the steadying beat of his heart beneath her ear, she allowed herself the truth.
She was Parisa DeVille McGinnis, Risa for short. Her mother was a Kaziri woman who’d married the strapping young US marine who’d saved her from death in a terrorist attack in her war-torn homeland. Risa herself had married a marine, a smart, brave and loyal man she’d met in the mountains of Kaziristan many years later. Like her parents, they’d been on track for their own happily-ever-after.
Until Risa McGinnis had died in a bomb attack on a commercial flight from Kaziristan to the US almost seven months ago. The plane had disappeared from radar over the Pacific and only a few pieces of debris had been found floating in the ocean near the plane’s last coordinates on the radar.
All souls lost.
Well, all the souls who’d actually made it aboard the plane.
“We need to get moving.” Connor’s voice rumbled in her ear. “Lose the roosari.”
She tugged the scarf from her head and shoved it into the pocket of her coat. She allowed herself a quick look at him, though the sight of his face, so close, so achingly familiar, left her feeling breathless and light-headed.
“How far away do you live?” he asked quietly.
“You can’t go there. I live alone, unprotected.” The words came out so easily, as if she truly was the woman whose life she’d lived for months now.
“I’m your husband, Risa.”
Something inside her chest melted and began to warm her from the inside out. “But they think I’m a widow.”
“I hope I died a heroic death.” His dry tone should have made her laugh, but her heart ached too much.
“Where are you staying?” she asked. “We could go there.”
“It’s not far from here.” He draped his arm around her shoulder and pulled her closer. “Remember, you’re not Yasmin now. You’re Parisa. Sexy and smart. You take no prisoners. And you’re with me.”
She looked at him, her heart breaking. “I’m sorry.”
“We’ll worry about apologies later.” He nodded toward the trash-strewn alley stretching out in front of them. “Ready?”
Risa nodded, ignored the ache in her back and legs, and wrapped her arm around his waist.
Huddled together against the cold, they hurried down the darkened alley until they reached the 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