“And you can?”
Small lines fanned from the corners of his eyes when he smiled. “I just did.”
“Why?”
He didn’t answer immediately. From her seat by the desk, she watched him settle on the bed with his long legs stretched out, his ankles crossed, and his shoulders propped by the pillows. He laced his fingers over his stomach.
She dragged her gaze away again. “Do you need a shirt, Mr. Blake? I believe Sir Pup has several more in his hammerspace.”
“I’m comfortable, Winters.” He grinned, and she was suddenly looking at his mouth.
Dammit. She stood and stripped out of her jacket and weapon harness. “Why, Mr. Blake?”
“I was in Darfur four years ago.”
Though her back was turned to him, she could see him in the mirror. He was no longer smiling. “I know you were. And?”
“And there are times when I’m looking through other people, I see things I don’t want to.”
Maggie closed her eyes, suddenly unsure she wanted to hear this. “Yes, I suppose your parents kept their bedroom dark.”
“Unfortunately, no.” She heard the smile in his voice before it left again. “Four years ago, I slipped into the head of a man with a young girl. She was maybe ten or eleven. Tied up on a bed. She’d already been… He wasn’t done.”
Maggie faced him. “I get it. Go on.”
“He must have been nearby, but I didn’t know where the hell he was, so I started looking. And I knew by his surroundings that it was one of the government houses, because everyone else lived in shacks.”
The same way he was looking for Katherine now, she guessed. Recognizing surroundings, narrowing down a location.
“What were you going to do when you found him?”
“Get her out of there. Kill him.”
Probably not in that order. “Did you find him?”
“No. Someone else did. I don’t know what she was doing there, what trouble she’d been sent to fix-but she opened the door, and she looked at him. She looked at the girl. And she shot him. Just raised her gun and fired.”
Realization struck, made breathing suddenly painful. “You were in my head then?”
“No. His.”
Jesus. “You weren’t… hurt… by being in him when he died?”
“No. I just lost contact. So I moved into the girl, stayed with her after you helped her to the exit. She limped down the street right past me, and I made sure she got where she was going. I tried to find you again, but…” He shook his head. “I didn’t.”
“He wasn’t my target,” she admitted. Not her target, never reported, and not classified.
“He should have been.”
Maggie toed off her boots and tucked them beneath the desk. “If the girl had screamed, it might have compromised my mission.”
“Yet you did it anyway.”
“Yes.” She hadn’t even had to think about it.
“With a reaction like that, you were in the wrong line of work.”
Yes, I was. But she only asked, “Why tell me this?”
“I never got a chance to thank you.”
“I didn’t do it for you.”
“What does that matter? You did what I couldn’t, and I’m grateful for it. Just as it doesn’t matter now whether you’re helping me find Katherine because she needs to be found, or if it’s because you feel responsible for James after letting him go alive. Either way, I’ll be grateful for the help when we find her.”
Who was this man? Was he for real? Her fingers were clumsy as she unbuttoned the cuffs of her sleeves. What kind of person offered trust like this? Acceptance? She wasn’t family. Their only connection was one of the few impulsive acts Maggie had performed in her lifetime. She shouldn’t even matter to him.
And yet… his acceptance and trust had begun to matter to her, too. It must have, because her throat was aching, and she wanted to say “Thank you” in return.
But as she moved toward the bathroom, she only said, “You aren’t at all what I expected, Mr. Blake.”
Chapter Five
She looked too soft with her hair blown dry and loose around her shoulders. She felt too soft, and so Maggie braided it into a rope before leaving the bathroom. Her only clothes were a tank and underwear, but she had no intention of looking down at herself.
Sir Pup hadn’t abandoned his sprawl across the second bed. She studied him, wondering how to maneuver through this. Sleeping had never been an issue before.
“It seems an easy choice, Winters. There’s hardly enough room over there for a child.”
She narrowed her eyes at the hellhound. “He could get up. He doesn’t need to sleep. Or eat. So I don’t need to buy him a bag of sausage biscuits tomorrow morning.”
Sir Pup yawned, exposing three sets of gigantic teeth, and rolled onto his back.
Maggie sighed and crawled onto the bed next to Blake.
“You caved?”
She reached for the light and clicked it off. “He probably wouldn’t let me eat tomorrow, either. It’s a practical decision.”
“And this marks the first time a woman has come to my bed for practical reasons. Usually, they say it’s a mistake.”
“I don’t make mistakes.” She turned on her side, facing away from him. “Not many.”
“You trusted James.”
She stared into the darkness. “Yes, I did.”
“Was that a mistake?”
She hadn’t thought so. But she had wondered, even back then, if caring about James as a person-and as a friend-had given her a blind spot, prevented her from seeing some terrible truth. But, in the end, she’d made her decision and lied about following through on the kill order.
The reasons behind the kill order hadn’t been given-reasons were rarely given-but the kill order itself hadn’t made sense. Operatives didn’t assassinate other operatives. Even if James had been a traitor to the country, if he’d sold government secrets, or come across sensitive information that an operative couldn’t be allowed to possess, the first step would have been to convict him. Perhaps the public would never hear of it-or even most agency employees-but there would have been hear ings. And if James fled custody and posed a security risk-which he hadn’t-Maggie shouldn’t have been the one to take him out. Someone higher up would have done it, very quietly.
And so from the moment her superior had given her the order, her gut had told her something was off. Way off. She’d have bet her life that James hadn’t committed a breach of national security, but had witnessed someone else’s. Someone within the CIA. Someone higher up the chain of command, who could distance himself from the kill by pushing it down through the ranks.
When she’d spoken with James on that final night, he hadn’t verified her suspicions. He’d kept his secrets as well as she did. But she’d worked with him too long, known him too long. And although she wouldn’t stay with the agency and try to discover who had betrayed them-that would have been signing her own death warrant-she wasn’t going to murder James for that person, either. So she’d told him to run.
Behind her, Blake turned heavily over, and she heard the thump of his fist against the pillow as he punched it into a comfortable shape. She could visualize him, on his stomach and his head turned to one side. And though he could be facing either way, she was certain that if she rolled over, she’d find that he’d turned his face toward her.
“No,” she said quietly. “I don’t think it was a mistake.”
As soon as he replied, her instincts were confirmed: Blake was facing her… and was closer than she’d thought. Not invading her personal space, but not across the bed, either. “James knew how to contact you. Do you know where he was before this?”
“I wasn’t in hiding. It’d have been easy for him to find me.” She paused, weighed the rest, and decided she could reveal it. “I didn’t want to know where he was. We’d agreed: no contact, ever.”
“Because the agency keeps tabs on you.”