![]() | ![]() |
"I still say it's a bad idea." Kate paced the length of the apartment's living space with short, angry strides. "There has to be another way."
"We've gone over it a hundred times, Kate." Jonas scrubbed a hand over his face and sighed. "There is no other way."
"Do feel free to jump in with suggestions if you have them, however," Grant Douglas added, a note of impatience edging his voice.
Kate glowered at him. They'd been at this for three hours, going over every detail, everything that could possibly go wrong—but she was damned if she'd make it easy for Jonas to get himself killed. Or for Grant to help him.
"You can't seriously mean to let him do this," she said. Foreboding tangled with a growing helplessness in her belly. She crossed her arms over it and scowled at her ex. "It's not like you to take chances like this. When the hell did you become such a goddamned maverick?"
Grant's lips tightened. "I'm not a maverick. I just think Jonas is right. This is the fastest way to—"
"It's the only way," Jonas interrupted. He rose from the table and intercepted her agitated pacing, his grip firm on her shoulders. Kate's knees wobbled at his touch, and it took all she had not to lean in against him. To hold him. Tightly, so she never had to let him go. But he wouldn’t let her. He'd made that crystal clear.
"You're not thinking objectively, Kate," Jonas said, his brilliant blue gaze steady. Focused. Calm. Missing the point altogether.
She crossed her arms in sheer self-preservation.
"Step back for a minute and be a cop again," he continued. "If this thing is as big as we think it is, we have no other choice. People are going to start burying evidence—if they haven't already—and the longer I'm in the wind, the more chance they have to do so. We don't just need to move fast, we need to move now. Before they realize we've brought in the FBI."
Kate blinked back sudden hot tears, swallowing against the hard lump in her throat. For an instant she almost hated the quiet strength of the man before her—did hate the wordless compassion he extended. She didn't want to step back and be a cop, didn't want to be objective. Not when the thought of what he was about to do filled her with a fear unlike any she'd ever known. Not when she was about to lose the man she—
She lifted her chin. "Then let me go with you," she said.
"No."
She knew argument would get her nowhere. Knew with absolute certainty he wouldn’t change his mind. She hated him for that, too.
Over Jonas's shoulder, she saw Grant still sitting at the table, studying the cellular phone in front of him as if it held the utmost fascination for him, and looking like he'd rather be just about anywhere else in the world. He wouldn't try to change Jonas's mind, either. Defeat settled over her like a suffocating blanket. She turned her face away.
Jonas's grip on her shoulders hardened for a second, and then he released her. "I'm ready," he told Grant.
In silence, Grant held out the cell phone to him—a burner he'd brought along so Lewis wouldn't be able to trace it back to anyone. Jonas punched in a number, put the phone to his ear, waited.
Then, "Lewis," he said. "It's Burke."
Kate walked to the window and stared down at the stream of glaring headlights and flickering taillights below the apartment hotel, mentally tuning out the conversation on the other side of the room. She didn't need to hear it, knew already what Jonas would tell the man on the other end of the phone line.
Rick Honeyman had given him information, he would say to Lewis. Files. Papers. Hard evidence. He wanted to deal, he'd tell him. The evidence for a cut of the profits—enough to let him disappear. For good.
He'd give the address of an abandoned building chosen by Grant's team for its ease of surveillance. He'd give a time, too—ten tomorrow morning—and go in alone, wired, trying to get someone to say something they could use. Trying to get someone to confess, or at least give them enough to open an investigation, obtain a search warrant, start the long process of nailing Lewis’s and Ramirez's asses to the wall.
Trying not to get killed first.
Kate drew a quick, reflexive breath against the pain that lanced through her. No. He'd be fine. He had to be fine, because the alternative was unthinkable—especially knowing she couldn't be there to prevent it.
"Kate?" Grant's voice and cleared throat brought her back to the present. She turned and found him at the door, trench coat on, briefcase in hand. Jonas no longer held the cell phone to his ear. The plan was set. The damage was done.
"I'm going," Grant said. "Do you want me to pick you up on our way to the stakeout in the morning?"
The FBI team would be at the location three hours before the meet, setting up their stakeout. Waiting for Lewis and Ramirez and the others. Waiting for Jonas to—
Kate pressed her lips together and nodded.
"I'll be here at six-thirty," Grant told her. "Try to get some sleep, okay?" He turned to Jonas. "You, too. I'll bring someone with me in the morning to get you up and running with the tech we’ll need you to wear."
The door closed behind him. Silence descended on the room, deafening in its totality. Jonas looked across at her, the physical distance between them made a thousand times greater by his remote expression. An ache settled into her heart, deep, hollow, awful. She had no idea how to breach the gulf, and Jonas had no intention of doing so.
"I'm going to bed," she said. She passed him on her way to her room, near enough to feel his warmth brush against her skin. Hoping, wanting, needing him to reach out a hand to stop her.
He didn't.
* * *
Jonas propelled his torso off the floor on his third set of push-ups. A thin sheen of sweat bathed his body, sensitizing his skin to the whisper of air moving past as he descended again, pushed up again. He set his jaw against the quiver of fatigue in his arms and across his chest, against the nagging tugs of pain that still plagued him, against the reason he was doing calisthenics at three in the morning in the first place.
He'd been tossing and turning since midnight, unable to settle into a sleep that didn't center around dreams of car chases and cabins and filmy white nightgowns. Dreams of rising from his bed and going to the room next to him. Going to Kate...just once.
Awake wasn't any better. Lying in a tangle of covers, staring at the ceiling, listening for signs of her presence on the other side of the wall. Distraction had seemed the only answer, and so for twenty minutes he'd punished his body with the most intense exercise he could dream up in the cramped living space of the hotel apartment. And still he wondered...
Abandoning the push-ups, he levered himself into a sitting position and rested his arms across bent knees in the dark. This was useless. He could run a marathon right now and it wouldn't do a damn bit of good. He stared at the closed bedroom door only a few feet away. Of all the roads Lewis and Ramirez could have dumped him on, why did it have to be the one Kate Dexter was traveling that night? Things could have gone so differently if someone else had found him...been so much less complicated.
Right, because anyone else would have taken the same chance on your sorry ass that she has, a snarky voice said in his head. Picked you up, believed your story, not turned you in, given up half her life for—
A soft scrape sounded against the door to the hallway. Jonas stopped breathing. He waited. It came again, accompanied this time by a muttered exclamation and a metallic jingle. The blood in his veins ran cold. Someone was trying to get in.
He pushed himself up from the floor. He thought of his gun, still in the nightstand drawer by his bed, then glanced at Kate’s closed door. No, warning her came first.
But even as he took a step toward her bedroom, the apartment door edged open, and he changed direction, swiftly crossing the room to flatten himself against the wall behind the door. A shadow stepped into the apartment. Jonas waited until it cleared the doorway, then threw himself forward, slamming it into the wall.
The intruder grunted under the impact, then recovered and looped a leg behind his, dropping him to the floor. His grip tight on a zippered sweatshirt front, Jonas pulled the figure down with him. The carpet had barely brushed his back before he gave a mighty heave and rolled over, pinning the other person beneath him. With his left hand, he slammed both the intruder's hands against the floor, then he leaned his right forearm across the vulnerable throat, applying enough pressure to leave no illusions about his superior power. Or his ability to cause great damage.
"Now," he snapped, glaring down at the hoodie-sheltered face, "suppose you tell me who you are and what the hell you're doing here."
The shadow sucked in a quick, ragged breath. "Jonas?"
Jonas stiffened, and in the span of a heartbeat, he became aware of the distinctly feminine curves of the body between his thighs. The gentle rise of the chest beneath his. The softness of the belly pressing against his—
"Kate?" he croaked.