Page 67 of Breaking the Rules
He could see how it had happened. Fresh out of college, Dante Wrede tempted her with the offer of a little excitement. Finally, something she could choose. Given her unpredictable childhood and then the cage of expectations she’d found herself in as a young adult, Waverly had always found small ways to feel that rush of adrenaline. Jumping off yachts, racing motorcycles. But running around playing spy games? Operatives got killed. It could and did happen. It had likely happened to Wrede. And if the man was alive, odds were he’d led Waverly into a trap.
Things had seemed so clear last night. The magnitude of the need that each felt for the other, the moments when they were so close they stopped being two and became one. It didn’t happen like that for everyone. They hadit. And he’d finally had tangible hope that she’d find her way back to him. She had to feel it, too. There was no denying what they ignited in each other.
But when he’d looked around her study and now at her assignment notes, at the evidence of her worlds of screen and spy, he wondered how he would fit in anywhere besides her bed. Could he handle it if she chose to continue her work?
So many questions and so few answers. He roused himself from his reverie. He would find a way to make Waverly his, even if it killed him. For now, he’d settle for putting her two steps ahead in the game.
Micah was making calls to intelligence community buddies trying to unofficially confirm some of the more hush-hush investigations. Cayman, Invictus’ ever-fashionable head of research, was plowing through the rest with a handpicked team. With the investigation moving forward, Xavier decided to do a deeper dig through Waverly’s case notes.
He was cross-referencing a particularly hairy assignment to clone the phone of a playboy son who looked to be in line to take over his ailing father’s Middle Eastern weapons business. He pulled up paparazzi footage of Waverly entering a Miami hotel in South Beach for the son’s midnight club party. She looked like the picture perfect party girl. The short kimono dress in jade green covered what he could only assume was a very tiny bikini. Her blonde hair was pulled up into a knot on the top of her head, and despite the dark, she wore oversized sunglasses to protect herself from the photographers’ flashes.
He spotted Kate a few paces behind her. Casual in a ball cap and jeans and a t-shirt.
Where she once would have kept her head down and scurried inside, this Waverly smiled and waved, blowing kisses as photographers and fans shouted her name. She strutted inside on ankle-breaking platform wedges. The videographer followed her shapely ass to the door and then panned away as another celebrity arrived.
Xavier did a search for videos from that same night and found one of Waverly leaving the party at two o’clock in the morning. The amateur quality left much to be desired, but the video showed Waverly teetering out of the hotel on the arm of a burly security guard. She was grinning and cracking her gum, and though the crowd outside the hotel was smaller now, she thrust an arm up in a salute. The cuff bracelet on her arm slipped a bit, and Xavier paused the image.
He zoomed in, enhancing the image on screen, and kicked back in his seat. That wasn’t Waverly. That was Kate dressed as Waverly. It was a trick they’d pulled back when he met Waverly. He’d almost fallen for it, too. It made sense here. “Waverly” would be long gone before the host’s phone disappeared and magically reappeared. No one would suspect a woman who wasn’t even there.
Memories of the day he’d caught her leaving the house as Kate, of kissing her that first time, pushed to the surface. It was the first of many times that’d he lost his cool around her. He’d thought being older and wiser and with the distance of so many years between them that her pull on him would have lessened.
But that longing that he’d refused to name had made him just as reckless now with her. He’d taken her in the courtyard of a church.Sinner and Saint, he thought wryly. If that wasn’t the perfect definition of their relationship, he didn’t know what was.
He stared at the image of Kate dressed as Waverly onscreen and smirked. Kate was incapable of walking in heels, and he wondered if that’s where the drunken party girl rumors had begun. With Kate stumbling out of clubs in shoes that didn’t fit. He’d have to ask them.
For now, satisfied that he could confirm one of her assignments, he moved on to another. This was a joint assignment with Wrede handed down from the SEC. They were to get information that could confirm suspected insider trading by a young tech startup billionaire. This case Xavier recalled from the extensive press coverage. The weasely little dick had taken investors’ money out of his company and used it to short sell securities. When the market price tanked, he’d purchased it all back at a huge profit.
According to Waverly’s cryptic notes, after attending a dinner party hosted by the weasel in London, not only were they able to confirm the man’s participation in the short sell, but they’d also uncovered a Ponzi scheme. Xavier’s eyebrows winged up. While it was impressive work, it was the paparazzi photos of Waverly and Dante leaving their hotel together that he couldn’t stop studying.
They looked as though they belonged together. Wealthy, confident, decked out in designer fashions, they’d paused to pose for the cameras outside the hotel before sliding into the back of a white Range Rover. Waverly wore purple, a body-hugging dress that drew the eye and didn’t let it go until it had skimmed every perfect curve. Beside her, his hand at her back, Wrede wore a couture crushed velvet dinner jacket in navy with satin lapels. Xavier didn’t know if he wanted to punch Wrede more for daring to touch Waverly or wearing that douchey jacket.
Waverly was looking up at him, her expression sweetly serene. Xavier tilted his head and keyed in a command. The image of just her face filled his screen. God, she was beautiful. Flawless skin, eyes that drew a man in just to drown, that thick curtain of hair that made his fingers twitch with the need to dive in. And her lips, painted a dusky rose here.
Lips that were curved subtly. He frowned and looked again. Waverly Sinner had a bombshell smile that could reach into a man’s chest and stop his heart. And then she had her “working” smile that never quite lived up to her genuine one. It didn’t light up her eyes. That was the smile she was giving Wrede.
Hope bloomed in his heart, and Xavier abandoned his research to pull up every picture of Waverly and Wrede together. Over and over again, he spotted that smile. Never quite the full wattage. Was it his imagination? Or was there really hope that when all was said and done, Waverly loved him more than Dante Wrede? He wanted to call her and demand an answer.
Micah ambled in the door and took a glance at Xavier’s screen. “Oh for Christ’s sake. I thought you were helping out, not obsessing over Lover Boy,” he accused.
Xavier shut off his monitor. “I’m researching.”
“What? How to dress like an asshole?”
“What kind of a man goes out in public wearing red skinny jeans?” Xavier complained.
“Apparently your girl’s boyfriend does.”
“What’s your take?” Xavier asked. “Dead or double cross?”
Micah shrugged his linebacker shoulders. “My take is that there’s something rotten in Denmark.”
“Look who’s quoting Shakespeare,” Xavier said, giving his friend a sarcastic golf clap.
“Suzanne’s latest obsession. Family book club.”
“When is she going to get into something you can get behind like home brewed beers or fantasy football?”
“Why would she do that when it’s so much fun making me quote Hamlet and knit shitty potholders?”
