It was empty. He was gone. Again.
A cramp the size and pain of ten charley horses stabbed through her middle and she doubled over, dry heaving on the pavement in front of the convenience store. She’d indeed lost her freaking mind.
* * *
Rob made his way out of the men’s room toward where he’d spied Trina ordering food on the fancy terminal. She was gone, and he looked out the store window to see her bent over just outside the doors, plastic bags clutched in the hands that grasped her knees.
Drat.
He walked as fast as his aching, pounding body allowed, out into the afternoon sunlight. He winced as heard her strangled heaves, the blanket of humidity wrapping around him again.
“Trina.”
She was throwing up, the puppy on some kind of makeshift tether she held, but nothing was coming out of her mouth. Dry heaves.
“Trina.” He tried again, placed his hand on her shoulder. “I think you’re dehydrated. You need water.” The puppy jumped and tried to get to their faces, as if this were a game.
“I thought you were gone.” Her tortured whisper reached him, even though she was bent over. Hell. He’d already put her through it once, and she thought he’d done it again after only an hour or two together. Guilt dug its long claws into his conscience, and he had to bite the inside of his mouth to keep from spilling his guts.
“I’m right here, Trina.”
Her body stopped convulsing within seconds of him touching her. She slowly straightened, her face as white as the ice freezer behind them. Her eyes blazed with an intensity of emotion he’d thought was reserved for wartime.
“You mother—” To her credit she stopped herself, straightened her spine fully and gulped in large breaths. She reached down for the puppy and hugged him to her chest.
“Just hitting you, huh?” Obviously the trauma of seeing him again had cost her more than she’d let on. He was still trying to process the fact that she’d barely blinked as they outran Vasin. And she had to have recognized him almost immediately. A pain deep in his chest lit a flame of compassion. Now that was an emotion he hadn’t allowed himself to feel in a long time. Trina was shaking with her suffering. And he hated himself, knowing he’d caused it.
“You’ve been here all along. Capable of finding me.” She spat out the last, her anger building from a boil to vaporizing steam. And he knew whom she’d like to zap off the planet. He reached out to her as a large horn blare from an eighteen-wheeler ripped through the sultry air, startling both of them.
Damn it, he’d forgotten that they were both still targets of ROC. He never allowed anything to keep him off his mission. He’d never cared for anyone as he had Trina, either. He’d have to go over it later, mentally. How, no matter how many women he’d casually dated off and on since Trina, he’d never forgotten her. No one compared.
“Get in the car, Rob.” Her demand cut through his pangs of regret, and she stalked off. No offer to help him as he half ran, half limped back to the tiny car. She waited for him next to the open back door. “Hold the dog.” Once inside he held the squirming pup on his lap but otherwise took Trina’s lead. Save for noisily gulping the bottle of water she handed to him, then sharing it with the clumsy puppy, he remained silent.
Within twenty minutes of leaving the filling station, Trina turned into the parking lot of an auto rental place where she exchanged the economy model for a huge, honkin’ SUV.
She spoke not a single word to him, her only acknowledgment of his presence when she held the front passenger door of the SUV open, motioning for him and the dog to get in. It wasn’t fun, climbing into the large bucket seat with his battered bones, but he did it. To show her or himself he could, he wasn’t sure. He found himself more than willing to take out any punishment she’d give him. Which was downright stupid. No amount of abuse from Trina would ever make up for what his presumed death had obviously done to her. The pup curled up on the back seat, as if the emotionally charged day had worn him out, too.
They continued their silent journey on a less-traveled highway that paralleled the main routes. Rob went along with Trina’s zero communications policy until she turned on the radio and played a country station at full blast. The Garth Brooks tune he could deal with, as well as the Miranda Lambert ode to all the bastards she’d ever dated. But when a melancholy, I’ll-never-love-anyone-else ballad began, he pushed the power button and cut the artist off midtwang.
“Just hitting you, Rob?” Her words cut like a bayonet, eliminating any doubt that she’d been as slain by their forced breakup as he had.
“Baby cakes, it hit me the minute I saw you with your new man and baby.” Shoot. Double crap. Holy counterintelligence. He’d just spilled his guts to her. Maybe it was time to get out of covert ops, after all.
“You spied on me?” Her tan hands, naturally olive by birth and deepened by the sun’s kisses, gripped the wheel of the large vehicle, and he was so damned grateful they were busy. Because he had no doubt she’d wrap them around his throat if she could, and he wasn’t sure he’d stop her. Or if he wanted to stop her.
Because he felt lower than dirt. He didn’t deserve her in the desert, and didn’t deserve her when he’d gone to find her the first time.
“It wasn’t spying. I intended to talk to you.”
* * *
Unexpected tears burned like Mace against Trina’s eyeballs, and she damned them to hell. She’d shed more than her share of tears over a man she’d thought dead and buried.
“Wait—I visited your grave at Arlington. Who’s in there?”
He looked straight ahead for once, a relief since he hadn’t stopped staring at her since they’d driven from the rental place. “No one. It was a cover-up.”
“Cover-up for what?”
“I worked for the Agency right after. It was the perfect time to do so.”
“The CIA? But that’s not such a secret that you couldn’t come find me, tell me that you were using a pseudonym.”
“I did find you. You were otherwise involved.”
His explanation was making no sense.
“Where did you find me?”
“Norfolk. You were still living there—on shore duty.”
“That was almost two years after, after...”
“After I was ‘killed’?” He made air quotes around the word, and she almost laughed. Then remembered how pissed she was at him, how ugly this whole situation was. Not including that they were hiding out, on the run from ROC’s top members.
“Go on.”
“I was detained for a while, and then had some physical rehab to contend with.” What he didn’t say, the obvious mental anguish he must have faced, concerned her more. But he wasn’t volunteering, and she wasn’t admitting she cared.
“And?”
“And I was on your street, across from your town house, waiting for you to get home from work. It was a beautiful day, the sun shining, the wind cold as the North Pole. You pulled in your driveway and got out, and lifted your kid out of the back seat.” He shook his head stiffly, and she thought the little gasps he was letting out through his bruised face were laughter. Until she risked a quick sideways glance and saw the single tear, pointed like a knife, sliding down over his enlarged, purpled cheek. This tear wasn’t from tear gas.
“You didn’t like seeing me with a child?” It could have been anyone’s; how did he know it was hers? He clearly didn’t know the real truth of it. That the baby