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  So was she, and maybe it was time he told her so. “We were both lucky,” he said.

  Her brows drew together with confusion.

  “You had two sets of parents who loved you, too. But I’m not surprised, either. You are eminently lovable yourself.”

  She sucked in her breath with surprise, her eyes raking his face as she took in his meaning as if searching to see whether he was in earnest.

  He was. “I love you, Natalie.”

  “You do?”

  She looked so incredulous he had to smile along with the nod. “I should have told you a long time ago, but I wasn’t sure you felt the same way, and I was too much of a coward. But I’d finally worked up the courage to tell you when I got back.”

  “Is that what you said you wanted to talk to me about?”

  “Mostly.” He paused. “I’d also planned to ask you to marry me. I carried the ring around with me for weeks. I even had it with me on the mission.”

  He wasn’t sure whether the tears that filled her eyes were happiness or sadness. Maybe both. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Why are you apologizing?”

  “Because what I did ruined everything.”

  It hadn’t. But he’d tell her that when they were out of this, and he had the ring back in his pocket again. “You didn’t ruin anything, but we’re going to need to figure out a way to prove that, okay?”

  She looked up at him, her eyes full of so much trust it made his heart squeeze. When she nodded, he knew there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do to keep that promise.

  Twenty-one

  Kate had just hung up the phone with Mac, Brittany Blake’s friend whose skill with cyberespionage and subversion of cybersecurity could best anyone she knew in the CIA’s elite hacking team—including herself—when the doorbell rang.

  She glanced at the security system monitor and stiffened, seeing Colt standing there. Her heart started to race. It was anxiousness about a possible confrontation, she told herself. It didn’t have anything to do with him or the fact that she couldn’t get the other night out of her head.

  He’d been so sweet. So tender. So caring. So unlike the emotionally closed-off man she’d fallen in love with.

  Until she’d brought out the adoption papers.

  Her heart squeezed. It was silly to still feel disappointed; she should know better. She should know better about a lot of things.

  She was tempted to ignore it—to ignore him—but Colt would just find a way in. His impatient stance and the determined way he was looking into the camera left her no doubt. Don’t make me break the door down.

  She sighed, realizing she might as well get it over with. She was surprised that she’d put him off as long as she had. It had been cowardly to run, but she just couldn’t face him the morning after . . .

  After what? How exactly did one characterize the colossal fuck-up that had also been the single most incredible and tender sexual experience of her life? A one-night stand? Her lapse into the stupid and “how the hell could I let myself go there again?”

  Whatever you called it, Kate had left the hotel at the crack of dawn and caught an earlier flight back to DC. Colt had left increasingly frustrated messages on her phone for her to call him back—that they needed to talk—but her only response had been the short, businesslike e-mail to forward the camera footage from Alaska that Mac had dug up for Kate.

  Kate walked from the kitchen into the foyer, going past the entry table that held the enormous bouquet of peonies. The pungent floral scent hit her senses with a burst of fragrance that was impossible to ignore, not unlike the man who’d sent them. She should have tossed them out when they’d arrived, but they were her favorite—as he knew—and she couldn’t bring herself to throw away something so beautiful no matter who’d sent them.

  She’d had no such tossing issues, however, with the note that had accompanied them. It had gone into the trash not long after she read it. She didn’t want any more apologies. He was sorry. She got that. Maybe she could even forgive him. But ultimately it wasn’t enough.

  She wanted a child. She’d put that aside for him once—or tried to—but she wasn’t going to do it again. And them talking about it wasn’t going to change her mind.

  She intended to tell him that, but as soon as she opened the door, he handed her a folder. “We have a problem.”

  From the grim look on his face and the fact that he wasn’t reading her the riot act for not calling him back, she knew it was serious. She stepped back to let him in, while opening the folder and removing a few pieces of paper. He shut the door behind him and waited as she flipped through the printouts.

  They were stills from some of the camera footage Mac had found showing from different angles the two hit men who’d killed Travis. One of the photos must have been from a street camera, two appeared to be from the bank that Kate knew was across the street from the bar—it was the camera they’d initially focused on—and the last one, which was the clearest, was at the gas station near where they’d parked.

  Kate had seen them already. “What’s the problem?” she asked. “These are good. We should have a better chance of identifying them. I’m running them through—”

  “Don’t bother,” Colt said. “These guys won’t be in any databases—they don’t exist. But I know this guy.” He pointed to the mean-looking one with the MMA fighter nose and elaborate tattoo on his neck. “The ink fooled me initially, but that’s what it was supposed to do. The tattoos are fake. He’s one of ours.”

  Kate was floored. “By ‘ours’ you mean . . . ?”

  Colt nodded. “He works in the same group that I do. We’ve crossed paths once or twice.”

  Oh my God. The ramifications were spinning in her head: one of the men who’d killed Travis was US black ops? “Are you sure? I thought operators in your group worked alone.”

  “We do most of the time. But occasionally I cross paths with other operatives at the—” He stopped, obviously not wanting to tell her too much. “I’ve seen this guy a couple of times. His head is usually shaved but the nose is hard to forget.”

  Even from the not exactly high-resolution photos, Kate could see that the operative’s nose was kind of pushed to the side, as if someone had hit it and it had just stayed in that position. She’d noticed it right away herself. It was the kind of nose that belonged on a boxer named Lefty.

  “Jesus,” she said, understanding Colt’s grim expression. This was a disaster. It changed everything. It meant that unless Russia had a mole deep in US black ops—which seemed a stretch—the order to kill Travis had come from someone in the highest echelons of the American government. The very highest. Kate didn’t know much about the off-the-books group Colt worked with, but she knew they reported directly to the president. Which meant that only President Cartwright and her closest advisors would know about or have access to operatives like Colt.

  “Maybe Scott was right.” She’d spoken her thoughts aloud and Colt looked at her questioningly. She filled him in on her last conversation with her brother. “I thought he was reaching, but what if Natalie wasn’t the source of the leak? What if she really did erase the program on the deputy secretary’s laptop before he went into that meeting?”

  Colt finished her thought. “Then someone else in the room was responsible for passing on the information about Retiarius’s mission to Mick.” He cursed. “Who was in that meeting?”

  “I imagine the usual suspects,” Kate said. “Aside from the president, the vice president, secretary of state, defense secretary, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would likely be involved in a high-level meeting like this about a covert operation. We know the deputy secretary of defense was there and I’m assuming due to Team Nine’s involvement the head of JSOC”—Joint Special Operations Command—“and WARCOM”—Naval Special Warfare Command—“I’ll call Scott. Natalie might know.”

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