“Where did you go to high school?” Kane barked the question from his position in a chair at the table.
Cassie paced back and forth in front of her unmade bed, thinking that he sounded like a drill sergeant. “Lincoln High school,” she replied.
“What was your mother’s name?”
“Mary…Mary Sinclair and my father was Joseph. They died in a car accident when I was eighteen and my brother, Jimmy, was eight.”
“What was your address in Des Moines?”
Cassie stopped her pacing, frozen as she drew a blank. She stared at Kane with frustration.
“Bang, you’re dead,” he said.
He was right. It was the kind of lapse in memory that got you killed when you went undercover. She sank down on the edge of the bed, exhausted both mentally and physically. They’d been at it for the past three hours, Kane firing questions and her answering.
“You’re right,” she said tiredly.
“We’ll take a break, eat some dinner, then start again.”
She wanted to protest. What she really wanted to do was curl up in bed and sleep for about ten hours. She’d stayed up most of the night studying the information in the file, then had gotten up before dawn to study some more.
“I feel like a college student cramming for finals,” she said.
He rose from his chair. “Yeah, but in this case if you flunk your final, you might lose your life.”
“I know…I know.”
“So what are you hungry for?”
“I don’t care as long as it isn’t another hamburger.” He’d brought her a burger and fries for lunch. “Surprise me.”
She immediately wanted to call the words back as a muscle in his jaw ticked and his eyes darkened.
“I’ll be back,” he said and left the room.
Cassie rubbed the center of her forehead where a headache threatened to take hold. Surprise me. How many times in their past relationship had they said those words to each other…a hundred? A thousand?
“If we get out of this alive, want me to tell you what I’m going to do to you?” he whispered when they’d been trapped in a cooler on a ship smuggling explosives to the Philippines and left to die.
“No, don’t tell me. Surprise me,” she’d replied.
“Want to know what I’m going to do with you when we get back to your place?” he’d asked, his eyes lit with fires that had burned her from the inside out.
“Surprise me,” she’d whispered breathlessly.
She now got up and began to pace once again in an attempt to erase the past from her mind. So far, Kane certainly hadn’t acknowledged that they’d shared any kind of a past. He hadn’t asked her why she’d left. He apparently had moved on.
It was important that she do the same.
All she had to do was get through these three days in the motel room. After that she’d be undercover and immersed in the job. There would be no time for thoughts of Kane, no time for entertaining any regrets that might plague her even temporarily.
He was back within twenty minutes, bringing with him Chinese takeout. He opened the containers as she got out the paper plates and chopsticks.
Moments later they were seated at the table across from each other, eating in silence that quickly became oppressive and heavy.
“Has the agency kept you busy in the last couple of years?” she asked, unable to stand the silence any longer.
“Fairly busy.” He speared a piece of sweet and sour chicken with one chopstick. Cassie swallowed a smile. He was adroit at almost everything else, but had never mastered the art of chopsticks.
“Domestic or foreign?” she asked, trying to draw him into something that resembled a normal conversation.
“Both. Did you follow the Brahm’s case?”
“The guy in New York selling arms to Iraq?”
He nodded. “We were in on that. It took almost a year to build the case.”
“Tell me about it,” she urged, eager to keep the silence at bay.
To her relief, he did. As he told her the details of the operation that had taken place two years before, his eyes lit with animation and he appeared to relax.
Cassie found herself relaxing as well as the tension between them disappeared at least for the moment. As Kane explained the various operations he’d been a part of for the past five years, Cassie asked questions to keep him talking.
She had always enjoyed Kane when he spoke with passion and conviction, and that’s what he exhibited whenever he talked about the job. The darkness left his eyes and his features softened.
Clad in a pair of tight jeans and a black T-shirt, there was a look of danger about him. His dark hair was carelessly mussed, but that only added to his attractiveness.
As he filled her in on his work over the last five years, she found herself wondering about his personal life. He told her where he’d been and what he’d done for the job, but he didn’t mention anything about the days, weeks and months that he wasn’t working on an operation or in recovery from his bullet wound.
When they’d been together, they’d spent much of their off time in Hawaii indulging in their passion not only for each other, but for scuba diving.
“You still diving on your downtime?” she asked.
With that simple question she shattered the mood. Shutters dropped over his eyes and he shoved his plate away from in front of him. “No, and that’s enough idle chatter. Time to get back to work.”
If she thought he’d been relentless in his drilling of her before, there was a new intensity now. He fired question after question at her, his expression revealing satisfaction when she answered and disapproval when she faltered.
He was a hard taskmaster, pushing her harder and harder until she finally cried uncle. “Enough,” she said and collapsed on her bed. “That’s enough for tonight. I’m exhausted and my brain shut off about an hour ago.”
“Actually, an hour and a half ago according to my assessment.”
To her surprise, one corner of his lips curved upward in a half smile. It was like a gift after their grueling hours of work.
She felt herself responding to his smile, not just with a smile of her own but with a warmth that suffused her entire body.
“You did better than I expected with just a night of study,” he said as he got up stiffly from his chair and stretched his arms over his head. “I have no doubt at all that by Saturday morning you’ll be ready to go.”
“I appreciate the vote of confidence,” she said, pleasantly surprised by his words.
“I’ve never doubted your abilities when it comes to the job.” He dropped his arms and held her gaze. She held her breath as she waited for him to say something more. There were unspoken words in his tired eyes and her heart quickened as a new tension sprang up between them.
“I’ll see you in the morning,” he finally said, then opened the door and disappeared out into the night.
She locked the door behind him, then took a long hot shower and pulled on her short-sleeved nightshirt. She kept her mind carefully blank as she sat on the edge of the bed and applied the lotion to her arms, legs and throat. The scent of pears filled the air and her heart filled with a loneliness she hadn’t experienced in years.
As she crawled into bed and shut