“Why?”
“So you don’t break it.”
“I’m being careful.”
“You don’t know the meaning of the word.”
Part of him wanted to shatter the butterfly. Talia hadn’t made the slightest effort at the party. She hadn’t even tried to make a favorable impression.
He set down the figurine. If he didn’t, he would break it, snap its delicate wings in half. “Where’s the Gamblers Anonymous list?”
She opened a file on her computer. “I hate it when you do that.”
“Do what? Change the subject without warning you? Would you rather talk about how not-over-me you are?”
“Go to hell.”
As if he hadn’t been there already. After Talia walked out on him, he’d saddled up with Satan too many times to count.
She activated her printer and handed him a copy of the Nevada GA list she’d compiled. “Happy?”
“Are you?” he shot back.
“Ecstatic,” she droned. “I can’t wait to become your phony wife.”
“We’re going to sleep in the same room.”
“Over my dead body.”
“That can be arranged.”
“How? Are you going to contract Julia and Miriam’s hit man to do me in?”
“If only I could. We don’t even know who he is.” Suddenly he thought about the person who’d asked them to help the FBI find Julia and Miriam. Thunder’s brother, Dylan, was the concerned party. Dylan had inadvertently rescued Julia from a kidnapping just days before she and her mother had disappeared, and now he was tangled up in their lives. Dylan even felt guilty about the assassin, but that was a long story.
“I don’t need to hire someone to take you out,” Talia said. “I could do it myself.”
“Go ahead and try,” he retorted. “Better yet, you can do it while we’re sharing a room.”
“I’m serious about that, Aaron.”
“So am I. It’s part of our cover.”
“Bull.”
“If we’re going to pull this off, if we’re going to become a married couple, then we have to behave accordingly, to get into character, to make our cover believable.” He glanced at the fragile butterfly, itching to touch it again, to threaten to break it. “We’re not going to blow this, Talia. We’re not going to put our lives on the line.”
She gave him a cynical look. “No matter how much we want to waste each other?”
Touché, Aaron thought, recalling her pearl-handled gun. “We’re going to pose as a couple on vacation in Nevada. I’ve been working on the details.” He paused, explained further. “I’ve got a makeup man on the payroll who will teach us how to change the way we look, just to be sure that the assassin doesn’t recognize us. We don’t know who he is, but he might know who we are.”
“I don’t mind changing my appearance.”
He took an unabashed gander at her. “I’m still deciding on the color of your hair.”
“Red,” she told him.
“We’ll see.” He wanted to tug her head back, to use her hair to rein her in. “SPEC will provide us with new identities, but I’ll make sure the feds approve them.”
“How long will we be gone?”
“Two weeks. Three if we need more time. I’ll make the travel arrangements.”
“I’ll be there with wedding bells on.” She fluttered her lashes, then mocked him with a breathy seduction. “I can’t wait to shack up with my husband.”
He didn’t appreciate her rotten-tempered wit. He stood and left her office, wanting to choke himself with his tie, right before he strangled her with it.
There was nothing funny about how badly he wanted to check into a hotel with her.
Nothing at all.
Three
Less than a week later, Talia sat next to Aaron on a flight that took them to Reno. Silent, she sipped apple juice and picked at the snack the flight attendant had distributed.
As specified, Aaron had created their cover, right down to her auburn wig. The chin-length hairstyle he’d chosen for her was straight and sleek. The designer clothes he’d suggested were from last season’s collection. He’d told her that she was going to play an elegant thirtysomething wife who stood by the man she’d married. Or that was the impression she gave. In truth, she was struggling to hold her emotions together, to remain loyal to a gambler who maxed out their credit cards, drove a car that was beyond his means and insisted on the finest foods and best hotels.
A pretentious Californian, she thought.
The trip to Nevada was the husband’s idea. He wanted to hit Reno, Carson City, Las Vegas and Laughlin, sightseeing in between. But his wife had other ideas. Once their vacation was under way, she was going to threaten him with divorce if he didn’t get some help.
According to Aaron, they loved each other. Deeply, desperately. So her threat was going to work. But not without a struggle. He didn’t want to lose his wife, but he didn’t want to admit that he was a compulsive gambler. That he was ill. That his actions were destroying their lives.
Talia glanced at Aaron. He’d changed his appearance, too. He’d added threads of gray to his hair, making him seem a bit older than he was. He’d changed the color of his eyes with greenish-gold contacts and dusted his skin with an amber-hued bronzer, softening the deep, dark tone. Like Talia, his features had been altered with carefully applied prosthetics. Although he still carried an ethnic flair, his heritage wasn’t easy to define. To her, he looked like a suntanned American with European roots.
He toasted her with his cocktail, and Talia wished that his non-Native genetics were real. If his culture hadn’t been an issue, he would have married her all those years ago. Their relationship would have worked.
After their plane touched down in Reno, Aaron rented a luxury car, which they would use on the remainder of their trip.
His new name was Andy Torres, and hers was Tina. They lived in Los Angeles, and he was a real estate agent who gambled away most of his commissions, chasing his dream to win big and maintain the lifestyle he craved. She ran a successful Internet business, but his losses were cutting into her hard-earned endeavors and putting them deeper in debt.
Once they arrived at the Reno hotel, Talia’s nerves kicked in. She was going to spend the next two to three weeks posing as Aaron’s wife, sharing rooms with him at night, waking up each morning with the shower running, watching him emerge with a towel wrapped around his waist.
