Page 16 of Velvet Vaughn

Anja’s hand flew toward the Sig on the console before her brain caught up with her reflexes. Kayla stared back at her through the glass with an entirely unapologetic grin.

Wonderful. She’d almost been ambushed by one of her own. She started the SUV and rolled down the window.

“Didn’t we say goodbye already?”

“I thought of something.”

“Kayla—”

“Be careful.” Kayla rested her forearms on the window frame and studied her with an unreadable expression. “And be honest with yourself on the drive.”

“I always am.”

“No, sweetie, you’re not. That’s the problem.”

Kayla patted the roof of the Escalade twice, stepped back, and walked off toward the park without a backward glance.

Anja sat there for a three-count. Then she shifted into drive and rolled out toward the gate with the last of the sunset burning in her rearview mirror.

#

As she crossed from Indiana into Illinois, Interstate 70 stretched flat and straight through farmland only beginning to green up after the long winter. Anja drove with the stereo off, a bottle of water in the cup holder, and her mind moving along two parallel tracks at once.

Fifteen minutes in, she started to instruct her phone to call Leo but paused. She didn’t want the story filtered over a car speaker. Phone calls were for logistics or to pin down an ETA. She’d end up reacting to his pacing and word choices, not to mention his lawyer’s instinct to structure a story for the listener. Whatever he had to tell her, she wanted to watch him say it.

Civilians leaked information through their hands, eyes, and even how they held a coffee mug. Leo might be a talented liar in court, but he was a very poor one in his own kitchen. She’d learned that at four in the morning while watching him drink water at her counter without clothes, his face giving him away every time he looked at her. Whatever he wasn’t saying to her yet, she’d catch it faster in person.

She sent a single text instead.

Three and a half hours out. Don’t touch the thing, whatever it is. Stay inside. Don’t answer the door for a delivery, building management, friends, or anyone.

His reply came within thirty seconds. The automated voice read: Copy. Door’s locked. I’ll be here. Drive safe. Thank you, Anja.

She listened to it twice, felt the inconvenient hitch in her chest she’d been managing since his name came up on her screen, and stared out the windshield. Some things didn’t require a reply. They needed to be left alone until you could look them in the face in a room with doors and walls and the grounding weight of actual work to do.

As she drove, the operational track in her head started building a list on its own. Sweep the unit the second she was through the door—every room, fixture, and outlet. Find out what had Leo so spooked. Loop her bosses in by morning.

The personal track was harder to silence, and she didn’t try. It ran like a second radio station she couldn’t quite turn off, the volume low but the signal clear. She was going to be in a room with Leo De Luca tonight. She’d been managing the absence of him for five months by telling herself she didn’t need to see him, and here was the universe handing her a legitimate reason to be in the same room as him. The bottom of her stomach was doing an entirely unprofessional, inconvenient thing about it.

Kayla’s parting words came back to her ten miles past Effingham. Be honest with yourself on the drive.

Anja had told herself for five months that what had happened at the wedding had been an answer to a question she’d been carrying around since she’d met Leo. One night. A choice. Nothing more. She’d left that reasoning untouched because it kept certain things orderly, and a woman in her line of work relied on structure far more than honesty.

That logic was flawed.

In between bouts of thoroughly, mind-blowingly unforgettable lovemaking, she’d lain awake next to Leo with his arm across her waist and listened to his breathing. She’d known, in a way she hadn’t bothered to examine since, that one night was not going to be enough.

She’d let him leave anyway, which meant the choice she’d made wasn’t one night. It was only one night, and the difference between those two phrases was the entire problem.

Leo was different. He hadn’t cost her anything yet, and he had asked nothing of her either. He’d given her months of uncomplicated silence, and that wasn’t insignificant. It might, in fact, have been everything, because five months of respecting the distance between them, despite obviously wishing it didn’t exist, had turned out to be the most patient thing anyone had ever done for her.

And now he was in trouble, and he’d called her first, and she was driving west at seventy-three miles an hour with a cashmere sweater in her bag she had no business packing.

Be honest with yourself.

Fine.

She would be honest.