“What do you want, Cain? Why are you here? How long have you been here?”
“Been here in town?”
“No, here at the restaurant.”
“I just walked in a second ago. Why?”
Hayley studied him for a minute, looking relieved. “Never mind, it doesn’t matter. But what do you want?”
“Why don’t you sit down? You look like you could use a few minutes’ break.”
Hayley’s eyebrows arched but she did what he asked.
“Do you need something to eat?” he asked. She looked like she hadn’t had a solid meal in months. “I could order something for us both.”
She ignored his question. “Why are you here, Cain? I know it’s not to have a meal. I know you’re not stupid enough to come back here for a social visit.”
Cain could feel a muscle tightening in his jaw. “No, I’m here on business.”
He could see her visibly tense. “I haven’t done anything that violates my parole. Haven’t broken any laws.”
Of course that was why she would think he was here. Why wouldn’t she? “No. When I said I was here on business I didn’t mean to arrest you or anything like that. You’re not in any trouble.”
She still didn’t relax. “Fine. Then what did you need to talk to me about? I need to get back to work, Cain. Some of us get paid by the hour.”
“And how many hours a week do you have to work here to make ends meet? You look tired.” He touched her hand lying on the table before he could think better of it.
She snatched it away as if she’d been burned.
“No.” Her voice was hoarse. “You don’t get to be concerned about me. Ever. You gave up that right four years ago.”
“When I had you arrested? You were guilty, Hayley. Guilty of using your computer skills for hacking.”
She laughed, but the sound held no amusement whatsoever. “You know what? I’ve had a long time to think about this. To categorize and figure out exactly how I felt about everything that happened with my arrest and incarceration. You were a federal agent, I was a criminal. It was your job to catch me—I’ve never blamed you for that.”
She slid to the edge of the booth. “When those cops barged into my apartment to arrest me, I wasn’t surprised. I think I’d always known I would eventually get caught.”
Cain wanted to feel relief that she didn’t blame him. That she understood he’d been doing his job. But he knew there was more.
She stared at him. He almost wished it was with fury rather than the exhaustion that seemed to blanket both her body and spirit. “Then I saw you. Realized you were the one in charge of the investigation. Realized you had deliberately used the feelings we had for each other, the connection we’d always had, to get close to me.”
He started to interrupt, but she held out a hand to stop whatever he might say.
“You seduced me in order to arrest me, Cain. And it nearly cost me everything.” Hayley stood. “So whatever business it is you want to talk to me about? Forget it. We have nothing to say to each other.”
The next morning before the sun was even up, Cain sat in the diner a few blocks away from the Bluewater Grill. Hayley was supposed to meet him here in twenty minutes.
She damn well better show up. When she’d walked away yesterday, he’d let her go. But he’d stayed, had lunch, even suffered through an hour of reminiscing with Timothy.
When Hayley had come out of the kitchen to refill the ice in the server’s station, he’d caught her glance. He’d seen her big brown eyes widen, then narrow, from all the way across the restaurant.
Eventually she’d made her way back over to him.
“Why are you still here?”
He’d leaned back in the booth like he didn’t have anywhere else in the world to be. “Because you haven’t listened to what I have to say yet.”
For just a second she’d looked at him as though she would like to push him into oncoming traffic. Cain didn’t mind. He would take that any day over how breakable she’d looked a couple of hours before. “Fine. If I listen to you, will you leave?”
“It will take more than two sentences. You’ll have to sit down. Give me a few minutes.”
Hayley had looked over her shoulder at Timothy, who’d been glaring. And just like that the anger was gone. Breakable was back.
“I can’t.” She started loading dishes off his table and putting them in the bin she’d carried out. “I don’t have any more time today.”
Damn it. Cain had wanted to punch something. And it might have been Timothy if he’d started harassing Hayley again. But that would’ve just added to her distress.
“You’re working a double tomorrow, too?” he asked.
She’d nodded and wiped down his table.
“Fine. Meet me for breakfast at the diner down the block in the morning before your shift starts.”
She grimaced. “Fine. Six thirty. You’ll have thirty minutes.”
He’d left after that. Mostly because he couldn’t bear to stay in there and watch Hayley work so hard and look so damn fragile.
Forget the mole, all he wanted to do was steal Hayley away from here, take her to a beach house somewhere and let her just sit out in the sun.
And feed her, for God’s sake. Meal after meal until she finally put enough weight on to be considered thin. And exhaustion and fear didn’t blanket her every expression.
Cain scrubbed a hand over his face. He felt like he was missing some important piece of this puzzle. He could understand why Hayley was working at the Bluewater, and even the difficulty in getting a job. But why the hell was she working herself to the bone? The cost of living in Georgia wasn’t so high that she needed to work eighty hours a week to get by.
What the hell had happened to her? Had life in prison been that bad? Or adjusting back into society that difficult? Hayley was so damn smart. He’d halfway thought she would use her time incarcerated to plan a new business or get her college degree. Maybe the no-computers decree had disrupted whatever plans she’d made.
She obviously needed money in a pretty desperate way. Omega was willing to pay her a hefty consultant’s fee for her help in catching the mole.
Of course, Cain was also going to have to carefully watch where that money was being spent. There weren’t a lot of good reasons he could think of that would have her working herself into the ground, but there were a lot of bad ones.
Buying her way back into the den of hackers was the most obvious. Maybe she had to have a certain dollar amount by the time her computer restrictions were lifted on her parole.
Cain’s hands clenched into fists. He’d be damned if he was going to let her drop back into that life again.
So maybe this mission was going to serve more than one purpose: catch the mole inside Omega and save Hayley from herself.
But first she had to show up this morning. Even if it was only so Cain could feed her.
He got a cup of coffee and put in an order for a full breakfast for both of them about ten minutes before Hayley was scheduled to arrive. He wasn’t going to let not having enough time be an excuse not to eat. Although he was hoping to talk her out of going to work altogether. The consultant’s fee would