He lifts himself up slightly, running his finger over my wet cheek.
“Did I hurt you?” he whispers.
The concern in his voice makes me cry even more, but they’re not tears of sorrow at all.
“No,” I say. “They’re happy tears.”
He smiles at me and gives me a peck on my forehead and lifts himself up and off me.
“Sorry about this, but I’ve got to call in what happened. Before they get panicky back at the office.”
I nod, then lie back to enjoy the remainder of the post-orgasmic fog I find myself in.
Before he gets the chance to get his phone out of his jean pocket on the floor, a loud crash rips through the quiet of my apartment, and the rays of flashlights light up the half-dark interior. I let out a loud shriek, but it’s soon drowned out by another voice.
“Anti-terrorist squad! We are authorized to use deadly force. Surrender now, and no one will be harmed!” A man so loud he has got to be using a megaphone barks.
I instinctively pull my blanket over myself, while Liam just straightens himself and lifts his hands above his head. He doesn’t even seem to care that he’s naked, neither do the half dozen or so armed men entering my bedroom, led by the guy I remember Liam referring to as Clark last week at the airport.
“Clear!” Clark shouts, “Everson. Fancy seeing you here.”
“Clark. What a lovely surprise.” Liam leans to the side, nodding at the scary redhead who has also entered the room. “Ma’am.”
“Agent Everson. Care to explain what happened today? Or should I arrest you for treason right now?” the woman asks.
“I’m sorry for this, Tess. I’m sure they’ll repair your front door…” Liam says while Clark puts a pair of handcuffs on him.
I’m lost for words. Why the hell are they arresting him? Isn’t he one of them? And he actually took down the guy who abducted me too, which is a good thing, right?
“I apologize for the intrusion,” the red-haired woman in charge says to me, as Liam is led out of my room, and then my house by Clark and the other men. “And I’m sorry he’s involved you at all.”
I look at her, then at the men who are leaving, and at her again.
“Liam rescued me,” I mumble. “Why is he in trouble for that?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.” The redhead gestures at the last man, standing just behind her like a bodyguard, and they both turn on their heels, heading straight for the door. “Have a nice evening, Ms. Aldershot.”
Man of Mystery - Part 3
Chapter One
All night I’ve been a nervous wreck. Is Liam OK? Surely it was all a misunderstanding, right?
My calls to his number were met with a switched off message. By five am, I am too exhausted to stay awake and too frazzled to get to sleep. Maggie will have just reached home after her shift, so I call her instead.
“Hey, Tess, what’s going on?” Maggie sounds alert concerned, obviously, why would I call her at this ungodly hour unless something was wrong?
“I don’t know! I’m freaking out.”
“Calm down; tell me everything,” Maggie says.
I take a deep breath, then tell her everything that happened yesterday from start to finish. Ordinarily I would have embellished details or omitted things that may reflect badly on Liam, but by now, I don’t have the mental capacity or patience for any of that. Maggie is going to get the whole story, warts and all.
Once I’m done rambling, she remains silent for a moment.
“You still there?” I ask, worried that perhaps the line has gone dead, and I’ll have to tell the whole story all over again.
“Yeah, just… thinking.”
“I’m just so scared. What if they don’t believe him? What if they keep him locked up?”
“Just so that I’m certain I’ve understood… These are his own people, who barged into your apartment, invaded your bedroom while you guys were in the middle of some hanky-panky, and then they cuffed him and took him away.” Although her recap is worded like a question, her tone sounds more like she’s just making a statement.
“Right.”
“And his phone is switched off.”
“Right.”
“Well… I don’t see how there’s anything else you can do. You have no way of contacting these people. You don’t know where they’re based. If they want to hear your side to clear things up, they’ll have to be the ones to get in touch with you.”
Maggie makes sense, as she often does. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s what I want to hear right now.
“He saved my life twice, Mags.”
“You wouldn’t have needed saving if he hadn’t got you involved in God knows what.”
I sigh. And that’s exactly why I tend to filter the stuff I tell her.
“Either way, it’s five-thirty in the morning. You’ve got a job to go to in a few hours. Afterward, we’ll hang out and talk some more. Oh, and I hope you don’t mind, but Alec may drop in at some point. I thought it would be nice if you two could meet, finally.”
“Sure,” I answer absentmindedly.
We say our goodbyes, and I’m alone again. She’s right. I can’t do anything. I put the phone down and fall back into my pillows. When my alarm goes off, it feels like only a minute has passed, not two hours.
“Bye, Tess!” Karen’s cheerful voice grates at me as she leaves for the day.
Meanwhile, my eyes are burning due to lack of sleep, and I’ve got the lucky job of staying behind and finishing what should have been her work. Stupid reports. Stupid people. Stupid life.
I continue to grumble to myself while selecting various cells full of meaningless numbers in the stupid spreadsheet I’ve been working on for the better part of the afternoon. Just when I’m ready to throw in the towel and give up on it all, my phone buzzes once. A message.
My heart starts to race. Could it be?
Dear Tess, I apologize for last night. Ever since we identified a mole in our unit last week, everyone’s been quite paranoid. That said, last night taught me that our lives are and always will be incompatible. I am sorry. L
I’m not sure what to do, fling the phone at the wall and watch it break into a million pieces or scream until my vocal cords rip themselves apart. All day I’ve been waiting for some sign - any sign - to let me know that Liam is OK. And now this?!
What if someone else messaged on his behalf? What if it’s a ruse? I take a deep breath and hit the little ‘call’ icon beside his name.
It rings once, twice, thrice, and then finally there’s an answer.
“Hello?” A voice answers. It sounds like Liam, but then, I’ve never spoken to him on the phone so how would I know?
“Tell me you didn’t mean that?”
The silence that follows is painful.
Finally, Liam takes a deep breath on the other end, before responding. “Twice, I’ve endangered your life. They’re right. In our line of work, we can’t afford relationships. It gives the bad guys leverage they shouldn’t have.”
“But…” Wait, who was right? Don’t tell me the bitchy redhead is giving him relationship advice now.
“What if I hadn’t reached you in time yesterday? What if they’d hurt you, or worse, killed you? I couldn’t live with myself.”
“Wait…”
“That’s how people end up dead, Tess. You said it yourself. Whenever we’re together, people die. I’m not about to wait around until one day you’re the one who’s killed.”
Click.
Tears are prickling in my already sore eyes, and I feel empty as empty can be. Like my guts have been ripped out and dumped on the floor in front of me, and there’s nothing I can do about it. No way. This is fucking unbelievable!
I dial his number again, but this time, there’s no answer.
Great, just bloody ignore me without giving me a chance to have my say. Men! Always think they fucking know what’s best for everyone else.
I shut down the spreadsheet, not
giving a damn whether I’ll get into trouble for not finishing it. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. In another surge of rebellion, or recklessness, I turn the PC off by switching off the power, rather than doing it the proper way. I need to get out of here, right now!
Maggie will know what to do, even if it’s just to watch girlie movies and drink wine together. And ice cream. We’ll need ice cream.
I pick up my stuff and rush out of the office, straight to my car. I can’t think of anything, focus on anything other than that pathetic excuse for a conversation I had with Liam just now. It’s a miracle I make it to Maggie’s place in one piece.
Rather than ring the bell downstairs, I slip inside her building just as someone else leaves and head straight for her door.
“Mags, open up, it’s me,” I shout, while banging my fist on the plastic finish door - the types you often see in cheap housing from the early nineties.
When it unlocks, I’m surprised not to be faced with Maggie but a flustered-looking Alec. Shit, she had said he’d be coming over too. Crap.
“Hi. Maggie is just taking a shower,” he mumbles, while eyeing me suspiciously. “I’m Alec.”
I’m about to comment on his stares, when I realize that I’ve probably been crying, meaning my mascara must have run down my face, and the lack of sleep will have made me look half dead anyway.
“Hi. I’m Tess,” I say, while shaking the hand he’s offered and avoiding eye contact with him.
He waves at me to enter, and I follow him inside. Maggie’s house is a mess as always - a cozy mess, as she likes to say. We take a seat on the sofa, in silence.
“So… you’re Maggie’s best friend?” Alec starts, a painful few seconds later.
I just nod. I’m not up for small talk or generally in a sociable mood after everything that’s happened in the past twenty-four hours. If he thinks I’m an arrogant bitch because of it, so be it.
We don’t talk anymore until a bathrobe-wearing Maggie enters the room, with a towel wrapped around her head.
“Tess, when did you get here? So you two have met then. Good.” She walks around the messy coffee table, and I get up to give her a hug.
“Jesus, you look like shit.”
I try not to cry again, but my face contorts itself into an ugly frown anyway. “I called him. Finally.”
“Right… and?” Maggie sits down between Alec and me and puts her arm around me.
“After I’ve worried about him all night and day, no explanation, nothing. He’s calling it quits. What the hell is wrong with men?” Realizing Alec is still sitting there on the other end of the sofa, I lean forward, acknowledging his presence for a second. “No offense.”
“None taken,” Alec mumbles.
“He what?! The fucking nerve!” Maggie exclaims.
“Right? I don’t know what to do anymore.”
“You’re here now, and that’s what matters. Alec, would you be a dear and make us a cup of tea? We have a bit of girl talk to do,” Maggie says.
Alec mumbles in agreement he’s clearly uncomfortable with the situation as it’s about to unfold and glad to get the chance to escape the drama for a while.
We watch him leave before continuing our conversation.
“Now, don’t spare any details. What did he say?” Maggie says.
I tell her the entire story, showing her the text message he’d sent first, and then recount our phone call word for word, including how he didn’t even give me the chance to respond to any of it.
“It did sound like him, right?” she asks.
I nod through the fresh tears. I think so. Considering he did refer to something I’d told him when we were alone, I’m pretty certain it must have been him.
“You know how I felt about the guy, right?” Maggie gives me a big hug, as I continue to sob into her clean bathrobe.
“I thought he was different. That you were just being paranoid,” I complain.
“The whole thing from start to finish had alarm bells going off in my head,” Maggie says.
I guess she’s right. I can’t find the energy to argue anymore.
“There’s some ice cream in the freezer. Let’s get it out and see if we can find some ridiculous romantic movie on TV,” Maggie suggests, as she’s just about to get up.
“Wait, I’ll get it. You get dressed in the meantime.” I lift myself off the sofa, stretching out my shoulders which have completely locked up and reluctantly drag my tired body towards the kitchen, while trying not to bang into any furniture on the way. Meanwhile, Maggie stirs as well and disappears into the bedroom, shutting the door behind her.
“Hey,” I call out while opening the kitchen door, then pause when I hear his hushed voice inside.
“Look, I’ll be free soon,” Alec whispers. He hasn’t noticed my presence or heard me call him.
I push the door open a little further and see him with his back turned in my direction. He’s holding his phone against his ear.
“If the package is on the way to Folkestone already, we have nothing to worry about… Uhuh. Yes… And the agent himself? Right, so he’ll be there in a couple of hours, tops. Perfect timing.”
Remembering the weirdness at the airport last week, when Alec all of a sudden ended up manning the checkin desk of the flight Liam was trying to ground, formerly dormant suspicions are once again aroused. He blew off a date with Mags to work. That’s just plain weird. And as far as I’m aware, Maggie and Alec don’t even do checkin duty normally.
Now he’s talking about packages, agents… What the hell is going on?
“All ready.” Maggie’s cheerful voice makes both me and Alec jump. “How about that ice cream?”
Chapter Two : Liam
“So you want us to believe that you managed to overpower two of Fletch’s men as well as the mastermind himself in some warehouse in Stanwell?” Mrs. Hill - the boss lady, or H, for short - looks like she has even less of a sense of humor than normal. The stark surroundings of our interrogation cell don’t help matters any; neither do the handcuffs around my wrists. Following our standard operating procedure, they’d kept me awake in isolation all night but not started questioning until my patience had worn thin, many hours later.
“Send a team in if you don’t believe me,” I say.
“Why didn’t you call for back-up?” Clark asks.
I eye him, looking for any sign that he is, in fact, playing for the wrong team. I can’t believe how quick they were to take me in, while completely ignoring the fact that our most valuable witness from the airport died in Clark’s custody yesterday.
Of course, I shouldn’t have kept Fletch’s threats to myself, nor should I have removed the chip from the dead suspect in the morgue and taken it to Fletch’s hide-out. But what other choice did I have? There’s a definite rat stink hanging around this unit, and until I could be sure whom to trust, what was I supposed to do? Let Tess die?
“Fine.” The boss lady dials a number on her phone, all the while keeping her eyes fixed on me. “134, Stanwell Moor Road. Beyond the reservoir?”
I nod in agreement. Yes, beyond the reservoir.
“This is a matter of extreme urgency, you understand? I’ll expect your report within the hour.”
“So where is this chip now?” Clark asks, leaning forward onto his elbows, which are resting on the steel interrogation room table.
“May I have a word, Ma’am?” I ignore Clark’s protests and keep my gaze firmly on H instead.
“Fine. Clark, I’ll call you back in if I need you.”
He reluctantly leaves, while I watch Mrs. Hill take a seat in the chair Clark had just vacated across from me. She crosses her legs and waits.
“In private,” I say, gesturing at the camera in the corner of the room.
She sighs and leans forward, switching it off with the button installed at the side of the table. Normally that’s where I sit. Normally, I control those cameras, while someone else is in my chair.
“The chip is safe.”
/>
“Where is it now?” she asks.
“Soon, the other team will reach the warehouse and verify my story. Rather than waste time questioning me about some non-existent connections to Nexus, let’s put our heads together and figure out who could be the real mole in our unit,” I say.
She squints at me, pressing her lips together tightly like she does whenever she disapproves of something.
“I’m listening.”
“Yesterday, Clark and I were questioning the witness from the airport. After days of steely silence from his side, we were finally making progress, when all of a sudden the guy ends up having Clark’s pen stuck in his throat. Coincidence?”
I wait to give her the chance to let my words sink in.
“I received the phone call from Fletch - at least I presume it was, - and Clark was all over me. Who is it, where am I going, what’s happening-It was rather suspicious.”
“I see.”
“And he seems awfully keen to get his hands on that chip himself. And was he the one who alerted you when I left the office yesterday? He had no way of knowing where I was going, so how did he know I was lying to him?”
“It’s a theory worth exploring, certainly. If you let me know where the chip is, we can have it analyzed and find out what’s so important about it anyway.”
“Agreed,” I say, then tell her about leaving it in the glove box of my car.
“Thank you, agent. Now, there’s still the matter of the civilian. What do we know of her involvement?”
I shake my head. “Not involved. No way. We crossed paths last week completely by coincidence. I picked the first car I could find in moving traffic on the A4.”
“I see. And then you involved her. I don’t need to repeat myself and tell you what a reckless and stupid idea that was, do I?”
I take a deep breath. Tess. My heart wants me to think about her some more, but my current predicament means it’s less than practical. She’ll be worried sick about me by now.
“If she’s indeed just an innocent bystander in all of this, your contact with her was the sole reason her life was put in danger yesterday. You understand this, don’t you?” Strict as ever, H crosses her arms as she stares at me. Her tone is almost like a principal putting the guilt trip on a bad student.
Man of Mystery: A BBW Romantic Suspense Page 7