Whose safety, though? That was the question that was really coming to bear for KC at the moment.
“Shall we?” Atlas pointed down the hall. With ahmpfand a toss of her head, Yardley took off at a brisk pace that meant Atlas had to walk faster to hold on to the lead. They navigated KC and Yardley to a second lobby that KC knew led to the transportation bay.
“Whitmer, if you’d like to change, that’s been arranged for you in the locker room adjacent to this area.” Atlas indicated the direction Yardley was meant to go. “Once you’re finished, we’ll be taken to the White House to be briefed.”
KC stopped short. “The White House?”
“Everything will be covered at the briefing.”
With this, Atlas strolled away to the double doors, already open and letting in cool air and the chemical smell of the transportation bay.
“Do you know anything about this?” KC asked Yardley.
“No.” Yardley tipped her head and seemed to scrutinize KC. She still had color in her cheeks, but her eyes were sharp and assessing. “You covered me pretty quick in that Starbucks.”
“I’ve been trained. And I don’t skip workouts.”
There was a time Yardley would have laughed at KC teasing her, but her assessing expression didn’t change. “You don’t. Ever. Infact, you’re really strong. Decisive. You’ve always been observant, but you haven’t worked as an operative. Have you wanted to?”
“Who doesn’t?”
“That’s a nothing answer. Lots of people don’t want to be in the field. Do you?”
KC remembered too late that the Unicorn was a notoriously exacting and ruthless interrogator. “I don’t run for my health,” she hedged.
“Officers,” Atlas said to the transportation bay. “If we could.”
Yardley strolled in the direction of the locker rooms in stocking feet, moving in a way that was so arrogantly unconcerned, it made KC think of seeing her for the first time at the barbecue.
The way she carried her shoulders in that diaphanous white picnic dress. The intelligence in her gaze that pinned KC in place right before she smiled. Like she’d planned that moment. Like it was happening exactly the way she wanted it to.
I’m going to marry that woman, she’d thought, as though Yardley had put the desire in KC’s body herself.
If absolutely everything had been different, they could have been so, so good.
CHAPTER FIVE
Situation Room, the White House
Typically, Yardley enjoyed meeting the president.
Ada Williams had a presence that filled every room she was in with easy warmth punctuated with intelligence and gravitas. Yardley was fascinated by how she managed to invite her colleagues to bring their best selves to the table, encouraging collaboration while still maintaining the personal force field necessary for America’s first Black woman president to command.
And she mixed a mean old-fashioned.
In ordinary circumstances, the tense mood in the Situation Room would have fired up Yardley’s delight with strategy as she sorted through the subtle power dynamics and social hierarchies at work. This was the type of once-in-a-career gathering her granddaddy called “a quilting bee,” and on any other day Yardley could have counted on her central nervous system to be as relaxed as a lizard on a desert rock.
She was the Unicorn in large part because she paradoxically enjoyed a wrench tossed into the works. Her brain held plans B through Z in reserve like a full house in Vegas.
The Unicorn had not arrived, however, to solve the problem of KC Nolan. The Unicorn had tossed her rainbow mane at Yardleyand insisted she deal with this disaster that she had so spectacularly caused.
KC was a spy. Yardley was a spy.
The world was still in danger because today’s mission had failed.
She was still broken up with the only true love she’d ever had, but now she sat across the table from the president of the United States of America, who had undoubtedly been briefed about all of this, including everything Yardley and KC had said to each other less than an hour ago, possibly accompanied by photographs or video.
Yardley suddenly remembered she’d thrown a wig at a portrait of Officer Byron Davis, an unsung hero of the Cold War whose quick thinking avoided a nuclear disaster. This fact would be dutifully recorded in her file, waiting for declassification in some unknown future.
