She spit and fought the weight pinning her legs as it shifted away.
Hands grasped her arms and hauled her to her feet, turning her to face her pursuer. She hardened her gaze, determined to memorize her captor’s face. Struggling to free a fist and throw a punch, Meghan caught a good look at him and went limp, her fight dying.
Green eyes.
Familiar eyes.
The eyes of a dead man.
* * *
Tate Walker’s grip loosened, then tightened again. He scanned their target’s face, skimming familiar short dark hair and deep brown eyes that no one who saw them could ever forget. He nearly choked on nothing more than air.
Meghan McGuire was their mark? What would a hacker who was threatening national security want with her?
She jerked once, hard, breaking the connection and twisting her arm as she tried to pull away from his grasp. “You’re not real.” Her voice was raw, and although the words were low, they carried the force of a shout. “Let me go.”
He couldn’t. If he released her and she ran or, worse, stood there and vented the anger burning in her eyes, his cover would blow sky-high and they’d both be dead in the next ten seconds. Glancing over his shoulder, he figured he had about that long to explain before Isaac rushed out of the building, if the other man wasn’t watching already. “I’m under cover. Follow along.”
Her nostrils flared and she pulled again, struggling against him. Meghan had always had fight. It had made her a partner other operatives in their small specialized military unit had envied. More than once she’d been offered other teams, other assignments, but she’d always stuck close to their partnership, loyal until the day she walked away without even offering him a goodbye.
Right now, her fight was about something more than self-preservation. She had the wild-eyed, caged-animal fight of someone who thought she was losing her senses. “This isn’t real. You’re dead. Ethan told me you died. There was a funeral. Everything.” She twisted her body, trying to free herself, but her eyes stayed on his. “You’re—”
The fire door crashed open behind him, and Isaac’s shout echoed off the trees. “You got her?”
Time was up. Tate winced and fired one last plea at Meghan. “Trust me.” That was a lot to ask of any woman. Especially one who’d believed he was dead for four years.
But she had to trust him. His heart hammered. He’d had his cover compromised one other time, and it had left him close to death in a pool of his own blood under a hot Pennsylvania sun. The moment had changed everything about his life. His chest ached empty even now, his breathlessness a testament to the physical price he’d paid at the hands of a traitor.
He wouldn’t land himself there again.
After shooting a warning into Meghan’s angry and confused expression, he whipped around, keeping his grip tight and her close, tucked slightly behind him. “Yeah. I got her when she busted out the fire door. Go get the van and bring it around to the back lot.” He pointed toward the corner of the parking lot barely visible on the other side of the low brick building, praying Isaac wouldn’t decide to take issue with Tate giving orders. “It’ll keep us from dragging her out into the open by the road. Too many chances for somebody to see us if we try to take her out the front. She’s a fighter.”
Meghan pulled again, growling low. Whether she was helping to sell his story or truly trying to escape, he couldn’t take the chance and ease up. If she ran while Isaac was present, the man would shoot her before she made cover in the wood line. Isaac wasn’t a man with a whole lot of patience. Short, stocky and prematurely balding, he covered his perceived inadequacies in front of his small band of ruffians with a lot of bravado and a notoriously hot temper.
Isaac’s volatile personality was of the dozen reasons Tate didn’t look forward to the consequences of what he was about to do. On a normal day, a man like Isaac wouldn’t even make him blink. But when Tate had to keep cover and couldn’t defend himself? Things could get ugly. Fast.
Isaac hesitated, assessing the situation. He scratched the back of his head, clearly unwilling to let his prey out of his sight.
Come on. Go. Tate’s muscles tightened. He hadn’t been a member of Isaac’s ring long enough to gain the man’s full trust, and he was severely testing a fragile thread right now.
The pause felt like an eternity, but Isaac turned and tried the door.
Locked.
He tossed a disgusted smirk in Tate’s direction and took off at a slow jog around the corner of the building.
Tate nearly sagged in relief. Turning fully toward Meghan, he kept a firm hold on her wrist. After reaching under his T-shirt at his waist, he pulled his clipped holster free, holding the pistol out to her grip-first. “Take this.” He’d count it a blessing if she didn’t shoot him with his own weapon.
She stared at him in wide-eyed shock, an expression he’d never seen in all the years they’d worked side by side. Seeing him living and breathing had to make her question everything she thought she knew about reality.
He laid the holstered pistol on her palm. “Stay with me, McGuire. Just get through the next few hours and I’ll give you answers.” The ones the government hadn’t classified, anyway.
She swallowed hard, the lines around her mouth deepening. At least she was losing the panicked-deer look; her expression morphed into the concentrated stare of a warrior. This was the Meghan McGuire he knew. He’d smile if the situation weren’t so desperate. And if she wasn’t so uncharacteristically silent.
She was listening. And she hadn’t started running. Yet.
Tate fought the crazy urge to pull her into a hug before he let her go. “You have keys to the building?”
“I do.”
“Take my gun. Go inside through the fire door. Isaac will assume you’re locked out and you ran for the woods. Get in your car and get out of here. Go as far as you can. Don’t go near your apartment because there’s two more guys waiting there for you. Get out of town and don’t call the police. We can’t blow this operation wide-open yet.” This mission was too important. If their target figured out they were onto him, he’d pack his toys and vanish by nightfall. Tate was too close to shutting the door on an op they’d been running for more than two years, an op that had left several broken lives and untimely deaths behind it.
He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and slipped it into hers. “Don’t answer it, no matter what. I don’t care what number comes across. I don’t care what text messages you see. Do not answer. But don’t lose it and don’t turn it off. I’ll find you.”
“Stop talking to me as though I’ve never done this before.” The words were coated with sass thick enough to choke them both.
Ah. There was the blowback he’d expected. He grinned in spite of himself. “Then stop looking at me as though you’ve never done this before.”
She drew her eyebrows together, pulling her keys from her pocket and stepping around him, prepared to make a run for the building. “You have so much talking to do, you’re going to be hoarse by the time you’re done.”
Tate grabbed her elbow and glanced over his shoulder. “I promise I’ll find you and explain later. Right now I need you to...” He was fully, painfully aware what he was about to ask of the woman he’d trained himself. “Hit me. Pretend you hate me.”
If the silent anger she fired at him was any indication, this might be the worst punch he ever took.
Meghan pulled in a deep breath, her posture easing into the one that knew this business was life or death.
The part of her that knew Tate was a dead man if they couldn’t sell her escape.