Relieved as much by his reaction as by the fact that he was wearing a polo and shorts, she shook her head. “I still have to put on my makeup. You go ahead, and I’ll be down in a few minutes.”
He gave her a sharp frown, as if suspecting she was trying to manipulate him into something—which she wasn’t. Really.
“You look gorgeous the way you are. I don’t know why you women wear that crap.”
“Because we women like it. And believe it or not, Scott, not everything we do is to make ourselves more attractive to men.”
He grinned. “It’s not? Then who are you trying to impress?”
She thought about it a minute. “Other women.”
He laughed. “All right, but don’t take too long.”
There might have been a little bit of a plea in there.
This time she was the one to lift a brow speculatively. “Don’t tell me the big bad SEAL is scared?”
He didn’t miss a beat. “Out of my mind,” he said as he left the room.
That he admitted it so readily made her heart go out to him. She wished there was some way to make this easier on him. But other than be there for him, this was something he had to work out on his own.
Natalie knew it was going to be awkward, but when she was shown into the dining room by the ever-ready Dalton, who’d been waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs, the silence was cringeworthy. Scott, holding a cut-crystal lowball glass that appeared to have been drained, was standing by a huge window overlooking the side garden, and the senator, clearly struggling with what to say, was seated in a chair next to the unlit fireplace.
Small talk had obviously been exhausted.
Natalie spent most of the evening serving as a bridge between the two men, who barely said anything to each other directly. Although the senator was charming and easy to talk to, Scott wasn’t. He’d clammed up. Every time she tried to lure him into the conversation, it stopped, and she’d have to think of something else to say.
It was exhausting. And frustrating.
By the time they went to bed, she was angry enough at Scott for being so stubborn that she told him to get some rest and she would see him at breakfast.
He was angry enough not to protest.
She knew it wasn’t at her, but she was still stewing when he crawled into the bed next to her. He didn’t say anything, but just pulled her into his arms and fell asleep. It wasn’t exactly an apology, but she took it as one.
She slept later than she intended, and Scott had already gone down when she woke. The senator had told them breakfast was served buffet style after eight on the patio—they could of course order hot food whenever they liked (of course)—but it was closer to nine by the time Natalie made her way outside. It was like a fancy county club, with a glass-topped wrought-iron table, chairs with thick cushions in a floral pattern, umbrellas, silver, china, and fresh flowers everywhere.
Scott was already halfway through an omelet when she walked outside.
“Where’s the senator?” she asked.
“Done.” The way he said it made it clear that departure had been welcome. “He left a few minutes ago.”
Natalie didn’t say anything until her egg order had been taken by Dalton, and she’d sat down at the table with the fresh fruit, croissant, and coffee that had been set up for them on the side table buffet.
“What happened?” she asked.
Scott looked up from the paper he’d been reading intently—or appeared to be reading intently. “Nothing. He finished eating and left. He said if we needed anything to let him know, and that I could use his office if I wanted. He has a secure telephone in there that I can use to call Kate.”
From his tense, pained expression, Natalie knew there was more to it than that. “Scott . . .”
He looked up at her with a fierceness on his face that made her heart break for him. “What?”
“You have to try to talk to him.”
“I don’t have to do anything, and it isn’t your place to interfere.”
Ouch. Natalie flushed with a sharp pang of hurt. Nothing like the harsh truth. If she’d ever had a place in his life to interfere, it was clear she didn’t now.
She was obviously putting too much store in him climbing into her bed. Twice. For different kinds of comfort.
Seeing her reaction, Scott swore and grabbed her hand across the table. “Shit. I didn’t mean it like that. You have every right to interfere.” The sting began to ebb when she realized he’d been lashing out, and she’d just stepped in the way. “I know what you want, but we aren’t going to be one big happy family, okay? Whether I talk to him or not.”
“If that’s true, then what’s stopping you from talking to him?” She paused, looking at the tight, shuttered expression that couldn’t quite hide the pain. “I just don’t want you to regret anything. You need closure, and he’s not going to be around long for you to get it.”
He held her gaze just long enough for her to know that her words had penetrated. Whether he agreed, she didn’t know as he changed the subject.
“There are other, more important things we need to talk about right now.”
“Like what?”
“Like figuring out what the hell is going on and why someone wants you dead so badly. I want you to tell me everything again. Slowly, and from the beginning.”
For the next hour, while she ate and savored a few cups of the delicious (even decaffeinated and without almond milk) coffee, Natalie did as he asked. Going over every inch of what had happened with the proverbial fine-toothed comb.
He asked her dozens of questions, particularly about the program she’d installed on the deputy secretary’s computer, the password change, and the e-mail she’d sent to her boss afterward in an attempt to call off the mission.
“Too bad we don’t have access to the deputy secretary’s laptop.” He paused thoughtfully. “Where did you send your e-mail to him from?”
She thought back. She’d been at home hanging out with Jennifer when Mick had called to tell her that thanks to her, her boyfriend was going to have a nice surprise waiting for him in Russia.
Natalie hadn’t had any idea what he meant. But when he explained, she realized that not only had something gone wrong with her plan to sabotage the program on her boss’s computer, but Scott and Team Nine were in the middle of it.
She’d been shocked and horrified. Jennifer had thought she was going to faint.
But it had taken Natalie only a few minutes to realize what she had to do. Even if it blew her cover, she had to try to get the mission called off. She’d sent the e-mail to her boss from her laptop immediately.
“What time was that?” Scott asked.
“I don’t know. Evening. It was before dinner. Maybe five o’clock.”
He nodded. “We were already on our way. When did you leave the text on my sat phone?”
She flushed, thinking he might be mad at her for that. She wasn’t supposed to contact him on that phone. “I knew it was a risk to text you like that—which is why I didn’t do it right away—but when I didn’t hear back from my boss and no one showed up to arrest me, I tried calling him but wasn’t able to get ahold of him. I didn’t know the timing of the mission, but I didn’t want to risk that you didn’t get the message in time. It was probably only a couple hours later.”
“Good thing,” Scott said. “We couldn’t get a signal so I turned on my phone and your text was waiting for me.”
She nodded. “I should have realized that Mick would be monitoring my computer and e-mail. He told me later, when he called to tell me you’d been killed, that he intercepted the message to my boss before it reached him.”
“Where is your laptop now? It will help if we can prove that you sent that message.”
She sighed. “I have no idea. It was in my apartment when I left after Jennifer was
killed. I didn’t want to take it with me and draw suspicion.”
Scott nodded. “That was the right thing to do, but it sucks for us. It’s probably a dead end—especially if Mick had a chance to get to the apartment before the police. But I’ll have Kate look into it.”
* * *
• • •
Scott took the senator up on his offer, and after he and Natalie finished their coffee, he went into the office to make his call.
It was already hot outside so Natalie said she was going to grab a book and go down by the pool. He told her he’d meet her when he was done. The prospect of seeing Natalie in a bathing suit made him eager to join her.
The call with Kate didn’t take long. He filled her in on what he’d learned about the adoption agency and the two laptops.
Kate couldn’t quite hide her skepticism when he told her about Natalie erasing the program and changing the Wi-Fi password.
“Maybe she thought she erased the program, and the deputy secretary just reentered his password.”
It was hard to argue as he had pretty much said the same thing to Natalie. “I know, but she was pretty adamant.”
Kate paused. “All right. Let me run it by someone and see what they think. Maybe there’s some way to track it without the laptop.”
“I thought you were the computer expert.”
“I am, but this person is better.”
He realized who she meant. “Brittany Blake’s friend?”
The specialist—or, more accurately, hacker—named Mac had helped John Donovan find Brittany Blake when Mick abducted her.
“Yes,” Kate said. “She helped me track down the camera feeds from around the bar where Travis was killed for Colt. It wasn’t easy. They’d been erased. Or more accurately someone tried to erase them.”
Scott swore. “The Russians have reach that widespread?”
“Looks like it.”
Although she was trying to hide it, there was a weary edge to Kate’s voice that told him something was wrong. He suspected the source. “Do you want to tell me what’s going on with Colt?”
The long pause that followed told him he’d hit the nail on the head. “No. Do you want to fill me in on what is going on with Natalie?”
He responded with his own moment of dead air before saying, “No.”
“Are you sure you can trust her, Scott? There’s a lot at stake here.”
Maybe he shouldn’t, but he realized that he did. He wouldn’t have gone to her yesterday otherwise. “Yes, I’m sure. Natalie has made some pretty bad mistakes, but she’s telling the truth about her involvement in leaking the information about the mission. There is more going on here than there seems.”
“What are you thinking?”
“I’m not sure yet. But there was something that Natalie said about Mick a while back that bothers me. How did he stay one step ahead of her all the time when she was the one who was supposed to be giving him information?”
“You think someone else on the inside is involved?”
“I don’t know. But I only talked to Mick for a few minutes, and it was long enough to know that the guy was a smug asshole but not a leader. And why did they keep Natalie around for so long?”
“What do you mean?”
“She never gave them anything useful, and yet they kept her around.”
“Maybe they needed someone around to take the fall.”
“Maybe.”
Kate paused. “Are you sure this isn’t wishful thinking on your part, Scott? Are you sure you aren’t looking for something that isn’t there?”
He wasn’t sure of anything. Was he so desperate to hold on to her that he was trying to see something bigger?
He hoped not because he was waging his career on it. But Travis’s murder and the fact that Scott’s men were still being hunted told him that there was more to this than they were seeing.
He hung up the call with Kate and decided to clear his head with a run before joining Natalie down by the pool. He’d been out of commission for almost a week, and the lack of exercise was getting to him.
Maybe he’d hit the weights, too. He was sure this place would have a gym.
It did, and an hour later—after a forty-minute hill run on the treadmill and a few sets of weights—he was feeling considerably better. From a body standpoint, at least. His head, however, was still in second-guessing mode.
Scott had always prided himself on his clear judgment, on his ability to make the right call, and on his confidence in his decisions. Uncertainty was new for him, and realizing that his emotional involvement with Natalie was the source made him uneasy.
She was clearly a blind spot. How could he be sure he was doing his duty to the job and his men when his feelings for her were affecting his decisions?
He couldn’t. Which left him in this no-man’s-land of impaired judgment, being unsure of himself, and not knowing how to proceed, which pretty much sucked.
None of which put him in the best frame of mind when his sperm donor cornered him in the gym as he was leaving.
Scott stopped suddenly. He thought about walking around him, but the old guy looked so frail Scott was scared he’d touch him and accidentally knock him over.
“I’m glad to see you found the gym. It hasn’t been getting much use lately.”
It wasn’t hard to guess why. The former senator was barely strong enough to stand let alone lift a barbell.
Scott clenched his jaw, refusing to let himself feel sorry for him. Lots of people had cancer. People far less deserving than a man who’d cheated on his wife and foisted a bastard off on another man.
But did the guy have to look so pathetic? Scott was already hot from the workout, but he felt his temperature rising even hotter with the reflexive anger that seemed to rush through him whenever they were in the same room.
He never should have let Kate talk him into this. He’d known that it would be a disaster.
But he couldn’t deny that they were probably safer here than just about anyplace else. “Fort Knox” was putting it mildly. Greythorn had started his career in the CIA and continued his intelligence work in the Senate Intelligence Committee as chairman. He’d made a lot of enemies along the way with his hard-line, pro-military positions and had been the focus of a number of threats from extremist groups that had obviously been taken seriously. His security system was extensive; no one was getting within a couple of miles of the estate without someone knowing.
Not that inside was any less monitored. Scott had noticed the security cameras following him to the gym. He knew this was no accidental meeting. “Yeah, I was just leaving to meet Natalie at the pool for a swim.”
“I’m sure you do a lot of that.”
Scott didn’t crack a smile at the SEAL reference. “If you’ll excuse me.”
He started to brush by, but the senator’s words stopped him in his tracks again.
“Is she pregnant?”
Scott turned toward him very slowly, his hands clenched tightly at his side. “What?”
If the old guy had more blood in his body, he probably would have flushed. Instead his sickly colored skin turned faintly less pallid. “I couldn’t help notice that Natalie didn’t have wine last night and Dalton mentioned that she’d asked for decaf this morning. When I was down at the pool earlier, I noticed a little . . . I thought . . .” He stopped uncomfortably. “It probably isn’t my place to say anything, but I just want to make sure she has everything she needs.”
“Damned right it isn’t your place to say anything.”
It wasn’t any of his business. Scott fought the blast of temper that was threatening to take hold. This wasn’t about Natalie’s comfort—or that wasn’t all of it anyway. The old man was practically salivating at the idea of a baby to carry on his foul bloodline.
The bloodline Scott didn’t
want.
Thomas Greythorn the fucking third wasn’t getting anywhere near Scott’s progeny. When he thought of how happy his real father would have been—the father he would give anything to have back, even if he were on death’s door—it made him even angrier.
Scott came right up to his “father” and looked him square in the face. “Stay away from Natalie. I don’t want you anywhere near her. We wouldn’t be here if there was anywhere else I could have gone. I needed a safe place to hide out for a few days. I didn’t come here to get to know you or be some big happy family, so if that doesn’t work for you just say the word and we’ll go. I had a father, and I sure as hell don’t need one who cheated on his wife and tricked someone else into raising his bastard.”
The senator showed the first glimpse of his former hard-assed reputation. “Sit down, Scott. Now.”
Scott was so shocked by the steely tone, he snapped back. “What?”
“I said sit down. I can’t stand for long periods of time, and you are going to listen to what I have to say whether you like it or not.” His mouth was pulled so tight, white lines had appeared around his lips. The expression wasn’t one that was unfamiliar to Scott; it was like looking in a damned mirror. “When I’m done you can decide whether you want to leave.”
The senator sat on one of the weight benches and Scott sat opposite him on one of the machines.
“I regret a lot of things,” the senator said, “but tricking another man into raising my son isn’t one of them. Your father knew you were my biological child.”
He might as well have smacked Scott across the forehead with a two-by-four. The effect was the same. Scott had been leveled. His head was ringing with shock and disbelief.
The senator read his reaction. “Yes, he knew you weren’t his. He knew about the affair. Although ‘affair’ is probably putting too strong a word on it. Your mother and I were two old friends who were having problems in their marriages and had a drunken lapse one night that could have destroyed a lot of lives. It was stupid, selfish, and unforgivable, but I cannot regret it. How can I when you were the result?”
Scott was glad he was sitting. He felt as if the rug had literally been pulled out from beneath his feet, leaving him with nothing to stand on. Words stuck in his throat. “What happened?”
Out of Time Page 26
