main drag, where streetlamps lent a twilight glow to the nightlife tableau. It was past ten now, but even on a weeknight, the traffic flow, both vehicular and pedestrian, would continue past midnight.
By the time Connor led her to a shabby-looking walk-up just a couple of blocks east of Vine Street, Risa’s back was starting to cramp. To her relief, there was just one flight of stairs to climb before he stopped and led her down the hall to a door marked 201. He unlocked the door and let her inside.
Compared to his place, hers looked almost homey. His living room consisted of a couple of mismatched wooden chairs around a table, and a third chair sat facing the window. A laptop computer lay closed on the table next to a take-out box.
“Have you eaten?” he asked, tossing his keys on the table.
She eyed him warily. His calm, businesslike demeanor wasn’t what she’d expected from her husband upon learning she hadn’t actually died.
She’d spent the past seven months letting him believe she was dead. If the situation had been reversed, she’d have been furious.
Except he didn’t seem furious, either. He seemed...distant.
“Food?” he asked again. “I don’t have much here, but I can run across the road to the all-night diner.”
“I’m not hungry.” She shrugged off her coat and looked around the bare apartment. “But I could use a bathroom.”
His gaze dropped to her round belly. “Right.” He nodded toward the narrow hallway just off the main room. “It’s the door on the right.”
The door on the left was open, revealing a darkened bedroom. In the low ambient light seeping into the hallway from the living room, she saw that his bed was little more than a bunk, wide enough to accommodate—barely—a man Connor’s size.
This was a mission, she realized as she closed the bathroom door behind her. Not a man looking for his missing wife, but a soldier on assignment. That was why he was so distant.
He was looking at her as his job, not his wife.
Shaking from a combination of cold and delayed reaction, she stared into the wide hazel eyes of the pregnant woman in the cabinet mirror and realized she’d never felt so alone in her life.
* * *
NO EMOTIONS. EMOTIONS are messy and unreliable.
Connor gazed out the window at the street below. The snow had started again, coming down in light flurries. He was glad they were out of the cold for the night.
“Am I staying?”
Risa’s soft alto sent a shiver rippling down his spine. He turned to find her standing in the doorway, one shoulder leaning against the frame. The docile young Kaziri widow was gone, and the clear-eyed CIA agent he’d fallen for three years ago had taken her place.
“I don’t think you should risk going back to your apartment.”
“I don’t have a change of clothes.”
“I have a shirt you can borrow.” He regretted the words even as they slipped between his lips, for they reminded him of long, sweet nights of lovemaking, followed by lazy mornings with Risa wandering around their apartment in his shirt and little else.
She ran her hand over the large bulge of her stomach. “Make it a big shirt.”
He wasn’t going to ask. He wasn’t. If she had something to tell him about the baby, she would.
Wouldn’t she?
The Risa he’d known would have played it straight with him. Always.
But the Risa he’d known wouldn’t have let him believe she was dead when she wasn’t.
“You must have so many questions,” she murmured, walking slowly toward him. She was trying to play it cool and sophisticated, the sexy spy in control, but carrying around a baby inside her was apparently hell on the femme fatale act. She still looked sexy, but in an earth-mother sort of way, all fecund beauty and softness.
He couldn’t hold back a smile. “You can drop the act, Risa. You just can’t sell it with that beach ball you’re carrying under that dress.”
She stopped, looking uneasy. “Why aren’t you asking the obvious questions?”
He played dumb. “What are the obvious questions?”
“How did you survive the plane crash, Risa?”
“How did you survive the plane crash, Risa?”
“I never got on the plane.” She took another step.
“Why didn’t you call me, Risa?”
He stayed quiet that time, struggling to control a potent storm of anger and hurt churning in his chest.
“Dalrymple pulled me off the flight. He told me there was a price on my head and I needed to lie low. Then we heard the plane crashed.”
He looked at her through narrowed eyes, wondering if he could trust what she was saying. It was so pat. So obvious. Hell, maybe she even believed the story herself. Maybe Martin Dalrymple really had pulled her off the plane and told her about a price on her head. The plane crash immediately after his warning was a convincing touch.
A little too convincing, maybe.
“You think I haven’t wondered the same thing?” she asked softly, moving another step closer. If he reached out now, he could touch her. Pull her close to him the way he had out in the cold alley. Feel her heart beating against his chest once more, something he’d thought he would never experience again. “You think I didn’t wonder if Dal was pulling a scam on me?”
But he kept his hands by his side. “Dalrymple isn’t known for his truthfulness.”
“I know.” She put her hand on her belly. “But if he wasn’t lying—I couldn’t take the chance. There was too much at stake. Not just me.”
His gaze fell to where her hand cupped her round belly, despite his determination to remain unaffected. “You mean the baby?”
“I didn’t know I was pregnant when I agreed to play dead.” Her voice was soft, her tone sincere. “I found out almost a month later. But you’d already held the memorial service. You’d left the Marine Corps.”
“So, what? You decided that what I didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me?”
“No, of course not—”
“Because it did.” His grasp on his emotions broke, and a flood of anger and old grief poured into his throat, threatening to choke him. “It hurt like all hell. It still does. Every damn day.”
Her face crumpled. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry you let me believe you were dead?” He closed the distance between them in one furious step. “Or sorry that I found out you weren’t?”
She
