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.”
“How do you know?” Tanner asked. He hated to be obvious, but he got the feeling Trevor wasn’t seeing the situation clearly.
“Because I could smell her arousal.”
“Oh,” Tanner said.
Okay, that was definitely TMI. There was a reason men didn’t share this kind of stuff with their friends.
“Up until that point, I’d assumed Alina was very good at deception and that she was playing the role Dick had given her. But you can’t fake arousal, no matter how good you are.”
Tanner couldn’t argue with that. “What are you going to do?”
“I have no frigging idea.” Trevor dropped his back on the couch and stared up at the ceiling as if the answer was written there. Or maybe he was simply looking for divine inspiration. “I want to ignore what my head is saying, just go with my instincts, and trust her. I want to believe this thing that seems to be going on between us is real. But at the end of the day, how do I toss aside all my doubt and trust her completely, knowing that if I do, and she’s dirty, it won’t be me paying the price? It will be our friends.”
Tanner would have answered, but he had no idea what to say. He sucked at relationships almost as much as he did at giving personal advice. Fortunately, Trevor’s phone rang, relieving him of the responsibility of solving his friend’s dilemma.
Trevor pulled out his phone and looked at it warily, as if he was worried it might be Alina calling to ask if they were talking about her. After a moment, he thumbed the button and put it to his ear.
“No, Evan. It didn’t go well tonight,” Trevor said in a deadpan voice. “Is there another reason you called?”
Evan must have said something interesting, because Trevor told him to hold on. “I’m putting you on speaker so Tanner can hear.” He pressed the button. “Go ahead.”
“Vivian just called,” Evan said. Vivian was the receptionist at the main office in DC. She acted as their eyes and ears at that facility, even though there wasn’t much going on there lately. “Thorn booked one of the classified conference rooms at the DCO office in DC. He didn’t give her an exact time but just told her to reserve the room for the next two days.”
Trevor frowned. “Why would he bother using one of our classified conference rooms? He must have at least half a dozen of them at Chadwick-Thorn.”
“I was wondering the same thing,” Evan said. “The only reason I can think of for why he might want to use one of our rooms instead of his is if what he’s discussing is so secret he can’t risk anyone at Chadwick-Thorn overhearing it. Their secure facilities are good, but ours are better.”
“Anything that classified is something we’re going to want to hear,” Trevor said.
“That’s what I was thinking,” Evan said. “Which is why I called you.”
“Is there any way we can get someone into that meeting?” Tanner asked.
He’d only been to the DC office once. While it was hidden in the basement of the EPA building on Pennsylvania Avenue, it was fancy as hell, not to mention secure.
