“No. I grew up farther north in the Kjerringøy Mountains.”
“That’s why you said you’re a man of the mountains. Who was the guy who gave us the truck, anyway?”
“An old friend.”
She rolled her eyes, clearly annoyed by his taciturn answers. She wasn’t the first woman to feel that way. “Why aren’t we going to your home town? Wouldn’t you have the advantage of knowing it well?”
“If you were back in the States and got into trouble, where would you run?”
“Home,” she said promptly.
“Exactly. It’s human instinct to return to what you know and where you feel comfortable. My home town is in my military records, which Sokolov could easily access if he wanted to.”
“I wouldn’t have thought of that.” She tugged another grape from its stem and tucked it in her cheek like a chipmunk. “Do you want me to drive?” she asked. “You must be tired.”
It was nice that she’d offered, but he doubted she had experience driving on the left hand side of the road. More than one tourist had crashed a car when instinctively correcting into the wrong lane. Plus there was the fact that if something went wrong he wanted to be in the driver’s seat. He didn’t care if that made him sound like a control freak. “No, I’m fine. Thanks.”
She unbuckled her seat belt, smoothed his sweatshirt around her hips, and re-buckled. He liked seeing her in his clothes. He’d like it better if she were in one of his t-shirts with nothing underneath.
For frig’s sake, he thought, disgusted with himself. It had obviously been too long since he’d been with a woman if he couldn’t get a single kiss out of his head. The faster this situation was resolved the better it would be for the both of them.
It seemed she was having similar thoughts, because she hadn’t once mentioned the kiss in the office. It was as if they’d come to the unspoken agreement to forget the whole thing had ever happened, and that suited him just fine.
“So Ian,” Leah said after taking another swig of water. “Let’s talk about that kiss.”
Ah, shit.
Chapter 27
Leah had never been skilled at beating around the bush, unlike her boss who was the master of it. Still, the question was bold even for her. She hadn’t actually meant to bring it up, but then she’d pulled his sweatshirt over her hips and he’d given her a look so smoldering she’d nearly had heart palpitations. She’d decided then that the best idea was to get whatever this was between them out in the open. That way they could talk about it rationally and get on with the business of surviving.
If Ian was surprised by the question there was no evidence of it. “What about it?”
Yes, what about it? She should have thought of an answer to that before she started blabbing. “Why did you kiss me?” Good start. Put the responsibility on him.
“Because I wanted to. And because you wanted me to.”
She opened her mouth to argue but then closed it. It was true, but only half the truth. She’d wanted him to do a lot more than kiss her. “I live in the U.S. Nothing can happen between us.”
He was silent for a full thirty seconds. In that time it felt as if the air in the cab heated by several degrees. “So you’re saying we could never have a relationship?”
She nodded vigorously.
“You know,” he said in a low voice, “There are such things as affairs.”
Oh God. She should have left it alone. Now she was thinking about hot, sweaty, temporary sex. She glanced over at him, wondering what kind of lover he would be. The morning sun pulled golden highlights from his hair and lit the radiant blue of his eyes. His face was strong and hard, his jaw shadowed with two days growth of beard. Despite the chaos of the night, he appeared relaxed and casual in his worn jeans and gray t-shirt, driving with one hand on the wheel. In fact, he hardly even looked tired.
Stamina, she thought. He’d definitely have stamina in bed. And he’d be bossy and demanding in a way that left her wrung dry and begging for more.
Ian turned and caught her eye. As if he could read her thoughts he gave her a slow, wolfish smile. Leah’s stomach did a cartwheel straight into her groin. Holy shit, she wanted this man. But did she want him badly enough to sleep with him while a crazed psychopath tried to kill her?
No. Maybe.
Instead of answering him, she deflected by saying, “Don’t you think we should focus on not having our heads blown off?”
His expression sobered, and she marveled at how quickly he went from casual and sexy to stone-cold soldier. “Yes,” he said. “Sokolov isn’t a threat to be taken lightly, and we both need clear heads. So whatever might have happened between us, consider it over on my end.”
It was what she’d been fishing for, but it irritated her that he was making the decision for the both of them. “Good,” she said. “That was exactly what I was going to suggest. Consider it extra-over on my end.”
Wow. Mature, Leah.
“Great.”
“Excellent.”
She turned to the window, scowling until she realized she was frowning at one of the most gorgeous scenes she’d ever had the privilege of laying eyes on. E6 North, the main north/south artery in Norway, cut through mountains and inlets that were so vivid with color and life that she felt as if they were driving through a postcard. Directly outside her window stretched a vast, sparkling body of water dotted with white triangular boat sails. Beyond the fjord, a mountain range of smoky grays and iced peaks jutted from a lizard green forest. The road wound tightly to the coastline with nothing but tall yellow grasses between it and the flashing waves below. It reminded her of the Scottish coast, although in Scotland the coastline had seemed tamed, softened in some way. In Norway the ragged mountains and deep cuts of the fjords were so raw and majestic that she felt as if she’d been picked up by a giant hand and dropped on the edge of time when the world was still an infant.
Leah exhaled appreciatively. “Is all of Norway this breathtaking?”
Ian’s eyes flickered toward the view. “Yes, I think so.”
She’d thought she was happy in D.C., but compared to this, the city suddenly seemed dumpy and overcrowded. Maybe it was time for a change. She unexpectedly longed for the red-spoked corn fields that stretched across the Pennsylvania landscape, yearned for fresh air, for quiet, for a moment to breathe without the rushing, rushing, rushing.
“Do you miss this?” she asked, gesturing to the window. “Now that you live in Oslo? Wait, do you live in Oslo?”
“I have a house in Oslo, but I travel extensively so I’m not there a lot.”
“Do you still have family in your hometown?”
At the mention of his family Ian’s face visibly softened. “My mom lives there. She won’t ever move. She grew up in Kjerringøy, as did her mother, and she’s part of the fabric of the community. She has these four friends that she sees every single week. They call themselves the Fab Five.”
Leah smiled. “And your dad?”
The shift was subtle, but the tenderness she’d briefly glimpsed when he mentioned his mom vanished. “He left us when I was a kid.”
She waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t. “Do you still speak to him?”
“No. My older sister, Nina, tracked him down when she was in high school. She found him living in a halfway house for recovering alcoholics. He hit her up for her babysitting money. He still contacts her occasionally, begging for krone.”
“But you never visited him?”
Ian spared her a glance. “I had zero interest. He’d done me a huge favor by leaving. He inspired me to be everything he wasn’t.”
She thought she might be pushing it, but she asked, “Is that why you joined the military?”
“Not directly. I was recruited because of my interest in languages. In middle school I came across a set of used Learn Russian CDs at the music store and went through all nine discs in two weeks. My mom must have realized I had an ear for languages, because she dug into her savings and b
ought me the next level of CDs. It kind of snowballed from there. For every birthday or Christmas I was given books or CDs on languages. By the time I graduated high school I could speak French, English, and Russian, although my accents were terrible.
“My senior year my high school had a job fair with the typical trade booths: fishing, oil, a couple of tech companies, and the good old army. I’ve always been a big guy, so when the recruiter caught sight of me he pitched me hard. When he learned about my affinity for languages he got a different look in his eye. He told me my country could use my services and there was a place for a man like me. I signed up that day.”
“How long were you in the military?”
“Ten years, seven of those in Special Forces. After Afghanistan I got out. I was done. I met Erik in the FSK and after he was discharged he suggested we start our own business. All it took was one high profile kidnapping case and boom, we were in business.”
Leah mulled this over for a moment. “Before, you said that Sokolov could find out where your hometown is?”
“If he could get someone to hack into my phone, I have no doubt he could find someone to unseal my military records.”
“But what if he figures out who your mom is? Will she be safe?”
For the first time Ian appeared caught off guard. “It’s nice of you to think of her,” he said. His voice sounded more gravelly than usual. “I had Chani send a few men to watch over her as well as my sister. My family is used to it,” he said, noticing her concerned expression. “It hardly fazes them anymore. Every once in a while I piss off the wrong person and have to make sure no one does something stupid, like go after my family.”
Leah thought someone would have to be deranged to go after Ian Haugen’s family. He would rain down vengeance like Thomas Jane in The Punisher. She could read the protective instincts written all over him, had even benefitted from them recently. He was a man with a strong sense of values and duty, and he would be fierce in his defense of those he loved. He was, as her favorite author Brad Thor would say, a sheepdog. He protected the herd from the wolves.
“And what about you, Leah Hannah Parker? Do you have family in D.C.?”
“No I—wait a second. How do you know my middle name?”
He gave her a wicked grin.
“You had Mia run me!” she accused.
“Of course.”
She crossed her arms. “Then you already know all about me.”
Chapter 28
“Knowing names and addresses is different than actually knowing a person. For example, I know you grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I know that you graduated at the top of your class at Penn State and got accepted into William Harrison University School of Law, and I know you dropped out a year later and became a paralegal. That was all on paper. But what I don’t know is why.”
“Why I dropped out of law school?” When he nodded, she shrugged. “It just wasn’t for me.”
He waited patiently, which seemed to be his default interrogation mode, but she dug in. Why did he care why she left law school?
“Did it have something to do with your grades?” he prompted. She knew he knew it didn’t. She was confident the ever-thorough Mia had also laid her hands on Leah’s transcripts and seen that she’d aced her first year courses.
“No.”
Ian remained silent. Leah looked at the clock. They had two hours to go. Would he wait the entire time for an answer? She suspected he might just be that patient. She sighed. She wasn’t going to outlast him, wasn’t even sure why she was so reluctant to share the information. Maybe because it was so damned humiliating. “I left because the school asked me to leave.”
His eyebrow winged up. “That wasn’t in your records.”
“It wouldn’t be,” she said sourly. “It was all swept under the rug. They didn’t want a blemish like that on their reputation.”
“And what blemish would that be?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Fortunately, we have plenty of time.”
She sighed again, this time with more impatience. “You want all the sordid details? Fine. My first year at William Harrison I took a required constitutional law class. The professor was a self-important ass by the name of Arnold Deering. Of course I didn’t know he was an ass at first; I was just as enthralled by him as the other first years. He was known on campus as a law legend, and the fact that he deigned to teach a 101 class was unheard of, so students packed his halls.
“He singled me out within the first month. He pulled me aside at the end of class one day and asked me my name. When I told him his face fell, and he said he recognized my name from one of the failing papers he’d graded. He could tell my law foundation was shaky and suggested I take extra tutoring sessions. He had a gap in his schedule and was willing to take on the task as long as I was willing to put in the work.”
“Is that typical of a professor?”
“No, but I didn’t know that at the time. All I could think was that I’d been handed an incredible opportunity to learn from one of the best. I was young and I was stupid.”
“You were young and trusting,” Ian corrected.
She gave a half shrug. Trusting or stupid, it had amounted to the same thing. “Over the next few months I met with Professor Deering every Monday at the coffee shop and he tutored me. He was professional every time, and I thought nothing of it. But it seemed that no matter how hard I tried I could never please him, never seem to get my grade above a C. I would study for hours and re-write my papers dozens of times, only to have him read them and shake his head and wonder out loud how I’d ever been accepted into such a prestigious university and how fortunate I was to have his help.”
Ian’s expression had taken on that blank look she’d already learned meant he was concealing emotions. “He was conditioning you.”
“Yes. About halfway through the semester he increased our sessions to twice a week. He convinced me that without his help I would fail the final exam. He was the expert, after all, and he taught the class so he would know. The second weekly session was to take place at his home office.”
Ian’s knuckles whitened on the wheel.
“The first few times we met at his house he was aloof, remote even, as if he was annoyed to have me in his space. Then the meetings gradually became more intimate. One day he wore jeans instead of trousers. The next day we worked over spaghetti that he’d happened to throw together right before I arrived. The time after that I started to get a migraine halfway through our session and he insisted on giving me a very awkward shoulder massage despite my protests. That’s when I started to feel that something wasn’t quite right and I told him I couldn’t make the next session. When I cancelled a second time, things got nasty.
“When I arrived at lecture that week he pulled me from the class. He told me that if I wasn’t serious about being a lawyer I shouldn’t waste his or the school’s time. He was going to give me one last chance to prove myself. He wouldn’t pass someone who was only flirting with the idea of practicing law. There were plenty of students at the university who would scratch my eyeballs out for the chance to be privately tutored by the great Professor Deering, and either I was committed or I wasn’t. If I didn’t show at his house that night, he’d fail me and my GPA would never recover. He even told me he might feel duty-bound to make a call to admissions detailing my lack of enthusiasm for my studies.”
Leah paused, remembering the sense of despair she’d felt at being trapped in an impossible situation. She’d wanted to be a lawyer her whole life and she’d busted her ass to get into law school, and then just like that a single man had put himself in a position to rip it all away.
“You didn’t go.”
“Oh I went. I told myself there were only a few weeks left in the academic year. If I could just make it through the last of his creepy tutoring sessions I’d be free of him. When I arrived that night his house was dark except for a light in the study. I called out to him but he didn’t answer,
so I walked down the hallway and pushed open the office door.
“He was sitting at his desk typing furiously on the computer. When I walked in he had this feverish look in his eyes and I knew he was worked up about something. I should have listened to my instincts and left then, but all I could think about was passing my first year. So I went in.
“He had me sit down at the work table where we usually studied. As soon as I did his hand came down on my thigh. I pushed it off and told him I was serious about being a lawyer and wasn’t looking for any romantic entanglements. He persisted. He…he pushed me on the table and started ripping at my shirt.”
Ian’s jaw was so tight it could have been chiseled from stone.
“So I kneed him in the balls. Then I whacked him over the head with my constitutional law textbook.”
The look Ian gave her was incredulous. “I didn’t think that was where this was headed.”
“I got lucky,” she said quietly. “Not all survivors do. I ran out of there and flagged down the first campus officer I saw. I pressed charges and it went through the usual round of internal appeals. In the end, Professor Deering was one of the university’s top draws for incoming students and it was determined that I had no proof of the assault. Instead the university offered me a deal: Professor Deering wouldn’t press charges against me—as he had visible injuries from the textbook to prove the assault—if I left the school quietly.
“So I dropped out. And I didn’t apply anywhere else because Professor Deering promised to blackball me should I try.”
“Did you explain what happened to your mother?”
Leah scoffed. “My mom already has a daughter she’s convinced is going to hell because she runs a burlesque club. I figured it would be easier on her to think I was ambitionless then to find out what really happened.”
“Did it ever occur to you that you might not be giving your mother enough credit?”
Leah lifted a brow. “Do you know my mother?”
“All I’m saying is how do you know how she’ll react if you don’t tell her? She might surprise you. What would you do if that happened to your daughter?”
Finding Lies Page 14
