Breach Of Trust

Meghan pulled again, growling low. Whether she was helping to sell his story or truly trying to escape, he couldn’t take the chance and ease up. If she ran while Isaac was present, the man would shoot her before she made cover in the wood line. Isaac wasn’t a man with a whole lot of patience. Short, stocky and prematurely balding, he covered his perceived inadequacies in front of his small band of ruffians with a lot of bravado and a notoriously hot temper.

Isaac’s volatile personality was of the dozen reasons Tate didn’t look forward to the consequences of what he was about to do. On a normal day, a man like Isaac wouldn’t even make him blink. But when Tate had to keep cover and couldn’t defend himself? Things could get ugly. Fast.

Isaac hesitated, assessing the situation. He scratched the back of his head, clearly unwilling to let his prey out of his sight.

Come on. Go. Tate’s muscles tightened. He hadn’t been a member of Isaac’s ring long enough to gain the man’s full trust, and he was severely testing a fragile thread right now.

The pause felt like an eternity, but Isaac turned and tried the door.

Locked.

He tossed a disgusted smirk in Tate’s direction and took off at a slow jog around the corner of the building.

Tate nearly sagged in relief. Turning fully toward Meghan, he kept a firm hold on her wrist. After reaching under his T-shirt at his waist, he pulled his clipped holster free, holding the pistol out to her grip-first. “Take this.” He’d count it a blessing if she didn’t shoot him with his own weapon.

She stared at him in wide-eyed shock, an expression he’d never seen in all the years they’d worked side by side. Seeing him living and breathing had to make her question everything she thought she knew about reality.

He laid the holstered pistol on her palm. “Stay with me, McGuire. Just get through the next few hours and I’ll give you answers.” The ones the government hadn’t classified, anyway.

She swallowed hard, the lines around her mouth deepening. At least she was losing the panicked-deer look; her expression morphed into the concentrated stare of a warrior. This was the Meghan McGuire he knew. He’d smile if the situation weren’t so desperate. And if she wasn’t so uncharacteristically silent.

She was listening. And she hadn’t started running. Yet.

Tate fought the crazy urge to pull her into a hug before he let her go. “You have keys to the building?”

“I do.”

“Take my gun. Go inside through the fire door. Isaac will assume you’re locked out and you ran for the woods. Get in your car and get out of here. Go as far as you can. Don’t go near your apartment because there’s two more guys waiting there for you. Get out of town and don’t call the police. We can’t blow this operation wide-open yet.” This mission was too important. If their target figured out they were onto him, he’d pack his toys and vanish by nightfall. Tate was too close to shutting the door on an op they’d been running for more than two years, an op that had left several broken lives and untimely deaths behind it.

He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and slipped it into hers. “Don’t answer it, no matter what. I don’t care what number comes across. I don’t care what text messages you see. Do not answer. But don’t lose it and don’t turn it off. I’ll find you.”

“Stop talking to me as though I’ve never done this before.” The words were coated with sass thick enough to choke them both.

Ah. There was the blowback he’d expected. He grinned in spite of himself. “Then stop looking at me as though you’ve never done this before.”

She drew her eyebrows together, pulling her keys from her pocket and stepping around him, prepared to make a run for the building. “You have so much talking to do, you’re going to be hoarse by the time you’re done.”

Tate grabbed her elbow and glanced over his shoulder. “I promise I’ll find you and explain later. Right now I need you to...” He was fully, painfully aware what he was about to ask of the woman he’d trained himself. “Hit me. Pretend you hate me.”

If the silent anger she fired at him was any indication, this might be the worst punch he ever took.

Meghan pulled in a deep breath, her posture easing into the one that knew this business was life or death.

The part of her that knew Tate was a dead man if they couldn’t sell her escape.

TWO (#ulink_906a9b5d-8b78-52cc-bfde-98b2db79a121)

Tate Walker was alive. And Meghan couldn’t decide whether she hated him or loved him for it.

As directed, Meghan had avoided her apartment and run here, to the house owned by the Snyder Foundation, the one place that couldn’t be connected to her. She paced the length of the darkened living room, the old hardwood creaking beneath her feet. The midnight wind sang through the trees, ruffling new leaves and brushing branches against the old white farmhouse. Normally, the solitary sounds of the house settling for the night brought comfort. This place had a story, and though Meghan had no idea what it was, she’d love to find out. With the age on the little farm nestled in the midst of the woods, there was no telling what it had seen.

She might not know the past, but she knew what it would see in the near future. Hope. A place where kids beaten down the way she had been could find refuge and acceptance. The bouncing from foster home to foster home would end at this front door. There would be love here, love that defied thievery or deception, that carried on no matter what mistakes the kids made or what they felt they needed to do to get attention.

But it wouldn’t happen if Meghan couldn’t keep herself out of trouble long enough to finish the renovations. Her past had come for her, and no one would want a woman with a target on her back working with troubled children.

At the window by the front door, Meghan lifted a slat on the plantation blinds and peeked through, hoping to see headlights but finding only moonlit shadows.

She should have stood her ground against Isaac, should have stayed with Tate to have his back if things went south. You didn’t abandon your partner. By following Tate’s directive and fleeing instead of staying behind to see what happened, she’d certainly abandoned him.

Except he was no longer her partner. And standing her ground would have probably gotten them both killed, especially with her edge worn off by his reappearance.

Hard as it was, taking refuge was the right course of action. Meghan slipped the phone from her pocket and slid her thumb across the screen, concrete proof his appearance wasn’t the product of an overactive imagination. From her time chasing cybercriminals in their small clandestine army unit, she had no doubt the tech in the device could track her to the nearest meter. So where was he? She’d failed him once and believed her failure had left him dead. If her pseudoescape today had cost him his life...

Unfamiliar nausea swirled, and she dropped the slat, dragging a finger along the grip of the revolver holstered at her hip, refusing to think anymore. To keep from being traced, she’d pulled the battery from her cell phone and locked it with Tate’s gun in the small safe in what would be her bedroom when the house was finished. She’d pulled out her own weapon, wanting the familiar heft of her Ruger. The revolver was on her at all times when she worked on the property, but it was usually to make her feel better about the remote possibility of coming across a snake.

Her skin tightened. Kidnappers, she could handle. Snakes? They were the one foe she feared.

Headlights danced across the front windows, and Meghan laid her hand on the pistol, heart revving, ready for confrontation. If this wasn’t Tate, things were about to get real ugly, real fast.

The headlights flickered three times, paused, then flashed twice more.

Tate.

It was an old signal they’d worked out years ago, one she’d thought she’d never see again. One she’d longed for in the darkness many nights, wishing he were still alive.

Never dreaming he actually was.

She loosened her hold on the pistol and cracked the door open, stepping onto the wide wraparound porch. The diesel on the old pickup rattled as Tate killed the engine; then he climbed out, his figure in the moonlight a silhouette against the trees.

Meghan stood guard at the top of the steps. What should she do? Throw her arms around him and welcome him to the land of the living? Or punch him one more good time? The war between relief and anger centered right in her stomach, twisting into a knot so tight it might never unravel.

Tate stopped at the bottom step, almost as though he could hear the swords clashing. He was taller than her memories gave him credit for. His shoulders broader, his stance speaking of an inner strength different from the one she remembered. No longer a barely leashed weapon, this strength ran deeper, steadier, more solid. Powerful enough to handle whatever life threw at him. Even death, apparently.

He looked up, face an interplay of shadow and light. His hair was still dark, though some very premature gray had shot through a few places. His jaw was still strong. But it was the eyes. It had always been the eyes, a clear sea green contrasted with his dark hair... In a rush, they brought back all the reasons she’d fallen in love with him in the first place.

And those same eyes reminded her how they’d haunted her after he supposedly died, begging her to save him.

Her grief had been for nothing. Meghan balled her fists. “I don’t know whether to hug you or shoot you.” She let the anger drip off her greeting. He deserved to hear it.

Tate took another step but stopped before he got too close, respectful of the new chaos in her life. “I hope you don’t opt for shooting. It’s been a rough day already.” He tilted his head and surveyed the front of the house. “What is this place? I thought you had an apartment near the school.”

“It’s not mine. Not exactly.” She was the one with questions, but she couldn’t make herself stop answering his. She’d spent four years thinking he was dead. Something inside still couldn’t process his seeming immortality and kept on operating as if this was all normal. “I’ve been hired by the Snyder Foundation. It’s going to be a group foster home when we finish renovating. The foundation bought this farm, so tracking me to it would be tough going.” Tough but not impossible, especially if the anonymous blackmailer from her past was a bigger deal than she’d thought. If her former unit was involved, things were much uglier than a simple kidnapping. They tracked cyberterrorists on the highest levels. Small-time gangsters didn’t even cross their radar.

“Really.” Tate wore the ghost of a smile. “A foster home. Your dream come true. I’m proud of you, McGuire.”

In spite of everything, the praise settled into the hollow places behind her rib cage. He’d remembered what was important to her, what she’d wanted to do from the time she was a little girl, shuttling to yet another foster home. It really was her dream coming true. One of them, anyway.

The pleasure chilled, wrapping her heart in ice. She’d scuttled an entirely different, softer dream for her future when she’d walked away from the army and Tate Walker four years ago. Walked away without leaving him any clue that her side of their friendship had grown into something so much more.