and happy as he moved closer to the lobby. Just a regular guy on his way to meet friends for a celebratory drink.
There were no potential hit men in view, or anyone who registered on his radar as connected to the man he’d been hunting for ten years. Hunting with the laser focus of a man poised to lose everything he held dear, a possibility that might be closer than he realized if the letter from Paolo Hawk was the warning he dreaded it was.
His eyes followed a lanky bellhop pushing a loaded luggage cart toward the service elevators. Ryan stepped aside to give him room. He tipped his hat with a “Good evening, sir” before moving on. As the luggage rack moved past him, a gorgeous, shapely backside adorned in a pink dress caused him a moment of distraction before his eyes flickered back to the crowd. No time to enjoy the scenery when he could be ambushed again at any moment.
He allowed himself a last look at the woman standing at the bar, this time taking inventory of her legs. He was just starting to wonder if her face matched the sophisticated sexpot allure of the rest of her body when she accepted a martini from the bartender, then turned to look across the lobby.
Ryan’s jaw dropped. He might’ve made a little sound of disbelief, but it was hard to tell given the volume of music streaming from the ballroom.
This changes everything—she changes everything.
Ducking farther into the hall’s shadows, he reflexively brought a foot up to tap his service weapon, his backup piece for the night. Double-checking the presence of his guns was rather pointless, but after seventeen years as a soldier, it was one nervous habit he couldn’t see fit to break.
Maybe he’d mistaken the woman’s identity. San Diego was full of women with long, wavy blond hair and big brown eyes.
Taking care to keep his face in the swath of shadow created by the enormous lobby Christmas tree, he tipped his head around the corner until he had a clear view of the bar.
No two ways about it; the woman in pink was Avery Meadows.
With her lips on the rim of her martini glass, she glanced around anxiously, as though she was waiting for someone. Him, he assumed. What a dangerous move, to waltz into the middle of the undercover op she knew full well was happening here. She looked like a pink bull’s-eye, standing in plain sight dressed like she was, as though she had zero concern for her personal safety.
Then again, if she was working with Vincenzo Chiara, maybe safety wasn’t a concern. Maybe, instead of looking for Ryan, she was meeting up with Chiara’s men to ensure they’d followed through on their job to off him.
But why the dress and the drink—to blend in with the New Year’s Eve party crowd? Why would she bother? Nothing made sense.
He strained his brain to remember what she’d been wearing when he’d left the office but couldn’t pull it up from his mental files. Maybe a charcoal-gray dress and a sweater...or was it a pantsuit? He’d pretty much been avoiding eye contact with her since arriving at the San Diego office. Mostly because she wouldn’t stop looking at him in that sly way women did when they were making plans for a man.
Watching her watch him gave him the willies, as though maybe he’d been right to suspect her of misdeeds. But even if she hadn’t been on his short list of corruption suspects, he wasn’t in San Diego to get involved in a relationship or even have a bit of no-strings-attached fun. He was there for only one purpose: to bury Chiara along with the secret Ryan had dedicated his life to protecting. He couldn’t afford to get distracted—not even by his office’s sweet, cute secretary.
She certainly didn’t look sweet and cute tonight. More like trouble wrapped in a pink hourglass. And Ryan already had plenty of trouble.
He smoothed a hand over his hair and straightened his tie. Whatever dirt Avery was mixed up in, it was time for her to come clean.
He skirted the room along the wall. She hadn’t noticed his presence, so he took advantage of the element of surprise and walked around the far side of the bar to approach her from behind. She looked even sexier the closer he got. His eyes traced the line of her calf to the skin on the back of her knee. And that butt—how had he never noticed it before?
When he was near enough to see the movement of her teardrop pearl earrings as she fished the olive from her drink, he double-checked his body language. Just a guy meeting his date at the bar.
He wrapped his hand around her elbow and ducked his lips close to her ear. “You know what they say about people who eat the olive before finishing the drink, don’t you?”
Startled, she stiffened and sucked in a sharp breath. The martini sloshed over the rim of the glass. “Agent Reitano, thank goodness. I was starting to think I’d never find you.”
She tried to face him, but he maintained his position of power with an unyielding grip on her arm. “Ryan,” he corrected. No need to advertise he was an undercover agent. “What are you doing here?”
“I left you a voice mail and texted you that I was coming.”
“I tossed my phone.”
“What? Why?” She tried to turn again, so he pressed against her back, pinning her between the bar stool and his hips.
“My question first.”
She fiddled with the base of her glass. “Okay. The answer is no. I don’t know what they say about people who eat the olive first. That we’re hungry?”
Huh? “Avery, what are you doing here?”
She angled her head over her shoulder and whispered out of the corner of her mouth, “There was a problem with the document you asked for.”
Damn it. Now what was he supposed to think? Avery definitely wasn’t giving off a double-agent vibe, but her actions were suspicious as all get-out. Once upon a time, Ryan had valued his intuition first and foremost, but ever since the betrayal that had broken up his black ops crew and turned Ryan into a lone hunter, he knew better than to trust anyone or anything— including his own instincts.
And wasn’t that a royally jaded thought? When had he become such a cynic? Actually, he could pinpoint the exact day and time he’d turned into a cynic, not that it made the transformation any less jarring.
He shook off his regret and frustration about the past. There was nothing he could do to change the way things went down with his crew.
“What sort of problem?” He leaned in for a view of her facial expression when she answered.
“The office’s computers crashed, so I searched for the hard copy, but the file was missing. I didn’t know what else to do but come find you.”
Scowling, he shook his head. “You expect me to believe that?”
“Uh, yeah. Why wouldn’t you?”
Another loud, beat-heavy song drifted into the lobby from the second-floor ballroom as the New Year’s Eve ball went into full swing. Regardless, the ground-floor lobby bar was not an ideal place for an interrogation.
From his research on the hotel, he remembered a row of conference rooms on the third level. Taking the service stairs would be quicker, but with Avery’s dress, they’d stand out too glaringly to anyone on the lookout for incongruous movement. Staying with the horde of revelers attending the ball was the best camouflage he could manage under the circumstances.
After dropping a twenty-dollar bill on the bar, he slipped his arm around her waist, working to ignore the heat of her body and the provocative curve of her figure. “Let’s walk.”
Hip to hip, they strode in pace with the impenetrable crowd lining up at the base of the escalators. Well, Avery didn’t so much stride as teeter along in a pair of black stiletto heels that looked downright torturous.
As soon as they shuffled onto the escalator, Ryan turned their backs to the lobby and looked out the wall of windows at the sea of cars and pedestrians on the packed downtown street. Chiara was out there somewhere nearby. Ryan could feel it.