Page 12 of Midnight Secrets

But…she wasn’t an ordinary woman. She didn’t do well in company. The days of bursting into tears with people around her were over but that didn’t mean she was back to normal. She could throw up. She could become so dizzy she’d faint. She could lock herself in the bathroom because she couldn’t deal with him.

They were all fun possibilities. She didn’t trust herself at all. Joe helped her because she was visibly wounded and still relatively weak. He never asked, bless him, and she never said what was wrong. Keep it like that. Let him think she’d been in an accident and was putting herself back together again.

Because the truth was much blacker and bleaker. The truth was that shehadbeen in an accident that had torn her family from her but shewasn’tputting herself back together again. Maybe she’d be like this for the rest of her life, unfit for human company.

Missing her family like crazy, for the rest of her life.

Put like that…put like that maybe all she really was good for was to cook things for someone who’d suffered but who was pulling himself out of it.

She swiped angrily at her eyes as she finished the pan of ziti and started making focaccia.

3

“Well?” Joe asked Felicity impatiently, ignoring the nasty look Metal was shooting at him. Everyone always treated Felicity with kid gloves. Apart from the fact that she was Metal’s love and Metal would pound anyone who was disrespectful to her, she also earned a hell of a lot of money for the company as their in-house computer guru.

And she beat everyone’s ass at video games.

“Sorry, Joe.” Felicity Ward, soon to be Felicity O’Brien, pushed herself away from his desk where she’d been using her own computer. Some kind of woo-woo piece of tech that could have been time-traveled from the future, it was so advanced. Felicity had taken one look at his laptop and sniffed in disdain. “Whoever sent you that message is scary good. I can’t identify the IP. Believe me when I say that’s unusual.”

Oh yeah, he believed Felicity. She was a computer genius and ASI had snatched her up, right after she’d unmasked an international conspiracy. An internationalnuclearconspiracy no less. She was smart in everything but she was off the charts smart when it came to IT. If she couldn’t track down the sender of the mystery message, no one could.

“Whoever sent it must be as smart as you,” he said.

Felicity smiled and waved Metal, who’d risen from his seat, down. It was a pillar in Metal’s thought system that Felicity was the smartest person on earth. “Yeah. Hard as it is to believe.”

“Scary stuff,” Metal rumbled.

“Yes.” Joe nodded his head sharply.

Itwasscary stuff. Someone Felicity couldn’t ID had sent a message about Isabel. That blew his mind. That someone knew about Isabel and that that someone knew she was connected to him. How could that happen?

“So,” Felicity said. “Let’s look at the object of the message. Isabel Lawton. Who is completely off the grid.”

Joe frowned. “What do you mean?”

Felicity was frowning, too, only at her monitor. “She almost doesn’t seem to exist. No Facebook page, no Twitter handle, I can’t find any trace of her educational or job background anywhere in the US. I’ve found plenty of Isabel Lawtons but they’re either too old or too young and no one fits what you’ve told me about her. Which, frankly, isn’t much.” She sighed and turned a serious face to him. “You’d almost think she is me.”

Hmm. Felicity had grown up in the Witness Protection Program. Her father had been a famous Russian nuclear scientist who had defected and Felicity had basically been undercover her entire life. She’d changed names several times during childhood.

“Like…a spook?” Joe asked. “Or a spook’s daughter or sister or—” He swallowed. “Someone’s wife? Maybe the wife of someone dangerous? And she’s run away from him?”

That thought burned in his chest. Isabel married to an abusive husband. It was a thought he didn’t want to have but it sort of made sense. Instead of being a woman of mystery maybe she was a woman on the run. Maybe someone was after her, which would explain how she seemed always on edge.

If that was the case, her running days were over. Joe wouldn’t let anyone hurt her. No one was going to touch her. Except him.

“Not a nice thought,” Metal said.

Metal hated abusers as much as Joe did. They’d both been sick at heart when they’d had to negotiate with a warlord in Helmand for safe passage for a convoy of marines. The warlord, who was in his sixties, had called in his pregnant wife, a girl in her late teens, to serve them. Her shaking hands had spilled some hot tea on Joe and the warlord had punched her in the face.

Joe and Metal had kept their faces bland because the mission was an important one with the lives of a marine battalion at stake, but they didn’t forget. It had been Joe’s immense pleasure to find the warlord’s head in his crosshairs after a double cross had cost the lives of fifteen marines. Pulling that trigger and seeing that fucker’s head explode had been one of the great pleasures of Joe’s life.

“What do we know about Isabel Lawton, besides the fact that she makes the best boeuf bourguignon I’ve ever tasted?”

“The best what?” Joe and Metal said in unison.

Felicity rolled her eyes. “The best boeuf bourguignon. Hello? What we had for lunch and which we all agreed was fabulous?”

“Oh.” Joe sat back. “The beef stew.”

---