Ian knew the second everything fell into place for her.
“No one,” she said. “I was supposed to call him is all.”
Beatrice eyed her closely but his wife didn’t so much as blink. “Who is he?”
“My therapist.” Vivi gave a short laugh that sounded forced. “Even I need help sometimes. Once a quarter I was required to check in with him. He’d been sanctioned by Homeland, although he wasn’t employed by them. He was—probably still is—a consultant. I would discuss anything bothering me and go through a check system about my health and stress levels. I was overdue so I made a note to contact him.”
“There’s no one else that raises a red flag?” Ian asked, taking the spotlight off this Dr. Crowe. He’d get to the truth of it as soon as Beatrice and Rory left.
She studied the codenames again. “Afraid not.”
“Vivi.” Beatrice returned to the other side. “What about the trip to Vegas? More than one of my employees has had, shall we say, unfortunate outcomes when visiting there. Ian mentioned you experienced an incident at a cafe.”
She sat back in the leather chair and rubbed her forehead. “That was nothing more than a morning-after freak out. Ian and I had put our careers on the line when we wed. Our original plan was to not take vows until he’d finished his last deployment and his term was up. My resignation was going to be harder to negotiate, but I had a back door that I felt was solid. I’d already signed every confidentiality statement they threw at me, but I was willing to do whatever NSA, Homeland, the President, you name it, required in order to make a clean break from my duties and assure everyone I would never become a threat to our country. I mean, I married a SEAL. Can’t get a better bodyguard than that, right?”
Ian winked when she glanced at him.
She toyed with the pen. “I had a written agreement outlined with my plan to create a new identity and check in with Homeland on a regular basis to ensure I was sticking to it.” Her gaze dropped to her desk, but he knew she was seeing the future they’d talked about. “Others had done it successfully. I was going to do it, too. For us.”
Her pretty eyes met his once more. All the hardship they’d endured in the past six months, all the self-loathing he’d stored inside him, believing he’d killed her, the trauma she’d gone through, dissolved in that gaze.
I will fix this. He would make it right. “You need rest. How about we get you back to your room?”
“Before you do,” Beatrice said, “I want the names—the real identities—of everyone on that list.”
“That would be a breach of doctor-patient confidentiality, but under the circumstances, I’ll share. I know you won’t let their names fall into the wrong hands.” She clicked the pen and began writing. “Again, I’m certain none of these people were involved.”
When she finished, she slid the paper to Rory. He placed it inside his bag. “And your mentor? You’re sure about him?”
She spread her hands wide in a supplicating gesture. “He’s a professor, an outsider to all of this. Impeccable background, of course, or they wouldn’t have let me see him. He never knew the specifics of my job, and I wouldn’t have shared them. I would’ve put him in danger if I had. He treated my father, another brilliant soul who was completely off his rocker in his later years. I trust Dr. Crowe.”
Rory gathered his crutches and stood, Beatrice walking him to the door and opening it for him. “If you think of anything else that can help us…”
Vivi nodded and yawned. “I’ll let you know.”
Once they were gone, Ian gathered her into his arms and held her for a long moment. “You didn’t fool any of us, you know.”
She drew back, meeting his eyes and giving him a grin. “Didn’t I?”
That’s when he knew he’d been had. Beatrice and Rory, too. “It’s not Dr. Crowe?”
Breaking his embrace, she gathered her notebook and pen. At least she’d stopped rubbing her head as if it were about to explode. In fact, in the last few minutes she’d completely morphed into the confident woman he’d fallen in love with. “Oh, it is, but not in the way you guys suspect.”
“Are you going to fill me in?”
“On the way.”
He trailed her out the door. Thunder rumbled in the distance. “Where are we going?”
She paused at the elevators, glancing around to be sure Beatrice and Rory were gone. Lowering her voice, she leaned in as she pushed the bottom button. “Can you get us out of here without them knowing?”
A challenge to be sure, but when had he ever backed down from one? “What are you up to?”
“I got myself into this mess, and I’m going to get myself out. We are dealing with highly sensitive information and people who won’t think twice about obliterating all of us if they realize I’m alive and still walking around. Our government believes I’m a traitor; proving I’m not is possibly the most difficult thing I’ve ever done, but if I play my cards right, I’ll be free. You’ll be free. And there won’t be any blowback on Beatrice or SFI. Will you help me?”
The elevator dinged and the doors slid open as he stared at his version of Sherlock Holmes. She was more like Irene Adler, the woman Holmes was obsessed with. “Did you just bat your lashes at me?”
She grinned cheekily. “Did it work? Are you wooed by my feminine wiles?”
Of course he was. He escorted her inside, then backed her against the wall. Smiling down into her eyes, he ran his hands up her sides. “If I remember correctly, I took a vow that I would be there for you, no matter what, for better or for worse.”
She trailed her fingers through his hair, her gaze landing on his lips. “Fair warning, things could get a lot worse.”
“Or a lot better.” He dropped a kiss on her mouth. “I don’t fucking care. As long as I’m with you, I’ll go through hell and back. Ten times. A hundred, if that’s what’s necessary to make you happy.”
She pushed up onto her toes and kissed him. “I love you, Ian.”
“I suppose you’re going to have to start calling me Teddy Greene.”
“Not if I do this right. If we have to go on the run, though? I hope you’re good with it.” They shared a laugh and another kiss. “You’re distracting me,” she said as the elevator opened on their floor.
“Is it working?” he mimicked, batting his lashes at her. “Are you wooed by my masculine wiles?”
She playfully smacked his arm. The storm hit with force, rain slashing against the window at the end of the hall. He followed her to her room, enjoying the extra strut she put into the swing of her hips.
“Don’t ever stop flirting with me,” she demanded. “No matter how old we get, or how comfortable in our married life, promise?”
“Promise.”
Once inside, he shut and locked the door and made good on cherishing her one last time before he snuck her out of SFI headquarters and into the dark, stormy night.
“My father was an accomplished physicist, but his superior brain had trouble with any type of normalcy. My mother did her best to cater to his mood swings and mind periods, but it was tough on their marriage.”
Ian glanced across the seats to where she sat as the SUV cut through night, the headlights reflecting off sheets of rain that poured over them. Visibility was terrible as they took a country road into Virginia. She’d never opened up about her family before. “Mind periods?”
She chuckled. “That’s what mom called them. It was like a version of PMS, where Dad’s mind would go into overdrive and he would lock himself in his study. The walls were covered with chalkboard paint so that he could scribble formulas and mathematical equations in streams around the room. The periods would last for about a week, and it was all she could do to get him to eat or sleep. It always caused adverse effects, and afterwards he would practically be comatose for days. It was like his brain would download something and he had to vomit it all out. Then he had to recover. It happened approximately every thirty days or so, and that was another reason Mom termed it a period.”
“Dr. Crowe helped him?”
“His real name is Dr. Ardy Lippenstein and he used hypnotherapy on Dad.” She scratched at her short hair. He knew she missed her long locks. He did, as well. They would come back, just like her memory. “Dad had gone to many doctors and experts, all of whom put him on drugs. Those only seemed to exacerbate the problem or turned him into a zombie. His health began to deteriorate faster and faster. Hypnosis unlocked a different part of his brain that helped him moderate the outbursts. It was truly amazing, and probably extended his life by several years.”
“I had no idea it could do such a thing.”
“It was quite experimental and revolutionary, and Dad became fascinated with psychology. Even considered trying neurotherapy. He taught me a lot of what he learned, and I became intrigued with the brain and its functions, too.”
“So Crowe is another codename?”
He heard the smile in her voice. “I loved Bruce Willis’ character in The Sixth Sense, Dr. Crowe. Hence, I used it for Lippenstein.”
“And you started going to him as a patient when?”
“I was a teenager when Dad began seeing him, and sometimes I drove him to the sessions. Since I knew I wanted to go into psychotherapy, I was fascinated with Dr. Ardy’s techniques and asked him to let me sit in on some of them. Dad was cool with it, and at home, we would practice on each other. When I went to college, he and I kept in touch, and he helped me demonstrate my technique for my Ph.D. Eventually, I ended up at NSA and in need of my own therapist. I called him.”
The SUV’s navigation instructed him to turn right in a hundred feet. “How does this tie into what happened? You haven’t explained that yet.”
An oncoming car’s headlights spotlighted her for a brief moment. “As we discussed, manipulating me would take someone highly trained. Someone I trusted, and it wouldn’t be a person easily flagged by my employer.”
He was going to kill the guy. “Dr. Lippenstein.”
Her gaze swung to him and he caught her smile out of the corner of his eye. It was full of cunning. “Yes and no. He had a part in it, I believe. What I’m unsure of is if it was intentional or not.”
“I assume you’re going to let me in on what you’re thinking at some point before we actually confront the man.”
She leaned over and patted his thigh. “I hope you’re good at playing things by ear.”
“I prefer to have a working game plan.”
She slid her hand higher and he sucked in a breath as her fingers grazed his cock. “I know, but I don’t actually have one yet.”
He groaned, both from her confession and from her ‘evil feminine wiles.’ “What if this guy is the man behind all of this? What if he uses some trigger word and causes you to go off the deep end again?”
Her fingers gripped him through his pants. “That’s why I brought you. You’re going to protect me, in case he tries anything.”
His words came out strangled. “Now the truth comes out.”
She chuckled, releasing him before she pinched his leg. “You big, bad SEALs are good for something.”
“Former SEAL.”
An assessing pause. “Are you sorry you left the brotherhood?”
Was he? Some days, if he were being honest, yes. He missed the hell out of it. Others, not so much. “I do, but SFI has filled that hole for me. Sort of.” He glanced over at her. “If we work this out, I’m happy to leave them, though.”
She nodded. “I get it. Maybe you won’t have to. The group—family—has grown on me. It wouldn’t hurt us to stay for a while.”
The navigation instructed him to take the next drive. “Are you sure he still lives here?”
“The estate has been in his family since the Civil War. Plus, Rory just texted me his address.” She gave a rueful chuckle. “He’s still here.”
“Told you that you didn’t fool anyone, but damn, I disabled every tracking device this vehicle has, plus our phones. I thought for sure I’d gotten us out without that bastard knowing.”
“He’s as good as he claims.”
He drove past the mansion looming on their right. “So are you.” He pulled to the curb a block down, near a fenced pasture. “Since you don’t have a plan, I do.”
“Care to share?”
Slipping the SUV into park, he cut the lights and shifted to face her. “First, it involves you staying put until I secure the premises. He may be under watch by our government friends, or have significant security in place. I don’t want to tip any of them off that we’re here.”
Her head was outlined by a flash of lightning in the distance. “Logical. Then what?”
He grabbed the bag of weapons he’d stolen from SFI and handed her a stun baton. “I promise to come back for you. After all, you’re the one who’s wired and knows the right questions to ask.” He’d made sure they could record the doctor’s confession, or whatever information he might volunteer. Next, he handed her a comm unit and walked her through syncing it with his and demonstrating how to use it. “I want your word that you’ll let me motivate him if he needs it. My, shall we say, incentives, may not be to your liking, but we don’t have time to string this out. We need facts, evidence, a confession, something to resolve this as quickly as possible.”
She gave a heavy sigh, not liking what he was suggesting. He knew it took all her faith in him to say the next words. “You’re the expert.”
A huge step for her, giving her consent to harm someone. He didn’t care for the idea either, but at times, it was called for. “I won’t kill him, even if I pretend otherwise. We need him alive.”
This seemed to relieve her mind and she gave him a grateful half smile. “Roger that.”
He made her test the earbud again, hoping to reassure her that he was in reach, even if he wasn’t physically close. “Keep the doors locked and stay out of sight until I’m back. Do not engage with anyone who isn’t me.”
He started to bail, the bag of goodies in tow, when she grabbed his arm and yanked him back. “You’re the one who needs to stay alive, you hear me? Be safe.”
He dropped another quick kiss on her lips. “Always. I’ll be back.”
“Maybe I should have given you a different codename. Terminator,” she called after him with a laugh.
He shut the door, shook his head, and slunk off for the mansion.