by Lexi Blake
A wistful smile crossed his handsome face. “I don’t know. Maybe both. I feel for the guy, but you’re smarter than he is. You don’t really know him. I would say try again, but it’s hard to go back. I’ve found you get one shot at doing something right.”
And she’d blown hers. They’d blown theirs by going too fast.
Her heart felt heavy, but she couldn’t throw herself into a relationship with a man she barely knew. She just couldn’t.
She followed after Kyle and hoped the day didn’t take a worse turn.
Chapter Eight
“Thank you for joining us, Señor Grumpy Face.” Big Tag sank into his chair at the head of the conference room table.
Right back where he started. Wasn’t that the story of his life? One step forward, two steps back and shoved to the street.
He was in a fucking mood. He glanced around the room. Big Tag was there, but Charlotte was not. In her place sat Adam Miles, and that meant something serious had happened. Adam didn’t work for McKay-Taggart anymore and hadn’t for years. He was the head of his own firm. The two companies worked closely together, though, and Adam was always around to help with a crisis.
Just what he needed.
He slid into a chair as the door opened again and MaeBe walked in. Today’s outfit consisted of bright green tights and a black skater dress that went oddly well with her combat boots.
“Good morning, boss. Morning, big boss.” She waved Adam’s way. “Mr. Miles.”
Adam gave her a friendly smile. “It’s Adam, MaeBe. I’m just a guy.”
He was a guy who’d built an insanely successful company that had changed the industry. Adam had gotten used to the techies of the world kind of worshiping him.
“She’s calling you mister because you’re old, not because she respects you,” Big Tag said with a roll of his eyes.
Big Tag and Adam had a weird thing that had been going on for as long as Hutch could remember. They played pranks and gave each other shit more than any of the others.
“I’m not old,” Adam insisted.
“She’s twenty-five. To her you’re old as dirt,” Big Tag explained.
“Uhm, I totally respect you, Mr. Miles. You’re a giant in my world.” MaeBe settled in beside Hutch. She leaned in. “Did I do something wrong?”
He shook his head. MaeBe had only been around for a year and had yet to get a full dose of Big Tag and Adam’s unmistakable chemistry. “Nah, it’s the way they flirt.”
Adam coughed, nearly spitting out the coffee he’d been drinking.
Big Tag simply laughed, proving he was perfectly comfortable with himself.
“We do not flirt,” Adam corrected. “He’s an asshole and I have to defend myself.”
Big Tag gave him a once-over. “If I swung that way, it could happen. He’d be a good sub after some proper training.”
Adam pointed a finger Big Tag’s way. “I am not a sub.”
Big Tag shrugged. “In some weird parallel universe, I would bet you are, and trust me, you wouldn’t be bottoming for Jake. MaeBe, you got any idea why Hutch stalked through the office like Godzilla earlier? He made small children cry.”
“I did not.” He might not be in a good mood, but he wasn’t a monster.
“Yasmin said you didn’t even say hello, and she had her daughter with her, and yes, she did cry,” Big Tag insisted.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” MaeBe replied with wide, innocent eyes. “He seemed perfectly normal to me. And Yasmin’s little girl was crying because she wants a puppy. Like real bad. There’s an adoption drive in my neighborhood this afternoon, but Yasmin doesn’t have any personal days left.”
Big Tag made a gagging sound. “Not only did you cover for your boss, now I have to lose my receptionist for the afternoon so she can pick up some sad-sack dog who will poop on her floor. You’re working reception.”
MaeBe sat up straighter. She never seemed to mind covering the phones. “Absolutely, boss.”
Excellent. Everyone was getting what they wanted except him. “Why am I here?”
He wasn’t sure he wanted to be back at Noelle’s, but he knew he didn’t want to be here. He should go to his place and work from there, but he’d stopped by before he’d come to the office and been struck by how little warmth there was there. Unlike Noelle’s, which was covered in pictures of her family and friends, his house had blank walls and utilitarian furnishings. It felt empty.
Like his life.
Adam nodded Ian’s way. “Yeah, I see what you mean.”
He wasn’t playing around right now. “I have work to do. I’ll be in my office if you need me.”
“You’re not going anywhere.” Tag shifted from mildly amused to that blank expression that let Hutch know he meant business. “We’ve had a couple of developments in Noelle LaVigne’s case.”
His gut tightened because whatever Tag was about to tell him wasn’t good, and if Adam was sitting here rather than running his own company, then it was probably bad. “What is it?”
“First of all, I ran a check on the security guard you asked me to look into. He’s definitely DPD,” Tag explained. “Brighton told me he couldn’t work with us on this one, and that tells me we’re caught in something serious.”
“Chris Taylor is a veteran detective who moved onto a major crimes task force six weeks before he took on this second job of his.” Adam rested his hands on the table as he talked. “Brighton might be loyal to his department, but we can always find someone willing to give up some intel.”
“Brighton would talk in a heartbeat if he thought someone was in danger. Brighton’s unwillingness means that Chris Taylor is working something serious. One of the things he’s known for is working well with the feds,” Tag explained.
The knot in his stomach got tighter. How serious was this and how was Noelle involved? “So we think we’ve got feds on this?”
“That’s what I want MaeBe to figure out.” Big Tag passed her a folder. “I need you to do a deep dive on Genedyne and Jessica Layne. I want to know everything about this woman, including all the nasty rumors about her on the Deep Web. You know they’re out there. I want to figure out who’s looking into her and why. Check into Chris Taylor, too. I’d like to know if something in his background makes him suited for this particular job. If there is, it might give us a clue about what he’s looking into.”
MaeBe nodded, taking the file. “Will do. The rumors about Jessica Layne are numerous.”
“I want to hear them all.” Now that Kyle was moving into the woman’s circle, they needed to know everything about her. “I’ve got some contacts who might be able to help.”
He kept up with his old group of hacktivists. Most of them were married with families, but a few were still active. He could throw out a couple of lines and see if he caught anything. The Deep Web thrived on rumors and gossip.
“Do that, but we’ve got something else we’d like you to check into.” Tag looked to MaeBe. “I’d like something on Jessica Layne this afternoon. Thank you, MaeBe.”
She stood, taking her tablet and the folder with her. “I know when my clearance level has been reached. Fine. But it will be hard to do since I’m covering the phones.”
She didn’t even flinch when Tag grunted, proving she’d been around long enough to speak Tag. That was his you-got-yourself-into-it grunt.
The door closed and Tag’s attention was once again on Hutch. “She was a good hire. She didn’t even tell me you’re upset because you slept with the client and then apparently got the cold shoulder from her.”
“Seriously? Damn. I didn’t expect that,” Adam said. “Are you sure? Isn’t Hutch usually the one who slips out the door before his lady love awakens?”
“You’ve been reading too many of your wife’s books. Hutch doesn’t have to slip out of the door. Well, not out of the door of like an apartment or a house. He’s slipped out of lots of closets. You know his upper body strength must be off the charts,” Tag mused. “
Some of those closets are small. He’s got to be picking them up.”
“I was thinking he’s super stretchy,” Adam countered.
He managed to tamp down his irritation. “I take it Kyle’s been talking.”
Big Tag’s jaw went tight, and he sat back. “He writes a detailed report, and he’s sending them to the head of his department every morning. Fisher thought I should see this one since it involved a developing relationship. That was how Kyle put it in his report. I read the subtext. I’m right about you sleeping with Noelle?”
“It’s okay because I apparently was neither stretchy enough or upper body strong enough for her.” He wasn’t going to let the humiliation get him down. It was his old friend. “So it’s not going to be a problem.”
It was good to know Kyle was a tattletale. Although at least he’d been somewhat discreet. Big Tag could read between almost any line though.
“She told you she didn’t like the sex?” Adam asked.
“I am not doing this. I made a mistake. I’ll fix it.” He’d thought about it a lot. There was a simple solution, and he thought Noelle would appreciate it. They didn’t need another awkward encounter. “The truth of the matter is it’s not necessary for me to stay at Noelle’s. Kyle is the bodyguard. I can come and go as needed.”
“That would have been an option had you not introduced yourself around as her boyfriend,” Big Tag shot back. “I think there would be a bunch of questions if you left and your so-called brother was living with her. Unless you haven’t met any of her friends yet. How did you introduce yourself when you went against Genedyne security and found Noelle in the locker room?”
“I suspect you know exactly how many people I’ve met.” Kyle seemed thorough. So his plan to drop all the in-person work into Kyle’s lap seemed like a long shot now. Or a no shot. Like his relationship with Noelle. “I’ll handle it.”
“See that you do,” Big Tag intoned. “So I sent MaeBe away for a reason.”
Now they would get to why Adam was here. Everything he’d heard so far would have been handled by McKay-Taggart. “All right. Is this about the case? Because I trust MaeBe implicitly.”
“Not about this you won’t.” Tag nodded Adam’s way.
“Yesterday Jake met with a member of the Senate about the search for her missing daughter,” Adam explained. “Julia Ennis was reported missing in Hong Kong, where she’d been working with the American embassy there. That was three months ago. The government hasn’t been able to find her. Her mother is frustrated.”
Adam passed him a folder.
Hutch pulled it toward him. Almost everything they did now was done on tablets. If Adam was giving him a hard copy it was because whatever was in that folder was sensitive enough, he didn’t want any chance of it getting hacked.
He opened the folder and saw a picture of a stunning woman with long blonde hair and green eyes. She stared at the camera with a ready smile, but there was something cold about her. “This is the daughter? And you said she was working with the embassy, not at the embassy?”
“Yes. She actually works for a large conglomerate. She speaks three different languages and has a business degree from Yale. She’s in charge of coordination between the arms of the company, and apparently that means she travels a lot,” Adam explained. “From what we’ve been able to put together, she was on the road roughly thirty weeks last year alone.”
“What does this have to do with my case?” Hutch asked.
“You’ve gotten impatient.” Tag took over. “You know I’ve tried to stay out of the spy shit for the last seven years.”
Hutch sat up straighter because that statement was correct. The last seven years had been peaceful in their way. Tag had told the Agency to fuck off, and he’d concentrated on the Dallas and London offices and his family. It had been ages since Hutch had found himself in the middle of an international conspiracy. “You think she’s a spy? Why would a missing woman drag you back into Agency business?”
“I think she might be trying to bring back an old enemy. She’s visited ten of the most important CEOs in the world over the course of the last year, and I’m seeing a familiar pattern,” Tag said, his tone grave.
A chill went through Hutch. “The Collective broke up a long time ago.”
Adam sighed. “As they might say in royal circles, The Collective is dead. Long live The Collective. They might call it something else, but eight of those ten she visited were suspected Collective companies back in the day. The daughter of a senator would have a lot of opportunities a member of The Collective could use. We suspect she’s brokering between the companies.”
“And none of that would be my business because I’m not going to work with the Agency again.” Tag’s fist clenched. “But they found a way to drag my ass back in. Turn the page, Hutch.”
Hutch turned the page and realized the one thing that could drag Big Tag anywhere he didn’t want to go.
Family.
There was a collage of photographs showing the same young woman, but this time with a man. A couple of the photos looked like they’d been taken from CCTV, but some were definitely from a personal camera, one with a long-range capability.
Kyle Hawthorne. The man in the photos holding hands with the lovely and probably deeply corrupt woman was Kyle.
Kyle, who had maneuvered himself into a situation where he had access to one of the most influential CEOs in the world.
“I can’t tell Sean because he’ll have to tell Grace,” Ian admitted, his eyes on the table in front of him. “How am I supposed to tell my sister-in-law that her son might be working for the same organization that tried to kill her and her whole family?”
“Or he’s investigating them.” Despite his tattletale ways, Hutch couldn’t see Kyle as a man who would betray his family like that. “Does Kyle know the story? Does he know what happened to his mother?”
What had happened to Grace Taggart had been getting shoved off a building by a rogue CIA operative after watching the same man nearly kill Sean. He’d read the files on those dark days and struggled to see how Kyle would reconcile working with people who could hurt his family.
“At the time he didn’t. We told Kyle and his brother, David, that what happened to Grace was an accident, but he could have found out if he was working with the Agency the way we suspect he was,” Adam explained. “There’s a report on why I believe Kyle at the very least worked with the CIA on several occasions. His military records don’t match up with my facial recognition. I can place him on different continents from where the military records put him.”
The facial recognition software Adam had invented was the centerpiece of his investigative empire. It was likely why the senator had come to him.
“Did you ask the senator if her daughter had a boyfriend?” Kyle looked awfully cozy with the blonde.
“They hadn’t talked in the six weeks before her disappearance,” Adam explained. “Jake is getting more information from her, but she seemed to genuinely not know anything. She’s worried about her daughter. I had Eve work up a profile on her and she suspects if the daughter is doing something criminal, the mother isn’t aware of it.”
“I asked them not to show the senator the pictures of Kyle,” Ian admitted.
Because the last thing they needed was pictures of Kyle leaking on the Internet or the senator wanting to make him a suspect in her daughter’s disappearance. “Have we thought about asking him what’s going on?”
“Do you think I didn’t put him through a lot of talks before he hired on?” Tag asked. “I asked him flat out if he’d worked for the Agency. He said no. Should I believe him when he tells me no, Uncle Ian, I’m not using your company to get to your corporate clients? Shortly after Julia Ennis went missing, Kyle left the military, and a shocking amount of cash showed up in his accounts. Yeah, he hasn’t told his parents about that either.”
“We’re worried that Kyle took Julia’s job.” Adam got to the heart of the matter.
“I’
m sorry, Hutch. I was worried about him lying to me about working with the Agency, but I did not have this intelligence in front of me when I gave you this job,” Tag said. “I would never have sent him out knowing what I know today. I have to decide what to do.”
“You let me do my job.” Hutch closed the folder and handed it back to Adam. “I can’t take this with me. We’re going to be in close quarters, and if he finds it on me, he’ll figure out I’m watching him.”
“I know I joke about what a dipshit you are,” Tag began.
Hutch held up a hand to stop him. “Sarcasm is a part of who you are. We both know how good I am at this type of undercover. You don’t have to tell me.” But he’d had a day. “Or you should. Go on. I could use some praise.”
“It’s because the chick didn’t like the sex,” Adam whispered.
Adam was a dick.
Tag ignored him. “Hutch, you’re one of my best agents. I don’t send you out in the field often because you’re brilliant behind a computer, but when I needed you, you came through in a way few people ever do. I trust you to handle this.”
And that was why he put up with Big Tag’s shit. Because at the heart of it Big Tag was the best father figure he’d ever had. He would never say that though. The dude had gotten sensitive since he turned fifty.
“You should know that Kyle is meeting with Jessica Layne right now about a job.” Hutch might not be on the Kyle-is-bad bandwagon, but he wasn’t going to hide anything from his boss. “You should also know that I tried to talk him out of it and he was incredibly insistent. He wants to be in that building.”
Tag nodded. “Understood. Watch that relationship for me. I need daily communication, Hutch. To me. No one else. If you need Adam, call him. He’s going to keep us up to date on the Julia Ennis case.”
“It’s a thrill to be back to dealing with politicians.” Adam understood the language of sarcasm, too. He stood and grabbed his tablet and the rest of his things. “You coming down for lunch? Phoebe ordered pizza.”
