“Let me get you something to eat,” Yardley offered. “This flat is terrible, but there’s nice food.”
“And a cuppa?” Kris asked. “Sweet and light, please.”
“Sure thing.” Yardley went to the mini fridge in the corner that had a basket and a kettle perched on a board on top. She raised her eyebrows at KC, pointing the spoon she held at Kris.
There was something way, way tooattentiveabout Yardley’s whole demeanor. It was terrifying. How many bad guys had picked up on this vibe before the Unicorn crushed them under her heel?
Yardley lifted her eyebrows higher and double pointed at Kris with the spoon.
Right. Time to interrogate their potential asset. In front of Officer Whitmer, superspy.
“Could you start from the beginning?” Yardley continued to make tea with her hands while, with everything else, she watched KC.
Maybe she should’ve been watching Flynn, but if an obviously pregnant woman without identification, money, or even a good coat had found a CIA safe house with two spies in it, then Flynn—no matter what she’d done or what side she was on—would be working for the agency shortly, at least for the duration of this mission.
Nothing to be concerned about there. Yardley was a lot more keen to find out what information Flynn’s presence would extract from KC.
“Did I interrupt something?” Flynn twisted around to look at Yardley. “I’m feeling like there’s an undercurrent.”
Yardley turned her attention to pouring hot water over the tea bag and let herself smile, even as the question made her throat tighten with navy-blue sadness. She could still see a mark on KC’s neck where she must have bitten her. She was going to have to put her unabated horniness for her ex-girlfriend to work in the service of sharpening her ability to observe her.
All’s fair.
“Why?” KC asked. “What makes you think you interrupted anything?”
Yardley was impressed with KC’s tone. It wasalmostuninterested in Kris’s answer. If Yardley hadn’t spent the last months scrutinizing every shift in her expression and all of her spare energy trying to figure out how to save them, she might have believed KC wasn’t freaked out.
Flynn showing up here was obviously what had her freaked out the most. Freaked out on a personal level, if Yardley was reading her right—and not because Kris shouldn’t have been able to find them. It gave Yardley more evidence there was something about KC’s involvement with Project Maple Leaf that she didn’t know.
Shewouldknow it, but she didn’t know it yet.
It was a good problem to keep at the center so that the yawning pit of denial and grief currently squatting in the spot where her heart used to be didn’t swamp her focus.
“I thought I heard you arguing as I came up the stairs,” Flynn said. “It sounded personal. And there’s something in the air.” She waved her hand around. “I’ve been a lot more sensitive lately because of the baby.”
“We’re colleagues,” KC said, like she was holding ice in her mouth.
Ha!No. Not the best way to win the trust of a critical asset. “We broke up,” Yardley said. She plucked a bright red packet of Ballerina biscuits from a basket near the kettle, selected a banana, and carried them to Kris Flynn.
Flynn accepted the snack, meeting Yardley’s eyes. The steady intelligence in her gaze confirmed she was not a woman to underestimate.
Yardley enjoyed meeting people like this on a mission. Regardless of what side they were on, they became part of a network of wildly unusual and smart people who were all very useful to each other when it came to balancing the humors of the world.
“Colleagues is how I met Declan,” Flynn said. “We had cubes right next to each other in the same firm. He specializes in software architecture. Extremely excellent work. He was absolutely dead hot, but I couldn’t look because Aisling, my assistant, said he had a girlfriend. But then I found out Aisling only wanted a crack at him herself.” Flynn pointed a biscuit at KC. “That’s when I moved in, or I would’ve, but Declan moved first. Shagged me in the unisex.”
“Oh my god.” KC shot Kris the small, crooked smile that Yardley thought of as her warmup smile. It meant she was starting to like someone, or find a conversation too tempting to resist participating in, even as she held herself in reserve.
It made Yardley wonder what kind of mentor Dr. Brown had been to KC, if his intercession in her life meant she’d ended up with a career at the agency but no Kris Flynn. No one close.
And she’d struggled to let Yardley close.
Flynn was smiling back at KC. “It wasn’t the story I told my da, for sure, but Declan and I haven’t been able to keep our hands off each other since, so it wasn’t just an impulse. He’d been hinting he might propose, and I’d had fantasies of a wedding before baby comes. Don’t know whether that will happen now, do I?” Flynn shook her head. “So what’s the trouble with you two, exactly? Don’t say there isn’t chemistry. That’s plain.”
KC coughed, her hand covering her mouth to conceal what Yardley was certain would have been a bark of surprised laughter.
“You two not permitted? Are you fighting your attraction while saving the world? Tell me, I’m tired and pregnant.”
Yardley carried the steaming mug of tea to Flynn, who immediately took a long drink. “That’s perf, thank you.”
