Page 61 of The Blonde Who Came in from the Cold
“That’s not it.” She held a little tighter to his shoulder. “I’m sorry she keeps making you work with me.”
Was that what she thought?
“I don’t... I mean... You are... Who do you usually work with?” he blurted, then studied her out of the corner of his eye. “Is there anyone... Tyler, for example...”
“I’m better alone. Always have been.”
King was better alone. He was cranky and demanding and impossible to please. She was none of those things.
“Sterling—”
“Probably for the best, though, right? I don’t want to get anyone killed. A really smart guy told me I was going to, you know. Maybe I don’t want to risk it.”
“I was wrong.”
He expected her to taunt or tease, but when she spoke again, she sounded sad and resigned and not at all like the girl in theFuture Spyhoodie. “You’re never wrong.”
He was, though. He was never wrong about the past, but he was often wrong about the future. From the moment he first met her, she’d surprised him. For example, he never would have dreamed she would say—
“Do you ever think about what would happen if we stopped hating each other?”
King pulled back so fast his neck popped. “I don’t hate you.”
“You just don’t respect me.”
“Are we really going to fight about why we fight?”
“A girl’s got to have hobbies.” Alex forced a smile that was so unlike her that he stumbled to a stop on the dance floor. People were staring. They looked like they were about to break up. Or he was about to go down on one knee and pull out a ring. Or something. They weren’t far from Irina’s table and the guards were going to get suspicious, but all King could do was gape at Alex and say, “We don’t have to fight.”
“What else can we do?”
“We can do anything!” he snapped, throwing an arm out and pointing to the coast and the sea and the world, big and beautiful and all around them. They spoke ten languages between them. They had so many skills. They could go anywhere. They could do anything. But they were there and they were... them. And—
He didn’t see the waitress, not until it was way too late. His arm was swinging out again, and this time it caught a tray of drinks, sending the glasses soaring through the air and crashing onto the nearest table, leaving everything doused in glass and booze and smelling like lemons. Irina jumped out of her chair with a screech. Her phone flew out of her hand and skidded ten feet across the dance floor.
As it turned out, the job was easy after all.
Chapter Thirty-Two
King
It took more than a month of surveillance. They probably could have done it in half the time, but Merritt was being cagey. Or cagier than usual.
She found them a yacht that they kept moored off the coast, and he and Alex spent their days riding up and down the twisting highways on a Vespa, Alex’s arms around King’s waist. They spent their nights watching the house through a telescope, lying on the big loungers on the top deck, eating pasta and looking at the stars.
“What are they watching tonight?” King plopped an olive in his mouth while Alex stood at the telescope that was currently trained on Viktor Kozlov’s living room. Whatever she saw made her sigh, a little jealous. “Goldfinger! Ooh, this is a good one. Q gives Bond an Aston Martin with an ejector seat.”
“That’s not genuine tradecraft.”
“Take that back!” Alex gasped, offended, but it was all King could do not to smile.
“I guess we’ve learned one thing about Kozlov—he’s even more obsessed with spy movies than you are. And that’s saying something.” He pushed the olives away, not trusting himself when they were within reach, and Alex went back to scanning the roofline and the grounds.
“There are six perimeter guards tonight,” she said, stepping away from the telescope.
“So they double the watch when the old man’s on the premises.” King made a mental note and Alex made a real one, logging the observation in her own secret code in a tiny book that she sometimestucked into her bra. Not that he’d been noticing. Or, well, any more than he noticed everything because that was his birthright and his job and the key to his survival.
“I wonder what they’ve got in that compound?” King still didn’t know what Merritt wasn’t telling them. But she definitely wasn’t telling them something.
