Page 90 of Hot Intent

Hisnew life. The exclusion of her from that future hurt bad enough to steal her breath away. What had happened to him? He’d acknowledged that he’d been drugged into chemically induced paranoia and that she hadn’t betrayed him like heroriginally thought. Why was he still thinking in terms of leaving her behind?

“You do know I would never force myself upon you, don’t you?”

“I beg your pardon?” He stared at her blankly.

“And you do know that no matter how much I hate you, I still love you, right?”

“How am I supposed to respond to that?”

Crud. He’d completely withdrawn from her emotionally. He was firmly entrenched in being the cold, analytical spy in his fantasy, high-threat scenario.

Oh, she definitely accepted that they were in danger. After all, the wound in her shoulder was entirely real, as was the shootout back at the motel. But she was equally convinced it was all a big misunderstanding of some kind. If Alex would just hand over that flash drive and the evidence of chemical weapons in Cuba, the CIA would calm down and leave them alone.

She’d planned to tell him that she loved him enough to place his happiness before hers and that she would seriously consider his implied offer to go with him. But he was obviously in no mood to hear anything she had to say right now. She sighed. “Now what?” she asked in resignation. “Where will you find a computer? Or do you plan to steal one of those, too?”

“I’m going to the nearest public library. Are you coming?”

“Sure. Why not?” Maybe she could check out a book on abnormal psychology and gain some tiny insight into Alex and his thoroughly screwed up head.

The anonymous, slightly decaying urban landscape around her was oddly comforting. She was rapidly picking up Alex’s aversion to being noticeable. The local library was a dingy beige building, most deserted inside. Alex sat down at a carrel with a computer in it, and she pulled up a chair beside him to watch him work his magic.

“What are you going to do?” she asked curiously.

“I’m going back in for more information on Cold Intent.”

“Are you crazy?” she exclaimed under her breath.

“Do you have any better ideas?”

“We could talk to Uncle Charlie.”

“He told you to stay away from it. He knows what the operation is all about, and somehow the two of us pose a threat to it.”

“Is there any way you can figure out who gave the order to have you—“ she dropped her voice to a whisper, “—drugged?”

“I gave the MP’s in Gitmo André’s phone number. The order had to have come through that chain of command.”

Katie frowned. “At first, the soldiers were nice to you, right? They gave you the samples from me and let you go to the hospital on your own.”

He leaned back to stare at her. “Follow that train of thought.”

“After they let you go, they called André. He told them something that made them go to the hospital, arrest you, interrogate you, and drug you. And that same something made them detain me and not let me join you.”

“Go on.”

“André likes you. He’s always had your back in the past. That tells me he must have called his CIA boss and told him where we were and what we brought with us. I’ll bet he only relayed the boss’s orders to the folks down here. So, why did the CIA want the cops to go after you? You had information the CIA desperately wanted. Why not bring you in with all possible speed?”

Alex stared at her, his gaze dark.

She continued, “André must have told them I wasn’t a physical threat, but you were. He also must have told them the two of us were to be separated.”

“Which would weaken me,” he commented.

“Really? Why?” she blurted.

“If I don’t know what they might do to you, I’ll behave myself and not cause trouble they might take out on you.”

He cared about that, did he? Should she take that as evidence that he did have feelings for her, after all?

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