Cooper Security 06 - Secret Intentions (15 page)

Jesse eased down on the edge of the bed. “I imagine you’re feeling pretty trapped. Stuck here with me, away from your family and friends.” Now that his eyes had adjusted to the dim light, he could see her well enough to read the subtle shift in her expression.

She shook her head. “I don’t feel trapped. I feel safe with you.”

“I’m not sure I’ve given you reason to.” He touched the back of her hand where it lay in her lap. “I’ve been waiting for you to bring up what happened in the alley. I mean, don’t women usually want to analyze things like that? What they mean?”

“I’m not sure talking about it will answer any questions.”

“Why’s that?”

She looked at him, her gaze level and strong. “I’m Rita’s sister, right?”

He’d said that, hadn’t he? Used it as an excuse to put a stop to their kiss in the rose garden. “I’m not sure you and I mean the same thing by that—”

“Does it matter?” She shrugged. “There are plenty of other reasons to keep our hands to ourselves. I’m your employee, we’re in a high-tension situation that’s not exactly conducive to making smart decisions—”

“I hurt Rita. I didn’t want to, but it happened. And you might be willing to overlook that enough to work for me, but I don’t think you could ever put it behind us. I know your parents couldn’t.” He looked down at his hand, realized he was still holding hers and pulled his away. “I think I’ve hurt the Marsh family enough for one lifetime.”

“Interesting that you assume you’ll hurt me.” There was no emotional inflection in her voice, only a hint of objective curiosity. He didn’t like not being able to read what she was feeling. Evie was usually an open book to him, her heart in her bright blue eyes. Seeing her so closed off from him made his chest ache.

“I’m not a good bet where relationships are concerned. I’m stubborn and set in my ways, and I work in a high-stress, dangerous job.”

“Right.”

Her calm nonresponse annoyed him. “So you understand.”

“Sure. I understand.” She scooted off the bed, stretching her arms over her head. “Do I smell food?”

“Yes, you do. And I hope to hell it’s not burning.”

Fortunately, the beans and turnip greens weren’t overcooked, and he spooned the vegetables onto a couple of plates Evie retrieved from the cupboard. “Sorry these weren’t home-cooked,” he said.

“They’re not bad.”

“But not as good as your mom’s.”

“Well, no. My mom grew up on a farm in Mississippi.”

“I know.”

She smiled at him again, driving away more of his uneasiness. “Right. She made it her mission to teach me to cook. I wasn’t the most willing of students—I preferred to be outside running and climbing and chasing boys away from my secret fort—but she was relentless.”

“She taught me a few things, too.” He answered her smile with one of his own. “One time she showed me how to make peanut-butter fudge. Shannon still asks for peanut-butter fudge as her Christmas present from me. Every year.”

“I love my mom’s peanut-butter fudge. Of course, I have a voracious sweet tooth.”

“I know. I bribed you with enough candy bars.” As she looked up at him, a hint of surprise in her blue eyes, he remembered the cookies. “And speaking of your sweet tooth…”

He crossed to the cabinet and pulled out the bag of cookies. He laid the bag on the table in front of her, grinning down at her. “You’ll owe me a lot of favors for finding those for you, Marsh.”

Her gaze snapped up to meet his. “You’re good.”

He laughed softly. “Save me one, okay?”

She pulled one of the cookies from the bag and gave it a slow, deep sniff, as if she were a wine taster about to sample a rare vintage. “Mmm, macadamia nuts.”

“I was hoping you’d like them.”

“What’s not to like?” She took her first bite. A low moan of pleasure escaped her throat, shooting straight to his sex. He had to shift in his seat to relieve the sudden pressure in his jeans.

She finished that bite, waving the cookie at him. “What brought this on? What are you bribing me to do this time?”

“No bribe.” His voice came out rough. He cleared his voice and continued. “I just thought you could use a home-cooked meal. Sort of.”

“To take my mind off this afternoon.”

“Yeah.” He should probably stop there, but he didn’t like the way their conversation in the bedroom had ended. “And I wanted to make you happy.”

She stopped in the middle of taking another bite, her eyes meeting his over the cookie. “I’m not unhappy.”

He wished he could believe her. She’d once been one of the happiest people he’d ever met, a smiling woman-child who could find the humor in any situation and the positive spin on the worst of situations.

He hadn’t seen that person in a long time. Certainly not since she came to work at Cooper Security. She was energetic and smart, industrious and prone to taking the initiative, even quick with a smile and a kind word. But under it all, he’d caught glimpses of darkness, as if there was a piece of her soul, carefully hidden from view, that ached and bled.

Until she’d walked into the Cooper Security offices looking for a job, he hadn’t seen her in nearly nine years. The child had grown up, lived up to the promise and potential he’d seen in her handsome face and gangly limbs. Handsome had become beautiful, her angular figure softening into well-proportioned curves. But something vital, something he’d always remembered with fondness, seemed to have fled.

“Evie, after Rita and I broke up—” The trill of his cell phone interrupted him. With a flicker of annoyance, he answered the phone. “Yeah?”

“Jesse, it’s Shannon.” His youngest sister sounded distraught. “Something horrible has happened.”

His gut clenched with dread. Was it one of the family? Or someone in Evie’s family? “What?”

“Someone broke into Lydia Ross’s house while she was there. She’s in the hospital, and the doctors don’t know if she’s ever going to wake up.”

Chapter Twelve

“I want to hurt someone.”

Jesse looked up from his laptop to find Evie sitting on the arm of the sofa, her fists clenched. Her eyes blazed with anger and, if he was reading her correctly, no small amount of fear.

“So do I,” he admitted. “But there’s not much we can do from here.”

“Those bastards have killed people. Good people. Your brother-in-law, General Ross—”

Jesse crossed to her, catching her balled-up fists in his hands. He gently pried her fingers open, threading them through his own. “I know. And probably a lot more people we don’t even know about.”

“All for the sake of the Espera Group.” Her brow creased. “The continued tensions in Kaziristan are their doing, aren’t they?”

Jesse gave her hands a light squeeze. “Probably.”

“And the U.S. has been wondering for years where El Cambio has been getting funds to keep up the fight against the government of Sanselmo, considering their group has lost the support of the people. What if it’s been the Espera Group bankrolling their terrorist attacks?”

“I think that’s another strong possibility,” Jesse agreed. Sanselmo, a small country on the northern coast of South America, had finally begun to make significant reforms in favor of economic and social freedoms after years of struggle. The country would have come farther faster without the incessant acts of violence perpetrated by El Cambio, a neo-Marxist terrorist group. “Sanselmo’s oil reserves have barely been tapped at all. They could end up being a huge world exporter if they can keep El Cambio from sabotaging their oil rigs and refineries.”

“Has the Espera Group been stirring up the ongoing troubles in the Middle East? Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan—”

“Probably.”

She stared at him, looking frustrated. “How can you be so calm about it? I want to break things!”

He released one of her hands, holding on to the other as he led her back to the small desk where he’d been working at the laptop. “I’ve been channeling my anger into some research.” He pulled up another chair for her and sat at the computer.

She leaned closer, reading the news article he’d pulled up on the internet. “Well, what do you know? Katrina Hilliard is another fan of what the Espera Group has planned.”

“We don’t know that she’s specifically supporting the Espera Group,” he cautioned, settling in his own chair. “But she supports global control and regulation of oil production and sales, as well as a more equitable sharing of what she calls a ‘planetary resource’ belonging to all the people of Earth.”

“It’s easy to see why so many people buy into the idea without giving it more thought,” Evie murmured. “It sounds so reasonable. Until you realize it trounces on the very notion of private property and national sovereignty.”

“And it puts an unelected group of custodians in charge of massive amounts of wealth and power. People who’ve already indicated a willingness to kill and manipulate to get their way. Not the kind of people you want to bestow with that much power and influence.” Jesse closed the article he’d been reading and went back to the search engine. “You know what keeps nagging at me?”

“What?”

“Those guys who were following us this afternoon had SSU written all over them. And if we’re right that it was Katrina Hilliard’s name that man in the street was saying, how does he know her?”

“Maybe she hired him.”

“Maybe. But how would she know how to contact them? I mean, we’ve been trying to pull together all the threads connecting individual operatives with the parent company, AfterAssets, and we’ve been hitting brick wall after brick wall. So how would Katrina Hilliard know how to find those guys?”

“Maybe they approached her,” Evie suggested.

“But why? How would they have known she was in the market for their services? We can’t even connect her definitively to the Espera Group so far. There has to be some other connection. Something that would give her extra access to the services the SSU has been selling to the highest bidder.”

“Well, what do we know about her background?” Evie waved at the computer. “Can you find an online bio?”

He typed
Katrina Hilliard bio
into the search box. A list of hits popped onto the screen, including the official White House bio. He clicked that one and found a dry, formal biographical sketch of the chief of staff, including a recent photograph.

Katrina Hilliard was an attractive African-American woman in her early forties. Slim and stunning in a deep red power suit in her official photo, she oozed confidence and competence. He scanned her credentials, stopping for a second on one particular line. “Did you realize she was at the Department of Energy before Cambridge tapped her as his chief of staff?”

Evie tugged her chair closer, her clean, warm scent making his head swim for a second. In that moment, he wished they were somewhere safe and secluded, with beautiful mountain views and a big, soft bed to share. Anywhere but here, holed up in a borrowed apartment with danger all around and a million reasons not to give in to the attraction zinging between them.

So, so many reasons.

“Interesting,” Evie said. “Makes me wonder—”

“If she’s the woman Morris Gamble’s having an affair with?” Jesse finished for her. “Yeah, that crossed my mind, too. I’ll put in a call to that number Nicholas Darcy gave us. Maybe he can run down some more information about their connection—”

“Whoa,” Evie interrupted, staring at the computer screen.

“What?” He tried to follow her gaze, but the lines of credentials seemed to run together in front of his tired eyes.

She pointed at a line near the bottom of the screen. “‘Hilliard spent three years on the board of the Singer Foundation,’“ she read aloud. “Doesn’t that ring any bells for you?”

“It’s a security-affairs think tank,” he said. “A few of my Marine buddies have done some work for them over the years.”

“Several of my father’s former colleagues did consulting work for them as well after their retirements, which is how I know that Jackson Melville was also on the Singer Foundation board around the time Hilliard was. There was a huge stink about it when MacLear went down and Melville was indicted for his crimes.”

“So Hilliard would have known Melville pretty well.”

She nodded. “I can’t say for sure they were close, but they’d have known each other.”

Jesse rubbed his jaw, his mind speeding through the implications. “And if she needed, for some reason, to get her hands on some amoral guns for hire, she’d know just who to ask.”

“We need to find out if she ever visited Melville in prison,” Evie suggested. The former MacLear CEO remained in custody pending his trial because the judge had deemed him a flight risk.

“I’m not sure how we do that without official imprimatur.”

“Then let’s get it.”

“Small problem—we’re sort of on the run.”

She looked up at him, frustration shining in her blue eyes. “Right.”

He caught her hand, giving it a squeeze. “We don’t have to solve this mystery tonight. It’s been a long, hellish day, and I don’t know about you, but my eyes are starting to cross. Why don’t we just call it a night and try to get some sleep?”

Her expression fell briefly, before she hid her emotions behind a carefully neutral mask. “Okay.”

“Unless you don’t want to get some sleep?”

She slanted a look at him. “No, I’m beat.”

“I know. But maybe you’re a little scared to close your eyes?”

She breathed a long, deep sigh. “You don’t have to baby me. I’m fine.”

“Considering what you witnessed this afternoon, there’s no way you can be fine. I’ve been in battle, Evie. I’ve seen plenty of people die in terrible ways, and even I’m still dealing with what we saw today. It’s okay to need time to process it all.”

“What am I supposed to do, stay awake all night to avoid more bad dreams?” She shook her head. “We have so much we still don’t know about what’s going on and so little time to find out. I have to get some sleep or I’ll be useless.”

“Maybe I could find something here to help you sleep—”

“No, I don’t want to be drugged. What if someone came after us here?”

He pushed a chunk of coppery hair out of her eyes. “I’d protect you.”

“Who’d protect
you?
” Frustration creased her brow. “We don’t know if there’s really anyone we can trust here, including our friend with the DSS—”