Tracie smiled and limped to the bathroom while Shane reached into the paper bag, removing the first-aid supplies. A moment later the bathroom door creaked open and she returned, carrying her jeans. A motel towel that at one time had been white and was now the color of dirty dishwater was wrapped around her slim waist.
She eased onto the bed, primly covering herself, looking more like a shy young girl than the kick-ass CIA spook Shane now knew her to be. He wanted to crack a joke but decided she seemed uncomfortable enough without him making things worse, so he bit his tongue and began unwrapping the bandage covering her wound. Blood had seeped into the gauzy material before clotting, more or less, and the bandage felt stiff, stuck to the wound.
He stepped into the bathroom and returned a moment later with a washcloth soaked in warm soapy water. He dampened the soiled bandage, working carefully to remove it. Then he cleaned around the puncture wound in much the same way he had done last night, dabbing and probing, doing his best to ignore the lacy pink panties he could see under the insufficient cover of the towel. Tracie squeezed her eyes shut, teeth gritted against the pain, muscles tensed.
There was no sign of infection, and when he had cleaned the injury to his satisfaction, Shane patted the area dry with a second hand towel. Then he began wrapping the fresh Ace Bandage around her thigh, trying to make it tight enough to provide support and prevent the wound from bleeding again, but loose enough for some semblance of comfort.
He concentrated on his work, and when he finished, he looked up to find Tracie’s eyes open, unblinking, staring into his. She eased up off the cheap headboard bolted to the wall and leaned forward, moving slowly, deliberately, and then they were kissing, and Shane thought about those pink panties and reached down and pulled off her towel, throwing it to the floor while she fumbled with his belt buckle and the snap on his jeans, and then they were together.
32
Tracie sat perched on a rickety chair, watching the mostly-empty parking lot through a slit in the drapes while Shane dozed. He had fallen asleep despite his protestations he wouldn’t be able to, and now he lay sprawled across the bed, covers tangled around his waist, snoring lightly.
Tracie wondered if she should feel guilty for sleeping with him in the middle of this insanity. After all, they had been thrown together by chance, and when this was all over — assuming they survived; assuming the president survived — Shane would go back to his air traffic control job in Maine and she would return to Langley for another assignment. She had no idea where that assignment might take her, but felt pretty certain it would not be Bangor, Maine.
So, yes, she thought, she probably should feel guilty. But she didn’t. Her life for the last seven years had consisted of training, work, and more work, most of it clandestine and dangerous, and over the course of those seven years, she could count her sexual relationships on the fingers of one hand. And she wouldn’t need most of her fingers.
Then along came what at first glance appeared to be a simple job, a piece of cake once she had escaped East Germany. All she needed to do was babysit an envelope, deliver it to Washington, and then move on to her next assignment. Somewhere along the line, though, things had become immeasurably more complicated, and in the middle of everything, here was this solid, earnest, well-meaning guy who was gorgeous to look at, self-deprecatingly modest, and who had, oh by the way, crawled into a burning airplane to save her life.
The attraction she felt to Shane Rowley was immediate and consuming, and she simply hadn’t been able to stop herself from coming on to him when he finished bandaging her leg. She hadn’t planned what happened between them, not exactly, but her injury was not exactly something she couldn’t have dealt with on her own, either. She had handled much more severe wounds by herself, out of necessity, and could easily have waved Shane off when he insisted on cleaning and bandaging her leg.
So maybe what happened hadn’t quite been spontaneous. Maybe somewhere deep in her subconscious, Tracie had intended to seduce him all along, but either way he didn’t seem to mind. She smiled, thinking about the frenzied lovemaking of their initial encounter, and then a slower, more sensual second round just a few minutes later.
She glanced across the room at Shane’s sleeping form, and when she looked back out at the parking lot, the smile froze on her face before turning into a frown of concentration. A late-model Chevrolet Impala was creeping past the motel office, lights off. From this distance and in the poor lighting, she couldn’t make out the color, but the vehicle looked black or dark blue, or maybe green. It wasn’t the car the Russians had used earlier — she had scanned all of the cars in the Bangor Tower lot by force of habit even as she had been rescuing Shane, and this Impala had not been among them — but that didn’t mean anything. They would undoubtedly have changed cars by now, just as Tracie and Shane had.
She glanced at her watch. It was 3:45 a.m.
The Impala eased into a parking space several slots away from their Granada. Its driver killed the engine. For several long minutes nothing happened. The car’s occupants were being cautious, eyeing the surrounding environment, alert for any movement or anything out of the ordinary.
Tracie knew they couldn’t see her in the darkened room. She waited, tense, her weapon held in her right hand, her body ready to move.
Finally, both front doors on the Impala opened at the same time and two men stepped out. The car’s interior lighting had been disabled. The doors they left ajar. The men were dressed entirely in dark clothing, identical watch caps covering their heads, grease paint tamping down any sheen from their white faces.
Tracie’s heart dropped, and the sadness she had felt earlier returned with a vengeance. Winston Andrews, her mentor and father figure, had betrayed her.
She forced herself to push her feelings aside. She needed to focus. She could come back and mourn her lost relationship with the traitor Winston Andrews later. If she survived.
The two men outside moved slowly, scanning the parking lot while moving steadily toward the dummy motel room with the Granada parked nose-in toward the door. Tracie backed silently away from the window and bent over the bed. She gently shook the slumbering Shane. “It’s going down,” she whispered. “Stay here and keep quiet. If things go bad, get to the car and get the hell out of here. Find a police station and turn yourself in.”
He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and nodded once. Tracie crossed the tiny room in a few steps and slipped into the bathroom. Built into the rear wall was a small window just large enough for Tracie to wriggle through. She had cut the screen away earlier and the window stood open for quick access, the cool early-June night air filling the room with the tang of ocean salt. Tracie stepped onto the closed toilet cover, braced an arm on either side of the window frame, and boosted herself through.
She dropped to the ground noiselessly, the long wooden motel building shielding her from sight of the parking lot. Three steps and she had arrived at the back end of the structure. Less than thirty seconds had elapsed since she had moved away from the picture window. She peeked around the corner. Sixty feet away, shrouded in shadow, the two Russians had arrived at the front of the dummy motel room. One of the men was bent over the doorknob working on the lock, while the other man stood facing outward, keeping watch.