Page 104 of Hot Intent

But Claudia would break her. Katie was no professional operative. The good news was that after the sweep netted Katie, the team of men had all trooped back into the house behind her. The bad news was he had maybe an hour to rescue her from his mother. At most.

Katie stared at the woman who’d given birth to Alex. Claudia Kane was as elegant and icy as she’d expected the woman would be. Any mother who could abandon her newborn baby to the clutches of a spymaster like Roman Koronov couldn’t have much of a heart.

Claudia, seated in a big wingback chair across the elegantly furnished living room, studied her back closely.

The men who’d dragged Katie up off the ground and into the house had released her arms and now stood quietly in the corners, weapons still drawn, alert and wary. It was clear they were waiting for Alex to make a move to rescue her. She was bait.

Sit tight, Alex, she thought desperately.It’s a trap.

Claudia finally broke the silence. “Tell me about my son.”

“He has your eyes,” Katie blurted. Although Claudia’s might contain a tiny bit more blue than Alex’s gray eyes, both sets of eyes were sharply intelligent and observant.

“Where is he?”

“I have no idea.”

“Don’t lie to me. You’re not any good at it.”

“But I really don’t know.” Technically, she didn’t. He could still be in the pasture in front of the house, or he could have fled somewhere else entirely in his efforts to avoid Claudia’s men.

“What are you doing here?” the woman demanded. Her voice lashed at Katie’s waning courage, shredding what little she had left.

“Sitting, at the moment.” As irritation flashed through Claudia’s eyes in the exact same way it did Alex’s, Katie added less confrontationally, “I’m curious, actually. I’m wondering why you chose to surface, now. Why you thought you could use your son to destroy your ex-husband, and why you would hold such a grudge against Roman Koronov after all these years.”

Not by so much as a flicker of an eyelash did the woman react to Katie’s accusations. Cool customer. Had Katie not dealt with the woman’s equally cool son for so long, she would’ve been scared to death of this woman.

But Katiehaddealt with Alex, and shedidknow how to read his moods and tempers. Katie sat back patiently in the wooden chair they’d hauled in here from the kitchen. She could wait out the mother the same way she waited out the son.

“How did you meet Alex?” Claudia threw out.

Katie knew the technique. She used it on patients who were reluctant to be honest about their health history or how they’d gotten hurt. Get them talking about something, anything, innocuous, and then, once they were already gregariously chatting, shift the conversation to the thing she really wanted the patient to talk about.

Katie answered, “I suspect you already know how he and I met. How long have you been watching Alex? A few years? His whole life, perhaps?”

“I’m asking the questions, here,” Claudia snapped.

She could ask all she wanted. It didn’t mean Katie was going to answer. She wasn’t about to spill Alex’s innermost feelings to this woman.

“Why did the two of you go to Cuba?”

Katie frowned. “You don’t know? I would have assumed you were of sufficient rank in the CIA to have been briefed on your son’s activities. If nothing else, I would have thought you’d know what the primary operative in your operation was doing. Yet, here you are, asking me? Interesting.”

Claudia’s pale stare narrowed. It actually was interesting seeing Alex’s eyes in a blond, fair face instead of contrasting with Alex’s dark hair and bronze skin. “You’re in too much trouble to be flippant with me, young lady.”

“How am I in trouble? Call the police and accuse me of trespassing if you’d like. I haven’t done anything else wrong.” A flash of the dead bodies she and Alex had left in a forest in New Jersey flashed through her mind’s eye. But she pushed the grisly images away.

“You’ve interfered with a secret, high-level government operation.”

Katie jumped on that one, replying casually, “You mean Cold Intent? Sheesh. That’s no secret. A ton of people know about it.”

Even the guys in the corners lurched at that salvo.

“Who knows?” Claudia bit out.

“Well, there are Alex’s hacker friends. I don’t know how many of them helped him with the research on Cold Intent. Could be dozens. Oh, and there’s Alex’s boss at Doctors Unlimited. But you already knew that, didn’t you? You’re the one who had André relay your orders to have Alex and I separated and Alex drugged at Guantanamo, aren’t you?”

Claudia’s eyelids flickered slightly.Hah. Katie’s stab in the dark had struck true.

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