Secret Keeper

by Paula Graves

  “Retirement for her, too?”

  “Exactly.”

  Wade pulled up the only chair in the room so he could sit near her. He reached out tentatively to touch her hand. “I think she still remembers how to be a patriot, don’t you?”

  Annie’s expression softened and she curled her hand until it was palm up against his. “Yes. I just hoped she wouldn’t have to go back into service again, especially not this way. Not knowing where my dad is or if he’s even going to come back to us alive—” Tears sparkled in her eyes. She blinked them away, not letting them fall.

  “They’ll keep him alive, you know.”

  She looked at him through narrowed eyes. “No, I don’t know.”

  “They wouldn’t be looking for you if your father had given them the code, would they?”

  She gave it a moment’s thought, then shook her head. “No, probably not. It’s not like the people who took us aren’t already wanted by the authorities, right? So they’re not coming after me because they’re afraid I can testify against them.”

  “Right. They’re after you because they’ve figured out that you’re the best leverage they can use against your father, which means he’s still got to be alive, right? Or they wouldn’t need the leverage.”

  Her troubled expression didn’t shift at all. “Or it could mean something else,” she said quietly, sliding her eyes upward to meet his.

  The pain and fear in her eyes made his gut clench. “Like what?”

  “There’s something I haven’t told you about the night the men broke into our cabin and abducted us,” she said in a low, strangled tone. “Something my father told me just before it happened.”

  “Besides telling you about the coded journal?”

  “Yes.” She let go of his hand and sat back a little, wrapping her arms around her waist as if she were suddenly cold. “I told you that he explained how he and the other two generals decided to write down their suspicions and keep it safe by triple-encrypting their words. But that he hadn’t given me the code so I’d be able to fill in the blanks if something ever happened to him.”

  “Right.” Wade’s eyes narrowed. “So what haven’t you told me?”

  “I lied,” she blurted out, looking utterly miserable. “He did give me the code. And I’ll bet the S.S.U. knows I have it.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The look on Wade’s face made Annie’s heart contract. “You lied?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, meaning it. “I wanted to tell you but—”

  “But your father told you not to tell anyone.” He looked away. “And I’m a stranger to you.”

  She reached out blindly, grabbing his arm. “You’re not a stranger.”

  “It’s okay. I understand.”

  She tightened her grip on his arm, not sure why she was so desperate to make him understand. Wouldn’t it be smarter, wiser to let this rift starting to form between them continue growing? The last thing she needed was to have her reckless feelings for Wade Cooper continue complicating her already overcomplicated life.

  But letting him think she didn’t trust him was more than she could bear. He’d earned her trust, and she’d been wrong to withhold it from him, no matter what her reason. “I should have told you.”

  “I guess your father told you not to tell anyone?”

  “Right.” She loosened her tight grip on him, turning her touch into a caress. He looked down at her hand, watching her fingers play lightly over his bicep. “But I’m telling you now.”

  There was a hint of a smile on his face when he lifted his gaze to meet hers. “Why’s that?”

  She touched his face. “Because you deserve my trust.”

  He caught her hand, gently removing it from his cheek. “I’m not sure that’s really true.”

  “You’ve protected me this whole time. And I don’t believe for a second it’s just because you think I can help you out in some way.”

  “That’s part of it.”

  “But not all of it.” She edged closer, unfolding her legs until they dangled over the side of his bed. She faced him fully now, reaching across the narrow space between them to cradle his face with both hands. “You know that’s not all of it.”

  He gazed back at her, the expression on his face a mixture of consternation and helpless desire. “You’re so damned sexy when you’re deadly serious. Anybody ever told you that?”

  Not many people had ever told her she was sexy, period. She’d been wary about letting people get too close in her line of work. Too many people in the world in which she lived were out there working their own agenda, willing to lie to a person’s face to get an edge on an opponent or steal a story out from under her.

  Sex was a weapon, intimacy a trick, a relationship a carefully calibrated business arrangement where one side always got the better end of the deal. The only love she’d ever really believed in was the one between her parents.

  But Wade Cooper wasn’t playing any angles. She didn’t know if he even had that sort of deceit in him.

  “Nobody’s ever told me that,” she admitted, running the pad of her thumb lightly over his bottom lip. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re sexy every second of the day?”

  His eyes narrowed slightly. “No, definitely not.”

  “Well, that’s a damned shame.” She bent toward him, her gaze on his firm, well-shaped mouth.

  He caught her arms in his hands, keeping her at a short distance. “This isn’t a good idea.”

  “Why not?” she asked, resisting his attempt to keep her at arm’s length.

  He tightened his grip and gently nudged her back toward the bed. “Because I’m not who you think I am.”

  * * *

  “SOMETHING FISHY?” Jesse grabbed an empty chair from the desk next to Evie’s and sat beside her, noticing that despite the long day and her otherwise disheveled appearance, she still smelled clean, like the woods after a hard rain. The scent hit him hard, right between the eyes, making his head swim for a second.

  Disturbed by the unexpected reaction, his first instinct was to pull away from her. But she was already talking to him, clearly oblivious to his discomfiture, forcing him to slide closer in order to follow what she was telling him.

  “I’ve been working on processing the expense vouchers before the big quarterly report presentation, and I’ve come across something odd about Derek Fordham’s reports.”

  “Odd how?”

  “Well, let’s start with his miles. He was gone from the office on business ten days last month and logged one hundred and forty-three billable miles. But I checked that against the logged mileage on his vehicle—you know the fleet manager checks every time an agent brings a car back in. There are only seventy-nine miles listed on those vehicles he used.”

  He looked up at her and felt another odd twinge of vertigo. Looking down to clear his brain, he said, “We allow people to bill hours on their personal vehicles.”

  “I know. But the agents still have to log in the mileage of their personal vehicles before they’re allowed to expense those miles.”

  “And Fordham didn’t?”

  “No, he did,” Evie said. “But his mileage was way, way out of whack for the last month.” She pointed to a column on her spreadsheet. “This is how many miles were on his personal vehicle when the fleet manager checked it at the beginning of the month. He only claimed sixty-four work-related miles. But look at his month’s mileage.”

  Jesse looked at the number she pointed out and gave a slight start. “Eight hundred and seventy-three miles in one month?”

  “I checked but he wasn’t on vacation, and in fact, he worked overtime last month, clocking in nearly sixty hours a week including working each Saturday.” She picked up a sheet of paper lying on her desk. “This is his work dossier. He lives on Blackbriar Road, which is only two miles from the office. That’s four miles a day for twenty-five work days—one hundred miles. And he was off only six days, and only a day or two at a time. Unless he took
one hell of a road trip on one of those days, how did so many miles get on his car?”

  “A girlfriend?”

  “Lives alone. No girlfriend, boyfriend or otherwise—I checked around.” Evie paused for a moment, sliding a sidelong glance his way.

  He narrowed his eyes, his gut tightening. Not with anger, as he might have expected, given that one of his office support employees had run her own unauthorized investigation into another employee, but with worry. “What do you mean, you checked around?”

  Her gaze dropped to her hands. “I might have followed him on his lunch hour a couple of times. And asked about him.” Her dark lashes lifted, her blue eyes slanting toward him again. “I might have hinted that I found him really cute and wanted to know if he was available.”

  Now he was angry. “Evie, have you lost your mind? You can’t just go around doing investigations into other employees! You can’t go around doing investigations at all—you’re not an agent. You’re an accountant!”

  “I know, but it was strange, and y’all are all so wrapped up in this Harlowe case—” She sighed. “I didn’t want to bother you about this if there wasn’t anything to it. So I did a little preliminary groundwork, that’s all.”

  “That’s too much.” He should fire her, he thought. Just terminate her now, give her a good job reference and let her go be a staff accountant at some boring firm where she wouldn’t be tempted to play girl detective.

  He never should have hired Rita Marsh’s little sister in the first place.

  “Oh, wait,” she said, just before he opened his mouth to give her the sack. He bit back the words and looked at her expectantly, but she was looking at the computer screen again. He followed her gaze and saw she was opening her email program. There was a new message with the subject line, “Derek Fordham inquiry.” The email address wasn’t familiar.

  “What have you done?” he murmured.

  “Just a sec.” She opened the email, which was a formal letter from a real estate agent. The email was addressed to her, providing a list of tenants at the Bellewood Towers in Dallas, Texas, during a period from January to November four years earlier.

  The list included a brokerage firm, a couple of law firms, an ad agency and a name that made Jesse’s breath catch in his throat.

  MacLear Security, Inc. was the fifth name on the list.

  “Oh, no,” Evie murmured.

  He looked at her. “What is this list?”

  She met his gaze, her blue eyes troubled. “Daughtry Security provided the building security for the Bellewood Towers. Derek Fordham worked for Daughtry at the time MacLear had offices in the building.”

  Jesse’s blood chilled in his veins. “And Fordham is one of the security guards who’s keeping watch here tonight.”

  * * *

  WADE LAID HIS HANDS on his knees to keep from touching Annie again and met her confusion-filled gaze. “I’m not a hero. Not anymore. Not ever.”

  “Isn’t that up to me to judge?” she asked.

  “Look, all I’ve ever been is a grunt. Enlisted straight out of high school, marched in the mud for years, crawled on my belly in the cold and the heat, in rain and in desert sand, and did what I was told. Couldn’t shoot a rifle worth a damn, except maybe to save my own skin and the life of the man in the foxhole next to me.” He shook his head. “Jesse hired me because I’m his brother. Lord knows I don’t have any marketable skills besides being pretty good cannon fodder.”

  “Stop it.” She grabbed his hands. “If you don’t want things to go any further with us, just say so. You don’t have to cut yourself down that way.”

  He twined his fingers with hers, unable to stop himself. “I want to kiss you right now so much it hurts. But I’m smart enough to know when someone is way out of my league.”

  “Again, isn’t that up to me to judge?” She gave him a pointed look. “I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next hour, so I’m not exactly in the position to make any long-term commitments anyway. Why don’t we just accept this thing between us for what it is?”

  He couldn’t hold back a smile. “Which is what?”

  A little crease of consternation formed between her eyebrows. “Why do we have to define it anyway?” She tugged him closer. “If you want to kiss me, just kiss me.”

  “Annie?”

  “Here, I’ll make it easy for you.” She pushed to her feet and stepped between his knees, her hips pressing against his ribcage, making his heart rattle like a snare drum. She let go of his hands to slide her fingers through his hair, tilting his face up to hers. “I want to kiss you. That okay with you?”

  He closed his eyes and nodded.

  Time seemed to stop as he waited to feel her lips on his once again. The tension grew so exquisite, he could hardly take a breath.

  She dropped her hands away from his hair and he heard the creak of bedsprings. He opened his eyes and found her sitting on the edge of his bed again, her eyes on the floor.

  “Okay, now I’m confused,” he murmured, his whole body tingling with frustration.

  Annie twined her fingers together in her lap. “I’m not really very good at relationships.”

  Wade stifled a smile. “Who is?”

  “No, I mean, I’m really bad. I’m sort of notorious for how disastrous my social life is. I once had a blind date with an escaped felon.”

  A laugh escaped his throat.

  “I’m serious!” she insisted. “That’s the last time I’ll let a confidential informant set me up on a date.”

  Wade shook his head, still smiling. “You’re beautiful and smart and funny—I can’t believe you have trouble attracting men.”

  “Oh, I attract them. But they’re all married or predators or way too nice to put up with me for very long.” She pushed her hair away from her face. “I work crazy hours and I’m on assignments sometimes days and weeks at a time. My best friends are cutthroat journalists and seedy informants. My dad’s an Air Force general, which seems to fascinate all the wrong people and repel all the otherwise right people.”

  “If it repels them, are they really the right people?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “When we found you, I did some reading about your background, so I could help you better. And you know what struck me more than anything else in my research?”

  “What?”

  “Your parents have been married for thirty years, and your father has been rising in the Air Force almost all of that time, spending months and years away from your mother and you. And yet, in all that time, there wasn’t even a whiff of trouble in their marriage. No battlefield affairs for your dad, no stateside flirtations for your mom. Everyone we talked to—everyone—seemed downright envious of them.”

  Annie smiled. “They’re crazy about each other. Always have been.”

  “Don’t you want that for yourself?”

  “Of course I do.” She looked up at him, her eyes shining with pain. “I’ve just stopped looking. Because I don’t think it exists outside of a few very rare instances.”

  Wade wanted to argue with her, but how could he? His own experience supported her theory. Sure, his brother Rick had recently lucked into a relationship that seemed to make both him and his new wife happy. And all three of his sisters were madly in love—Megan and Izzy were newlyweds, and Shannon would probably be engaged, if not married, before Christmas. But Jesse’s one great love was about to marry somebody else and Wade himself hadn’t had a serious long-term relationship since high school.

  “What are you thinking about?” Annie asked.

  “How I’d like to argue with you about the odds of finding that someone special. But I guess I can’t.”

  “Your sister Isabel and her husband seem happy.”

  He nodded. “They are. But they came really close to losing it all. And don’t get me started on my parents.”

  Her eyebrow arched. “What about your parents? Divorced?”

  “No. Just separated.”

  S
he frowned sympathetically. “For how long?”

  “Twenty-two years.”

  “What?”

  “Seventeen years into the marriage, my mom decided motherhood and marriage wasn’t really for her. At least, not in any conventional way. So she left us with Dad and went off to find herself or something.”

  “Without any warning?”

  “Jesse said he had an inkling, but he was nearly sixteen when she left. The rest of us were younger. Shannon wasn’t even in kindergarten yet.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “I think with some time and distance, most of us have come to see it was probably the best thing she could have done for us. She was miserable being a mom, and not terribly good at it. Letting us go allowed us to find better mother figures in our lives. It worked out.”

  “Still, it must have given you a really skewed idea about love and marriage.” She tucked her knees up to her chest—a protective posture, Wade thought. If he could get his bum knee up to his chest, he might be sitting much the same way, as tough as this conversation was turning out to be. “That’s what scares me, I guess. That it’s so much easier to find bad examples of romance than good ones these days. It makes sense to just keep your distance from someone else, doesn’t it?”

  “What makes you think I do that?” he asked, his tone light.

  She shot him a wry grin. “I see the panic in your eyes. If you didn’t have to protect me, you’d have run screaming out of here ten minutes ago.”

  He laughed. “Frankly, I’m kind of enjoying talking to someone who appears to be as rotten at this relationship stuff as I am. We could form our own bowling team or something.”

  She smiled back at him, but it faded quickly. “I tell myself I don’t want to be tied down in a relationship. I’m independent and successful at my work, and I don’t need a man to come home to—”

  “But you don’t really believe it.”