Her Spy to Have (Spy Games Book 1) (16 page)

There had to be some reason for these revelations. He remained silent, waiting. Her body against his was no longer limp and satisfied, but stiff with tension. He hoped she wasn’t about to ask him for favors on her father’s behalf. He wouldn’t do any, and he refused to mislead her about it.

“I have something to tell you,” she said.

He’d suspected as much. When he’d stopped to examine the day, it became clear to him that she hadn’t been herself since she’d left the Access Nova Scotia office that morning, although she’d hidden it well. But there’d been a distant look in her eyes at lunch. She’d practically run through the pharmacy, and after their recent activities, he could attest that her need for feminine products hadn’t been that urgent. She also already had a full box stashed in her bathroom. It had been nothing more than an excuse for her to go into the store alone. He wondered what she’d really purchased, and if that was what she was about to tell him. His mind raced with possibilities.

Then he had it. Thanks to the interesting conversation the children had initiated, he’d been distracted when she’d come back to the van after her test. She and her father were both runners, something she’d told him they used to do together. The stranger this morning had passed her a note with the URL for a running website on it, and he’d missed the significance. A running website would have particular meaning for her. He’d been jealous, rather than suspicious, that another man had passed her what he’d assumed was a phone number. Instead, she’d received a second message from her father. It was his fault for not picking up on it sooner.

He continued to wait, allowing her to gather her thoughts uninterrupted, until he feared she’d decided not to say anything more.

“Is it about the note you were passed this morning?” he finally prompted her. “The website was a message from your father, wasn’t it?”

She lifted her head to look at him. In the pale moonlight washing the room, the dark pools of her eyes seemed to fill her face. Satiny strands of hair had stuck to her cheek and he freed them with the tip of a finger, tucking the tress behind her ear. He ran his finger down the length of her throat and along her bare shoulder, waiting for her to respond.

“There’s a broken hyperlink embedded in it. At some point in the next few weeks it’ll go live,” she said.

He made a mental note to look for more broken hyperlinks in the other websites she’d visited. “How did the messenger who passed you the note know where to find you this morning?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“Then I’ll have to do more guessing. You asked me about your driver’s license the day of the barbecue. Did somebody there say something to you?”

“Maybe.”

It was impossible for her to tell a successful lie when she was pressed against him the way she was. He could feel every untruth in the subtle shifts of tension rippling through her body. Besides, at the barbecue, she hadn’t been out of his sight the entire time. She’d talked to no one he didn’t know. It could only have happened sometime between then and…

This morning.

He pictured her standing in the kitchen, using the phone, making a call to find out what time she should show up to write her test. She’d had no real conversation with anyone. It had been a series of prompts, directing her to an automated recording.

For someone to know where she’d be, they’d have to be tapped into the phone line. Or have access to telephone records.

He considered the ramifications if either of those scenarios were the case. It would mean that someone with excellent connections was in contact with Beausejour. But who would be willing to do him a personal favor of this magnitude?

The answer was no one. Not if Beausejour was simply a small link in a long chain.

There was nothing like stark reality to ruin an otherwise pleasant evening. He draped his arm over his eyes so he could think without giving anything away. He didn’t understand her motives. He had no firm idea of her true level of involvement in her father’s activities other than what she chose to tell him. He was becoming too emotionally invested, particularly since she’d repeatedly stated her loyalty was to her father—which meant sleeping together had been an error in judgment on both their parts. He didn’t regret it. Not yet. But one of them was going to end up feeling used.

He concentrated on the fact that she’d made the attempt to warn him the telephone had been tapped. He had a greater problem, however. He didn’t know who he could tell about this. He trusted his director. He didn’t trust whoever his director might be reporting to.

“You realize how serious this is, don’t you?” he asked.

“Of course I do. So you should understand why I can’t stay here any longer.” She pushed off him, rolling to her hip and sitting upright on the edge of the bed before swinging her feet to the floor in a single graceful movement. “Find a different prison for me.”

As she bent down to retrieve her shirt from the floor, the fall of her hair hid her face from his view. He caught a handful of it, combing his fingers through the silky strands. He couldn’t understand how he’d ever thought she was plain. Her beauty was in both the uniform simplicity of her appearance and the depth and complexity of her quiet personality.

“You’re not a prisoner,” he said.

“No?” She scraped her hair out of his grasp and drew on her T-shirt, then flipped her long locks free of the collar. Her raised eyebrows and straight lips expressed her skepticism far better than mere words.

If she truly knew nothing, then none of this was her fault. If she turned out to be more actively involved, it was best if he didn’t make too much out of it. Whoever had accessed the phone line didn’t need any warning that they’d been found out.

He stretched out fully naked, twined his fingers together behind his head, and grinned at her as if he had no worries, either. “Well. Maybe you are. But only unofficially. You got a problem with that?”

Her eyes tracked the length of him. She trailed her fingertips from beneath one of his nipples to the curl of hair at his groin. “I don’t want to cause problems for Peter and Cheryl.”

He caught her hand and held it cupped in his against his abdomen. “It was Peter’s decision to have you here. He hired you. He’s paying you. He has no one to blame but himself if it causes him problems.”

She curled her fingers inside his palm, making a small fist. “What just happened between us,” she began, a frown in her eyes. “What we did… Where do we go from here?”

“Would you like it to go somewhere?”

“I don’t think it can.”

So she understood the problems, too. “Why don’t we just see where it leads us?”

She leaned forward to press her lips to his. He inhaled the feminine scent of her, reminded of her mouth on his body, and of hers beneath his. She straightened, then stepped away. He released her hand with reluctance.

“I should be going. It’s late and I want to run in the morning,” she said.

He didn’t want her to leave. Once she stepped through the door, things would be different. She’d have regrets. So would he. “I can think of better ways to get exercise.”

“I’m sure you can.” She dragged her shorts up the long length of her legs. At the door to his bedroom, she paused. “I wish I could help you,” she said softly, “but I can’t.”

She wasn’t talking about exercise. Or sex.

He stared at the ceiling for a long time after she left, wishing he could believe with one hundred percent conviction that she couldn’t help him because she didn’t know anything.

Chapter Ten

It was Saturday morning. The men had taken the children to the farm for a few hours, so the two women were changing the linen on all the beds and doing some cleaning. Rain pitter-pattered against the windowpanes.

“Have you given any thought to what you might do at the end of the summer?” Cheryl asked.

Isabelle snapped the freshly laundered sheet and watched it float into place on top of Kiefer’s red Corvette toddler bed. Everyone seemed so concerned about her future. She was too, but she preferred not to think too hard about it. It loomed before her, a frightening, empty abyss. “I’ll most likely try to find another family who wants to go abroad.”

“Or, if you’d like,” Cheryl said, a little too casually, “I can help you find work here, in the city. You’re French, and fluent in four languages. You’re also well-traveled. There are all kinds of government jobs for translators. Garrett and Peter could both find you something, too. Or, I could get you into one of the universities here if you’d prefer to go back to school. I know people in admissions.” She smiled at Isabelle. “Peter and I were talking about helping you with the fees. You could spend your holidays here with us.”

Isabelle was touched. The Mansfords were nice people. Too nice. Despite their impressive careers, they were both so naïve about the world at large. They could have no true idea of the life she’d led, or what she might be involved in, because if they did, they’d never make such an offer. She wasn’t the most reliable person for them to invest in. She knew her own failings. Partway through the school year, she might decide to head off to Milan. Or London. Or back to Southeast Asia. Even she didn’t know what she might do next.

She liked it that way. She might be tired of the uncertainty regarding her father, but she’d never grow weary of exploring life. It was one reason she enjoyed children so much. For them, every day was a new adventure.

“That’s very kind of you,” she said. “It’s something for me to think about.”

They moved on to Beth’s room. Isabelle made the bed while Cheryl gathered the toys and put them back where they belonged so she could dust and vacuum.

Cheryl inserted a book onto a shelf with its companions. “You and Garrett seem to be hitting it off.”

Isabelle’s hand stilled for a split second as she was tucking a sheet corner under the mattress. She’d thought they’d been discreet. Garrett had been quite good at acting as if nothing intimate had happened between them.

A little too good.

“The children love him. I can see why he’s a favorite of theirs,” she said carefully.

Cheryl turned to face her. “I don’t have any objections to you forming a friendship with my brother,” she said. “It’s obvious he’s interested in you.”

Isabelle could hardly deny that he was. She was interested in him, too. But it was far more complicated than his sister knew. Their lives had only gotten tangled together because of her father. Under normal circumstances, Garrett would never have noticed her. She was a puzzle to him. He wasn’t nearly as much of a mystery to her. His work was his life.

“Your brother is bored and I’m a diversion,” she replied.

Cheryl picked up the dust cloth and began wiping the furniture. “I’d like to think he has more substance to him than that.”

“I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. All I meant was that we spend a great deal of time together because of the children. He loves them a lot and enjoys their company, but sometimes it’s nice for him to have another adult to talk to through the day, when you aren’t here.”

“I’ll admit I’m a little disappointed. I thought maybe you and he were more serious than that,” Cheryl said.

“I doubt very much if Garrett is ever serious about women. He likes his work too much. He likes the travel involved. He knows I understand that.”

“You’re one of the few women who do. That’s why I’d hoped… Never mind.”

Uneasiness prodded Isabelle. She had told Garrett she didn’t want to cause problems for Peter and Cheryl. She’d meant over whatever was happening with her father, and the Mansfords’ phone line being tapped. But she didn’t want to create problems for him with his family either, and Cheryl had noticed his interest in her. She didn’t want his sister to discover it involved his work, which he no doubt wished to keep separate from them.

“Garrett’s not interested in forming a serious relationship,” she said. “Not at this point in his life, and certainly not with me.”

Cheryl paused in the middle of dusting the top of Beth’s pink dresser. She looked at Isabelle. “Why not with you?”

She hadn’t expected to be asked to explain. She’d thought the answer self-evident. She could feel her cheeks burning. “I’m hardly his type.”

“I’m not sure I agree with you. The last two women he was friends with weren’t his type—which was precisely the reason they were nothing more than friends to him.” Cheryl smiled. “Well. Maybe they were a little more. But you know what I mean.”

Yes. And it wasn’t something she particularly wished to hear about.

They finished cleaning the children’s bedrooms. Isabelle moved on to her own while Cheryl took care of hers and Peter’s.

Upstairs, Isabelle left a stack of clean bedding in Garrett’s suite for him. As she was making her bed, her fingers touched the cell phone she’d tucked under her mattress. She hadn’t yet checked the running website.

She couldn’t ignore it forever. She picked up her laptop and sat on the sofa. The screen flickered to life. Within a few minutes, she was checking the hyperlinks. None were broken. That meant she had to check each of them.

By the third, she’d found what she needed—a string of digits that contained a phone number for her to call. The country code was Belgian. She recognized it from a few years ago, when they’d lived in a little town not far from the French border.