by Paige Tyler
He was anything but normal, though. It was about time for him to accept that and move on with his so-called life, so Zarina could move on with hers. And he needed to do it sooner rather than later.
He was still considering that when he heard footsteps outside his door. For a crazy half second, he thought it was Zarina. His heart beat faster at the possibility, but then his hybrid instincts took over, calculating the weight of the person from the heavy thud of their footfalls and their height by the interval in between strides. It was a tall man, wearing dress shoes. A moment later, he picked up Trevor’s scent.
Tanner was off the couch and across the room before Trevor could even knock. As he opened the door, he was about to point out it wasn’t a good idea for people to see them together, but one glance at the coyote shifter’s face, and he changed his mind. The guy looked like shit.
He took in the suit Trevor wore, his nose wrinkling at the whiff of fresh blood coupled with the subtle flowery scent of a woman’s perfume.
“Nice fashion statement, dude,” Tanner remarked as Trevor walked in. “Don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone wear a suit without a shirt. I’m pretty sure it’s not going to catch on.”
Trevor didn’t answer but simply flopped down on the couch.
“I’d offer you something alcoholic, because you sure as hell look like you could use it,” Tanner said, closing the door. “But Zarina thinks it’s a bad idea to mix hybrid and booze. So the best I can do is a Mountain Dew.”
“That’s fine,” Trevor said.
Tanner grabbed two bottles of soda from the fridge, then handed one to Trevor before taking a seat on the other couch. When he’d first come to the DCO, he and Trevor rarely crossed paths, mostly because Trevor and his counterespionage team had always been on missions. Since John’s death, they’d both committed themselves to helping their friends who’d been implicated in his murder as well as finding the real killer, so they’d become friends in addition to allies.
“Shitty night?” Tanner asked.
He knew Trevor had gone to Baltimore to look for a person who might have info on the bomb that killed John but not much more than that.
“You could say that.” Trevor opened the bottle of soda and downed half of it in a few big gulps. “I had the guy who made the bomb right in my hands. He came out and admitted Thorn paid him to make the device and deliver it to the visitor’s center at the main gate of the DCO on the morning of the explosion.”
“Which confirms our worst fears, that someone who works with us picked up that device and put it in John’s office.”
Trevor shrugged. “Yeah. Unfortunately, a bunch of muscle-headed bouncers from the club came out and thought we were robbing the guy. The idiots got trigger-happy and killed him before he got a chance to tell anyone.” He shoved a hand through his dark hair and let out a growl of frustration. “I had Thorn’s balls right in my fucking hand, then it all went to shit.”
“Is that how you got shot?” Tanner asked.
Trevor nodded. “Yeah. I got distracted at the wrong time, and one of the d-bags creased my ribs. It’s nothing.”
Distracted wasn’t a word Tanner would usually associate with his friend. Trevor was the kind of man who seemed to be able to focus on the details in the middle of the biggest shit storm.
“Alina okay?” Tanner prompted.
“Oh yeah, she’s wonderful. Peachy, in fact.”
Tanner wasn’t the most perceptive guy on the planet when it came to picking up nonverbal cues, but even he figured out something was going on here.
When he asked, Trevor was silent for so long, Tanner thought he wasn’t going to answer. Finally, his friend took a deep breath and took the plunge.
“Alina isn’t turning out to be the person I thought she was.”
Tanner wasn’t sure if that was good or bad.
“I thought she was supposed to spy on me and tell them everything I’m doing,” Trevor continued.
“Now you don’t think so?”
Trevor let out a short laugh. “Oh, she’s almost certainly reporting back to Dick. Two days after we talked to Seth Larson, Dick sent someone to rough him up and find out what he knew. The only way Dick could have known about Larson is if Alina told him.”
Tanner frowned. “Okay, so you’ve confirmed that she’s a spy for Dick.”
Trevor shook his head. “Yeah, but you should have seen the look on her face when she realized I’d figured out what she’d done. She seemed genuinely contrite, like she knew she’d made a mistake.”
Tanner lifted a brow.
“I know what you’re thinking.” Trevor held up his hands. “That she’s playing me. I admit, the thought has crossed my mind more than a few times. But I do this spy-versus-spy thing for a living. I usually know when people are playing me. I’m telling you, something else is going on with Alina. Sometimes it seems like she’s actually on our side.”
Now Tanner was even more confused. Either Alina was working with Dick, or she was one of the good guys. “Speak English, would you? What the hell are you saying?”
Trevor told him what happened at the club, saying he and Alina had fought well together, and how she’d brought him back to her place to fix him up afterward.
“If she was simply doing Dick’s dirty work, she didn’t need to do any of that. Hell, she could have let those guys kill me,” Trevor added. “My gut’s telling me that while she might have told Dick about Larson, she had no idea what he was going to do with that information.”
“That doesn’t mean she’s on our side,” Tanner pointed out.
Trevor turned back to the TV, his breath coming out in a rush. Tanner was tempted to call it a sigh, but since real men didn’t sigh, it had to be something else.
“We kissed,” he said quietly.
Tanner tried not to overreact—and failed. “You what?”
Trevor shook his head. “It wasn’t like that. Well…it wasn’t supposed to be. Alina and I needed a cover to get us into a club in Baltimore, and Skye and Evan set us up as a couple of newlyweds. One thing led to another, and before I knew it, we were put in a position where we had to act like a man and woman who’d just been married. So we kissed.”
“And?”
“And all it was going to be was a quick peck. Just part of our cover. But while it might have started out tame, it sure as hell didn’t finish that way. I’ve never had a kiss like that in my life.”
Tanner took a long drink of Mountain Dew as he considered that. “It might have been that way for you, but what about Alina? Maybe it really was part of your cover for her.”
“I thought that at first, too,” Trevor admitted. “But when Alina was tending to my gunshot wound later at her place, she kept running her hands over my chest and stomach long after she’d cleaned off all the blood. She was definitely into me.”
“How do you know?” Tanner asked. He hated to be obvious, but he got the feeling Trevor wasn’t seeing the situation clearly.
“Because I could smell her arousal.”
“Oh,” Trevor said.
Okay, that was definitely TMI. There was a reason men didn’t share this kind of stuff with their friends.
“Up until that point, I’d assumed Alina was very good at deception and that she was playing the role Dick had given her. But you can’t fake arousal, no matter how good you are.”
Tanner couldn’t argue with that. “What are you going do?”
“I have no frigging idea.” Trevor dropped his back on the couch and stared up at the ceiling as if the answer was written there. Or maybe he was simply looking for divine inspiration. “I want to ignore what my head is saying, just go with my instincts, and trust her. I want to believe this thing that seems to be going on between us is real. But at the end of the day, how do I toss aside all my doubt and trust her completely, knowing that if I do, and she’s dirty, it
won’t be me paying the price? It will be our friends.”
Tanner would have answered, but he had no idea what to say. He sucked at relationships almost as much as he did at giving personal advice. Fortunately, Trevor’s phone rang, relieving him of the responsibility of solving his friend’s dilemma.
Trevor pulled out his phone and looked at it warily, as if he was worried it might be Alina calling to ask if they were talking about her. After a moment, he thumbed the button and put it to his ear.
“No, Evan. It didn’t go well tonight,” Trevor said in a deadpan voice. “Is there another reason you called?”
Evan must have said something interesting, because Trevor told him to hold on. “I’m putting you on speaker so Tanner can hear.” He pressed the button. “Go ahead.”
“Vivian just called,” Evan said. Vivian was the receptionist at the main office in DC. She acted as their eyes and ears at that facility, even though there wasn’t much going on there lately. “Thorn booked one of the classified conference rooms at the DCO office in DC. He didn’t give her an exact time but just told her to reserve the room for the next two days.”
Trevor frowned. “Why would he bother using one of our classified conference rooms? He must have at least half a dozen of them at Chadwick-Thorn.”
“I was wondering the same thing,” Evan said. “The only reason I can think of for why he might want to use one of our rooms instead of his is if what he’s discussing is so secret he can’t risk anyone at Chadwick-Thorn overhearing it. Their secure facilities are good, but ours are better.”
“Anything that classified is something we’re going to want to hear,” Trevor said.
“That’s what I was thinking,” Evan said. “Which is why I called you.”
“Is there any way we can get someone into that meeting?” Tanner asked.
He’d only been to the DC office once. While it was hidden in the basement of the EPA building on Pennsylvania Avenue, it was fancy as hell, not to mention secure.
“Not a chance,” Evan said. “Thorn will almost certainly have his own security people there to keep people out. If we’re going to hear what they’re saying in there, it’s going to have to be covert.”
Trevor chuckled. “Fortunately, we work for a covert organization that’s damn good at snooping on people. See if you can find someone you still trust in IT, and ask if they have a listening device we can get into the conference room.”
“Getting a wire that can do the job won’t be the problem—it’s getting it into the room,” Evan said. “If Thorn’s people are any good, they’ll sweep the room before the meeting, so we can’t put the listening device in there ahead of time. It will have to go in at the last minute, and that might be tough.”
“Leave that to me,” Trevor told him. “You get the bug and make sure we find out exactly when Thorn is holding the meeting.”
“I’m on it.”
“You think this has something to do with this big move we’ve all been waiting for Thorn to make?” Tanner asked after Evan hung up.
“I hope so,” Trevor said. “Because if not, I’m not sure how else we’re going to get the son of a bitch. We’ve dug into every lead and gone down every rabbit hole looking for something to put the man away. I don’t know what else to do.”
Tanner wanted to put Thorn away as much as Trevor did, but it was looking less likely with every passing day. Even this classified meeting was a long shot. For all they knew, Thorn merely wanted a fancy place to hold one of his weapons program briefings for the DOD.
He and Trevor sat there in silence for a while, watching the fourth quarter of a game that even the fans in the stadium had given up on and walked out.
“So what are you going to do about Alina?” Tanner asked as the ref finally—and mercifully—announced the game was over.
Trevor shrugged. “Pick her up for work in the morning, then take it from there.”
Tanner considered suggesting Trevor try talking to Alina instead but thought better of it. Trevor was as crappy at talking to women as he was, so it would be a train wreck. Better to pray and hope for the best.
Chapter 9
Molly ran straight in to say good morning to Katelyn the moment Kathy opened the door.
“So how’d everything go last night after I left?” Kathy asked Alina. “Judging by how tired you look, I’m guessing it went very well. Tell me everything, and don’t even try to spare me the details. I’m a big girl. I can handle it.”
Alina was tempted to make something up so Kathy wouldn’t be disappointed, but she didn’t. Not only did she hate lying to her friend, but she was simply too tired to come up with anything.
“If you want to know how the night went, that’s easy. It sucked.”
Kathy looked surprised for a moment, then hustled her into her apartment and closed the door. Alina had been there enough times to know what the place looked like by heart. The layout was the same as her apartment, with most of the furniture nearly identical too. The only major difference was the pile of small cardboard boxes stacked up against the living room wall. Most likely socks waiting to be sent out in this morning’s deliveries.
“What happened?” Kathy asked.
Alina was in the middle of giving her friend the synopsized version of last night’s events when her cell phone rang. She dug it out of her pocket. It was probably Trevor telling her he wasn’t coming to pick her up and that she needed to take a cab down to Quantico.
It wasn’t Trevor. It was Dick, no doubt wanting to know why the hell she hadn’t returned any of his calls. In addition to calling her several times the previous night, he’d already called twice this morning.
She sighed and let this call go to voice mail, too, then shoved her phone back in her pocket.
Kathy must have seen the look of displeasure on Alina’s face, because she led her over to the couch and plunked her down, then sat beside her.
“What’s wrong? You haven’t had this new job long enough to be hating the thought of going to work in the morning already.”
“It’s not that,” Alina said.
Picking up last night’s story where she’d left off, Alina explained about Seth Larson and how she’d told her boss about the meeting.
Kathy frowned. “I don’t see the problem here. Dick is your boss, right? Why wouldn’t you tell him about it?”
Alina sighed. “This is going to sound crazy, but I’m getting the feeling my boss isn’t exactly one of the good guys. There’s a lot going on that I don’t understand, but my instincts are telling me that Dick is in league with the person who had the previous director murdered. From everything I’ve seen over the past few days, Trevor is trying to get the evidence to prove it.”
Kathy grimaced. “And you just told the bad guy exactly what Trevor is up to.”
Alina nodded. “Yeah. I didn’t realize what I was doing, and by the time I did, it was too late to do anything about it. Then last night, Larson called and said Dick sent some guys to pay him a visit. They roughed Larson up and scared the hell out of his autistic kid. I felt like crap knowing it was my fault, but then felt ten times worse when I saw the look in Trevor’s eyes. He didn’t say anything, but he knows it was me. I feel like I betrayed him.”
Hell, she did betray him.
Kathy considered that. “Well, the first thing you need to do is stop talking to Dick. Second, talk to Trevor, and tell him exactly how you feel. Tell him that Dick duped you into spying on him and that you had no intention of betraying him.”
Alina almost laughed at the simplicity of Kathy’s plan. Leave it up to her friend to uncomplicate the situation and say what needed to be said. Considering the way the tension left her body the moment she heard her friend’s idea, Kathy was probably right on.
“You’re suggesting I blow off my boss’s calls? Ignore the man who signs my paycheck?”
“
I remember you telling me that you always felt there was something off about Wade,” Kathy said. “That your instincts had screamed at you for months there was something sideways about him. You were furious you’d let your head overrule your instincts and promised me you’d never do anything like that again.”
Alina sighed. She vaguely remembered that late-night conversation with Kathy and the promise she’d made. Right now, those instincts were telling her Trevor wasn’t the bad guy in this equation. If anyone was—besides Dick and Thorn—it was her.
She nodded. “You’re right.”
“Of course I’m right,” Kathy said. “If talking to Dick feels wrong, it is. Tell the guy the battery on your cell phone died or that you dropped it in the garbage disposal. It worked for that quarterback. It’ll work for you.”
“It didn’t really work for him, Kathy,” Alina pointed out. “He was found guilty, got suspended, and lost millions of dollars in pay.”
“Well, yeah, I guess. You don’t have millions of dollars, and it’s not like your boss can be as evil as the football commissioner, so you should be fine.” Kathy shrugged. “Besides, you lie much better than that cute quarterback. His face is too honest to pull off a good one.”
Alina laughed at the image of Dick losing his mind when she told him she missed his calls because her phone fell in the garbage disposal. But her amusement disappeared as another concern took center stage.
She’d lain awake a long time last night trying to understand why she’d been so strongly affected by a simple kiss. She’d known since her first day on the job that she and Trevor had some kind of connection. And that connection was getting stronger than she’d ever experienced with any other partner or team member she’d ever had.
Who the heck was she kidding? The thoughts she’d been having about Trevor last night weren’t things she’d ever thought about any teammate she’d ever had. Those had been I-want-to-get-you-naked-and-wrestle-with-you-on-the-floor kinds of thoughts.