Shoot.She hated guns.
“I see.” Yardley smiled, trying to keep her eyes from crossing while her comm exploded in her ear. “Is that all you have in your pocket? I bet you’ve got something bigger.”
The gun pressed itself hard into the tender skin over her femoral artery. “Fucking shut up,” Mirabel whispered, his accent no longer posh. “I just got some information that very much ends this meeting.”
There was a scream by the door, and answering squeals from various Starbucks patrons as a small, sweater-clad form barreled across the dining area, bounced over a chair—and then Yardley was on the ground, the wind knocked out of her, and Mirabel was already on the move toward the counter, probably heading to the back exit.
Her training took over. She flipped the body that had tackled her and lunged at Mirabel, fitting the meaty part of her palm over the back of his wrist and bending it the wrong way while using the leverage to lift herself up.
He grunted, and she scrambled to her knees.
She was vaguely aware that the person who’d tackled her was fighting with another patron—or security?—while people emptied out of the Starbucks, but she didn’t have time to wonder who her attacker was because Mirabel had yanked her to her feet,snatched her against his body, and shoved his cursed gun back into her side hard enough to leave a bruise.
“Walk with me,” he hissed.
Yardley dropped her body weight and slammed her foot on his instep, then rose back up to collide the back of her head into his face, thankful her closer-to-heaven wig blunted the contact. She felt another hard yank on her waistband, and the person who’d tackled her managed to pull her back down and behind their body, using it to shield her.
Then, the last voice on earth Yardley had ever thought to hear in this situation said, “Back the fuck up.”
KC?
HerKC?
Yes. Katherine Corrine Nolan of Reston, Virginia, wearing huge sunglasses and a hideous lime-green ball cap that featured the distinctive logo of the Lynchburg Hillcats, was using her own body as a shield and pointing Devon Mirabel’s gun at his face in a very competent grip.
Absolutely not.
Yardley took a hold of KC’s waistband and yanked her back two feet so thatYardleywas the shield, then unarmed her to point the gun back at Mirabel.
Just in case her cover wasn’t completely blown to bits, she smiled at him. “You gotta learn to trust more,” she said, faintly gratified that her wig hadn’t slipped and her Queens accent remained intact. “But I like you. I’d love dinner sometime. Let’s keep in touch.”
Then she fisted KC’s sweater and towed her along behind her to the back of the room, keeping the gun on Mirabel until theywere through the service door and down the hall that spit them out behind the building.
She headed east at a dead run, dragging KC behind her until they nearly collided with the agency’s van, disguised as an Amazon truck, which she had no choice but to pull KC into.
Even if her cover stayed intact with Mirabel, there was no way the brown contact lenses Yardley wore or the makeup designed to make her eyes look a little closer together could ever manage to fool KC.
Why in the world had she had a sudden hankering for Starbucks on a Wednesday, anyway? KC never came to the Hill. Couldn’t she have put her pink drink order into DoorDash and had it delivered?
Yardley just hoped the town where the agency set up her new identity was nice.
As she slammed the van’s door shut, she glanced at KC, who had lost her hat and removed her sunglasses and who, predictably, looked surprised. Her color was up, her eyes bright, giving Yardley an instantaneous sense memory of the power behind that tackle.
She blushed hard under her makeup.
It had been a minute since she’d blushed like this from onlylookingat KC.
Dang it.
CHAPTER FOUR
The van was moving at a good clip, Atlas talking low and furious into a sat phone. The techs had gone wordless, probably because they didn’t know what to say.
Understandable. KC had blown their cover.
KC, more accurately, had stolen Atlas’s hat and sunglasses from the dash to wear as an impromptu disguise, flung the van’s doors open, burst out of the back, and sprinted away at full speed toward the Starbucks to save the Unicorn.
Who was Yardley.
