by Ines Saint
He nodded, and she knew she’d given him what he wanted, while she didn’t know how to get what she needed. She wondered if she’d done anything to dent his image of her being a social ladder–climbing, empty-headed woman. Probably not. So far, she’d admitted all she’d once wanted was a happy home life, that she’d thought she and Glenn would have it, and that she’d learned to protect her inner self by creating an outer shell. It would probably be best to talk to Agent Boyd about her job situation. She handed him the cookies she’d made for him, and that she’d almost forgotten about, and started to get up. “Well, it’s late and I’m tired—”
But he touched her hand and said, “Wait. Don’t go.” She sat back down and waited while he took out a cookie. After one bite, he looked up to the ceiling, and said, “I said no more games, and this is definitely a dirty play.”
He took another bite before moaning a bit, which made her giggle despite who he was and how she felt. When he was done, he wiped his mouth and said, “You baked these cookies for a reason. What is it you want from me? The truth, please.”
Paige hesitated. It was now or never. “I got a job offer today, and if all goes well, I’d start next week. I gave them your card, because I know you were right. When they search my name, Glenn’s mess will come up, and I‘ll look untrustworthy—to say the least—by association. I need you to assure Dr. Hernandez, the director of the adolescent addiction treatment center where I want to work, in no uncertain terms, that I am innocent. But it’s humiliating to sit here, looking for ways to make sure you do the right thing. I need you to do the right thing simply because it’s the right thing, Agent—Alex.”
He seemed surprised. “You’re going to work as a nurse? For an addiction center? Of course I’ll tell them you’re innocent. It’s the truth.”
Her blood heated and her nerve endings buzzed. She gritted her teeth. “Then why did you threaten to withhold the fact that I was innocent from a potential employer?”
“I’m sorry I ever insinuated I’d say anything other than the truth. I thought it was necessary.” He blew out a breath. “Look, Paige, I need to find some crucial evidence. You need to protect your family. I know those issues are basically one and the same, but you don’t. You lived with Glenn and there are things only you witnessed in the days leading up to him stealing and hiding the journal. You might remember something, and I need you to know you need to come to me if you remember anything at all that could help with the case.”
Blood began gushing in her ears the moment the first words left his mouth. The rest of his speech entered one ear and raced out the other. “You didn’t insinuate anything. You threatened to keep me from obtaining employment.” She shot up. “With everything I have going on, I’ve spent the better part of the day in a tizzy, scared out of my wits that you could keep me from getting this job because you haven’t yet found that stupid journal! I’ve been telling you difficult, personal things I don’t normally share with anyone on the off-chance it helps you realize that my kids and I are people and not just part of an assignment! I tried three double chocolate-chip chunk recipes before baking this batch, trying to score some goodwill, while neglecting at least a dozen other important things I have to do, and you have the nerve to sit here and eat my cookies and tell me you didn’t mean to insinuate your very obvious threat! And then you dare to ask me for more help in finding a journal you probably wouldn’t even need if the FBI weren’t so thoroughly incompetent! Je-sus! How can Glenn already be indicted and negotiating immunity, while you’re sitting here, acting like the whole case is still hanging on one missing piece of evidence?” She gasped. “Or is there something you’re not telling me?”
That was it! There was something more to it! Her eyes flew to his, but KGB-Iceman was back and not revealing a thing. “Never mind! I hope you choke on your cookies.” She marched to the door and slammed it shut.
* * *
Alex stared at the door, and nearly did choke on his cookie. Was he supposed to feel guilty, indignant . . . both? His assignment was a matter of national security, for God’s sake, and she expected him to be catering to her feelings? It didn’t matter what she knew or didn’t know: It wasn’t about her! Where had all the respect for the FBI gone?
A door opened downstairs, and he looked down to see Hope staring up at him. “Dammit, what the hell is going on up there?”
“I don’t think Paige knows you’re back,” was all he said.
She tilted her head. “But you did, right? ’Cause you know everything.” She smirked, went inside, and slammed her door, too.
* * *
The next morning, Paige was lugging eleven grocery bags up the stairs when Alex appeared above her, wearing his dark suit, red tie, and those stupid sunglasses. A surge of something hot ran through her. Anger.
It was a Saturday. No need to wear a suit. It also felt singularly unfair that men always managed to look so well-groomed in a well-tailored suit. It didn’t help her mood that her own hair looked like that of an eighties hard rock star. Humidity was high and her hair was frizzing every which way.
“Do you need help with your bags?” he asked, pausing at the top of the steps, as if she hadn’t yelled at him to choke on cookies just hours before.
“No. Obviously, I’ve already carried them up eighteen steps. I think I can manage to make it up three more steps.”
“I was being polite.”
“Pretending and lying is not polite.”
Alex sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Fine. Here’s the truth, with zero pretense. I’m sorry, Paige. I shouldn’t have made you feel like I’d keep you from getting a job that would put food on the table for you and your kids. This case has already affected so many people in negative ways. It makes me single-minded about closing it.” He looked away, thinking back to the boy who had made him decide to leave SWAT and focus on white-collar crimes. He should tell her. It might make her understand about life beyond her world.
But then he thought of everything he’d learned about her, and he knew she had learned that lesson before he had. It was what she’d wanted him to understand all along, that there was more to her, and that all she wanted was to keep her kids protected and safe. He looked into her eyes and saw a willingness to understand there. But it wasn’t like him to explain himself. “I’ll try harder to think of how it affects you and your kids, all right? You’re victims here, too, and what you’re focusing on is important. I don’t know if this helps, but I called and spoke to Dr. Gina Hernandez at Twelve Bridges this morning, and I had Boyd call her, too.”
* * *
The knot in Paige’s chest felt as if it had loosened up a bit. One less thing to worry about. “It does help. Thank you.” She eyed him. Everything about him seemed sincere in that moment. In his way, he was opening up, a little bit. She placed her grocery bags on the floor. “I’m sorry, too. You said people have already lost out, and I know Dr. Kumar’s research is important, and it’s not fair that someone should just steal her hard work.” She took a deep breath. “I’m going from stay-at-home mom to single provider for my kids, and it’s my priority, but I shouldn’t forget that your priorities are important, too.”
“It’s all-important.” He became serious then, and she sensed a change in him. “I witness the very real ways white-collar criminals hurt others day in and day out. Stuff that isn’t in the news as much as crimes that are more prevalent in poorer neighborhoods, mostly because money hushes things up. You’re trying to raise kids who don’t grow up to hurt people. I’ll remember that. With you and with others.”
Their eyes met, and there was something in his, something deep, that connected and stroked something in her. Like cloud-to-ground lightning. Two paths meeting in one-millionth of a second, a return strike lighting up the sky. Another caring soul; one that functioned in an entirely different way, but cared just the same.
It made her look at him and his job in a new light. He wasn’t the bad guy. This wasn’t his only case. And he’d seen things,
things that had colored his views, as much as her own views had been formed by her own experiences. It was what she’d wanted him to understand. Now he was asking her to understand. “Thank you. I’ll remember what you’ve said too.”
It was so formal, so staid, when she was feeling and wondering so much more. It was as if her world kept expanding, when only a few months back she’d felt as if it had collapsed.
“Is this a truce of sorts, then?” he asked, before smiling and adding, “A real one? Will you help me help you?”
Paige hesitated. “A truce to be honest for the sake of honesty—with no ulterior motives. It’s hard for me to trust you. For one thing, there’s still a threat on the table.”
Alex nodded, understanding. “If we find the journal before the immunity session, we’ll present it to him and give him a chance to confess, and if he does, we’ll include it in his immunity. I guarantee it. But I still can’t promise anything if we find it after the fact. It won’t be up to me.”
Paige nodded, slowly. It was something, and it was fair. More fair than Glenn deserved, if she looked at it objectively.
“What else is there, Paige? You said ‘for one thing’ . . .”
She looked up at him, determined now to gain a sense of balance in their crazy collaboration, or whatever it was. “Tell me everything you know about my family. I need to know.”
He blew out a breath. “I’d like to remind you that you’re the one who manipulated me into looking into your family in the first place.”
“I did. And I now want to know what you discovered. Pretend I’m a fellow agent, and you’re merely giving me a report. Bullet points will work, but be honest.”
* * *
Alex studied her. She was being way too clinical about this. She had something up her sleeve. Hadn’t they just said they’d try to be honest? He shook his head, and decided to do as told. “I know your dad was a nurse, that he and your mom met at Ohio State, that he died when you were ten, and that he was originally from Indiana. I, uh, I know what happened to Gracie.” His voice cracked then. He knew he was supposed to only state facts, but it was hard. “And . . . it angered me, Paige. Please know that I didn’t just learn these details and feel nothing.”
Paige’s throat worked. “Go on,” she said.
“If that’s what you want.” He stifled a sigh. “I also know Hope was divorced by the age of eighteen and has taken great pains to cover it up. Everything else I know, I’ve already told you.”
Paige nodded. “Now all I ask is that you tell me parallel facts about you.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
Her chin went up. “Nope. It will help me feel as if we’re on equal footing.”
He breathed in and out. In and out. This was the last concession she’d get from him. He thought about it a moment, trying to translate the facts he’d just said about her into parallel facts about himself. “I’m an only child. My parents met in Washington, where my mom worked as a translator and my dad was in the CIA. They died in a car accident during a blizzard when I was one. My grandmother and her sister took me in, and I grew up in Cincinnati. My dad is from Virginia, and our family there can trace their roots back to the original Jamestown settlers.”
“Why—why did you grow up here instead of Virginia?”
He sent her a wary look. This wasn’t part of the bargain. But he saw she was curious about him, and that made him feel something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. It bordered on anticipation, like when he was first reading up on a new, challenging case, but that made no sense. “While my dad’s family was working out the details of who would have primary custody and how they’d deal, my grandmother and great-aunt swooped in and said something like, ‘We have means. No dependents. We take him.’ And they took me.” His lips twitched a little, remembering the way his dad’s sister described the scene.
Paige smiled a little, too. “That was good of them.”
“They’ve never acted like it was a big deal or a burden or anything other than doing what’s right. My grandmother got married early, when she was only twenty, and she said my grandfather had been a whiny nuisance of a husband and she’d been glad to bury him at twenty-three. Her only goal was for me to be ‘good man.’ ”
“What did she mean by ‘bury him’?”
“I don’t know. That’s all she says and I’d rather not get her to expand. You’re not the only one with, er . . . interesting friends and family.”
They looked at each other a moment, sharing a smile. “Russians who think happiness is an American buzzword and Americans who can trace their roots back to Jamestown. I’m thinking things had to be interesting between all of you.”
“You’d think right.” He bit his lip. It wasn’t something he ever shared or laughed about, but it had made for situations that were amusing in hindsight.
One moment the shared smiles felt good, the next, uncomfortable. He was supposed to be investigating her husband, not bonding over his grandmother and great-aunt. “Okay, Paige, that’s enough about me. I’m not here to amuse you.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
There was nothing left to say. He lifted his head as if to say good-bye, and made his way down the stairs. “Who’s that?” he asked when he reached the bottom.
Paige turned, squatted, and squinted. “Oh no!” she exclaimed, dropping the grocery bags she’d just picked up.
Chapter 8
Paige turned back to the door and began fumbling with her keys.
“That’s Charlene McBride.”
“Glenn’s best friend’s wife?”
She opened the door and scrambled to pick up the grocery bags. “Yes! Her. How did she find out where I live? Agh! She’s getting out of her car.”
Before she could close the door behind her, Alex’s foot was in her way and he was holding the two grocery bags she’d dropped. Paige looked down the stairs and back up at him. How had he gotten back up so quickly and quietly? She shook off thoughts of super-agent prowess that went with the suit and sunglasses, and went inside.
“What are you doing?” she asked a moment later, when he’d followed her in and shut the door behind him. “You need to leave,” she half-whispered, half-hissed as she dropped the grocery bags in the kitchen and ran to the hall bathroom to try to twist her frizzy hair into a chignon.
“Why are you whispering?” he asked, following her.
“I think she may have super-human hearing ability, like you. It’s like I’m surrounded by freaks lately.”
He raised an eyebrow.
Paige went to the living room and waved him away. “Why are you here?”
“It’ll be good if Glenn finds out I was in your apartment, alone with you, when there was no reason to suspect he’d be nearby.”
“Oh. My. God, Alex! Didn’t you just apologize for that? For being so single-minded? For forgetting I have a life outside this case? My reputation reflects on my kids! I don’t want to be caught alone in my apartment with a man when I’ve only been separated from my husband for four months,” she hissed in her demonic voice.
To his credit, he looked stricken, as if he hadn’t even realized what he’d been doing. She took the opportunity to grab him by his tie to lead him out, but she caught him off guard. What looked like a normally impossible-to-move hard male body jerked down, his face now less than an inch from hers. His eyes widened and the gold flecks sparked... as if he were suddenly turned on. Paige froze, stunned by the truth she’d seen in his eyes, and by her own, sudden heated reaction to it.
Knock, knock. “Paige?”
Paige and Alex stared at each other, as if something had shocked them both into a frozen state. Knock. Knock. “I can you hear you in there, Paige. Are you okay?”
Alex’s eyes nearly bugged out. “I told you,” Paige mouthed, pointing to her ears.
“Coming!” she called, though there was no need to raise her voice. The woman could hear a dog whistle. She got up on her tiptoes again and put her lips as close t
o Alex’s ear as she could. “Follow my lead or I will tell Rosa, Ruby, and Grandma to move in here with me so they can dog your every step,” she breathed.
She turned, smacked a delighted smile on her face, and went to open the door. “Charlene! I thought that sounded like you!”
Charlene gave her a light hug and kiss on the cheek before fastening her eyes on Alex. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t think I’d be interrupting anything.” Paige looked over at Alex and saw as his amused glance flitted from Charlene’s chignon to her own chignon. She also noted his neck and face were flushed, as if they’d gotten caught doing something they weren’t supposed to be doing. Either he also had flush-on-demand super-agent powers, or he was still turned on.
Paige looked back at Charlene, put a hand to her chest, and laughed. “No worries. You’re not. I just got back from shopping for groceries and my neighbor here was kind enough to help me bring them in. Even though he’s late for work,” she added, sending Alex a not-so-subtle look.
Paige didn’t miss the way Charlene’s eyes did a quick, up-and-down sweep of Alex’s body. She then stuck out her hand and smiled the toothy, fake smile that always made Paige want to pull the woman’s bottom lip up and over her head. “Hi. I’m Charlene McBride.”
“Alex Hooke.” Alex reached out and shook Charlene’s outstretched hand.
Charlene turned back to Paige. “His tie’s nearly come undone. You should help him straighten it.”
“It got caught in a grocery bag,” Alex explained. “And there’s no need to help me straighten it out.” Finally, he headed toward the door.
“Oh. Well, nice to meet you, Mr. Hooke.” Charlene’s toothy smile spoke volumes.
“Likewise.”
Charlene then took in the entire apartment with a sweeping glance. “Wow. I hope you like golden oak,” the queen of subtle insults and backhanded compliments said.
Paige was about to explain how her grandmother had decorated the apartment, but before she did, she noticed Alex pause at the door. For some reason, his straightened back made her pause, too, and instead of launching into any explanations, she said, “Yes, I do.”
