Okay, something that didn’t take a lot of time, because she had work to do. She threw some bacon into the microwave, scrambled some eggs, and slapped slices of bread into the toaster. Breakfast would take ten minutes, max.
As she was plating the eggs, reality hit her smack between the eyes.
She’d been busy, pressed to lay in adequate supplies for him, and she’d been cooking for him, doing his laundry. She’d been knocked off her stride by his arrival, then the bakery incident, and all the extra work that taking care of him entailed. That was the only explanation she had for the fact that she’d asked almost no questions, had no idea really who she’d let into her house, knew nothing about him other than the scant information he and Axel had given her at the very first.
Well, that was easily remedied. As soon as he came out of the bathroom, freshly showered and shaved, dressed in an olive-drab tee shirt and black cargo pants that barely hung on him even with a belt, she said, “Are you a spy or something?” What he was was important because that was the reason why he was so thin, why he was here.
He flicked a glance at her but didn’t pause as he went to the counter and picked up the cup of coffee she’d set aside for him. “Starting to have some questions, huh?” He leaned one hip against the cabinet and eyed her over the lip of the cup as he sipped.
“A bit late, but yeah.” She wondered if he’d answer any of her questions, or if she could believe him if he did. Spies lied for a living, right?
“No, I’m not a spy.”
“If you were, you’d lie,” she pointed out as she divided the slices of bacon onto their plates, then got out another plate and began buttering the toast and stacking the slices on it.
“True. Though if I were, you’d be smarter not to point that out.”
His calm admittance was either annoying or gratifying, and she couldn’t decide which. She wanted to believe him; she wanted to think she was doing a good thing, even if she was being paid well to do it. Too bad there was literally no way she could know for certain; all she could do was go with what she thought was most probable. “I think it’s too late for smart-you’re already here. But if you aren’t a spy, then why were you ambushed?”
“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. We don’t know.”
She put down the butter knife for a sip of her own coffee while she considered that. “You work for the government, so you assume it’s job related. Could it be personal?”
“Not likely.”
“You’ve lived such a pristine life, huh?”
Amusement quirked his mouth. “I didn’t say that. But I don’t have any psycho exes, haven’t gotten into any fights with the neighbors, anything that could be a trigger. I’d been out of the country for a few months, and after I caught up on my sleep, I went fishing. Someone hacked the state files and tracked me using my boat registration number. Let’s eat while we talk; our food is getting cold.”
He set down his coffee and picked up the plates of eggs and bacon, taking them to the table. When he’d first arrived he’d looked like a wreck, not anyone’s idea of a James Bond type, but with just a few days of recuperation and steady food he was moving better, she thought, still slow but with more confidence. She was beginning to see an animal grace in the way his muscles worked that reminded her all over again that this man lived a life that was totally alien to hers.
She pushed away the thoughts about how he moved and worked through what he’d said. If the attack had been personal, then almost assuredly the attacker would have known where he lived and wouldn’t have had to hack any files. “Okay, so it’s the job.”
“Yeah. And the shooter was Russian mob, but he’d hired out for an outside job.”
That stopped her. She set down her cup and stared accusingly at him. “You said you didn’t know who shot you.”
“Clarification: we know who did the shooting because I nailed his ass. What we don’t know is who hired him. Whoever it was could get inside state files, which in itself isn’t that hard, but our-ah-agency files were also hacked, and that not only took a high level of expertise, but also knowledge that the files even exist.”
That information gave her pause. “Nailed his ass” was a euphemism, she assumed, for “killed.” This man had killed. Deep down she’d known it, simply from the way he’d gone for her throat when she’d startled him, and also because he’d been shot. She’d never before known anyone who was shot. Accidents happened, and people were shot because they were involved in crime or someone close to them was, but she got the feeling firearms and violence were a constant part of this man’s life.
She blew out a breath. “You said you aren’t a spy, but you said ‘agency.’ Are you freakin’ CIA, or not?”
“Not.”
“Then what are you? Or is this one of those ‘I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you’ deals?”
“No, I’m not covert, or black ops. I’m former military-”
Boy, was that a surprise. Not.
“-but now I’m paramilitary. More freedom to act. We’re organized into teams, government sanctioned, and we handle crises before they blow up into catastrophes.” While they were talking, she’d gotten the plate of toast and jelly, and he’d made a return trip for the two cups of coffee. He set hers beside her plate. She took the seat she always took; he slid into the one he’d appropriated, to her right. For the first time she wondered if he’d deliberately selected that particular seat because it faced the windows and door. He was unarmed so she didn’t know how much good it did to be able to see any approaching danger-not that they had to actually see if anything or anyone was outside because they had Tricks, who could hear things way before they could. She was an excellent alarm system.
The alarm system, attracted by the food, came to the table and curled up on the floor beside Bo’s feet.
“So do you think this was connected to your last mission, whatever it was?”
“Not likely.”
Impatiently she said, “Do you have any idea?”
“No. I’ve been over and over everything I did that day, and nothing pings. I talked to four people, unless you count the cashier at the supermarket where I stopped, which would make five. There was nothing unusual about the four, nothing that has shown up in Mac’s investigations. But because the agency files were hacked, that means someone knew what I do for a living and where I work.”
His delivery was calm and analytical, punctuated by bites of food. He sounded more as if he were discussing an academic problem than something that had almost gotten him killed.
She didn’t understand that perspective, unless being shot at was so commonplace he took it for granted. She couldn’t imagine that kind of life, or the type of person who deliberately chose it. “If it isn’t personal, then it’s either something you did, or something you saw-either on the mission or after you got home. Common sense.”
“I know, but I got nothing. If I saw something, I didn’t know what I was seeing so it didn’t register. Nothing about the mission was unusual. There were screw-ups, but there are always screw-ups, and none of them were major. We went in, we got the job done, we were sent to another hot spot, then to another, and seven weeks after we left, we made it home, everyone alive and in relatively good shape.”
She was operating from a position of ignorance, so there was nothing she could offer him in the way of possibilities that he hadn’t already thought of-he, and Axel, and probably a whole bunch of other people. She was also not entirely accepting of everything he told her, and she saw no reason to be coy about it.
“You could tell me anything,” she pointed out conversationally. “I have no way of telling whether or not you’re lying. For someone in your occupation-if that really is your occupation-you’re being very open about it, not just with me but with Jesse too.”