Off the Grid Read online

  Something is going on here, Colt thought. The wily bastard knew more than he was saying. Not that Colt blamed him. He wouldn’t share more than he had to with the general—or anyone, for that matter.

  “If Morrison didn’t do it, then who did?” Colt asked him.

  “I don’t know.”

  Colt kept him pinned with his gaze. “But you suspect someone.”

  The general shrugged. “It’s nothing I can prove.”

  He had their attention.

  “But . . . ?” Kate prompted.

  “But when I was going through the list of people who might have had access to the classified information, one name stuck out.”

  “Why?” Colt asked.

  “Because she was killed in a car crash right after the platoon went missing.” Colt didn’t want to turn his eyes from the general, but Kate seemed to have gone rigid beside him. “I knew her and liked her. She worked for the Deputy Secretary of Defense, but he relied on her as if it were the other way around. I wondered whether they were having an affair. She was an extremely beautiful woman.”

  Colt looked at Kate, who’d gone strangely mute. He frowned. She also looked a little pale.

  “You are talking about Natalie Andersson,” he said to the general. Colt had met her a few times. Murray was right. She’d been a stunning woman. He’d heard about her death.

  “Yes, but that wasn’t the name she was born with.” The general paused. “Her real name was Natalya Petrova.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Kate felt ill. What her godfather was insinuating couldn’t be right.

  Was it possible that the woman Scott had secretly been dating, who’d warned the platoon of the danger, was a Russian spy? Why would she have warned Scott if she’d been spying on him?

  According to her godfather, Natalie had been adopted from Russia when she was a child. Her adoptive parents—from Minnesota—had given her their last name and changed her name to the more American-friendly Natalie. But other than the accident and her Russian birth, the general hadn’t been able to find anything incriminating. Nothing to support that she was some kind of a twenty-plus-year Russian sleeper agent.

  It was ludicrous. That kind of stuff only happened in movies and novels. Russian birth didn’t make someone a spy. There were presumably thousands of kids adopted from Russia—were they all suspect? Of course not. But Kate had been CIA too long. Coincidences were never good. And there was no question that Natalie had had access to sensitive information about the mission. She’d warned the platoon, after all.

  Kate couldn’t wait to get home to see what she could find out. But first she needed to talk to Scott. As much as she would prefer to tell him after she’d cleared Natalie of any wrongdoing, Kate needed to know everything she could about the woman he’d been seeing in secret.

  But she already knew that he wasn’t going to like what she had to say.

  Kate didn’t realize how much her thoughts were showing on her face—or how closely Colt was watching her.

  The moment they got into the car, he turned to her. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Bullshit.”

  She looked at him. “Can you just take me home?”

  “I would, but I don’t have the keys. You drove.”

  Her face heated as she realized she’d sat in the passenger seat. He’d always driven when they were married, and she’d unconsciously slipped into their old roles. But as they’d met close to his hotel, they’d taken her car from the coffee shop.

  “It’s keyless,” she said. “The engine will start as long as the keys are in my purse.”

  Of course, she knew he wouldn’t make it that easy. He didn’t make any move to start the car. “Tell me why the mention of Natalie made you so upset.” He paused. “Did you know her, too?”

  She heard the note of sarcasm and understood the reference. Clearly he hadn’t bought her explanation for how she’d come upon the information for Brittany Blake’s source. She should have known better than to try to lie to him, but he’d caught her off guard. She should have just told him what she told him now. “It’s none of your business.”

  “If you want me to help you figure this out, you need to tell me everything.”

  “Just like you tell me everything? What about the woman in Iowa? Seems as if you forgot to mention her.”

  “I just found out about that, and I didn’t think it was important.”

  “Right,” she said. Did he think she would believe that? “You’ve never trusted me, Colt. Why would you start now?”

  “Did I have reason to?”

  It was hard to believe anyone’s eyes could get that hard and glittery. But she met the icy accusation unblinkingly. She knew it wasn’t really a question, but she answered anyway. “Yes, you actually did.”

  Colt had always hidden his emotions well, but she could detect the signs of his anger in the tightening of his mouth and the flare of his eyes. His hands were gripping the steering wheel so hard she thought he might pull it off. “You would say that even now? After what you fucking did?”

  She didn’t say anything. She just stared at him. Stared at the darkly handsome features of the man she’d thought she would love forever. And just for an instant, all the feelings, all the longing, came rushing back in a hot tidal wave of emotion.

  Why? She wanted to scream at him. Why had he done this to them? Why had he pushed her away? Why had he been so ready to believe the worst?

  She would never have been with another man. Colt had laid claim to her body as thoroughly as he had her heart. She’d never been so fiercely attracted to anyone. Just looking at him or standing close to him used to turn her into a syrupy mess.

  Even now the effects of being so close to him in the car were making themselves felt. The unwelcome prickle of awareness that sent a buzz of warmth along her skin and a pulse quickening through her heart. One gasp of air and she could breathe him in. The spicy masculine scent that had been as familiar to her as her own perfume. She could almost taste the mint of his toothpaste. Feel the grit of his stubble on her skin as he kissed her. Ravished her like some marauding medieval knight.

  That was him: medieval. Dangerous, merciless, and utterly unforgiving. Maybe a little primitive in his emotions, but also sexy as hell in a fiercely masculine way.

  Humiliated, she wanted to turn away. But she couldn’t. Because in that moment of awareness, she could see that he felt it, too. That the draw was just as powerful and overwhelming for him. It had always been like that between them—passion that was every bit as fierce, explosive, and dangerous as he was, coming out of nowhere to hit her with the force of a . . . hurricane.

  She could also see that he didn’t like it any better than she did.

  But he was going to act on it.

  His hand slipped around to grip the back of her neck and pull her toward him. Every hair prickled, and she shuddered at the rough but achingly familiar feel of his workingman hand on her skin. How could she remember after so long? How could her body flood and pulse with yearning with one touch?

  Three years of hatred—of telling herself she was over him—dissolved in an instant.

  But only for an instant. When his mouth dipped to hers, when he was only seconds away from touching his lips to hers, the memories returned. The pain of heartbreak. The feeling that she would never know another moment of happiness. The deep depression of losing a child, nearly dying, and having the man she’d given her heart to turn to her not with compassion and love but with cruelty and abandonment.

  She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t let Hurricane Colt back into her life.

  “No!” She put her hand on his chest and pushed him— or herself—away. “I’m engaged to someone else, for God’s sake!”

  She didn’t know whether she was reminding him or herself. She hadn’