Rachel Lee - Defending the Eyewitness

Corey watched with amazement. He might not be a chef, but he turned into a kitchen wizard right before her eyes. He tossed tortillas into one skillet while he flavored and stirred the beans in another.

“So what brought this on?” he asked.

“What?”

“Tortillas. Cooking them for me.”

“Oh! Well, I was talking to Melinda, and I mentioned that you liked fresh tortillas and it seemed a shame that the only kind you could get around here were the packaged ones from the grocery. Next thing I knew, she was calling and telling me to pick them up. When I got home, I didn’t know whether I needed to refrigerate them or whether they needed to be cooked right away, so...” She shrugged. “It just happened.”

“Thank you both. Do you have a potato masher?”

Jumping up, she pulled it out of the drawer for him and watched him mash the beans. From time to time he added a little water.

“It was really nice of your friend to do this,” he said again. Apparently he was nearly done, because a stack of cooked tortillas made its way to the table.

“She said it was easy. Not nearly as difficult as making a loaf of bread was how she put it. And I was kind of having fun experimenting.”

“Sorry I took your experiment over.”

“I don’t mind. I’m learning.”

Surprisingly soon, they were seated at the table with all the tortillas, a heap of refried beans that made her mouth water, green chilies in a bowl with a serving spoon and a jar of salsa.

“Wow,” she said. “I never thought it could be that fast.”

“Easy meal,” he replied. “It works pretty good with eggs in the morning... Well, like I said, you can put almost anything on a tortilla. It’s basically a rolled-up sandwich.”

The fresh tortillas were so much better than any she had ever eaten. And the refried beans? She’d had them once or twice from a can, ready-made, but these beat any she had ever tasted.

“You made it look so easy,” she said. “And it’s so good!”

He smiled at her, making no apology for his large appetite. “Fresh is best,” he agreed. “It wasn’t a problem in San Antonio, or in Mexico. But I did cheat by getting canned pinto beans.”

“Small cheat. You did everything else. I don’t know where we could get you fresh green chilies, though.”

“Oh, we could probably order them in a quantity suitable for a restaurant.”

She had a mouthful of food and quickly snatched up a napkin as she tried to stifle a laugh.

“I could probably get a friend or a family member to mail some to me, but...” He let that trail off and she saw his gaze grow distant.

It was getting easier for her to be around him as time passed, and she considered that a positive sign. But there was still so much she didn’t know about him, and she wondered how much she dared ask. It was none of her business, after all.

But in the end, she asked, anyway, because it seemed so important. “You aren’t ready to make those contacts again?”

His gaze snapped back to her. “No.” The word was short, but before she could recoil, or feel firmly put in her place, he spoke quickly. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you. It’s just that...” Again he hesitated and trailed off. “You know how it is with people you’ve known your whole life.”

She nodded, not sure where he was headed.

“They’d be full of questions,” he continued, reaching for another tortilla and covering it with beans, chilies and salsa. “I couldn’t answer. They’d want to know what I’ve been doing all these years. Naturally enough. I’m not ready to go home and tell the necessary lies, not to people I care about. And if they suspected any part of the truth and it started to make the rounds...well, I need to wait a while. I wouldn’t want to draw any trouble their way.”

“Could you? Really?” The thought astonished her.

“Probably not. But I want some time to pass first. I want to be long forgotten by the people who knew me when I was undercover.”

“That hardly seems fair to you.”

“Life isn’t fair. I think you know that.”

She did, intimately, but she didn’t want to think about herself right now. “So where do they think you’ve been all this time?”

“Officially I think I was assigned to a mission in Panama.”

“Circles within circles,” she remarked. “Like a maze.”

“That’s the general idea. Other agents on the ground had no idea who I was. That made for some, um, interesting experiences.”

Corey forgot all about eating, instead trying to imagine all of this. If his own side didn’t know who he was...“You could have been killed by your own people!”

“It was a possibility.” His face seemed to go blank, as if there was more that he didn’t want to reveal. She decided maybe she should just let it go. She didn’t want to make him uncomfortable, or remind him of bad things.

“I can hardly imagine being so alone,” she said finally. Although she could, if she let herself. Not for six years, but for a few days or weeks. Even after her grandmother and aunt had brought her back from Denver, she had felt alone. Separated. In an alternate universe. But at least she had been surrounded by people who cared about her. Austin had faced something very different. “So everyone was out to get you?”

“Not everyone, and not all the time.” He managed a slight smile. “It was most dangerous at the beginning, then later at the end when we were getting ready to roll everything up.”

“Did anyone know who you really were?”

“I had a couple of contacts.”

That didn’t seem like very many to her. Gage hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d said Austin had been walking a tightrope. And without much of a net evidently.

“Why did you do it?” she asked bluntly.

“Someone has to and I was especially suited. Obviously.”

“But did you really know what you were getting into?”

“Who does?”

She might have laughed if it hadn’t been so frighteningly true.

“Look,” he said finally, “it’s really like the rest of life. We all leap and then look because there’s no way we can really know what it’s going to be like. We think we know, but we don’t. Knowing what I know now, I’d never do that again.”

She nodded, understanding. “Was any of it good?”

“Plenty. I met lots of great people who had nothing to do with my job. I made friends. I had fun.”

“What about the bad?”

“I learned not to trust. I’m having trouble shaking that.”

“I learned not to trust, too.” She hated to say it out loud, but since he was being so forthcoming, she felt she should be, too.

“Ah,” he said, “but you don’t trust men. Me, I don’t trust anybody.”

Her stomach sank. She hadn’t wanted to hear that, even though she had suspected it. But what difference did it make? she asked herself. She might be sitting here having dinner with him, but she didn’t trust him, either. Not yet. Maybe never. All she felt was an attraction she didn’t want to feel, an awakening of desires she had never actually experienced because she was afraid, yearnings that now troubled her sleep, all because of this man, a man she didn’t trust. Not really.

Why should she trust him? They’d shared a roof for a week, but he’d pretty much stayed out of her way. She had tried to do something neighborly for him with the tortillas, and he’d been neighborly right back by making her a fine meal she would never have thought to make otherwise. But that was it. All of it.

She insisted on doing the washing up because he had cooked. He didn’t argue, simply thanked her and disappeared upstairs. That gave her plenty of time to think.

To think about a man who must be good at making friends, at pretending to be something he wasn’t. How else could he have inserted himself in such a way that he gleaned intelligence that could be gotten by no other means. After all, that was the whole point of going undercover. So if he wasn’t a natural-born liar, he had certainly had to become one.