Wait.
Wait one minute.
It’s not that her brain had wanted to torture her. No. It wasn’t torturing her with memories of losing Lachlan. Her memories were going back to Jeremy’s death. Why? Because that’s where the trouble really started. Where she took the first wrong step that led to The Repair Shop taking out a hit on her.
She was missing something and it started the day she left Paris to turn in her resignation.
Maybe if she let her mind remember she could figure out what it was.
* * *
“Ijust need to go back one more time to turn in my resignation,” she told Lachlan on their last day in Paris. “And I guess to give these rings back.” She laughed as she took the wedding rings Jeremy had given to her out of her purse. She couldn't help the laughter. She was free.
Lachlan beamed at her. “Before you put those on…” He picked her up and twirled her around.
Then he set her down and went to one knee.
“What…are you doing, Soup?” She bit her lip, knowing exactly what he was doing.
“Don’t know if I should be proposing to a married woman?—”
She rolled her eyes.
“But I’m not going to let that stop me. I love you. I think I’ve been in love with you since the moment I pulled you off those vines in the courtyard and looked into those golden eyes for the first time. And now I want to make you my wife.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a blue box. He opened the box and presented her with a beautiful ring. Instead of a white diamond, the stone in the center was a yellow topaz in the shape of an oval. Gina laughed as she realized what it represented—a lemon.
“So will you marry me?”
“Yes, Lachlan Soup Campbell, I will marry you.”
* * *
When her phone rang in the car on the way to the train station, she knew. She let it go to voicemail. And it immediately rang again. This time, she didn't just let it go to voicemail. She declined the call.
“No,” she said out loud as she put her phone into airplane mode.
She should have told the driver to stop right then and there. Gone back to the apartment where Lach still waited. He had a few more days off before he needed to return to California and turn in his own resignation. He’d stay in the military—he’d rather die than leave it, he’d told her and she was fine with that. He thought maybe he’d become an instructor. She could continue to run the gallery she’d created as a cover, relocating it to San Diego. Or maybe she’d work as an interpreter. Or write her memoirs. Or all of it. She could do anything she wanted. Anything at all.
No matter what messages waited on her phone, she needed to face them. Tell them she was out. Finished.
When she got to the hotel room, she wasn’t surprised to find it empty. The sick feeling in her stomach grew even as she imagined Jeremy was only out grabbing a drink. At a glance, all his things were still there. On closer inspection, only his raincoat, wallet, and phone were missing. Of course he’d gone out. The messages were probably Jeremy telling her that he wouldn’t be there when she got back and not to worry. Gina was being paranoid. Superstitious.
But there was truth to premonitions—anyone who ever worked a dangerous job knew that. Always listen to your gut. And right now, her gut was screaming that all her dreams had just been destroyed.
Gina sat down on the edge of the bed. She turned her phone back on and it vibrated with multiple missed calls; coded messages from a ‘friend’ checking in on her during her stay in London. They were really from the station chief in London who had been informed of the operation. And now there were texts too. Equally coded texts telling her that Eva was dead and that she and Jeremy needed to report in immediately.
So, they were looking for Jeremy, too. He really was missing.
Gina hung her head as tears formed. Eva was dead and it was Gina’s fault.
She scrolled through a news app on her phone to see what had happened and if it was public knowledge. Sure enough, the headlines blared that Eva Lambert had been found dead in her apartment, the apparent victim of a burglary turned deadly.
Burglary, my ass.
From the state of the body, they theorized Eva had been dead for almost two days.
Two days. And not a single message from Jeremy since I left. Gina tried calling Jeremy knowing in her gut he wouldn’t answer. Her call went directly to voicemail. It made her sick to leave a fake message from his loving wife, saying she was back in London from visiting her friend and wondered where he was. In five minutes, she would leave a second, panicked message asking if he knew about their latest client’s death in the robbery and to please call her because she was worried about him. If anyone had his phone or if it was found by authorities, the messages would help maintain their cover.
