Paula Graves - Kentucky Confidential

This was a mission, she realized as she closed the bathroom door behind her. Not a man looking for his missing wife, but a soldier on assignment. That was why he was so distant.

He was looking at her as his job, not his wife.

Shaking from a combination of cold and delayed reaction, she stared into the wide hazel eyes of the pregnant woman in the cabinet mirror and realized she’d never felt so alone in her life.

* * *

NO EMOTIONS. EMOTIONS are messy and unreliable.

Connor gazed out the window at the street below. The snow had started again, coming down in light flurries. He was glad they were out of the cold for the night.

“Am I staying?”

Risa’s soft alto sent a shiver rippling down his spine. He turned to find her standing in the doorway, one shoulder leaning against the frame. The docile young Kaziri widow was gone, and the clear-eyed CIA agent he’d fallen for three years ago had taken her place.

“I don’t think you should risk going back to your apartment.”

“I don’t have a change of clothes.”

“I have a shirt you can borrow.” He regretted the words even as they slipped between his lips, for they reminded him of long, sweet nights of lovemaking, followed by lazy mornings with Risa wandering around their apartment in his shirt and little else.

She ran her hand over the large bulge of her stomach. “Make it a big shirt.”

He wasn’t going to ask. He wasn’t. If she had something to tell him about the baby, she would.

Wouldn’t she?

The Risa he’d known would have played it straight with him. Always.

But the Risa he’d known wouldn’t have let him believe she was dead when she wasn’t.

“You must have so many questions,” she murmured, walking slowly toward him. She was trying to play it cool and sophisticated, the sexy spy in control, but carrying around a baby inside her was apparently hell on the femme fatale act. She still looked sexy, but in an earth-mother sort of way, all fecund beauty and softness.

He couldn’t hold back a smile. “You can drop the act, Risa. You just can’t sell it with that beach ball you’re carrying under that dress.”

She stopped, looking uneasy. “Why aren’t you asking the obvious questions?”

He played dumb. “What are the obvious questions?”

“How did you survive the plane crash, Risa?”

“How did you survive the plane crash, Risa?”

“I never got on the plane.” She took another step.

“Why didn’t you call me, Risa?”

He stayed quiet that time, struggling to control a potent storm of anger and hurt churning in his chest.

“Dalrymple pulled me off the flight. He told me there was a price on my head and I needed to lie low. Then we heard the plane crashed.”

He looked at her through narrowed eyes, wondering if he could trust what she was saying. It was so pat. So obvious. Hell, maybe she even believed the story herself. Maybe Martin Dalrymple really had pulled her off the plane and told her about a price on her head. The plane crash immediately after his warning was a convincing touch.

A little too convincing, maybe.

“You think I haven’t wondered the same thing?” she asked softly, moving another step closer. If he reached out now, he could touch her. Pull her close to him the way he had out in the cold alley. Feel her heart beating against his chest once more, something he’d thought he would never experience again. “You think I didn’t wonder if Dal was pulling a scam on me?”

But he kept his hands by his side. “Dalrymple isn’t known for his truthfulness.”

“I know.” She put her hand on her belly. “But if he wasn’t lying—I couldn’t take the chance. There was too much at stake. Not just me.”

His gaze fell to where her hand cupped her round belly, despite his determination to remain unaffected. “You mean the baby?”

“I didn’t know I was pregnant when I agreed to play dead.” Her voice was soft, her tone sincere. “I found out almost a month later. But you’d already held the memorial service. You’d left the Marine Corps.”

“So, what? You decided that what I didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me?”

“No, of course not—”

“Because it did.” His grasp on his emotions broke, and a flood of anger and old grief poured into his throat, threatening to choke him. “It hurt like all hell. It still does. Every damn day.”

Her face crumpled. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry you let me believe you were dead?” He closed the distance between them in one furious step. “Or sorry that I found out you weren’t?”

She put her hand on his chest. His brain told him to shake off the touch, but the feel of her palm warm against his sternum, so damn familiar and longed for, nearly unmoored him.

He closed his hand over hers, holding it against his chest. “Do you have any idea what it was like, hearing you’d died on that plane?”

“I’m sorry.” Tears spilled down her cheeks, unchecked. “I wanted to let you know, but Dal said you were in danger—”

“Dal said.” He spat the man’s name with contempt, his anger finding an easier target. “I don’t give a damn what Dal said. You told me you were quitting, Risa. We agreed. We were done. It’s why you were on your way home from Kaziristan in the first place.”

“I know, but—”

“We had a life planned, Risa! You and me and a house of our own in a place we both loved instead of living out of suitcases and passing in the airport, remember?”

She wiped her eyes with her knuckles. “I remember.”

He raked his fingers through his hair, trying not to let his emotions get the best of him. Focus, Marine. “Who were the men you were following?”

“I don’t know,” she answered. She sounded as if she was telling the truth, but he realized he just couldn’t be certain. Not anymore.

“So why were you following them?” he asked.

She moved toward the window, standing just a little short of it, as if she worried she might be seen from the street. “I shouldn’t have come here. People will notice if I don’t go home. In some ways, living in an immigrant community can be like living in a small town. Everybody keeps an eye out for everybody else.”

He noticed that she had formed a habit of rubbing her belly when she spoke, as if she was soothing the child inside. He didn’t want to ask the next question, but he had to.

“Am I the father, Risa?”

* * *

RISA HAD BEEN expecting the question. Dreading it, because of what it would mean. But she hadn’t realized how much his show of distrust would hurt, even as she understood why he harbored it.

“You’re the father,” she said simply, because anything else would only exacerbate his doubts.

“And you weren’t ever going to tell me I had a child?”

“Honestly, Connor, I hadn’t thought that far ahead.” She turned back to the window. “I was supposed to be on the plane. But Dal had heard chatter that al Adar had put a target on my back. We knew they had people placed in the airports and other means of transportation.”

“So he took you off the plane and sent two hundred and twelve other people to their deaths to fake yours?”

“God, no!” She turned to look at him. “I would never have allowed that. You know that.”

“But it’s what happened, isn’t it?”

He looked so angry, she thought, her own chest tightening in response. Was anger the only feeling he had left for her now?

“He seemed genuinely shocked by the bomb on the plane. Connor, he sent another agent on that plane to take my place so al Adar would think I was going to be landing in San Diego as we planned.”

Pain flashed across his expression. “I was waiting there. For hours. They didn’t tell us right away that something had gone wrong. I got a call from Jason Ridgeway. He’d seen it on the news. A Russian airliner had disappeared somewhere over the Pacific.”