Page 122 of Protecting Love

“Not much changes with us. Other than there wouldn’t be a way to keep it a secret. We don’t have that cover anymore.”

“I don’t want it to be a secret,” she said. “Are you okay with that?”

“I think if I wasn’t okay with it, you wouldn’t care either way.”

She laughed. “That’s not true. I care what you think. I care how you feel. Maybe more than I should have just let on.”

“I care too,” he said, his voice low enough he wondered if she’d heard it.

“It’s scary, isn’t it?”

He nodded his head. “Not like dead rat scary.”

She inched her chair closer to him, put her head on his shoulder and sighed. “The thing is, when I’m with you, I’m never scared. Maybe annoyed. Definitely aroused. But never scared.”

“Then I guess that’s a sign I need to be around you more.”

29

LET HIM SEE

“Sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you,” Avery said on Saturday morning. “Damn, this place is sweet.”

He wouldn’t address her last comment. “I know you’re busy.”

And he appreciated Avery coming to his condo this morning.

But the way she was looking around said she got a better idea of how much he’d upgraded from the FBI.

“Yeah, but if you’d told me what was on that file, I wouldn’t have put it off.”

“So you cracked it?”

“Never fear there,” Avery said, slapping her hands together as if she was dusting them off. “That’s my jam. I got your voicemail Thursday, got home around eight and pulled it up. It wasn’t as easy as you thought it’d be.”

“Really?”

He didn’t expect that place to be that sophisticated.

Which only meant there had to be something important on it without Avery making that comment.

“Yep. Had one of my programs running it all night, then yesterday morning I woke up and there it was. A bunch of numbers. Like a ledger.”

“And?”

“And I ran those numbers against things in our database because if it was locked up that tight, then there had to be a reason for it.”

He closed his eyes. “It’s like pulling teeth with you.”

Avery was shaking her head. “I’m telling you. Even gone from the FBI, you can’t let a case go, can you?”

“Avery!”

“Sorry. Remember Ivan Petrov?”

“Russian organized crime,” he said.

He couldn’t forget it. It was one of the last cases he had.