“You know what? I’ll think about it.” I smiled at Jana. “I have to go right now.” I shut the door and pivoted to glare at Bray. I held a finger to my mouth to silence him as I crossed toward the window to watch which way Jana went.
Jana waited on the doorstep for a moment, looking baffled for having had a door slammed in her face, before she did a three-point turn to move her stroller. She cast a curious look over her shoulder before turning left at the end of the walkway.
Satisfied to be rid of her, I turned around to deal with the agent in my kitchen and found myself face-first into his chest.
“Jesus.Do you have to stand so close?” I bounced backward, and his fresh smell tempered with the slightest bite of nervous perspiration lingered in my nose.
“Sorry,” he muttered and released the two slats he had pinched open to see out the window. His arm remained hovering over my shoulder.
I looked up at him, and a charge passed between us. Something unnamed I felt crackling all the way to my fingertips.
I quickly sidestepped and moved away from the window. “So, I get that you’re invested, but that’s not how this is going to work, okay? I don’t need you trying to intervene and screwing things up.”
A look of surprise crossed Bray’s face, as if he may have expected me to say something else. He cleared his throat. “Sorry. I just know you haven’t been fully briefed yet, and she showed up out of nowhere. I didn’t want you caught off guard.”
I rounded the table and snatched another apple slice. Hisapology seemed sincere. “Well, then why don’t you finish briefing me, Agent Bray.”
A tiny smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. He pulled a binder from his bag. “Everything you need to know is in here, but basically, you’re lined up to start as Melanie Browning’s new nanny ASAP. You’ve got an airtight background and references, come highly recommended, and aced your online interview. All that’s left is a trial run.”
I took the binder and skeptically frowned at him. “Iacedmy interview? I’ve never met this woman in my life, let alone interviewed with her. What are you talking about?”
He whipped out his phone and tapped at the screen before flipping it around to show me. “We generated your image and voice with AI from digital records we have at the DSA. Pretty cool, right?”
I gaped at the sight of myself on the screen. The fake was alarmingly convincing, right down to my mannerisms. I was not the least bit surprised the DSA had resources for such forgery. “Uh, cool is one word for it, I guess,” I muttered.
“Ithink it’s cool,” he said and shoved his phone back in his pocket. “But the point is, you’ve already wowed them, so all that’s left is to do it in person. You’re set up to start working with them this week.”
The sense I was being dragged by a moving train had me off-balance again. I set the file back on the table and held up my hands. “Wait. Let’s just take a step back here. You still haven’t told me where Agent Wallace is. Why isn’t he here?” The answer to that question still had my nerves jumping.
Bray took a breath like he had to stop himself from barreling on with my brief. His face flattened. “I can’t share that information.”
I frowned at the non-answer. “Can’t or won’t?”
He stroked his hand over his jaw, and a wave of frustration pulsed off him. “Can’t because I don’t have it. Some of myclearance has been revoked due to a recent …incident, and the higher-ups don’t feel I need to know that detail. All I know is you’ve been transferred to me, and I was supposed to meet you here.”
The sense of being dragged by a train suddenly morphed into a stomach-dropping free fall. I struggled to process everything he’d said. Not only was he a rookie, but something had recently gone wrong enough to revoke his security clearance, and I was supposed to trust him?
“No,” I said flatly.
He cocked a brow at me. “No, what?”
My heart had kicked up a gear. The implications of this new setup were too many to articulate, especially to someone as junior as him. “No, I’m not doing this. Not without talking to Agent Wallace.”
He stubbornly stared back at me. “Like I said, I can’t help you with that.”
“Then find me someone who can.”
He huffed an annoyed breath and put a hand on his hip. “What’s the big deal? I always heard that guy was kind of an asshole. I thought you’d be happy to be free of him.”
Again, another statement too loaded to unpack. “Asshole, yes, but my relationship with Wallace is … important.”
It was perhaps the biggest understatement I’d ever made.
Bray looked at me with a purse of his lips, interest clearly piqued again. “Does the importance have to do with the classified parts of your file?”
“My security clearance to answer that has been revoked,” I said with a smirk.
He narrowed his eyes to study me, apparently realizing I wasn’t the pliable puppet he expected. After a few beats of silence, he put his hands on his hips again and nodded. “How about this: You do this nanny job for me, and I’ll do what I can to get information on Wallace for you. Sound good?”
