Page 79 of Hot Intent

“Can you pick up the pace?” he muttered. They had to be well clear of this area before it was crawling with cops and fire trucks.

“Do I have a choice?” she asked wryly, speeding up her steps.

“Not if you want to live.” He added, “And in answer to your question, now we keep walking. And we don’t look back.”

As darkness fell on a long, harrowing day, Alex finished searching their cheap motel room in Delaware for surveillance devices. It was clean.

He sat down on the bed to think. He hadn’t planned to disappear with Katie. He’d assumed she would choose to stay with Dawn if it came down to a choice between the two of them.He could respect that. The baby needed her more than he did. Although sometimes he wondered about who was neediest?—

He cut off the thought before it could finish forming in his head. He did not need relationships. He didnotneed either of them. Katie was a liability, and Dawn was an even bigger one. End of discussion. Which meant he had to get rid of both of them, and sooner rather than later.

“Uncle Charlie told me your mother’s name this morning.”

He lurched around to face her and stared at her in shock. How in the hell had she pulled that off? He’d had the best hackers on the planet digging for years for information on his mysterious mother, and Katie had…what? Just waltzed into CIA headquarters andasked? Sonofabitch.

Tension stretched his vocal cords taut. “Tell me.”

“Her name is Claudia Kane. Charlie hinted that she’s dead but wouldn’t say so outright.”

“Why would he tell you her name and not tell me?” Alex demanded.

“Have you ever just asked the CIA for her identity?”

He frowned and answered evasively, “She came up during my training. But they never told me anything about her.”

His mother had been the focus of a particularly nasty interrogation session involving car batteries and some of his rather tender body parts. The bastards had known he had no information whatsoever about her, but they’d tortured him anyway just to be sure he wasn’t holding anything back.

She shrugged. .“Before we left for Cuba, I asked Charlie to research her for me. For you.”

He had to give Katie credit for being honest. She hadn’t ducked the fact that she’d visited her uncle this morning, or that she’d been asking about his mother. One thing he had never doubted about her was her truthfulness. She had always been straight up with him, sometimes to her own detriment.

Still, this news had him reeling. His mother, the faceless ghost who’d hovered over him his entire life, had aname? Was his mother coming out of the shadows at last? Was this a first step by her to approach him?

Claudia Kane. He rolled the name around in his mouth, getting used to it. His mother was American, was she? That surprised him. His father had always hated western women…or was his American wife the reason why Roman felt that way?

Eagerness and desperate need raged in Alex’s belly at the idea of finally filling the hole in his life that gaped around his mother. His emotions were too turbulent, too powerful to shut away in a mental drawer. He tried, and failed, to contain the glee and terror. Appalled at his loss of control, he forced his mind back the business at hand by sheer dint of will.

Katie had asked about his mother before they went to Cuba, huh? He blurted, “Did you inquire about Claudia before or after that gunmen took a pot shot at you on the roof of the condo?”

“Before.” Katie threw him a wide-eyed look. “Do you think the attempts on my life are related to my asking about her?”

It was possible. Had the attacks not been about Cold Intent at all? Had they been purely about his mother? Which begged the question of why an inquiry about Claudia Kane had sent an assassin into action against Katie. It was hard to believe that Uncle Charlie would set up his own niece to be sanctioned for a hit.

His mother was alive. He could feel it. God, he wanted to talk to her. To get the answers that had taunted him with their absence for all these years. Why did she leave him? Did she love his father?Did she love him?

Alex ordered Katie, “Start at the beginning and don’t leave out anything about your conversations with your uncle, no matter how small.”

He listened intently as she described her two meetings with Charlie, the one before Cuba and the one this morning. Alex’s first impulse was to be suspicious of the information. Why would the CIA cough it up to her, when they’d refused for all this time to tell him anything?

This was probably part of the grand manipulation of Alex Peters the CIA seemed to delight in playing at. Or maybe Uncle Charlie genuinely wanted to please his niece. It was possible, of course, that the information was caught up in some sort of internal power struggle within the agency. The CIA made a habit of hiring wolves, who in turn, made a habit of fighting over turf. Was his mother just another bone being snarled and scrapped over within the wolf pack? Or washethe bone?

Questions swirled inside his head so thick and fast he hardly knew where to turn his attention. He felt out of control. Buffeted by hurricane-force confusion. Why were they doing this to him? Or was this about him at all? God, and he’d thought his CIA field training had been a giant mind-fuck. This was a thousand times worse. Who was he supposed to trust? What was he supposed to think? To feel?

More agitated than he could ever remember being, he pulled out his laptop and initiated a deep Web search for information on one Claudia Kane. As he’d expected, there was nothing. As innothing. Which was, in its own way, informative. In this day and age, nobody left absolutely zero trail of their existence. Not unless that trail had been professionally swept clean. Interesting.

If Katie’s information was correct and his mother had been an American intelligence operative, the non-trail would make sense. Hell, Claudia Kane probably wasn’t even her real name. He would have to dig into the CIA’s computers if he wanted more. Or, of course, he could always ask Roman…

His train of thought derailed. Actually, that wasn’t a half-bad idea. His father had never spoken of his mother beyond the occasional epithet calling her a whore or a traitor. But then, Alex had never asked about her, either. It had always been understood between him and Roman that she was an off-limits topic of conversation.

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