“Which confirms our worst fears, that someone who works with us picked up that device and put it in John’s office.”
Trevor shrugged. “Yeah. Unfortunately, a bunch of muscle-headed bouncers from the club came out and thought we were robbing the guy. The idiots got trigger-happy and killed him before he got a chance to tell anyone.” He shoved a hand through his dark hair and let out a growl of frustration. “I had Thorn’s balls right in my fucking hand, then it all went to shit.”
“Is that how you got shot?” Tanner asked.
Trevor nodded. “Yeah. I got distracted at the wrong time, and one of the d-bags creased my ribs. It’s nothing.”
Distracted wasn’t a word Tanner would usually associate with his friend. Trevor was the kind of man who seemed to be able to focus on the details in the middle of the biggest shit storm.
“Alina okay?” Tanner prompted.
“Oh yeah, she’s wonderful. Peachy, in fact.”
Tanner wasn’t the most perceptive guy on the planet when it came to picking up nonverbal cues, but even he figured out something was going on here.
When he asked, Trevor was silent for so long, Tanner thought he wasn’t going to answer. Finally, his friend took a deep breath and took the plunge.
“Alina isn’t turning out to be the person I thought she was.”
Tanner wasn’t sure if that was good or bad.
“I thought she was supposed to spy on me and tell them everything I’m doing,” Trevor continued.
“Now you don’t think so?”
Trevor let out a short laugh. “Oh, she’s almost certainly reporting back to Dick. Two days after we talked to Seth Larson, Dick sent someone to rough him up and find out what he knew. The only way Dick could have known about Larson is if Alina told him.”
Tanner frowned. “Okay, so you’ve confirmed that she’s a spy for Dick.”
Trevor shook his head. “Yeah, but you should have seen the look on her face when she realized I’d figured out what she’d done. She seemed genuinely contrite, like she knew she’d made a mistake.”
Tanner lifted a brow.
“I know what you’re thinking.” Trevor held up his hands. “That she’s playing me. I admit, the thought has crossed my mind more than a few times. But I do this spy-versus-spy thing for a living. I usually know when people are playing me. I’m telling you, something else is going on with Alina. Sometimes it seems like she’s actually on our side.”
Now Tanner was even more confused. Either Alina was working with Dick, or she was one of the good guys. “Speak English, would you? What the hell are you saying?”
Trevor told him what happened at the club, saying he and Alina had fought well together, and how she’d brought him back to her place to fix him up afterward.
“If she was simply doing Dick’s dirty work, she didn’t need to do any of that. Hell, she could have let those guys kill me,” Trevor added. “My gut’s telling me that while she might have told Dick about Larson, she had no idea what he was going to do with that information.”
“That doesn’t mean she’s on our side,” Tanner pointed out.
Trevor turned back to the TV, his breath coming out in a rush. Tanner was tempted to call it a sigh, but since real men didn’t sigh, it had to be something else.
“We kissed,” he said quietly.
Tanner tried not to overreact—and failed. “You what?”
Trevor shook his head. “It wasn’t like that. Well…it wasn’t supposed to be. Alina and I needed a cover to get us into a club in Baltimore, and Skye and Evan set us up as a couple of newlyweds. One thing led to another, and before I knew it, we were put in a position where we had to act like a man and woman who’d just been married. So we kissed.”
“And?”
“And all it was going to be was a quick peck. Just part of our cover. But while it might have started out tame, it sure as hell didn’t finish that way. I’ve never had a kiss like that in my life.”
Tanner took a long drink of Mountain Dew as he considered that. “It might have been that way for you, but what about Alina? Maybe it really was part of your cover for her.”
“I thought that at first, too,” Trevor admitted. “But when Alina was tending to my gunshot wound later at her place, she kept running her hands over my chest and stomach long after she’d cleaned off all the blood. She was definitely into me.”
