“Not like this.”The tips of her fingers drag along the felt lining of the billiard table as she walks, her gaze fixated on the bookshelves lining a back wall.
I’d gutted three offices to make this one—a hybrid of library and study.“Brighter?Airier?”
“It’s in my home,” she says, “and it doubles as a guest room when needed.And I definitely don’t have a Clyfford Still hanging on my walls.”
“When you told me you worked at an art gallery…was any of that true?”
“I imagine you already know the answer.”
“I went to that gallery.They’d never heard of a Sophie Dubois.”
“You visited the one in London?”
I don’t answer.My question said enough.I’d spent six months and a small fortune chasing her ghost.My family called it obsession.They weren’t wrong.
She wasn’t in any database, never passed through customs in any country.But still, I traveled to the places she named, showing photographs, conducting much of the search myself to rely on instinct, hoping to sense fear or reluctance.Blank stares, annoyance at an absorption of time, that’s about all I uncovered.
“The Dubois identity was sculpted by my employer.But I was only supposed to use that alias for one event.I imagine my handler didn’t expect it to matter if someone visited a gallery in another country and discovered I hadn’t worked there.”
“Or called?”
“If you’d called that day, let’s hope the person answering the phone would have confirmed my employment.But truly, they weren’t expecting anyone to call.The alias was a party girl.If for some reason my employment cover was questioned, I could’ve played it off as a lie to pretend employment, to weasel my way into the art circles.”
“And why were you interested in art?”
“You mean my employers?”
I nod, letting my hands drop into my trouser pockets to fight the urge to step closer and touch her, to pull her to me.
“Money laundering,” she says, her tone stripped of apology.“Art was just the vehicle.”
For a moment, something like regret shadows her expression before the mask resets.“We were tracking weapons dealers who used gallery sales to move dirty money.And we weren’t interested in stopping it; we just wanted the intel.”
Disdain echoes in her tone.
“Is that why you’re no longer with the CIA?”Her long lashes flutter, her blue eyes zeroing in on me, and I lift a shoulder nonchalantly.“You already told me, it was CIA.There’s no surveillance in here.”
With that one word, her interest in my surroundings is shut down, and her expression transforms into what one can only describe as business.
“My status as a former CIA officer isn’t a secret.”She leaves the billiard table behind, and I watch closely as her long legs carry her across the office to my desk.“You have blueprints?”
“I do, but not in a file cabinet.”
“If they’re electronic I didn’t need to come here.”
I stride past her to the art hanging behind my desk, push a button behind the credenza, and the framed image raises, revealing a safe.
“You keep the blueprints in a safe?”
“Only because they didn’t fit in the filing cabinet, and it seemed like the kind of thing I should save.There are handwritten notes on the edges from the architect and it’s easiest to read on the paper.”
She steps closer for a better view, but she steps into my space, and I breathe in the subtle hints of saffron and jasmine that I remember from her body wash, a brand I acquired because it stayed with me, long after I’d given up on finding the mysterious golden beauty.
I used to wonder if time would dull the longing.It didn’t.It hits me again—the same pull, sharp and inevitable.Stronger, because now I know she’s real, not just a perfect memory I chased.The urge to thread my fingers through her hair, to angle her head, to taste her lips...and the way those blue eyes gaze up at me, pupils dilated, her breath catching—she feels it too.Her throat works on a swallow.Not nerves—want.She’d rather die than let me see it, but I do.I could close the distance.I don’t.
Because I remember the way she went still when I implied familiarity.Whatever this is between us, she needs to choose it.
The space between us charges with years of wondering, of wanting, of?—
