figure in her life. She had to separate her emotional connection and dependence on Austin from the real reason he was acting as her guardian.
He had a job to do, and once the CIA or whoever was pulling his strings had decided he’d done as much as they needed, they’d yank him off the case and send him back overseas.
She had to prepare for that eventuality and stop having ridiculous thoughts about him—and his body. She still had Tyler Cannon, her Spark date, waiting for her, and maybe a few more connections to check out once she was able to use her phone again.
She finished her shower with her feet on the ground and her head out of the clouds. After towel drying her hair and pulling her black camisole over her head, she tucked her sweater under her arm. Forget the sex appeal.
She marched back into the room, her glance sweeping past Austin, entering a text in his phone. At least he’d had the decency to cover all those flexing muscles with a white T-shirt and his jeans from last night.
He looked up from his phone. “Wow, I bet you look good in that red color.”
“This?” She held up the sweater she’d been ready to dump back into her suitcase. “Yeah, I like red.”
She stuffed her arms into the sweater and yanked it over her head. It was a just a sweater, not a shimmering cocktail dress.
“I made contact.” He held up his phone. “The CIA’s sending me to a guy, Melvin, in the Massachusetts Department of Justice. He’ll lift the prints and send them to the FBI first for a check against the national database. If there’s no match there, he has a connection to Interpol and we can see if we can get a fingerprint database from Pakistan.”
“That sounds like a long shot. Does Pakistan even have a database with fingerprints?”
“I don’t have a clue. That’s not our area.”
“What are the police going to find when they search for Patel’s identity?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he’ll have fake ID. What I do know is that I’ve already contacted the agency that’s running the show out here and indicated that I need to get into Patel’s homicide file.”
“They can do that?”
“They have computer guys—and one amazing woman—who can hack into anything.”
“Who is they, Austin? Who’s calling the shots for you other than the navy?”
“I can’t tell you that, Sophia.”
“Would anyone, including me, even know this organization?”
“No.” He slid open the closet door and pulled some clothes from a few hangers. “We’ll get going as soon as I’m done.”
“Take your time.” She parked herself in front of the full-length mirror on the closet door and ran her hands through her damp hair.
She caught his eye in the mirror. “What?”
“You do look good in that color.”
He slammed the bathroom door, and she smiled at her reflection in the mirror—a big, silly grin that spelled trouble.
* * *
WITH HER CELL phone back in her possession and clutched in her hand, Sophia took the seat across from Austin in a small breakfast café across the street from the Commons. “Do you really think Melvin will have an answer on those prints at the end of the day?”
“It’s a rush order, and Melvin seems like a competent guy.” Austin shook open the plastic menu. “He’ll get to the national database, anyway. It’s going to take longer for Interpol to get back to him—even with the CIA pressuring them.”
She turned her coffee cup upright and smiled at the waiter. When he’d filled her cup and Austin’s, Sophia continued. “The CIA knows about your assignment, but you’re not reporting primarily to them, are you? The CIA is not calling the shots here.”
“Why are you so interested?” He peered at her over the top of his menu, wiggling his eyebrows up and down.
“It fascinates me—the dark, twisting corridors of power.”
“You make it sound…nefarious. It’s all done to protect people like you—” he tipped his menu toward the other tables “—and the people in this restaurant, and the people waiting for their tours to begin in Boston Commons.”
She rolled her eyes. “If you say so.”
He hunched forward, opened his mouth and then must’ve thought better of it. “I think I’m going to have the pancakes. You?”
“I’m not a breakfast person.” She cradled her coffee cup with two hands. “Maybe some toast.”
As they gave their order to the waiter, Austin’s phone vibrated on the table. He ignored it until their waiter left, and then he grabbed it.
“Not the fingerprints yet.”
He shook his head. “Almost better. The initial police report on Patel’s murder.”
“Are they still calling him Peter Patel?”
“They are.” He swept his fingertip across his phone’s display. “Which means he must’ve been carrying fake ID.”
“Have they made any connection between him and Dr. Fazal?”
“Not that I can see, but when we get back to the hotel I’ll bring the report up on my laptop.” He placed the phone beside his coffee cup and tapped the screen twice. “I got what I wanted right now though.”
“What’s that?”
“The hotel where he was staying.”
“Have the police been there yet?”
“I’m sure they have, but it doesn’t mean I can’t check it out.”
“We. We can check it out. I’m not sitting around in that hotel waiting for you. Besides…” She dropped her lashes and ran the tip of her finger along the rim of her cup. “I—I just feel safer when I’m with you.”
When she looked at him through her lowered lashes, she caught her breath. His raised eyebrows told her he wasn’t buying her “poor pitiful me” act.
“You’d be perfectly safe in that hotel room, especially since you’re packing your own heat. You want to come along because you want to be in on the action—you want to be proactive in getting justice for Dr. Fazal. I get it.”
The waiter arrived with a stack of blueberry pancakes for Austin and some rye toast for her. “Anything else I can get you?”
They both declined, and Austin dumped a pile of whipped butter on top of his pancakes.
“You don’t have to use tricks with me, Sophia. You don’t have to pretend to be someone you’re not—because I like you, as is.”
She watched him dig into his pancakes through narrowed eyes. He didn’t want to take care of the soft, helpless woman? She’d rarely been soft or helpless in her life, but she could’ve given it a try—for Austin.
Back at the hotel an hour later, Austin brought up the police report on Patel’s homicide on his laptop and scrolled through it. Patel had died, bled out, probably moments before Sophia discovered him. Thank God Patel’s killer hadn’t ambushed Sophia before Austin had him in his crosshairs.
There were no akas listed in Patel’s file, so as far as the Boston PD was concerned, the murder victim was Peter Patel, a visitor to Boston from California and staying at the Cambridge Arms Hotel—even his room number was listed in the report. Money and credit cards had been lifted from Patel’s wallet to make it look like a robbery. Of course, the cops had to be thinking, what street criminal would slit a man’s throat to get cash and credit cards?
“What did you find out? Where was he staying?” Sophia sat on the bed beside him, crossing her legs beneath her.
His gaze glanced across her creamy shoulder where her sweater dropped off and then meandered to her
dark eyes, sparkling with interest and intelligence. He preferred this engaged presence to the scared female persona she felt she had to employ to convince him to take her with him when he went to Patel’s hotel room. Did she really believe he wanted a damsel in distress? Did he? Had he?
If he examined the truth head-on, most of the women he’d dated back home had been softer, more domesticated, more interested in a diamond on their left hand than one piercing the side of their nose.
“Hotel?” She cocked her head and her inky hair fanned across her exposed shoulder.
“The Cambridge Arms. Know it?”
“Nope. Sounds like one of those places thrown up to accommodate the parents of all those college students.” She tugged on her earlobe. “The cops think this is a robbery?”
“Uh-huh. His killer even stole money and credit cards from his wallet.”
“Oh, and just decided to slice him from ear to ear after they got their eighty bucks?”
“I’m sure that’s under their consideration.”
“When do we head over to the Cambridge Arms and what are we going to find? The cops have probably already been there, right?”
“I’m sure they have. They probably even removed some items from the room if they thought something had particular significance.”
“Will we find anything left that could help us?”
“We might. I’m not going to pass up the chance to find out.”
Her cell phone buzzed and she leaned forward to snatch it from the bedside table. Her fingers played across the display as she made a slight turn away from him.
Austin ground his back teeth, and he tapped his keyboard a little harder than he had to. When he’d had possession of her cell, he couldn’t help noticing a few more messages rolling in from that dating app. Was that what she was doing now? Answering her so-called dates?
He sniffed. Was that the kind of guy she wanted? Someone who spent time trolling for women online instead of meeting them face-to-face?
He rubbed his hand across his mouth. And how exactly was that any of his business?
She cupped her phone in her palm. “When are we going to Cambridge?”
“As soon as I finish going through this report.”
“You don’t think we should wait until nighttime?”
“Less conspicuous during the day, and we don’t have to worry about turning on any lights in his room—in case someone’s watching.”
Dragging her bottom lip between her teeth, she tossed her phone from hand to hand. “Do you think his killers know where he was staying?”
“They went through his pockets to take money from his wallet, so they saw his hotel key. They know.”
“So, they might be there?”
“Which is another reason why we’re going in the daylight. They know the police have been or will be in Cambridge. They’ll wait until they think it’s safe.”
“What if the police catch us?”
“You forget.” He thumped his chest once. “Even though I’m supposed to be under law enforcement’s radar, if worse comes to worse and they make me, I have an out.”
“It would cause some kind of…incident though, wouldn’t it? A US Navy SEAL involved in an operation in the homeland.”
“It would be a problem—but I don’t intend to get caught.”
“Oh, I won’t get caught either.” She flicked back her dark hair. “I got away with plenty back in the day.”
“I’ll bet you still do.”
A pretty pink tinged her cheeks, and then she rolled off the bed. “I’ll let you finish so we can get going. Something to drink from the vending machine?”
“I still have a water in the fridge.”
“I need…something.”
She banged out of the room, and Austin eased back against the stack of pillows. Despite the electricity between them, Sophia wasn’t comfortable with flirtation—and he needed to stop flirting with her and stop thinking about what she was and was not comfortable with. He needed to protect her against Fazal’s killers and that was it.
After the identification of Patel, he could be out of here and on the first plane back to Somalia. He and his team of snipers still had plenty of unfinished business with a nasty terrorist with the code name Vlad.
By the time Sophia had returned to the room, he’d gone through the rest of the police file and was stuffing his feet into his running shoes. “Did you get lost on the way to the soda machine across the hall?”
“I decided to take a quick look around the hotel. There’s an indoor pool and Jacuzzi on the first floor.”
“Yeah, this would be a great spot…if I was on vacation.” He grabbed his jacket. “Are you ready?”
“Do you have a plan?”
He winked at her. “I always have a plan.”
Except for a plan to deal with his attraction to a woman he’d just met and might have to leave just as quickly.
The drive over the bridge and into Cambridge didn’t take long, and Sophia seemed preoccupied with her own thoughts. She’d been through a helluva few days. Before this craziness she probably thought she’d seen her lifetime quota of dead bodies after her mother killed her father.
She’d needed to catch a break, and she’d gotten that break when Dr. Hamid Fazal came into her life. After losing his own wife and daughters, Fazal had probably taken Sophia under his wing without hesitation. Sophia would’ve trusted someone like Fazal immediately, given their shared losses.
Did she trust him? Most women did, but Sophia wasn’t most women.
He spotted the Cambridge Arms and then circled the block. “I don’t want to park in the hotel lot. We might need to be guests, anyway, and I don’t want to draw attention.”
“You’ll never find a parking place on the street, but there’s a public lot around the corner.”
“I know how much you object to paying for parking, so I’ll get it. All my expenses are reimbursable.”
“The navy’s going to be wondering why you shelled out so much for parking.”
He rolled his eyes and made a U-turn into a public lot.
As they walked across the street, Sophia asked, “What’s the plan?”
“I’m sure most of the hotel employees are aware that one of their guests was murdered. Even if they aren’t, the police most likely left instructions to keep Patel’s room off-limits.”
“That’s not very encouraging.”
“But—” he held up his index finger “—most hotels have a master card key that opens all the rooms, and we’re going to snag one of those.”
“You’re going to snag one of those.” She poked his arm. “I promised Dr. Fazal my life of crime was over.”
“Don’t worry.”
Getting the master proved easier than he expected, and he didn’t even have to plan the disturbance down the hall that took the hotel maid’s attention away from her cart. With the card in his jacket pocket, he led Sophia to the stairwell and up two flights to Patel’s room.
The maids had already finished or hadn’t started on this floor yet, which made their break-in easier. With his gloves still on, he slid the key home and pushed open the door, giving Sophia a nudge in ahead of him.
He caught the door before it slammed and eased it closed as he scanned the room. He flipped the inside lock. “Cops already did a number in here.”
Sophia had pulled on her own gloves and circled the room, hands on her hips. “Where do we start and what are we looking for?”
“Any personal effects—pictures, postcards, letters. Examine every piece of paper you come across for names, addresses and places.”
“Would the cops have already taken that stuff?”
“I’m sure they did. It is a murder investigation, and they need to contact the next of kin.”
“Wherever they are.”
“Probably Pakistan.”
Sophia blew out a breath and rolled her shoulders. “Okay, I’ll start with his suitcases.”
Austin strode to the nightstand and opened the drawers, looking for papers and anything jotted down on the hotel menu or flyers. He even thumbed through the Bible.
“Nothing but clothes in here.” Sophia flipped down the cover of one suitcase. “I’ll check the side pockets.”
He moved to the bathroom, hoping to find a leftover prescription bottle.
Sophia called from the other room, “Patel sure read a lot of different newspapers.”
“Anything written on them?” He poked his head out of the bathroom when he heard a clicking noise at the hotel door. Never breaking contact with Sophia’s wide eyes, he held a finger to his lips.
He crept from the bathroom and flattened himself against the wall behind the door. It opened slowly and then halted against the inside lock he’d flipped into place earlier.
Someone on the other side of that door sucked in a sharp breath.
Austin glanced at Sophia, who was still crouched on the floor next to Patel’s suitcase, an armful of newspapers clutched to her chest.
Sidling along the wall, Austin made his way to Sophia and then grabbed her arm, pulling her to her feet. He pointed at the sliding glass door that led to a small balcony.
She shook her head and breathed into his ear, “We’re three floors up.”
She didn’t have to tell him that, but whoever was outside that door wasn’t leaving until they did, and soon there might be someone stationed outside, as well.
He took two steps toward the door and tugged at it. It opened on a whisper. When Sophia joined him on the balcony, he closed the door behind them and peered over the railing around the edge.
Turning toward him, Sophia grabbed his jacket. “I can’t do this.”
“Sure you can.” He chucked her under the chin. “There’s a balcony beneath this one. If we hang off the edge, we can reach it by swinging our legs and jumping onto it. We should be able to drop to those bushes below from the second floor.”