Risk of Exposure (Alpha Ops Book 6) (5 page)

A
bby, wait. It’s just me,” he said, holding up his hands as if in surrender.

Her eyes blazed as she dipped her head and ran full tilt. She slammed into him and he went sprawling. She landed on top of him, and as his head slammed into the doorjamb, he saw stars around the periphery of his vision. He fought to stay conscious.

Abby jumped off him and reached for the frying pan again. He wanted to shake her. Couldn’t she see it was him? Had she been blinded by the sudden light?

He tried to grab for her leg but missed. Dammit. Shaking his head to clear his vision, he got to his feet, the sudden altitude bringing everything thankfully into sharp relief again.

“Abby. Stop!” He tried again to make her actually look at him. She peered up at him for a second from the floor. She’d reached the damned frying pan.

“Nope,” was all she said before she spun her legs around so her feet were pointing away from him and sprang up. As she did, she swung the pan upward with such force that it would certainly have broken his jaw if he hadn’t bent away from the swing.

Jesus, there was no way she was an orphanage worker. As far as he knew, Aide Internationale didn’t have a combat unit.

“What’s the matter with you? Fucking stop, will you?” he said again.

Her eyes darted around in an exercise he knew well. She was looking for another weapon. No way.

He grabbed her in a bear hug from behind, pinning her arms to her sides. “Okay, now you’re listening—” he began.

She dipped her head and reverse head butted him. Pain spread through his face. He’d pulled his head away enough that it hadn’t broken his nose, but now he was fucking pissed off.

He still had her in his grip, so he pushed her away, over the back of her sofa. She expelled air as she bounced over the cushions onto the floor, hitting her shoulder on her coffee table.

“Can you just stop now? I don’t want to hurt you,” he said, rubbing the side of his face. Jesus, he wasn’t sure her father was paying him enough.

“Well that makes one of us,” she said, running to the kitchen.

Oh shit.
She was going to eggbeater him to death. Or knife him. Neither was that appealing. Seriously, if she emerged with a knife, that was it. Fucking boss’s daughter or fucking not.

No sense in following her into the room that was so small there was a chance he could actually stumble onto a knife accidentally.

She came out wielding a knife, of course. Typical. “Well come on, then, get it over with. Stop fucking dancing around like you think I might just leave. I’m not leaving.” Why, though, he didn’t know. He could just leave and resume following her from afar. And to think, he’d only come up to make sure she was okay. He sighed. “Come on. Give it your best shot, little girl.”

As he suspected, his last words galvanized her. Anger flashed across her face.

Satisfaction came over him. Anger made people sloppy. He grinned and tilted his head, mocking her.

She leapt at him, knife poised to slash him. He shifted balance at the last moment, using his hands to push her away. She stumbled into the wall behind him but regrouped fast enough to slash at his arm. He looked down in disbelief and concern. She really did want to hurt him. And if he let her get close enough, he was going to have to put her down.

He stepped away from her. “Okay. You’ve made your intentions perfectly clear. You think you want to hurt me, and if I stand perfectly still and don’t defend myself, you probably can. But, and I can’t emphasize this enough, if you come at me again, I will hurt you. I don’t want to hurt you, but I don’t want you to kill me for some half-baked, ill-thought-out reason. Do you understand me?”

She approached him again, moving the knife across her body, like a pro, waiting for the ideal place to strike. She took it.

Mal stepped away from it and punched her knife-carrying arm hard enough to make her fingers lose sensation. It worked. Her face fell as her arm dropped uselessly to her side, the knife clattering to the tile floor. “I’m sorry about that, but you need to just calm the fuck down for a minute.”

He did nothing other than blink, his guard down for a second, before she suddenly had another knife in her other hand. She pushed him against the wall and held the knife to his throat. What the fuck just happened?

He wasn’t scared. He could still kill her with his bare hands if he wanted to. This was nothing more than a slightly rough dance to him, but he begrudgingly admitted that she had some skills too. And there was a much higher possibility that it was she who had hurt and maybe killed the two men outside.

Her eyes blazed not three inches from his. If he hadn’t been a little curious about who Baston’s daughter was—indeed, if she even was Baston’s daughter—he would have been turned on by the fury she showed. By her physicality and her strength.

She pressed the knife to his throat, not easing up the pressure even when he felt the warm trickle of blood down his neck. Shit. She was sexy, and violent.

He leaned toward her mouth, suddenly wanting to kiss her more than he wanted the knife away from his jugular. The knife held constant, but he didn’t. Even though she didn’t let up pressure for one second, in that second he valued the kiss more than the knife.

She startled when his lips touched hers, jerking away, and then back to his. He was kissing a woman who was holding a knife to his throat. Fuck, it was sexy.

She was lost for a second. And in that second she forgot she was holding a knife. Forgot that she was slicing into the neck of the man she’d had sex with the previous night. Forgot that he was an unknown player in the fight she’d just had with two guys she’d never seen before.

His mouth pressed against hers, sending a jolt of awareness through her. The fight that had left her bruised and a little bloody had injected a mother lode of adrenaline rushing her veins like a burst dam. Even though she’d just beaten two men, she’d never felt more like a woman. A powerful woman.

Kissing a jerk who…Yeah, who what?

She jerked away from him, slamming his head back into the wall with her palm on his forehead.

“Who the fuck are you?” she said in a low voice. Last thing she needed was her neighbors poking their heads into her apartment.

“Malone Garrett,” he replied through his teeth.

“How do you know where I live? How do you know the men outside?” As she asked the questions, she realized that his car trouble had been a setup. He’d known she’d pick him up. She hated that he’d predicted her actions. And then had sex with her.

She ignored the voice in her head that told her it was she who had instigated their rooftop liaison. Had he predicted that too?

Her knife pressed harder against his throat. “You have five seconds before I slice.”

He waited until she’d mentally reached five before opening his mouth. “I live across the road. I saw you come home, from my window.” He shrugged. “I was going to come and ask you out again, but…”

“Nope. Not even close.” Suddenly she had total courage of her convictions. She’d just annihilated two men who had threatened her, and she knew she was right about him.

“You’ve been following me. You set yourself up at the side of the road so I’d pick you up, right?”

“No. My car had broken down. I—”

“What was wrong with it?” she asked.

He hesitated. A long, silent second.

Just as she thought. “Exactly. Who are you, and why are you following me? I’m not afraid to kill you. I’m not afraid of anything.” Except maybe the Russians. And Brigda a little.

Mal rolled his eyes and calmly found her thumb with his hand and bent it back until it popped. The knife dropped to the ground again.

“Shit. You bastard.” She backed away from him, holding her hand in pain. Goddamn him. He took a step toward her and with no other choice, she popped her thumb back in its socket. She nearly threw up, but in the haze of pain, she managed to put the sofa between them.

He didn’t make a move on her, just grabbed some tissues from her flowery Kleenex box holder and held them to his neck. They instantly flashed red with the blood flowing from his wound.

She turned away from him for a split second, reaching for the weapon under the armchair seat cushion. When she turned back with the gun pointed at his head, she was startled to see his cell phone at his ear.

“Yup. Put me through to Baston, please.”

What?

He raised his eyebrows at her and smiled an innocent smile.

“No, n-no, wait…,” she stuttered, trying to get her head around the fact that this obtuse British man knew her father.

“What?” He held his finger up at her for a second. “Yup. I’ll hold.” He listened for a second and then pulled the phone an inch from his ear. “I’m guessing you have about three more bars of ‘Greensleeves’ to put that gun the fuck down and stop rampaging, or I’ll tell your father that you have me at gunpoint and that you are quite clearly not an Aide Internationale worker.”

Shit. He couldn’t know. No one could know. She had a vision of her ordered life and structured relationships with her family crumbling under this information.

She held the gun and her other hand up. “Okay, okay. Hang up.”

“Put the gun down first,” he said, jamming the phone back to his ear.

“Okay. It’s down.” She threw it onto the sofa.

He picked it up and checked the safety, then pulled the magazine out, pushing the top round down to check it. It was full. She’d never fired it. Then he put the phone back in his pocket without hanging up. Shit. She’d been fooled by the oldest trick in the book.

“You weren’t calling my father?” she asked, sinking to the now weaponless sofa.

“Nope. I don’t like to report in until I have a full picture. So let’s talk and you can tell me what the fuck you’re doing here, and with luck, this whole little family tale will have me back home before the week’s out.” He sat on the sofa arm and gestured at her with the gun. “Come on, sweetheart. Spill your guts.”

God, she hated him. He looked so cocky, so sure of himself. So unconcerned. Well, fuck that. “I’m not telling you anything until you tell me what you’re doing here.” She suspected that her father had sent him to watch her. Anger pulsed in her like an infection. She was too old to be treated like a child.

“I think you know what I’m doing here. I have the shittiest job in the world. I’ve spent the best part of this year in war zones. Killing bad people, rescuing good. Sometimes getting good guys killed. Protecting people, sometimes protecting bad people. And for the last couple of weeks I’ve had the most boring job in the world: watching a woman with the dullest life, who obviously doesn’t need my protection. And let me tell you this. It was worth my sliced and diced neck just to get off this fucking job. I’m going to tell your father that you don’t need my help, and I will be out of here.” He cocked his head and looked out the window. “Somewhere warm. Somewhere I can get drinks without vodka in them. Somewhere the women are in bikinis, not full-body sheepskin.” He looked at her coat on its hook. “It’s not an attractive look, you know.”

So he was a dick as well. Not the smooth, suave, handsome man she’d met the night before. That had been an act. She made a face. She’d had sex with him.

“Yeah, I know. I’ve been pulling that face when I think about last night too,” he said, as if he were discussing the weather. He shrugged. “For me it’s an occupational hazard. Not sure what it was for you, though.” He grinned.

“Pretty horrible. Desperation. It was you or Hans, and he couldn’t leave the restaurant until much later. I wanted to get to bed early. I could tell you’d be quick.” She gave him a fake sympathetic smile and cocked her head. “You know they have drugs for that kind of…problem now, don’t you?”

His eyes narrowed. Strike.

“Tell me who you are, and what you’re doing here,” he said.

She tucked her legs under her as if she were having a chat with a girlfriend. “You go first.”

“I’m the one with the phone and the gun. And the temper. You go first.”

She was strictly not allowed to tell anyone she was a CIA field operative. Not her family, and certainly not random people whom she happened to have sex with. Or people who hold her at gunpoint. “I’ve got nothing to tell you.”

In the silence that fell between them, a tone sounded. A beep. A loud and insistent bleeping. For a second she had no idea what it was. Was it something he had on him? No, not judging by his frown. Her eyes traced the room and alighted on the shopping and her handbag still on the floor. Her phone never bleeped like that.

Oh. Holy motherfucking shit. She knew exactly what it was. Her eyes met his, which she knew did not reflect the horror in hers. She was going to have to come clean.

Emergency measures.

And she needed him. Maybe.

S
he was a bitch as well as a complete waste of time. How could Baston—your everyday good guy—give him this job? The worst job Mal had been assigned since he started at Barracks Security. And that included being shot at, being interrogated by a warlord in Afghanistan, and suffering through fellow operatives inexplicably falling in love. He’d rather be back in the cave in Taliban-controlled Helmand Province than watch good guys make fools of themselves again. Over women. Jesus.

And if she didn’t turn that fucking beeping off, he would stamp on every piece of electronics in the house. “Whatever that is, turn it off before I shoot it.”

Her superior expression had vanished, leaving a wan face with alarmed eyes. He sighed. “Jesus, tell me it’s not a bomb.”

She swallowed and nodded to her bag. “Worse.”

What could be worse than a bomb?
“Start talking, sweetheart.”

She took a deep breath and looked as if she was about to say everything. Instead she lunged for her bag. He stood up and leveled his gun at her again, but she ignored him.

She straightened with a black remote control thing. “Shit.”

“What is that?” he asked, determined not to drop his aim even though he realized that he wasn’t going to shoot his boss’s daughter under any circumstances. You know, unless she
really
pissed him off.

“World War Three. Maybe.” She shrugged, but fear flickered across her face and took up residence in her eyes.

He lowered the gun. “I can’t help you if you don’t tell me.”

“What are you going to tell my father?” she hedged.

His patience evaporated. “Whatever I damn well please, you psycho. That you’re a trained killer, that you disabled two muggers downstairs, that you sliced my neck open. Hell, maybe I’ll just call the police and let them have you.”

“The police?” She looked at her watch. “There’s no evidence left now. They’ll probably arrest
you
.” Her triumphant smirk made him want to kill her, or put his fist through something. Anything.

She was right. Randall’s people would have worked their magic by now.

“Okay, so Daddy it is.” He tucked his gun into his waistband and reached for his phone.

“You probably don’t want to do that. I’d get you fired in a heartbeat,” she said, almost absentmindedly looking at the amber flashing light on the remote control. The beeping had thankfully stopped.

“Oh yeah? And how are you going to do that?”

She cast her eyes to the ground for a few seconds. When she looked at him, tears were running down her face. He made a step toward her. What just happened? But she stretched her thumb and pinky finger out to make a finger phone, held it to her ear, and said, “Daddy…that man?” she sobbed realistically. “That man you sent? He…he seduced me and then…and then he left me”—more sobs—“saying that he’d only screwed me to screw you…” She cocked her head, tears drying instantly, and slammed her imaginary phone down. “Get it?”

Wow. “Dude. What’s the matter with you?” he said. “Your daddy issues are out of control. Do you want to talk about it? I understand they have therapy for things like that now.” He couldn’t resist getting her back for her earlier implication about his endurance.

“Just get out.”

He laughed. “No fucking way, sweetheart. I don’t know who you are, or what you’re doing here, but neither of us is getting out of this building tonight.” He glanced through the window at the whiteout in the street. “You’re just going to have to tell me what’s going on or suffer the consequences.” He cracked his knuckles, even though he had no idea what the consequences would be. He dropped his voice into what he hoped was a soothing tone. “Just tell me what’s going on, and I’ll see if I can help.” He shrugged and sat on the sofa, patting the spot next to him. Ah. A condescending note too far, obviously, when she sat on the armchair under which her gun had been stashed.

He knuckles were white around the remote control she was holding.

“Let’s start with that,” he said, nodding toward her hands. “What is it?”

She sighed. “It’s a ground sensor.”

He waited for more information; none seemed to be coming. He sighed and leaned back on the sofa, ready for a long haul of questions.

“What does it sense? Water? Radiation? Earthquakes?” he asked calmly.

“Movement,” she said, still perched at the edge of the chair.

He hoped it wasn’t alerting her to the fact that he’d put a movement sensor under the carpet in front of her door. That couldn’t be it.

“Where is it alerting you to movement?”

She raised an eyebrow and held up the remote. “Here?”

“Don’t be such a bloody child. If you want my help—”

“When did I ever say I needed or wanted your help? You’re nothing but a momentary distraction. Something I have to deal with before I can get to work. I don’t even know what you’re doing here, and frankly I don’t care.”

And then everything went dark.

Awesome. Just fucking awesome. She took a deep, steadying breath. “You really think the roads are impassable now?” she asked, trying to eke out a plan from her tired brain.

His voice was calm. “We could get out on foot but not in a vehicle. Unless you have a snow machine in your bedroom.”

“I knew there was something I forgot to order…,” she said weakly.

He did her the honor of not forcing a laugh at her lame joke.

The darkness pervaded throughout the room. With no light outside, not by the moon nor streetlights, her eyes could only barely make out his silhouette across the room from her. He hadn’t moved, still sitting motionless on the arm of the sofa. She had to tell him what she was doing there.

She’d been at the CIA for nearly ten years, recruited before she’d completed her first semester at college. She’d told no one. She just hadn’t felt close enough to her older brothers, nor to her father. Although he was another problem entirely.

But in all her years, the one thing that had been beaten into her brain day after day, month after month, was service before self. She might be worried about losing her job for telling him what she was doing there, but if she didn’t, she would certainly not complete her mission.

Mission before everything.

“I don’t work for Aide Internationale,” she said.

“No fucking kidding,” he said, getting up off the arm and resettling on the sofa. Obviously he had the idea that this was going to be a long story. But it wasn’t.

“Well, I do actually work for Aide Internationale. They pay me, but I’m CIA. I’m here to keep watch on the border. The Russian analysts at Langley think that all the Russian posturing at the G20 meetings was a distraction for them invading Ukraine.”

He was silent for a few beats. “I was there. For the G20 shenanigans.”

She didn’t really want to think about that. “Anyway, this sensor was placed by my predecessor. These ones are placed ten klicks inside the border on the Russian side.”

“He had balls of steel on him to do that,” Malone said.

“Yes,
she
did.” Abby couldn’t help smiling as she said it. She had some big shoes to fill.

“So what makes you think a farm tractor didn’t trigger it? Or a malfunction?” he asked in the darkness.

“Who uses a tractor in the middle of the night in a snowstorm?” As she said it, she realized that it was possible. A stranded animal in a snowstorm? A tractor might be the only way to get to it.

“How many sensors do you have?” he asked.

“I can’t tell you that,” she said. There were thirty along the border ten kilometers inside the Russian border and another ten or so in the acres behind the orphanage. The theory being that they wouldn’t want to cross the border on roads where they would be seen, filmed on some kid’s cell phone, and posted on YouTube, with CNN reporters on the ground before they’d stopped for a bathroom break. And with NATO bombs before lunch. The common theory was that they’d use the farmlands to enter the northeastern part of Ukraine. They already had the Crimea. The Russian president wanted the rest. And God only knew where he would stop.

“How will you know the difference between those ‘pro-Russian fighters’ and the real Russian army?”

She hated that he knew all the right questions to ask. “You’re assuming that the ‘pro-Russian fighters’ aren’t the Russian army, and I think they are. I just have to be there to prove it. An insignia, a unit with military-issue weapons, uniforms, recognizable military vehicles that we can compare with those bought by the Russian government. That’s what I’m here for. If I can show that they are the Russian army, then the might of the NATO forces will rain down on them before they get to any densely inhabited areas.” She wanted to be there to see that so badly.

He was silent, barely moving at all. Maybe the dark had made it easier to talk, to basically spill all the secrets she’d held in for so long. She sighed. Maybe he wasn’t such a dick after all.

As soon as the thought formed in her brain, he jumped up. “Excellent. Well, it seems like you’ve got it all under control, and that means I can tell your father you don’t need any further protection and I can get reassigned. Somewhere less dangerous than your apartment. Like Kabul.”

She sprang up too. “No. You can’t tell my father. So you’re stuck here. Or I’ll have you arrested.”

“What are you talking about? Of course you can tell your father.” He checked the safety on the gun. “I’m going to keep this, by the way. It’s the penance you pay for pointing it at me.”

“Wait.” She put herself between him and the door. “My father does jobs for foreign governments, private corporations based who-knows-where. So I can’t tell him without losing my clearance and my job. If you tell him, you’ll be arrested. And fired.” She got as far as pulling a sad face and bringing her fingers up to her face again, mimicking a phone, before he grabbed her hand.

“Okay, enough.” He dragged his hand through his hair and sighed. “Jesus. How did this happen? Suddenly watching you from across the street feels like a dream.
Fuck
.”

“You were watching me? All the time?” she asked, a cold finger of creepiness poking her in the place were butterflies usually lived.

“Enough to know you can set soup on fire and inexplicably spill it down your…” He nodded to her breasts. “Not sure how you managed that.”

“I was startled by a mouse in the kitchen. A big mouse. Anyone would have jumped.” She put her fists on her hips.

“You have mice in here?”

She shrugged. “Just one. Boris.” As the words formed, she realized how ridiculous it made her sound.

“You named the mouse?”

“Jesus. Russians could be encroaching on the Ukrainian border, World War freaking Three could start tomorrow, and you’re making fun of me? Fine. I decided that instead of being freaked out by it, I’d make him a pet. That way it wasn’t so awful thinking he was around. Besides, I’m beginning to realize that he’s better company than you are.”

He ignored the last part. “Why didn’t you just shoot it?”

“I was saving all my rounds for you.” God, he was annoying. She wondered if he was one of those guys who figured everything a woman did was “the wrong way” or just wrong. She wished they could go back to fighting. That felt more real and honest than this verbal smackdown.

“Well to be fair, who knows what you might have ended up shooting.” He shrugged and went back to the window, peering out into the thick snowfall.

She fisted her hands, wanting to just punch him. A lot. She wished she had a punching bag with her. “Is it possible that you could stop being a dick for a moment?”

His eyes remained on the street. “Doubtful. That’s my default.”

“How is it possible that you have friends?” she said, needing a drink.

“I try not to. Too complicated,” he murmured.

She got some shot glasses and grabbed her bottle of contraband Grey Goose. She shoved the glass at him, making him turn around. “You know, you’d have to be fairly simpleminded to think that having friends was complicated. What else do you find complicated? Uno? Tic-tac-toe?”

“I don’t know what either of those things are,” he said, taking the shot glass. “You don’t have anything other than vodka?”

“Sure. Maybe Malibu would be more your thing?” she said, pouring a double shot for herself.

Malone gave her a pissed stare and held his glass out to be filled. She did.

Abby wasn’t sure why she kept sniping at him, except it was fun and exercised a part of her brain that had been dormant for six months. It was difficult to banter with people when you didn’t speak their language fluently.

But she was also relieved he hadn’t left. She didn’t need his help, but she wanted it. He was obviously skilled; otherwise her father wouldn’t have employed him or put him within a mile of his daughter.

She had no satellite communications and no secure way of contacting anyone without the call being tracked and traced. She’d already risked too much by calling Randall from her burner phone, which she’d then destroyed and thrown into the Dumpster next to the guys who had attacked her. Now she had no means of communicating with anyone until the power came back on. She felt impotent. Damn the snow. Damn those guys. She sat on the sofa, putting the vodka bottle on the coffee table.

“Who were they?” Malone asked, sitting beside her, yet a decent distance away. He tipped more vodka into his glass and leaned back.

“Who?”

“They men who attacked you.”

“Oh, them. I don’t know. I’ve never seen them before. Probably muggers.” She was proud that she’d neutralized them so easily. “They definitely weren’t professionals. More like opportunists. Snow, no one on the streets, and then they happen across a lone woman with her hands full and her purse easily accessible.” She shrugged and took another sip from her glass.

“Then how do you know Randall?” he asked.

She cocked her head. “Who?” She was just buying time here, and frankly she wasn’t sure why. He already knew too much to let him walk off.

He looked meaningfully at her but said nothing.

Oh hell. “My analyst gave me his contact number in case of emergencies. I didn’t want them to regain consciousness and then come find me. I couldn’t call the police because how would I explain? That I took karate as a kid?” She downed the rest of the vodka and leaned forward to pour more, holding it for him to offer his glass. “So are you going to stick around for a bit? Maybe help stop the next all-out ground war?”