Blamed (4 page)

So even though she kept her arm securely around his waist, and even though they kept moving down the stairwell toward the cold outdoors, Beth pressed the muzzle of her Beretta into his uninjured side. “I hope you’re a good speller, pal.”

His sigh sounded...sad. But that didn’t make sense. “I’m the man who’s meant to kill you.”

Chapter Three

There were worse things than having a gun held on him by a beautiful woman, he supposed. Such as glancing down in time to watch the pink heat drain from her honey-gold skin when he told her he was supposed to kill her.

That
was worse.

He sucked in a breath as they hit the street, the chilly night air swirling around them as Beth hustled him to the other side of the block. “Not sure going back to yours is the best idea,” he mumbled, hissing as each step jarred the wound in his side. He hadn’t been lying when he told her it was a flesh wound, but he could feel the bullet lodged against his lowest rib, pinching and scraping and being generally uncomfortable.

She shouldered open the front door to her building. “Do you want me to get that bullet out of you or not?”

“I do,” he grated as they ascended the stairs. “But we’ve got a limited window before they send someone to do my job for me.” He let her push him into her apartment, taking a seat at the dining room table while she set the alarm and locked the door.

“And by
job
, you mean me, right?” She didn’t look at him as she dropped his briefcase to the floor and disappeared down the hall, emerging a moment later with a hefty black nylon case that resembled an oversized lunch cooler. Drawing his surrendered gun from the waistband of her jeans, she replaced it with hers, setting his Ruger aside on the kitchen counter before she unzipped the case and began pulling out various medical supplies: latex gloves, sterilization pads, tweezers, an actual suture gun.

Thirty seconds later, she was kneeling next to his chair. “Lift your hand and take off your shirt.”

“Bossy. I like it.” But he complied, yanking his tie over his head, unbuttoning and shrugging off his shirt, and was relieved to find that the bleeding had slowed to a trickle.

Dark-lashed hazel eyes glared up at him, their gold-speckled gray flashing under the light of the chandelier above the table. “You flirt with me, I make this hurt. Understand?”

“What about the phrase, ‘Do no harm?’”

Ripping open a sterilization packet, she snorted, wiping away the mess surrounding the wound. “Do I look like a doctor to you?” A small pile of bloody wipes started to grow on the dining table. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“Question?” He was having trouble focusing, which could be due to any number of reasons: his employer had just tried to kill him, he’d lost a decent amount of blood from a gunshot to his side...he was shirtless in Beth Faraday’s apartment and she was touching him. Of the possibilities, blood loss seemed the safest choice, really.

Holding a piece of gauze beneath the wound, she reached for the tweezers. The look on her sweetly ovular face was one part frustration, one part worry, and two parts I-want-to-punch-you-in-the-balls. That expression shouldn’t make her prettier. “You’re supposed to kill me, huh? Then I’m assuming your agency is behind the hit. You tell me you quit your job, whatever the hell that means, but the hit’s still there, right?” Without warning, she slid the tweezers into the wound. “Right.”

He swore, loudly and repeatedly, eyes stinging as excruciating pain stole his breath, but her torture lasted only a minute, and then the pressure on his rib lessened as she drew out the bloody bullet. Using the gauze to staunch the flow of fresh red, she dropped the tweezers and bullet on the pile atop the table. “Who do you work for, Barnes? CIA? NSA? No way you’re FBI,” she murmured, more to herself than to him, “you’re too subtle to be a Fed.”

Barnes. He hated her calling him that. Preston Barnes was imaginary, as were all the other names he’d used over the years. Sharing his real name wasn’t an option, even if he had technically given Management his resignation. Like any good spy, an alias and appropriate documentation waited for him in the wings, separate from his former employer, his bank account, et cetera. As soon as this strange interlude in Beth’s apartment came to a close, he could gather what he needed and fall neatly into the new life he’d created for himself.

Not unlike what Beth had chosen to do a year earlier.

So instead of answering, he studied her. It was habit to watch her; the past six months of his life had been spent watching her, after all, day and night, night and day. His orders were never to approach, but to insinuate himself peripherally...and wait until the order came through.

The order had come through two days ago.

He’d bought himself—and Beth—some time. Turned down the thermostat in the flat across the street, closed up the cover office he kept in a high rise in the Loop, knowing the space would rent again immediately upon the lease running out, given the view of the Art Institute’s majestic lions. Part of him would miss the days he’d spent in that office, cameras and scopes trained on the entrance and exits of the museum, not to mention the surveillance equipment planted in her little white-walled office.

Her door read
Beth Bernard
,
Assistant Curator
,
Impressionist Art
. Every once in a while, one of his cameras would catch her staring at the words etched on her office door, a wistful smile on her face. As though she couldn’t quite believe this was her life. As though she were spectacularly grateful that it was.

He’d tossed his phone and laptop and purchased new with cash this morning, but not before sending a succinct message to Management.

Fuck you.

Yes. “Succinct” covered it quite nicely.

Gaze rapt on her as she rose from her crouch, he permitted her to place his hand over the gauze, keeping pressure on the seeping wound while she grabbed the suture gun and flexible bandages from the counter. Beth moved with an economy of motion that screamed—to him, anyway—of her training as a human weapon. To anyone else, she simply appeared to be a confident, graceful woman in her mid-twenties. And she
was
that, of course, but there was so much more to Beth Faraday than met the eye.

Tonight, her straight, dark-brown hair had been swept up in a high ponytail, showing off the colorful bohemian earrings dangling from her lobes. She wore a delicate blouse of midnight silk and dark jeans that molded to every inch of her endless legs. The file Management provided him claimed she was five-eight, but Beth was a woman who loved her high heels—the only time he had ever seen her in flat shoes in the past half a year was during exercise, until tonight. Slender yet deceptively strong, she’d taken his weight easily tonight on the dash from his place to hers, and he wished he’d had more presence of mind to enjoy having her amazing body tucked against his.

Even if she had been holding a gun on him at the time.

Speaking of guns.... “Don’t stitch me closed.” When she gave him a questioning look, the gray plastic suture gun already held in one gloved hand, he nodded at the stack of bandages. “If you have any saline on hand, use that to flush it out, then bandage it. Sewing up a GSW increases the risk of infection.”

A blush spread over her cheekbones, even going to so far as to redden the tip of her upturned nose. “I knew that.” She placed the suture gun back in the case, then braced her hands against the counter. Her head drooped between her shoulders. “I swear I knew that. Or I used to.”

Something tightened in his chest at her tone. “It’s okay.”

She looked at him, lush pink lips twisting in a grimace. “It’s really not.”

Deciding no response was the best response, he kept silent as she snagged a sealed plastic bottle from the case, along with more gauze and a handful of bandages. She knelt again, and this time, with the pain seriously lessened by the removal of the bullet, he could appreciate having her near.

It had been so damn long since he’d been this close to her, shirtless and feeling her breaths puff against his naked rib cage. Since he’d felt her fingertips play over his sensitized skin. Christ, he ached for her, as he had done every day for...hell, for
years.

And she didn’t have a fucking clue.

He laughed the second the saline hit the wound—not because it was funny, but because it was laugh or cry, and crying was absolutely not an option around her. Her touch remained gentle as she irrigated him, wiping away the excess fluid and blood streaming down over his hip and staining the waist of his trousers. More gauze patted him dry, followed by a breathable adhesive bandage, and then she was moving away from him, gathering the trash and tools and making quick work of the cleanup.

Slipping his arms back into his sleeves, he kept the shirt unbuttoned over his chest and propped his elbows on the table. His eyes slid closed as he rested his forehead on his clasped hands and listened to Beth move about the kitchen: the zip of the case, the snap of latex gloves being yanked off, water in the sink, a cabinet opening and swinging shut. A quiet
clink
sounded next to him, and he opened his eyes to see that she’d set a glass of water and four white pills near his elbow. Grunting his thanks, he tossed back the painkillers and drained the water.

When he finally glanced up, he found her sitting across the table from him, body language casual and Beretta pointed directly at his chest. “Ah. I see. I forgot to say thank you.”

“Har har, funny guy.”

His lips twitched, but his voice was appropriately serious as he said, “Thank you, sincerely.” Performing surgery on oneself was, generally speaking, heinous, and regardless of how this evening turned out—judging by the gun pointed at him, it might still require him to bleed—he was thankful she had relieved him of that particular burden.

Beth inclined her head, but her mercurial eyes remained hard. “Do I even want to know how you ended up in the bathtub?”

“Probably not.” The shooter had caught him by surprise, the fiery bullet punching him in the gut as he stumbled back from the table, struggling to retrieve his Ruger from the briefcase. For a moment, his mind had blanked, forgetting who he was and why he was being shot at, and he’d given chase without thought, grappling with the intruder all the way into the bedroom. One solid punch had sent him sprawling into the bathtub, however, and, dazedly, he’d stayed down, bleeding and dizzy.

He supposed he should consider himself lucky he hadn’t received another round in his head and two in his chest for his troubles.

“You gonna tell me who you work for?” She stroked a finger along the barrel of her gun, almost absentmindedly, he thought, unable to tear his gaze from that slender digit with its nail painted a deep fire-engine red. Fingernail polish and firearms—two things he always associated with this woman.

Schooling his expression, he responded, “I’m unemployed,” spreading his hands in a
what-can-you-do
gesture.

“No, you’re a smart-ass. I don’t think I’m in the mood for smart-assery this evening.” That stroking finger never ceased its slow back-and-forth over her weapon.

“Oh?” He couldn’t seem to help the way his voice lowered, roughened. “What are you in the mood for, then?” His hand itched to cover hers atop the gun, to feel the contrast between cool metal and warm skin. The latex gloves had stolen that small, heated intimacy from him, with a cruelty only he realized.

Because only he remembered how it had been between them, once upon a time. Him and Beth, year after year, clashing and coming together until circumstance demanded they part.

Six months. He’d lived across the street from her for six months, and in all that time, she hadn’t recognized him. It didn’t matter that he knew he looked different now—in coloring, features and build, he was undeniably different. And yet undeniably him.

It gouged him a little deeper with every breath that she couldn’t see
him
when he smiled at her in the Starbucks line. He lived for those mornings, once or twice per week, when he risked following her closely enough to stand behind her in line and catch the cinnamon-and-vanilla scent of her hair as she ordered her tall soy latte.

Her gaze narrowed on him. “I’m in the mood to know why you’re still here, since you disobeyed what I’m assuming were direct orders. Why were you in your flat tonight, Barnes?”

Again, he gritted his teeth against that stupid, bloody name. “I was going to leave town.” It would have been so easy to get in the car he had stashed in long-term parking at one of Chicago’s poorer hospitals, slide into a new persona, and drive for Canada. Or maybe Mexico.

“So why didn’t you?”

It might have been his imagination, but he’d swear he heard a faint tremor in her voice, her smooth whiskey voice that still carried a hint of Boston in its depths. So he answered her honestly. “I stayed...to protect you.”

A pretty, pretty pink rose in her cheeks. “You want to protect me. From the kill order your employer placed on me.”

“
Former
employer.” He couldn’t stress that enough. Fifteen years of covert service to his country, sacrificing any chance of personal happiness for the so-called greater good, down the proverbial drain with a single, two-word text. For her.

If he’d blinked, he would have missed the gun trembling in her hand before she steadied it. “Why?”

“Why what?”

The fine line of her jaw moved as her teeth clenched. “Why now? Why the hit now?” She rushed on before he could respond. “I’m going to hazard a guess you’re CIA, given your talent at blending in and the fact that you haven’t tried flashing some sort of badge at me. You’ve been watching me for months, so you know,
you know
, that I’m not in the life anymore. I haven’t taken a single job in a year, and I have zero intention of working for the family business ever again. So why now? You have to know that, in doing this, the Agency will lose every single Faraday resource you’ve got—and that’s a helluva lot of resources. Gillian and Adam and Casey, they will all be gone, whether you succeed in killing me or not.” Beth shook her head, a confused frown knitting her smooth forehead. “This makes no sense. So I want to know
why.
”

It was the most she’d said to him since—Well, since
before
, and it made the wound in his side throb. She was pleading with him, whether she knew it or not, which was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.