be full of questions,” he continued, reaching for another tortilla and covering it with beans, chilies and salsa. “I couldn’t answer. They’d want to know what I’ve been doing all these years. Naturally enough. I’m not ready to go home and tell the necessary lies, not to people I care about. And if they suspected any part of the truth and it started to make the rounds...well, I need to wait a while. I wouldn’t want to draw any trouble their way.”
“Could you? Really?” The thought astonished her.
“Probably not. But I want some time to pass first. I want to be long forgotten by the people who knew me when I was undercover.”
“That hardly seems fair to you.”
“Life isn’t fair. I think you know that.”
She did, intimately, but she didn’t want to think about herself right now. “So where do they think you’ve been all this time?”
“Officially I think I was assigned to a mission in Panama.”
“Circles within circles,” she remarked. “Like a maze.”
“That’s the general idea. Other agents on the ground had no idea who I was. That made for some, um, interesting experiences.”
Corey forgot all about eating, instead trying to imagine all of this. If his own side didn’t know who he was...“You could have been killed by your own people!”
“It was a possibility.” His face seemed to go blank, as if there was more that he didn’t want to reveal. She decided maybe she should just let it go. She didn’t want to make him uncomfortable, or remind him of bad things.
“I can hardly imagine being so alone,” she said finally. Although she could, if she let herself. Not for six years, but for a few days or weeks. Even after her grandmother and aunt had brought her back from Denver, she had felt alone. Separated. In an alternate universe. But at least she had been surrounded by people who cared about her. Austin had faced something very different. “So everyone was out to get you?”
“Not everyone, and not all the time.” He managed a slight smile. “It was most dangerous at the beginning, then later at the end when we were getting ready to roll everything up.”
“Did anyone know who you really were?”
“I had a couple of contacts.”
That didn’t seem like very many to her. Gage hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d said Austin had been walking a tightrope. And without much of a net evidently.
“Why did you do it?” she asked bluntly.
“Someone has to and I was especially suited. Obviously.”
“But did you really know what you were getting into?”
“Who does?”
She might have laughed if it hadn’t been so frighteningly true.
“Look,” he said finally, “it’s really like the rest of life. We all leap and then look because there’s no way we can really know what it’s going to be like. We think we know, but we don’t. Knowing what I know now, I’d never do that again.”
She nodded, understanding. “Was any of it good?”
“Plenty. I met lots of great people who had nothing to do with my job. I made friends. I had fun.”
“What about the bad?”
“I learned not to trust. I’m having trouble shaking that.”
“I learned not to trust, too.” She hated to say it out loud, but since he was being so forthcoming, she felt she should be, too.
“Ah,” he said, “but you don’t trust men. Me, I don’t trust anybody.”
Her stomach sank. She hadn’t wanted to hear that, even though she had suspected it. But what difference did it make? she asked herself. She might be sitting here having dinner with him, but she didn’t trust him, either. Not yet. Maybe never. All she felt was an attraction she didn’t want to feel, an awakening of desires she had never actually experienced because she was afraid, yearnings that now troubled her sleep, all because of this man, a man she didn’t trust. Not really.
Why should she trust him? They’d shared a roof for a week, but he’d pretty much stayed out of her way. She had tried to do something neighborly for him with the tortillas, and he’d been neighborly right back by making her a fine meal she would never have thought to make otherwise. But that was it. All of it.
She insisted on doing the washing up because he had cooked. He didn’t argue, simply thanked her and disappeared upstairs. That gave her plenty of time to think.
To think about a man who must be good at making friends, at pretending to be something he wasn’t. How else could he have inserted himself in such a way that he gleaned intelligence that could be gotten by no other means. After all, that was the whole point of going undercover. So if he wasn’t a natural-born liar, he had certainly had to become one.
Who was the man living upstairs? He seemed honest with what he shared, but how would she know? And he’d certainly shared very little, really. Maybe that whole thing about those Indians had been meant to disarm her. It had worked fairly well, but how would she know truth from lie with this man?
She felt a welcome stiffening of her spine as she put away the leftovers, including two big stacks of fresh tortillas, and washed the pans. If she was going to work on breaking down her walls with men, Austin was the last man on earth she ought to try it with.
He had secrets upon secrets. He might not even be sure who he really was any longer. Gage had sort of warned her, hadn’t he, with that stuff about finding the person he’d left behind. Well, Austin would never be who he used to be. Some things changed a person forever, as well she knew. He certainly hadn’t had time to settle on the man he’d become.
He’d admitted that he didn’t trust anyone anymore, and she wondered if his distrust included himself. It might. Six years undercover had probably taught him some things about himself that he didn’t like. She couldn’t imagine it wouldn’t. Now he had to deal with that along with everything else.
In short, the guy was a mess. Gage had warned her. So why the hell had she begun to lie awake at night fantasizing about him? It hadn’t happened right away, but at some point in the past couple of days, the initial attraction she had felt then squashed had returned big-time.
But maybe that was because he was safe in a way. He wasn’t going to be here for long, he’d expressed no interest in her, other than an occasional look quickly turned away that she couldn’t mistake even in her inexperience. So, yes, he’d evinced small moments of attraction to her, purely physical, but that was meaningless. She gave him credit for not acting on them.
Which left her exactly where? Indulging in fantasies as she lay in her lonely bed at night, fantasies that probably bore no resemblance to reality because she’d never even kissed a man, let alone gone any further.
Then she had a really ugly thought about herself. This whole tortilla thing. Had she done it to be neighborly or because she wanted his attention?
If
