“Three years.”
Ty turned the music up.
She nodded and leaned closer to Greg so he could hear her. “Must be hard working with a guy like Ty.”
Greg gave a little appreciative snort and shrugged. “He’s what the ladies expect when they come to the island, part of the fantasy and escape from reality,” he shouted in her ear. He paused. “You seem immune.”
“I’m going through a bad divorce.” She couldn’t help frowning at Ty. “Men aren’t high on my list right now, present company excluded.”
“I’m nonthreatening is what you mean.” He looked resigned.
“There’s nothing wrong with a safe man,” she retorted, wondering how to find out more about Ty without seeming obsessed by him. “So he’s just a pretty face?”
“No. He’s good at his job. Excellent, in fact.”
“The flawless man,” she said with more than a touch of irony. “Good at what he does as well as good-looking. He must have some irritating habits.”
He nodded toward the group of ladies, just as Ty wrenched the music up another notch and did something that made the colored lights spin faster. “Mostly that.”
Treflee felt herself flushing with anger and a surprising amount of jealousy. She had to know. She simply had to know. Besides, proof of infidelity might win her some sympathy points with a judge if Ty still refused to sign, and some more dollars from Ty in a renegotiated settlement. “That’s just part of his job. Is he that lucky with the ladies in real life? Is he seeing anyone?”
“What?” Greg cocked his ear to her. “I can’t hear you.”
“Is Ty seeing anyone?” she repeated at the top of her lungs just as the music shut off and the bus went quiet. Her question echoed off the bus walls, seemingly reverberating forever in the sudden silence.
Her eyes went wide.
Someone just throw a bucket of water on me so I can elegantly melt away and die like the Wicked Witch.
Ex-bridezilla and her ladies-in-waiting stared at Treflee. Ty gave her a deadpan stare that said he had her number.
She fumed in her seat. She couldn’t see his eyes in the dim light, but she’d bet her life they were dancing with malicious amusement. He’d shut the music off on purpose, the rat. As promised, he was keeping an eye on her.
Her question wasn’t what it sounded like, she wanted to shout. It really wasn’t. But there was no point. And shouting an explanation would have blown his cover. So she slumped in her seat and prayed they’d reach Lahaina before she died of embarrassment or killed someone, namely Ty.
* * *
Somehow Treflee survived the rest of the trip to Lahaina, but she’d never been so happy to get off a bus, even as a kid after a long day at school.
“I thought you said he wasn’t your type?” Laci teased, obviously amused that a girl like Treflee thought she could attract a guy like Ty.
If only she knew. Treflee’s tongue nearly bled from biting it so hard to keep quiet.
Ty got out first and offered the ladies a hand down from the bus. When it was Treflee’s turn, she blinked in the bright sunlight, thankful for fresh air as she snubbed the hand he offered. He grabbed her anyway and tugged with more force than was strictly necessary.
She tumbled into his rock-hard chest. The man still had it. And if the unsteady patter of her heart was any indication, she still had it for him.
But the tug was all a convenient ruse so he could whisper sweet threats in her ear. “No more stunts. I told you not to blow my cover. Shutting off the music in the bus was purely intentional. Caught you in the act, didn’t I? Stay out of my business, Tref. I’ll be watching you.”
“Stalking me now? Lovely,” she shot back.
“Watch yourself,” he said, and let her go, before turning to dazzle the other girls.
The bus dropped them off on Front Street facing the Lahaina Center. Greg made his escape immediately. Ty said his good-byes and hurried off to “run some errands” before joining everyone on the cruise later.
Treflee watched him walk down the street with panic making a mockery of her normally calm heartbeat. She couldn’t let him get away. She had to follow him.
“Are you coming?” Carrie said, snapping her out of her panicked stupor. “I thought you were immune to his charms. I thought you hated men?”
“I do. Except for Greg. He’s nice.”
“Uh-huh,” she said.
Treflee looked at Carrie’s bridesmaids. “They’re staring, too.”
“But they’re not pretending to be uninterested.” Carrie waved to the girls. “Let’s get a move on. We don’t have much time before the cruise.”
They moved as a herd toward the entrance. Treflee had to lose them while not losing Ty. He was already halfway down the street.
Carrie grabbed her arm and tugged her along with the gang. “There’s a good reason I didn’t pick you for maid of honor,” she muttered.
Fortunately, fate intervened. As the rest paused to coo over a display of designer handbags in a specialty shop window, Treflee spotted a corner art gallery across the way. She loved art galleries. Carrie hated them.
“Look!”
They followed her pointer finger and frowned in unison.
“A Salvador Dalí copy. Melting watches. I love that one. I’m going in,” Treflee said.
“Then you’re going alone,” Carrie retorted, with a frustrated look that clearly said her mother was going to owe her big-time for foisting Treflee off on her.
Treflee ignored her. “I can spend hours ogling art.” Which Carrie knew to be true from the time Treflee dragged her to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. “You girls go on ahead. I’ll meet you at the cruise dock.”
Not surprisingly, no one argued. They dropped into the handbag store as Treflee meandered into the art gallery. The minute they were out of sight, she dashed back out of the gallery and down the street just in time to see Ty turn the corner.
You’d think flat sandals would be good for running. Better than heels on any account. But they had no arch support. Treflee had shin splints by the time she reached the corner and saw Ty duck into Woo Ming’s Chinese Emporium. The old “stop by for an afternoon egg roll” trick, she thought and smiled to herself at her snappy Max Smart humor.
Chinese restaurant? The U.S. and China weren’t necessarily the best of friends. Being married to a spy made her suspicious of the simplest things, like the sudden urge for a cup of green tea and a fortune cookie. But if he was having tea, Treflee was watching him drink it. And if he tried the old briefcase switch drop, she was going to catch him at it. Just not on her camera. He still had that.
Note to self—buy a new camera, she thought. Unfortunately, no time for that now.
She took a second to catch her breath as she wondered how to sneak in behind him without him seeing her. In the hierarchy of spies, Treflee was more on the level of Max Smart than James Bond. She considered hoping there’d be a bead curtain she could hide behind in there. Or maybe a potted palm. Short of that, she was probably out of luck.
Fortunately, there was a tacky tourist shop next door with a rack of Hawaiian shirts and a table of floppy straw hats displayed on the sidewalk. No cameras, though. She bought a hat and positioned herself, hat shading her face, on a bench across the street where she could watch the door.
A couple of tourists went in for the early bird special. A few tourists came out. Ty stayed in. Ten minutes passed. Then twenty. She was bored out of her mind. If this was spying, Ty could have it.
Finally, she made up her mind. She was going in, baby, no matter the consequences. If Ty was sitting there calmly eating Peking Duck, so be it. She adjusted her hat and was off.
Inside the restaurant, it was cool and quiet. Someone had left the front desk unattended. A couple of people sat at red booths sipping ice water and eating fried rice, but no Ty.
Treflee frowned as she wondered if he’d given her the slip. Not willing to give up, she wandered down the hallway tow
ard the ladies’ room. He shouldn’t be in there. Which left her with two options: the men’s room and a door marked office/employees only. She wasn’t going into the men’s room. Not as her first choice.
The office door was closed. She put an ear to it, but couldn’t hear anything. There was no reason to storm in like Iron Man. Maybe she’d just try to get a peek inside first.
Afraid of someone hearing the latch turn, she gave it the gentlest push imaginable on the off chance she’d get lucky. And she did. Someone hadn’t closed it all the way. It cracked open just enough for her to see inside, and she put an eye to the door. That’s when she realized how curiosity killed the cat. She nearly had a heart attack.
A young Chinese man lay splayed on the floor with his neck slit open, a pool of bright blood forming around him. His glassy eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling as a pair of vulturelike flies buzzed around him.
Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh!
Ty stood over him with his shirt and hands covered in blood.
CHAPTER THREE
Fear does strange things to people. In Treflee’s case, it brought up the flight response. She ran. Just ran. Down the hall. Past the startled Chinese waiter. Out the door. Into the street. Around the corner. Her hands shook, and beyond, “Run, Tref, run,” she couldn’t think a coherent thought to save her life.
Finally, she spotted a little ice cream shop. Dad always bought her an ice cream when she was upset. She guessed this qualified. Her nearly ex-husband was a killer! Or so it appeared if she were the kind of girl to leap to conclusions. Which she was. And she couldn’t do a thing about the killing. Not a thing.
Yeah, she could call the cops. If she could borrow a phone. Ty still had her cell. But she might be blowing an important U.S. intelligence operation. Maybe thousands of lives depended on it. For all she knew, Ty had just taken out a terrorist or someone who was selling nuclear secrets or psychotic drugs. She couldn’t, she could not, call the cops. Ty and his agents would have to take care of it.
So she did the only thing she could. She bought a cup of ice cream. Cold, creamy coconut ice cream.
When the teenager behind the counter asked how she could help her, Treflee had to point to it because she still couldn’t form words. Then her hands shook so badly she was barely able to get her wallet out and pay.
She took her ice cream outside and sat at a table beneath a big, bright blue umbrella. She stuck her tiny plastic spoon in the ice cream and watched it melt as the “Oh my gosh” mantra repeated itself in an endless loop in her head.
She didn’t know how long she sat there. It could have been five minutes or an hour. She wondered vaguely if she was missing the cruise. She should find a taxi to take her back to the plantation. She had no desire to party.
How was she ever going to face Ty?
Never, never ask the universe a rhetorical question like that. Odds are it will answer you and you won’t like what it says. No sooner had the question popped into her mind than Ty called her name. Treflee started so badly, she knocked the ice cream cup over.
She looked up to see him standing before her, appearing out of nowhere as if he’d been transported there. That was the thing about him. He could creep up on anybody. He’d been trained in the art of sneaking.
“Tref?” He righted the ice cream cup and dropped a napkin on the spill to mop it up. His gaze flicked between the ice cream and her. “You okay?”
He knew her too well. She wasn’t a girl to waste ice cream, especially not coconut.
Treflee stared at his pristine white shirt, taking it in with the same calm as if she’d seen a ghostly apparition. As cold as she felt, she was sure the blood had drained from her face.
Her gaze trailed to his surgically clean hands. As far as she could tell he didn’t have a cell’s worth of blood on them, not even under his fingernails. His hair was dry and he was giving her a look of concern that didn’t show a jot of trauma in it, or give any hint he’d just killed a man. At that moment Treflee wished she had a black light she could shine on him to reveal blood residue.
How in the world had he made the transformation? Where had he gotten an identical set of clothes? Spies-R-Us?
“I’ve had a hell of a day,” she said in a voice that was shakier than she liked. “Running into you again hasn’t been easy.” Which was the understatement of the century, and completely true on both encounter counts, especially the last bloody one.
He looked at her ice cream again. “I can see that. Let me get you another one—”
“No!” She grabbed his hand to stop him and immediately released it as if his touch scorched.
He arched a brow.
It was thoughtful of him to offer. Had her stomach not been in such turmoil, she might have taken him up on it. She could certainly use the comfort. That was another thing about Ty. He could be sweet when he wanted to be.
“Look,” he said, pulling up a metal chair. “Let’s put this divorce unpleasantness behind us while you’re here. This is Hawaii. Enjoy yourself.”
Then stop killing people, she wanted to scream. Instead, she thanked her good luck. If the divorce was the tack he wanted to take, she was all over it. It was better than admitting to the scene she witnessed earlier. “Not easy to do, Ty, when I have to watch you act like some kind of gigolo with my cousin and her friends.”
“It’s just part of the job, Tref.” His voice was touchingly tender and sincere.
Treflee thought maybe he was getting the wrong impression from her degree of upset. She tried to work up a little indignant anger to show him she wasn’t pining away for him.
“That was always the problem, wasn’t it?” she said, feeling the old defensiveness and hurt again. “You get to flirt, and who knows what else, as part of the job…”
She really hated imagining the what-else. “If I flirted here, there, and everywhere on the job like you do, the office would be buzzing with gossip and innuendo. Someone would have to report me to my supervisor. I’d be fired and never allowed to work in human resources again.” She gave him a challenging look.
To her surprise, his returning expression was sympathetic. “I was never unfaithful, Tref. Never.”
She hated when he sounded like that. She wanted to believe him so badly. “What’s being unfaithful? Doing the full-blown deed? Stopping just short? Sticking your tongue down another woman’s throat?”
Ty grabbed her hand and put it on his heart. “It’s straying from the heart. Feeling something for another woman that I’ve always felt only for you.”
Her eyes misted over. Ty could be so touchingly dramatic. He’d always been like that. That’s part of why she fell in love with him. She pulled her hand away and tucked it in her lap.
“Give me another chance, Tref.”
Feeling on the verge of tears, she shook her head. On top of everything else, after what she’d just seen him do, how could she ever consider staying with him?
“We’ve been over this before, Ty,” she said softly. “We aren’t good for each other. I need someone who’s around, physically present, there for me.”
He frowned and pressed his lips together. He wasn’t the kind of man to beg. She knew that.
He sighed and glanced at his watch. “We have a cruise to catch.” He pushed back in his chair, stood, and extended his hand to her.
“Sign the papers and I can be out of your hair instantly,” she said, lamely.
“When I get back home.”
Is he ever really coming home?
“Promise?”
“You have my word.”
How do you trust the word of a man who will say anything and has the poker face of a master?
* * *
The harbor was just a few blocks away. They walked to the dock in silence. What was there to say? Treflee was terrified that if she talked too much she’d give away what she’d seen. And, although seemingly calm, she knew he was angry at her for not jumping to give him another chance. She felt perfectly horrible.
>
Greg and the girls were waiting for them aboard the Lahaina Dream, a gleaming white sixty-five-foot glass-bottomed yacht with deep sky-blue trim. Treflee liked blue. She wasn’t big on boats.
Laci leaned over the rail, spilling her cleavage out for all, particularly Ty, to see, and waved at them with the tiny umbrellaed cocktail in her hand from the upper deck. “Up here. Grab a drink and join us. The view’s to die for!”
Uneasy with that visual, Treflee shot a look at Ty.
“Jumpy?” he said, and smiled.
“I need one of those tiny umbrellas,” she said as they boarded.
They joined the others at their reserved table for eight on the upper viewing deck. Treflee downed half her mai tai on the way up from the main deck. Two kinds of rum and orange curacao, gotta love it.
Laci, that redheaded floozy, patted a chair next to her and smiled at Ty. “I saved you a seat.”
He sat and she settled herself uncomfortably close to him, her bare arm brushing his. She shot Treflee a triumphant look with a diamond-clear message—Treflee may have snagged Ty for a walk in Lahaina, but she meant to shag him.
“Tref,” Carrie said, sounding obviously put out. “We went back to the gallery to find you, but you gave us the slip.”
“I went for ice cream,” she said.
Carrie rolled her eyes. “You could answer your cell, you know.”
Treflee shot Ty the evil eye. He looked totally unfazed.
“I must not have had service,” she muttered, peeved that she couldn’t explain. She gulped down the rest of her mai tai and flagged the waiter for another. “Where are Brandy and Faye?”
Carrie pointed across the deck to where the two had cornered a pair of handsome men.
Judging by the men’s expressions, they’d just been ambushed. The girls could use a lesson or two in seduction techniques to augment their brusque war room skills. She glanced at Ty and scowled.
The Spy Who Left Me: An Agent Ex Novel Page 3
