Beneath the Secrets: Part One(23)

“How’d you learn to shoot?”

“My father,” she said without hesitation but her voice soft, barely there.

“The fisherman.”

She rotated to her knees to face him. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what, Kara?”

“Don’t try to figure me out.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s wasted energy when I can give you what you want.”

Her. He wanted her. His fingers curled on into his fist. No, damn it. He wanted Alvarez and he wanted him dead. “Which is what, Kara? What do you think I want?”

“To impress Mendez.”

She wasn’t wrong. Mendez was his ticket to Alvarez. “Go on.”

“It’s his nephew. He runs the shipping operation.”

“Did you tell the former head of security?”

“He was in on this entire theft ring.”

“You seem certain.”

“If you let me have my briefcase, I’ll show you why you should be, too.”

Blake considered her a moment and pushed off the mattress, grabbing the pizza boxes and setting them on the desk before returning to the side of the bed. With his hands on his hips, he studied her. “You want your briefcase; tell me how you drugged me.”

She hesitated, her lips thinning, but she agreed. “Fine. Yes. I’ll tell you. It wasn’t hard. The drug I used makes you pass out within ten minutes of contact with the skin.”

Holy hell. Blake didn’t even want to think about how dangerous that could be in the wrong hands. His simple mission to kill Alvarez had just gotten as complicated as reading a map after a bottle of bourbon. “What drug?” he demanded tightly. “I need a name.”

“I don’t know the name.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Right. We have trust issues. You’ve told me.”

His jaw tightened. “Start with how and when you used it on me.”

“It comes in thin white strips. You can rub them on any surface of an object or directly on the skin. Once a person touches it, the drug absorbs into the blood stream. So…you see. I was telling the truth before. I didn’t have to stay with you that night in Denver. I could have placed the drug on the folder and left right after I got to your room.”

Theirs eyes locked and held, the air crackling with electricity. Blake let this fears over this new drug slide away, his need to know where she was going with this suddenly all that mattered. “And yet you didn’t leave.”

“No,” she said softly. “I stayed.”

“Why, Kara? Why did you choose to stay with me?”





Chapter Nine


Why?

Blake’s question hung in the air and Kara didn’t know the answer. Why hadn’t she left that Denver hotel room without sleeping with him? She’d contemplated that question over and over in the past week, unable to stop thinking about him. She didn’t have an answer besides that she’d been feeling alone, as if the world was on her shoulders. She was alone. No one was helping her. Whatever she made happen, she made happen. And in his eyes, she’d seen pain and torment so like what she felt, that she had actually believed, if only for one night, they might just save each other. And they had, or he had her. He’d taken her away, made her feel whole again in a way no stranger should be able to. She’d needed it and him.

“Kara,” Blake prodded.

Her gaze snapped back to his, from the floor where it had settled. “I stayed with you and I didn’t have to. It’s the only answer I have. I just…I don’t want you thinking I slept with you to get that file. And I didn’t want to drug you. I struggled to go through with it.”

“But you did,” he observed again, but his eyes were softer now, his voice gentler.

“I had to. You have to know that.” And she had. Just not for the reasons he thought and damn if her stomach didn’t knot with the half-lie. How could she feel guilty for lying to a man who’d kill her if he knew the truth? Or at least hand her over to someone who would?

“Yes,” he said after an eternal silence. “You had to.”

Relief washed over her that she told herself was about gaining his trust, avoiding danger, but it was more than that. When she’d looked in his eyes in Denver, she’d felt a connection she couldn’t seem to shake.

“You shouldn’t have been there at all,” Blake continued. “You helped Richter gain leverage over both of us. He’ll wait for the right time and blackmail us both because he knows what we both know. Mendez won’t be happy about you helping Richter or me letting myself get drugged. ”

But she hadn’t been working for Richter at all, and Blake was too smart not to figure that out if she didn’t distract him and fast. “Then we have to stop these theft issues. That has to help us with Mendez.”

“Don’t kid yourself. No matter what good you do for him, if Mendez finds out you undermined him, it won’t matter. We need a plan if he tries. I’ll have my team work on something we can use as leverage on him but if he contacts you, I have to know right away.”

“I’ll get your briefcase,” Blake said, heading to the hallway where he’d left his bag.

Kara pressed her hand to her knotted stomach, feeling like she was swimming in the quicksand of her lies and she had this wild, ridiculous urge to tell him everything. She barely contained a nearly hysterical laugh at how deadly a mistake that would be.