Hard to Trust (19 page)

Adrenaline pumped through his veins even before he removed the painting from the wall and spotted the safe carved between the studs. His fingers trembled as he turned the key. The notion that this might be pivotal to the case loomed large in his mind.

Was she? Wasn't she? Those were the questions circling around his brain until he wanted to scream to make them stop. He had to know, but would he want to know the real answer? So much for his belief that nothing of importance was ever stashed in a safe.

Stacks of money guarded the entrance, almost as if a decoy or distraction for anyone who managed to ferret out the spot. While he didn't bother to count, he'd guess there might be well over a hundred thousand dollars cash. He brushed aside the money and spotted an unassuming-looking file folder in the very back, nearly obscured.

His breath seemed to constrict inside his chest as he flipped through the contents.

Pictures. A hell of a lot of pictures.

Of Tessa.

This wasn't good.

*  *  *

Tessa walked inside the small office as a sense of familiarity rumbled through. Everything about this space spoke of Alex—from the position of the desk and the selection of books housed in shelves along the wall to the CIA coffee cup situated in the middle of the desk. She sucked in a breath and could have sworn she caught a whiff of his aftershave embedded in the room. It was hard to mistake his presence.

A shiver traveled down her spine. She shook off the odd sensation and started on the desk, shuffling through drawers and looking for clues to Alex's very existence as a starting point. After all that had happened, she questioned everything she'd thought was real.

Beneath a stack of computer paper in the bottom drawer she spotted the corner of what looked like a picture frame and pulled it out. Her heart stopped. The picture of the smiling couple encased in an expensive crystal frame had to be recent, based on the small scar cutting through Alex's right eyebrow. He'd given various explanations as to how he'd gotten it, but it was less than six months old.

There was no arguing with Jake any longer about whether or not this was Alex's house. Living proof stared back at her. The beautiful woman with dark hair and eyes standing next to him with her arm wrapped around his waist looked eerily familiar, but she couldn't place from where or when.

Clearly a girlfriend at the very least. But there seemed more in the picture than a simple pose.

She couldn't say how long she stared as the significance of the discovery tunneled deep inside her brain. This wasn't only about Alex and their sham of a friendship. She had little doubt that whatever transpired in Afghanistan and afterward had all been an elaborate lie. The validity of the thought set up as a solid block of truth inside her gut. Memories floated around her head like fireflies. She needed to get a grip.

Instead of getting derailed, she took in each and every detail and committed it to memory. Alex wore a dark suit and tie, while the woman wore what appeared to be an off-white tea-length dress.

It almost looked like…a marriage photo. Had Alex married and not told her about it?

Pictures spoke a thousand words, or in this case, more like a million. The connection between Alex and the woman was unmistakable, their closeness not faked for the camera. The ease of their mutual smiles, the intimate touch of their hands on each other.

Okay, so he'd committed a lie of omission. Given their closeness that pill was difficult to swallow, but she could deal with the concept intellectually.

She wasn't in love with Alex in a romantic way and had never been attracted to him in the physical sense. The idea of the two of them getting married was rolling-on-the-floor laughable, but still the pain of this kind of betrayal cut deep. Why hadn't he shared such an important milestone in his life with her? She examined the photo more closely as if that might give her some clues.

Familiarity collided with reason in her brain. She'd seen that woman before. But where? Maybe there was a valid reason why he might not have told her.

Even while that nagging sensation made her want to stare until the time and place came to her, right now that wasn't practical. She'd already found what she'd set out to find, definitive confirmation that Alex had been hiding things from her when he died. What else might he have been hiding? Suddenly the idea of Alex's family circumstances seemed more real to her.

The moment in the desert when she vacillated in and out of lucidity, she could have sworn it was Alex's voice that thundered in the group of men surrounding him, and Behrang had the gun pointed at her head.

Do not kill her.

He'd saved her even while risking his own life. But why would they listen to someone they had captured? That was the real question that she didn't have an answer to. Jake wasn't too far off in his assumption that one untruth snowballed into several. That meant there was more she didn't know about Alex.

She started with the desk, searching through the drawers to see if she might find something of value. Outside the mundane stationery, business cards, and pens
nothing.

Energized now, she moved on to focus on the bookshelves. Alex loved gadgets. Certainly there was something hidden among the shelves that might make everything clearer. She rummaged through the books, coming up empty.

She wanted to know everything. Had their friendship been real or a means to an end as Jake had speculated? She slid the photo out of the frame and stuffed it in her pocket, returning the frame inside the drawer
.

Maybe they were barking up the wrong tree. Thinking about her and Jake as some kind of weird team made her blood boil. Over the course of the last couple of days she'd become way too reliant on his help. And that nonsense had to stop.

Immediately.

Sharing information with him was not in her best interest, regardless of what he'd said or how innocent and charming he seemed. Sniffing out trouble in people with agendas was what she did best. Just because he had saved her neck did not mean he didn't have his own self-interest at heart. Thinking anything else would be naive. He was making a fortune off this assignment. Being paid to protect somebody didn't seem like the most motivating of reasons.

Guarding herself should be her most important job right now. Getting to the bottom of this mess and figuring out how to fix it, her number one priority. She was a smart woman. Top of her class at Virginia Tech, which led to her recruitment.

Figuring this out should be something she could do in her sleep. But why was somebody out to kill her, and what did it have to do with Alex? She couldn't assume there was a connection. It was Jake that planted that seed.

Facial-recognition software might come in pretty darn handy about now.

*  *  *

Jake's heart beat in fits and starts as he rummaged through the file. There were some emails back and forth between Alex and some person named Reddog implicating Tessa as a double agent. It seemed like the plan was to trap her for what she'd done while on the mission in Afghanistan.

Alex had laid the groundwork and orchestrated how the process would work. Her friend. The one person she thought she could trust had worked to see her exposed. Was it because he was being a good American, or was there something else behind his mission? He couldn't decide which was more despicable
Alex playing both sides of the game to expose her or Tessa's duplicity.

There were pictures to back up his claims. Photos that told a damning tale of her alleged misdeeds. Then there was a photo of her with a gun aimed at Eli. Photos never told the whole story, but these were still damning, and it was hard to think anything other than the fact she'd killed a fellow agent.

His brother had nearly died under the same circumstances. A woman he'd trusted had sold out to the highest bidder and set Jake and his siblings up for murder. He knew all about being in that position, worried when the other shoe was going to fall and wondering if the three of them would spend the remainder of their lives in prison.

The memory of that night sent a shiver clear through his body. Even the possibility that Tessa did something similar sickened him. He forged through the memories and did what he'd come there to do.

He took pictures of the emails with his phone, but grabbed the envelope and shoved the worst of the pictures inside the pocket of his jacket. When he touched the envelope from Trevor Lang's widow, still there, he stopped. He couldn't go there now.

If there were any questions, he needed the photos implicating Tessa. But he had to wonder…if the photos were taken while she was killing another agent in cold blood, why didn't somebody stop her? Unless they were done automatically through cameras hidden as part of the operation. But if that were true, how did they get in Alex's possession after his death? Why didn't the CIA have them?

But if it happened the same time as the wound in her shoulder, how did that make sense? From the angle of the wound, it would have been nearly impossible for her to inflict that upon herself. It could have been from an attempt to stop her.

All these questions tumbled through his brain as he tried to separate facts from fiction. Part of him wanted to show the pictures to her to see how she'd react. The other part knew he would compromise the mission if he did.

If he showed her and she was guilty, he'd be able to tell. On the other hand, if he showed them and she was guilty, she might very well try to kill him on the spot. Then again, if he showed them to her and she was innocent, the betrayal of Alex would cut her to the quick. She wasn't taking the news that he'd hidden parts of his life from her well, let alone something like this. The idea that Alex could have potentially framed her seemed to be a possibility if she was as innocent as she seemed to present.

Just as he was closing up the safe, he heard footsteps on the stairs and Tessa whispering, "Holy crap. Somebody just pulled into the garage. We've got to get out."

"How many?" he asked, stalling for time as he tried to think through a plan of escape.

"Two. Somebody must have bought the house after Alex's death. It looks like a man and woman in the car. I saw them and rushed up to tell you." She stopped and pulled him closer as the sound of conversation filtered from below before they'd had a chance to do anything but figure out where to hide. "We're stuck for the time being."

"No doubt they're headed up here, so let's hide in the closet in the spare room. The roof is low enough there we can climb out the window once they fall asleep."

He put his arm around her waist as they rushed together into the closet, leaving the door open a sliver. He felt the rapid beat of her pulse. Some things could be faked, but not a body's reaction to fear. If she was as callous as the file would lead him to believe, what he saw in her didn't make sense. On the other hand, had he become so blinded by her persona that he didn't know the truth when he saw it?

When the woman entering the home giggled, he forced his attention to the task at hand. Sounds of footsteps on the stairs made the couple's destination clear. It sounded like they might be kissing along the way. He and Tessa looked at each other and cringed.

"Dinner was amazing." The voice came from the upstairs hall, and then it sounded like somebody pushed somebody else into the wall before Jake heard kissing sounds and various other prelude-to-sex sounds
like shoes coming off, moaning, and articles of clothing getting unsnapped, unbuckled.