“Thanks,” she said and slid in. “You’re riding shotgun.”
He had to clench his jaw to keep it shut. He wanted to drive. Needed to drive. But it was her car, her rules. Jack thought briefly about taking his car but it would stand out in Blake’s neighborhood.
“Of course,” he murmured, walking over to the passenger side, sitting down and pushing the seat back as far as it would go. Her car wasn’t made for tall people. He placed his bag in the footwell behind Summer, where he could reach it fast.
“How long do you think it will take to get to Casterly Blake?” The Delvaux kids’ term for the Glades, Blake’s over the top mansion, given to it the summer everyone read A Game of Thrones. Blake would have made a great Lannister. He’d been all about money and power.
“About an hour. What?” This with a sidelong glance at him.
He couldn’t hide the wince. It would have taken him maybe half an hour. “Nothing.”
“Don’t you ‘nothing’ me, Mr. Secret Agent man. I’m not about to get pulled over for speeding. Blake is dead. Nothing is going to change that. Speeding will get us nowhere.”
Except it would get them to Casterly Blake fast. Jack hated slow driving. He was all about speed. And there was something tingling in his system, some kind of sixth sense that something was happening and he needed to move fast.
Or it could be the woman at the steering wheel, carefully taking corners, beautiful face very serious. Maybe it was a different kind of tingle he was feeling. Not that operational tingle but one farther down.
Long time since he’d felt that tingle.
Think of something else.
“So,” he said. “Area 8.”
“Yep.” She took a neat turn, an excellent driver. He relaxed a little. He didn’t trust too many people behind the wheel. But she clearly knew what she was doing.
He wanted to know more about her. The extraordinarily pretty, nerdy girl had grown into a gorgeous and fascinating woman who wasn’t giving him jack shit about herself.
“Where’d you get the name? Area 8? Is that like Area 51?”
That coaxed a faint smile out of her. “Nope, not at all. Area 8 is a part of the brain discovered by a scientist called Korbinian Brodmann. It processes uncertainty and, interestingly, it processes hope, or rather expectation in conjunction with uncertainty. We live in an uncertain world that holds out some hope.”
“Hence, Area 8.”
“Yep.”
“And the blog? You didn’t study journalism.” He frowned. “Or did you?” He hadn’t been too concerned with the majors of the women he bedded in those days.
She shot him an ironic glance, perfectly aware of what he paid attention to in college. “I studied political science. My parents dragged me to some very unsavory parts of the world. I saw exactly what chaos and disorder could do. It wrecked lives, stunted lives. I wanted to figure out what made some societies stable and prosperous and what made some societies brutal and volatile. The ruling class is the obvious answer but there’s more there. A lot of it has to do with what people expect from their society and that’s what I wanted to dedicate my life to. I expect a lot and say so.”
“You must get disappointed a lot, too.” The unexpectedly bitter response was impossible to repress. Jack hadn’t had too many kumbayah moments lately. More or less everyone he knew was venal and power hungry and the few who weren’t had the bad habit of falling dead.
Her hands tightened on the wheel. “I think I had lower expectations than you, Jack.”
That shut him up. Because, yeah, she’d had a lot of crap in her life at a very young age. Her parents had both come from rich families but they were druggies and had died young, but not before dragging Summer all over. She’d had no stability and God knows what she’d seen when she was a kid.
Jack, on the other hand, had grown up in a great family. Stable and loving. He’d been in his twenties before he’d had anything bad happen to him. And it hadn’t even happened to him. They’d found the body of an Iraqi informer he’d recruited floating in the Tigris River, sans a lot of body parts. Body parts that had been cut out of him while still alive.
He’d seen a lot of bad shit in his NCS years, really bad shit. But he’d had a bedrock of love and stability in his early life that had acted as a shield. Summer hadn’t had that at all.
So Summer was right to call him on his bullshit. “I read Area 8 all the time,” he said quietly. “It’s great. Looks like you’ve got a wide range of correspondents.”
“And informants,” she answered. “Lot of wrongdoing going on. I didn’t mean for Area 8 to be a whistleblowing site. I wanted to pursue deep policy issues in an accessible fashion. I wanted to talk about the unsung heroes who work hard on our behalf. I wanted to be a sounding board for new ideas that would make our lives better. But I ended up being swamped by reports of politicians out of control and financial types openly stealing and smiling while they do it.” She shook her head. “That wasn’t what I wanted but it’s what I got.”
Jack was burningly and inappropriately curious about her personal life. Was she married? She wasn’t wearing a ring but then she wasn’t wearing any jewelry at all. So maybe she was allergic to jewelry but there was a guy handy to cook her soup and rub her feet.
Fucker. Jack hated him already. Summer was a catch for any man. She was gorgeous and smart and kind and she’d been really funny when they were going out, though they hadn’t had a chance to talk about funny things this evening, what with trying to smoke out a traitor and murderer.
Of course, there was the eight hundred pound gorilla in the room—the way he’d treated her. He’d fucked her blind for a week and then...well, and then he moved on. He remembered clearly showing up at her dorm room door and seeing her delighted face and then—
Jack pinched the bridge of his nose.
—then her devastated face as she realized he was there to take her dorm roommate out. Because Summer had been pretty and fun but her roommate was hot too and—why not?
Jack could barely remember how he’d thought in those days, those college days before everything changed. It was like childhood memories—vague and tenuous. And just like a child he’d reached out for what he wanted, the newest shiny thing, without any thought to the consequences. He had a vague memory of Summer’s roommate. She’d turned out to be a bitch, but by the time he realized that, he’d gone on to another girl on Summer’s floor.
What a slut he’d been.
He might even have slowly made his way back to Summer—because she’d definitely been the very best—but then life had intervened, the CIA had come calling and his previous life was over.
And it was probably a good thing that he’d had so much sex in college because his CIA days hadn’t exactly been drenched in it. Sex had been hard to find and to arrange and more or less every available female around had been off-limits. Either because she was a colleague, or a potential enemy or a potential target for recruitment or that pretty chick in the bar needed to be vetted before he could ask her out...
And he’d been undercover which meant lying all the time. It’s one thing to lie for your country to a potential enemy. It’s quite another to lie to someone who might be a perfectly nice woman. But who might also be a secret agent for a foreign intelligence service.
But in the days before he dedicated his head and heart and—with hindsight—his dick to his country, he had slept around on an industrial level.
And probably broken Summer’s heart.
Fuck.
He sneaked another look at her, in profile.
Jesus she was beautiful. Was she so beautiful because he hadn’t been near a woman in six months? Was it because he was starved for female company? Hell, he was starved for any kind of company. Except for the few days in Portland, reunited with Isabel and her fiancé and the cool group of f
riends they had, he’d been utterly alone for six months.
So maybe a bit of it was that but...nah. Summer really was beautiful, even more so than when she’d been eighteen. She had those bones that would still be beautiful at eighty. His mom had had looks like that and he knew his father had found her still beautiful at fifty.
His father, his mother, his brothers...God how he missed them.
Jack swiveled his head to look out the passenger side window so Summer couldn’t see his thoughts on his face. She’d always been preternaturally sensitive. Maybe because of the way she’d been brought up, always a foreigner, unprotected by her parents. The eternal outsider, observing.
He, on the other hand, had had the best family in the world and he’d barely seen them during his time in the Clandestine Service. Every time he saw the twins it seemed they’d grown a foot. He hadn’t been a good brother. He’d skipped the last Christmas home because he’d been debriefing a CI and two years ago he’d stayed with the family only on Christmas Eve and Christmas day. Then he’d spent two days with Hugh in his office, and then he’d flown back to Singapore. The twins had been pleasant, but distant, involved in their own lives, uninterested in his because he had to make his life sound as bland and boring as possible. Jack had been more like an uncle, not a brother.
And for what? Why had he sacrificed all that time with his family? He was protecting them, yes, but he’d been lost to them, too. On one brief trip home he found out that his mother had had a breast cancer scare and no one had told him. Teddy broke his arm when he was ten and Jack only found out when he saw his little brother in a cast walking by when he was Skyping his Dad. No one had thought to tell the brother who was far away that his little brother had broken his arm.
And these past six months he had been in complete isolation. So being in a car with another person was nice. Being in a car with a woman was nicer still. Being in a car with Summer was...great. Even if she didn’t trust him, even if she was still pissed at him.
He studied her profile, strong and clean. She drove well, paying attention to the road like good little girls should. She didn’t even glance his way. Jack himself drove very well, too, only really fast and he was able to multitask. He could have driven at twice the speed and still kept an eye on her.
He drank her in, in greedy little gulps that she wouldn’t notice. Each time he looked at her he added to his image of her. The color and texture of her skin, the glossy dark red of her hair, that long, pale neck, the graceful fingers on the wheel...
“You can stop staring at any time.” Summer was looking straight ahead.
Jesus. Fifteen years a secret agent and he couldn’t surreptitiously study a woman anymore. Out of the habit of being with people. “Busted. It’s been a long time.”
“Yes,” she said softly without looking at him. “It has.”
“You’ve changed a lot.”
She didn’t answer.
“For the better,” he said just in case she thought he was saying she’d aged. Fuck, he’d entirely lost his touch with women. Could a guy fall out of practice dealing with women? Who knew? He thought he’d been born with that talent but apparently not, it had withered right alongside his social life.
“You’ve changed a lot, too,” she said. “Not for the better.”
He didn’t wince. It was true. He looked old and battered and beaten. It was hard to remember what he’d looked like that golden time fifteen years ago. It felt like a lifetime ago. It was a lifetime ago.
A pretty bell-like ring came from his feet.
“That’s my message tone. Can you read the message for me? The cell’s in the outside pocket.”
“Sure.” Jack pulled out her cell and checked the last message. “You’ve got a bunch of unopened messages.”
“I know. I also know what they are. Who is the last one from?”
It was from someone called Zac. Jack thumbed the screen.
Where the fuck R U? We need to go to bed. Zac
“What’s it say?” she asked.
Jack pondered. “Zac wants to know where the fuck you are because you two need to go to bed.” He glanced over at her, hating this Zac, whoever he was. Where did he get off thinking he could talk to Summer like that? Soon as he saw this Zac he was going to punch him. Nobody treated Summer like that. “He said the f bomb to you. Do you want me to go punch him in the face?”
“You’ve said the f word to me, too, and I didn’t send anyone to punch you in the face.”
True. He had. Jack’s jaws clenched. “What’s this about going to bed?”
This time Summer did look at him, for so long he was about to tell her to pay attention to the road when she finally looked away. “You lost the right to ask me anything about my private life a long time ago. But I’ll give you this one for free. Zac’s one of my editors. We refresh our articles every four hours. He has a geeky love of old timey newspaper talk. Newspapers used to be put to ‘bed,’ that is sent to print. So he’s saying we need to renew about a quarter of our articles and he wants to know if I’m going to be able to oversee that. But I am hunting down info on Hector Blake with you.”
“You have editors?” Jack had only the vaguest notion of how a blog was run and it didn’t include editors. He imagined Summer keying in articles during the night.
Summer sighed. “Area 8 publishes roughly a million words a year, Jack. Of course I have editors. I have two of them, on staff. And I have twenty freelance reporters, four IT guys and over two hundred contributors on a regular basis.”
Wow. “Okay.” Jack scratched at his stubble. He’d done as much damage as he could in one car ride. “That put me in my place. Sorry.”
“Apology accepted,” she said crisply. “And don’t ever—whoa.”
Jack’s head whipped to look forward. Whoa was right. Red glow up ahead, painting the night sky. Suddenly, a warbling fire alarm started up, far away, coming closer. Then a second one.
“I have a bad feeling about this,” Jack muttered.
“They wouldn’t dare,” Summer said, shooting him a glance. “Would they?”
“They don’t hesitate to kill. Burning down a house would be nothing to them. They probably held off until after the service, so people wouldn’t connect the two. And they’ll make it look like natural causes.”
They were coming closer to the fire. A fire truck, doing seventy, raced past. They were coming up on the corner that would feed into Blake’s street, a wide avenue lined with ancient elm trees and stately homes. Not McMansions. The real kind, at least two generations old.
“Stop the car!” Jack said and Summer immediately braked and pulled to the side. Jack reached behind him and homelessed up, not bothering with the pissed on jacket. The smell of smoke would cover it up anyway.
Summer was undoing her seat belt.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Jack asked.
Her fingers froze. “Ah, coming with you. You’re clearly going to the scene of the crime, because we both know that’s Blake’s house that’s burning.”
Jack’s mind raced. He did not want Summer with him. Not in any capacity. It was a fire for fuck’s sake. Set by really bad guys—either traitorous Americans or foreign terrorists. It was going to be dark and smoky and confused and he didn’t think he could protect her while looking for clues. Besides which—he didn’t want her near the place. Period.
However, he couldn’t say that.
He was an operator, she wasn’t. All she’d think of was gathering info, not understanding the kind of people who were involved. There was no way she was walking into that. Nope.
The thing was, though, that Summer was smart and capable and powerful in her own right. He couldn’t treat her like a dog. Tell her “stay” and hope she’d stay. She wouldn’t. So he had to wrap this all up in a reasonable, logical sequence of facts, all
this while sweaty at the thought of Summer getting hurt.
Years of thinking on his feet undercover saved him. He talked fast, convincingly, as he suited up. He pulled on the wig, tugged it into place, hating the feeling of the rough under net against his skull.
“I’m going out to do a recon,” he said as he then fitted the itchy smelly beard. “They won’t still be there, they’ll have gone and there won’t be much to see, so I’ll be quick. I just want to get a feel for the blaze, see if maybe the fire trucks manage to salvage something. They’ll have killed cameras, but people might be out with their cells on and recording and you’re a very well-known face around town, so stay here. I’ll be right back.” He handed her his cell. “My FBI contact, Nick Mancino, might call, so I also need you to be here to answer, I might not hear him over the sirens.”
He grabbed a small backpack from his duffel and slid out of the car before she could even respond.
Most of what he’d said was bullshit. It was entirely possible that whoever had set the fire was still there to make sure enough of the house burned down. That was the point of him going there—he was going to see if he could catch someone, force intel out of them. Break their necks if he had to, certainly a few kneecaps and fingers, he didn’t care. This was war.
It was war but it should be fought by soldiers, not civilians caught in the crosshairs. He’d already lost most of his family to these fuckheads, he wasn’t going to lose Summer.
Not going to happen.
He moved silently, keeping to the shadows. He knew how to move without attracting attention and it was dark and there was a fire, so people’s attention would be riveted on the flames anyway.
He knew the neighborhood fairly well. His family had often dined at The Glades. He hadn’t been here in fifteen years, true, but it wasn’t the kind of neighborhood that changed much. It was the kind of neighborhood where families managed their affairs in such a way as to hand down estates intact, generation after generation.