Hush (36 page)

But he still could have saved it. He still could have kept the situation from going completely to hell. He'd observed that she had a problem with masculine aggression, and even knew the reason for it: the background check had revealed her mother's penchant for abusive boyfriends. It had been up to young Riley to protect the woman who should have been protecting her, time after time.

So when he'd seen that she hadn't liked being backed up against the wall, hadn't liked being reminded that he was bigger and she was smaller and sometimes size does matter, and seen that she was starting to panic a little at the thought that she couldn't get away from him, he could have gone with that. It wouldn't have taken much to have scared her off him for good and all, but he hadn't been able to do it. Scaring women wasn't something he did, and scaring Riley wasn't something he was prepared to do. Instead he had gentled her, letting her call the shots until she'd ended up in his bed.

Now he had to live with the consequences, while, not incidentally,
keeping her safe and getting the job he'd been assigned to do done.

It didn't help, he thought as he took a moment to look her over to make sure she was still soundly asleep before he tucked the covers around her, that she really was, as he'd told her, just about the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen in his life. The room was dark, but not so dark that he couldn't see the curve of her lashes resting on her cheeks, and her softly parted lips, and the sweetly unconscious curve of her body.

Best sex ever
. She'd surprised him with that. She'd surprised him with a lot of things.

Maybe the sex wouldn't prove to be such a disaster after all, he reflected as, having pulled on his pants and shirt, and picked up his gun, he quietly headed out into the hall for one more predawn conference with Bax. Women being what they were, there was a fair chance that she'd be feeling more trusting of him in the aftermath of having been well and truly fucked.

He hoped so, for both their sakes.

Bax, wearing plaid pajamas this time, came to his door blinking and yawning. The TV was silent but on in the background.

“You get everything set up?” Finn asked.

“Yeah.” Bax let loose with a giant yawn, covered his mouth with his hand, and blinked at him. “Sorry. Uh—where is she?”

“In my room.” Finn knew his face gave nothing away. What had happened between them—that was between him and Riley.

If Bax was entertaining any lascivious thoughts, they didn't show. “Thought so. Best way to keep her out of harm's way.” He frowned at Finn. “Without us, she'd be in real trouble. What happens to her once we get what we came for?”

Finn shrugged.

Bax continued, “We have to make sure she's going to be all right once we're gone.”

It occurred to Finn that, like him, Bax was opposed to seeing women get hurt.

“I agree. We'll take some steps to make sure she's safe. Count on it.”

“In the meantime, she's got us,” Bax said, and yawned again.

“She's got us,” Finn concurred without allowing any of the irony he was feeling to show. “Go back to bed.”

He turned to head back to his room.

“See you tomorrow,” Bax called after him.

Finn answered with a wave.

R
iley was smiling. Only semi-awake, she lay there in warm comfort while hot images lingered in her mind and warm and fuzzy thoughts about the man who'd figured prominently in them danced like sugar plums through her head.

Finn. He was why she was smiling as she drifted back to full consciousness. It was ridiculous, stupid, and very un-Riley-like of her to smile like a fool over a man, but there it was.

Her body was pleasantly lethargic. It tingled in all the right places. She felt tired, but good. Really, really good.

She'd had sex with Finn. Phenomenal sex. Multiple times. Now she was sleeping with him.

Only he didn't seem to be anywhere in the bed. She stretched out an experimental hand to check: nothing.

She remembered that bed: it was a standard hotel room bed, queen sized. No way could a man as large as Finn be anywhere in it that she wouldn't be able to feel him.

Her smile faded. Her eyes opened, swept the darkness. She was definitely alone in bed. As far as she could tell, she was alone in the room. A sliver of light shining beneath the door to the hall, plus some moonlight filtering in around the curtains, provided enough illumination for her to be sure. No Finn-sized lump in the second bed. No lump at all: the bedspread was perfectly flat. Could he be in the sitting area? Forcing herself up onto an elbow, she squinted at the couch and chair. Nope.

“Finn?”

No answer.

She looked toward the bathroom. The door was open and the bathroom was dark.

So where was . . . ?

A barely audible buzzing sound intruded on her consciousness. A quiet rattle that was separate and apart from the hum of the air-conditioning. She realized that it had been sounding intermittently ever since she'd woken up. In fact, it might well have been what had awakened her.

She tried to locate it and zeroed in on the bedside table. The sound was coming from inside the table. Inside the drawer.

Scrambling toward the edge of the bed, she opened the drawer.

A phone lay there in the bottom, right next to what looked like a couple of brochures and a Bible. It had to belong to Finn, unless a previous occupant of the room had left it behind.

It was vibrating. The vibration of the hard plastic case against the wood was the source of the buzzing sound. Even as Riley frowned down at it, she remembered how the phone in Finn's pocket had rattled against the car's console previously.

There was a text message glowing up at her on the front of the phone, clearly visible in a nice outlined bubble.

Personal privacy was a concept Riley understood and respected. Reading other people's text messages without their permission was a definite no-no.

She picked up the phone and read the message anyway.

It said:
Urgent. Computer inquiry into ID# 0045386, unable to identify source, possible security breach.

Riley stared down at the phone. She had no idea what the message referred to. Her first thought, clearly a product of the night she'd just spent, was,
I'll ask Finn
.

Her second, slower, more cautious one was,
maybe not
.

With a quick glance at the door, she scrambled out of bed, went for her purse, and dug out her phone. Then she typed the message into her notes verbatim as fast as she could.

Not to be paranoid or anything, but whatever this was, she wanted to check it out herself. No need to let Finn know she'd even seen it.

He was a stud in bed: there was no getting around that. He was also protective, considerate, and kind. She liked him. Maybe more than liked him. Maybe
way
more than liked him.

Trust him? She wanted to. She could tell him the whole sorry story, ask him about his picture on Jeff's cell phone, ask him what the text message meant, promise that if he told her everything she would tell him everything, too, and see how that went.

Of course, if it went wrong, it was going to go wrong bad.

Alternatively, she could keep her mouth shut and practice some due diligence.

Still thinking about it, she thrust her phone back into her
purse, returned the other phone to the drawer, and crawled back into bed.

Which was where she was when he returned. He came in from the hall, closing and locking the door quietly behind him. Without turning on the light, he walked into the bedroom, moving as silently as a shadow. Feigning sleep, her eyes opening to the merest of slits, she watched as he set his gun down on the bedside table, then pulled off his shirt and dropped his pants. Being careful not to disturb her, he slipped into bed beside her. Lying on his side so that, she guessed, he wouldn't touch and accidentally wake her, he was asleep almost as soon as his head hit the pillow.

Riley, on the other hand, lay awake for a long time. Finally, when the lightening of the room told her that dawn was breaking outside, she crept out of bed. Glancing back at Finn, she saw the gleam of his eyes, and realized he was looking at her.

Damn
.

She'd figured him for a light sleeper. It was one reason she hadn't gotten up sooner.

“Bathroom,” she said, and he inclined his head and closed his eyes.

She picked up her purse on the way, and took it with her.

It wouldn't hurt to exercise a little due diligence.

Getting the information she was after proved to be surprisingly easy. Advanced Google Search was a miraculous thing. Five minutes later, she was sitting on the closed lid of the toilet staring down at the results of her inquiry: a figurative fist to the gut encapsulated on a tiny cell phone screen.

She wasn't sure which emotion was uppermost: hurt, shock, or rage.

ID# 0045386 took her to a government web site, where a little further sleuthing brought up a picture of the badge of John F. Bradley, Special Ops, CIA.

The photo on the badge was of Finn.

After staring at the thing for a while, she finally managed to get her head around it, then went back over everything he'd said and done from the time she'd first run naked into his arms, and came to a conclusion.

Bottom line: he was a lying SOB.

Other bottom line: Trust R Not Us.

TWO SATELLITE
trucks complete with TV crews were set up outside the prison's front entrance when they arrived. Finn cursed when he saw them. It was possible that their presence had nothing to do with George, but not likely. Finn's best guess was that they were there to get a story on yesterday's stabbing of the disgraced former billionaire, and Riley was going to show up right smack in the middle of it.

There was nothing to be done about it. Canceling was not an option. His only consolation was that she would be driving right on past them, with only the single stop at the gate before she was inside and completely out of their reach. The reporters wouldn't be able to talk to her. They might not even spot her. Unless somebody had tipped them off, they wouldn't be expecting her, and she wasn't in her own car.

Of course, women who looked like Riley were kind of hard to miss.

“I'll be waiting right here when you get done,” Finn told Riley as he got out of the Acura's passenger seat into the steam bath that was this particular morning in southern Oklahoma. At just past nine thirty, the sun was already climbing the cloudless sky. Last night's thunderheads might never have existed. “Come straight back.”

The arrangement was that he'd wait for her in the small coffee-­and-doughnut shop in the seedy strip mall directly across the road from the prison's front entrance.

“All right.” She nodded agreement, looking out through the windshield at the prison across the way rather than at him, her hands tight around the steering wheel. If she was tired, it didn't show. She looked beautiful, as always, with her red hair waving around her face and a businesslike smoke-gray dress, sleeveless and knee-length, showing off her kickass shape. But there was something remote about her expression that didn't quite jibe with his expectations. He didn't know
what
he'd been expecting—well, he did; in his experience women tended to be all kissy-face and possessive on mornings after the night before, especially a night before like she'd had—but Riley wasn't it.

She'd been polite. She'd even returned the kiss he'd dropped on her right before they left the hotel room with an appropriate degree of heat. But she'd hopped out of bed fast—no cuddling, nothing like that—and disappeared into the bathroom, closing the door, showering alone. He'd showered while she'd done her hair and makeup, and then while he'd gotten dressed she'd gone back into the bathroom to get dressed in private. Not that big a
deal, but, again, not what he'd expected. After that she'd gone with him to get breakfast, and listened to his instructions about what to do inside the prison and what information she needed to get from George without arguing or smarting off or telling him to stuff it, which from anyone else he would have expected as a matter of course, but from her, not so much.

It was possible that she was keyed up about meeting George, and worried about her chances of getting the information they needed. He knew she was terrified for Emma.

But he didn't think any of those things was it.

He had the feeling that whatever was bothering her was personal, that it involved him. He didn't want to ask her if something was wrong, didn't want to push it, until after she'd talked to George. If she could find out where the money was, his life got so much easier in every way. He could say everything he needed to say to Riley then.

A text message had come in during the night, letting him know that somebody might have figured out that he was on the job here. That wasn't good. If it became known that CIA Special Ops had an interest in the missing money, all kinds of awkward questions might start getting asked.

Fortunately, his people were the best in the world at tracking down and dealing with potential security breaches.

Finn closed the door, smacked a hand down on top of the car to let her know she should go, and stepped back. Riley drove away.

Mack H. Alford Correctional Center was a collection of two-story gray concrete structures with a couple of low red-brick buildings out in front. It was a big, medium-security complex
surrounded by tall fences topped with loops of razor wire. Square guard towers rose at intervals near the fences. In those complexes, although he couldn't see them, would be a couple of armed guards. From where Finn stood, sunglasses in place as he watched Riley heading toward the complex, what he could see were acres of parking lot, dozens of cars, some activity as people went in and out of buildings. The one thing about orange prison uniforms was they showed up like beacons amidst all that gray.