Chapter Fifteen
Quinn stood at the window and watched the falling flakes. She blew out a deep breath—fogging the glass—and tucked her hands between her arms and rib cage to keep them warm. And despite the cold penetrating the window, she remained rooted to the floor with her eyes pinned on James, or at least the back of him. When he’d first marched outside, he’d prowled back and forth in front of the cabin like an agitated panther. After a few minutes of tromping a path in the snow, he’d stopped and stood completely still facing the woods with his back to the cabin. And that’s exactly how he remained, like a statue with his hands stuffed deep in his front pockets. Maybe he was actually frozen solid, she thought, noting how the snowflakes had accumulated into tiny piles on his shoulders and uncovered head.
How could he not be freezing? He was only wearing his black Ferrari hoodie, jeans, and street shoes. And yet he stood there, motionless, staring at the tall pines.
She wasn’t sure what she should do. She wasn’t his mother, wife, or girlfriend. She wasn’t even sure she was his friend. Besides, he was a grown man, and a CIA officer. And she didn’t need a degree in psychology to know he needed some time to clear his head and think through whatever was bugging him.
Still, it was obvious he was upset and not paying attention to the fact that if he didn’t come inside soon, he was going to end up with hypothermia and lose a digit or four to frostbite. Quinn came to the conclusion that James’s physical well-being was top priority. He’d just have to think or sulk or do whatever he was doing inside. She turned on her heel, hurried to the bedroom, and pulled on her boots.
Her head popped through the neck of her sweatshirt and she was in the process of shoving her arms through its sleeves when she heard the front door open and close. She ran her hands over her hair, resisting the urge to bolt down the hall. It was best to approach him slowly, so as not to spook him and send him scampering outside again.
That was the plan, anyway, until she got close enough to see him standing in front of the fire in the throes of a full body shiver. His shoes were soaked, snow clung to his jeans, and he had that I-can’t-move-my-face rigidity to him. She grabbed his hand in both of hers and felt how stiff and cold it was. “Oh my God, James. You’re a human Popsicle.”
She dropped his hand, tugged down the zipper of his hoodie, and yanked it off. “I should have gone out sooner and dragged you back inside,” she said under her breath. She ran her palms across his shoulders. The wetness had soaked through to his T-shirt. “Standing out in the snow. What are you, nuts?” She grabbed the hem of his shirt and barked, “Arms up.”
He did as ordered and raised his arms over his head. Quinn peeled his shirt off and dropped it to the floor. When James lowered his arms again, she found herself staring directly at his broad, bare chest. His arms and shoulders were muscled and only a wide, fading scar on his left side marred his hard, flat abdomen. She gulped, which was only slightly less embarrassing than the alternative: drooling.
Her gaze landed on another scar, a three-inch long, thin red line that stretched across his right bicep. Without thinking, she reached out and delicately traced a fingertip along it. At the coolness of his skin, she jolted from her trance and jerked her hand away.
She stumbled back a half step and her awkwardness ratcheted up a notch when she said, “You need to get out of those wet jeans.” She cleared her throat and peered into his face. “Do you, um, have another pair?” For the sake of her blood pressure, she really hoped he had another pair.
For the first time since coming inside, the glazed look in James’s eyes disappeared and he focused on her. “In my bag.”
She spun around and spied the bag on the floor near the couch. She knelt next to it, pulled out a pair of jeans, and tossed them over her shoulder. The only thing she saw for him to put on his upper body was the sweater he’d worn the night before. The black mascara splotch from when she’d used him like a Kleenex during her meltdown in her bedroom was still there. It might not be clean, but at least it was dry.
She heard the distinctive sound of ripping Velcro. She twisted around and saw James removing a pistol in a black ankle holster from his leg. He set it on the coffee table and repeated the process for the weapon strapped to his other ankle.
“One’s got bullets and one’s got darts?” she asked as she stood.
“Yeah.” He set the second holster on the table, and took off his wet shoes. Standing close to the fire had done him good. The color was returning to his face and he’d stopped shivering.
She thrust the dry clothes against his chest. “Go put these on.”
Her anxiety about his condition lifted when he gave her a teasing look and said in a husky voice, “I can’t change here by the fire?”
“Sure you can, if you want,” she said. “I’ve got five brothers.”
“For both our sakes, I’ll go change in the bathroom.”
It was a good thing he didn’t call her bluff.
“It’s just as well,” he called out as he walked down the hall. “Because you never know. I might be going commando.”
* * *
James’s wet T-shirt and hoodie hung off the backs of two dining room chairs Quinn had positioned close to the fire. His jeans were laid out flat on the brick hearth and bookended by his soaked shoes.
Quinn opened the fireplace screen and set another log on the fire. With an iron poker, she jabbed at the already-burning logs and stirred the glowing embers under the grate. She watched for a time, and once the newly introduced log began to snap and pop, she returned the poker to the stand and closed the screen.
She picked up her steaming mug of tea from the coffee table and curled up in the armchair. She sipped her tea and studied James over the rim of the mug. He sat hunkered on the floor in front of the hearth. A blanket was tucked tightly around his shoulders and he stared into the fire.
She lowered the mug and wrapped both hands around it to warm them. She breathed deeply, hoping to calm her emotions. He was grappling with something, and from what he’d said before he stalked outside, she had only the barest inkling of what it might be.
“Unless you were hoping to catch a glimpse of a real live Frosty the Snoworc, I get the feeling there’s another reason you stood outside in the snow until you almost froze.”
He’d been gazing mutely at the flames for so long, it surprised her when he finally spoke. “I’m sorry I overreacted.”
“Look,” she said, “I know spies are supposed to be mysterious and brooding and stoic and all that kind of crap, but I’ve never gotten that constipated Jason Bourne vibe from you.” She dipped her head to look at him. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
James’s eyes squeezed shut and he took several deep and deliberate breaths through his nose. His entire body tensed and she thought he might bolt again. He didn’t. Instead, his shoulders sagged further and he exhaled in surrender. When he opened his eyes and looked into hers, the profound sadness she saw there gutted her. “It was about a year and a half ago. We were on a mission in . . .” He stopped and blew a half laugh through his nose. “I can’t tell you where.”
“That’s okay. Can you tell me who ‘we’ are or is that off-limits?”
“The ‘we’ was my partner. I can’t tell you her name, so I’ll call her Claire. We were undercover.” He stared down at his hand and rubbed the thumb of one hand into the palm of the other. “We were, ah—” He stopped and carefully considered his words before beginning again. “We were betrayed by someone we were told we could trust. We both ended up getting shot. I survived. She didn’t.”
“I’m so sorry, James. That must have been devastating for you.”
He nodded. “We’d spent so much time together. We went through training together at the Farm and once we finished, they paired us up. We were a good team. We had a couple of successful ops together before . . .”
Silence hung between them, only interrupted by the staccato pops of the fire. “Were you two, um . . .” Quinn worked her tongue in an attempt to get some saliva going. “Involved?”
His head lowered and he shook it. “She had a serious boyfriend.”
Ah. “Did she know how you felt about her?”
His head jerked up and he stared at her. His surprise morphed into a knowing, fleeting smile. “Of course you’d figure it out.” He sighed and his smile faded. “No. She never did. No one did. We were professional partners only.”
James had wanted more with Claire. Now Quinn wondered if he wanted more with her in the same way. If their date was any indication, she would have to say yes, he did. It was all beginning to make a lot more sense.
“You’re afraid if I go on this op with you, the same thing might happen to me that happened to Claire?” No wonder he looked like he was going to throw up when he asked her to dinner. He was scared of letting himself get close to her, to anyone. And now he was facing the very thing that petrified him the most, going on an op with a partner he cared about in more than a professional way.
“Yeah.” He dragged a hand over his face.
“I get it,” she said with a gentle smile. “But just because something terrible happened to Claire doesn’t mean it will happen to me, too.”
James shook his head. “You’re not even a trained operative. If this thing goes sideways at some point, I can’t promise I’ll be able to keep you safe. I can’t do that to myself again.”
“I don’t need you to protect me.”
“Really.”
Without a word, she set her mug down, slid out of the chair, and knelt by the coffee table. She picked up one of James’s firearms and slipped it from the holster. When he tried to protest, a dangerously arched eyebrow shut him down.
“Nice,” she said. She studied the weapon, being sure to keep her right index finger away from the trigger by resting it on the slide. “The Glock 33’s a cute little pistol.” With her thumb, she pressed the magazine catch, slid it from the grip, and set it off to the side. “Three-fifty-seven SIG cartridges pack a pretty good wallop. No wonder they call it the Pocket Rocket.” Next, she pulled the slide back and locked it open. After visually checking to ensure the chamber was empty, she stuck her pinky into it. “You can never be too careful,” she said, winking at James who stared at her slack-jawed.
“Gaston Glock is Austrian, you know,” she said in a light tone. “His first pistol, the Glock 17, was called that since it was the seventeenth set of technical drawings for the company.”
She somehow managed to suppress a smile at how utterly and completely confounded he looked. Assured the gun wasn’t loaded, she released the slide. It popped forward with a click. She made sure to point the barrel in a safe direction and pulled the trigger. The resulting click was innocuous and uneventful.
“I know some people don’t like to dry-fire their weapon since it can damage the firing pin, but since the Glock has a safe action trigger, it has to be done to field strip it.” As she spoke, she gripped the top of the slide with the fingers of her right hand and moved it back a little. “Once in a while doesn’t hurt it, right?” With her left thumb and forefinger, she pressed down on the lock and let go of the slide with her right. There was another harmless click, after which she removed the entire slide from the frame. She set the lower part of the gun down, flipped the slide over, deftly removed the recoil spring assembly, and popped out the barrel.
Quinn squinted, checked out the barrel, and made a clucking noise with her tongue. “The feed ramp’s got some schmutz on it,” she said and scratched at the buildup with her fingernail. “You might want to clean that.”
James looked as if his cranium had just been smacked with a two-by-four.
She’d made her point. She replaced the barrel and recoil spring assembly, guided the slide back onto the frame, and ratcheted back on it a couple of times to make sure it was working properly. Finally, she slapped the magazine into the grip. Once the pistol was back in its holster, she carefully set it down on the table where she’d found it. She folded back up in her chair and gave James an innocent smile.
“How do you—? I don’t understand how—” His stammering was adorable. “God, you’re hot,” he breathed. The second the words slipped through his lips, he blushed. “Sorry.”
The heat crawling up her neck told her she was probably as red-faced as he. Not knowing how to appropriately respond to his slip, she ignored it and said, “My dad’s a Marine. I’ve been around guns my entire life. As soon as I was old enough, he started teaching me gun safety and then how to shoot, first with a BB rifle and then a .22. By the time I was in high school, I was shooting pistols and revolvers with him at the firing range. And I know it’s not exactly combat, but on most family occasions, my brothers and I engage in some pretty epic paintball battles.”
“Is there anything you can’t do?”
“I hate shopping for clothes, I’m terrible at applying makeup, and my cooking skills would be classified as ‘good-enough-to-make-it-edible-so-you-won’t-starve-to-death. ’” She shook her head slowly when she intoned, “And you do not want to hear me sing.”
“There goes going undercover as the lead in a West End musical.”
“Am I to take from that comment you’ve finally accepted the fact I’m going to London with you?”
“You’ve shot down, no pun intended, most of my concerns.” With a mock sigh of defeat, he said, “Yes, we’re going to London.”
She grinned as a surge of excitement sent a raft of chills through her.
“I’m still going to do everything I can to protect you and keep you safe.” One corner of his mouth lifted when he said, “Think of the avalanche of paperwork I’d have to deal with if something happened to you.”
She hurled the pillow at his head.
He snatched it easily from the air before it could hit him in the face. “Seriously, though,” he said, dropping the pillow to his lap. “You might be handy with a pistol, but you’re still not a trained operative. You have to follow my orders.”
“Yes, sir,” she replied crisply and she threw him a smart salute.
“I know you’re kidding around, Quinn, but this isn’t like the spy novel you’re reading. This is real life with real bad guys who can hurt you. You have to do what I say. I can’t let anything happen to you.”
Her frivolity dropped away at the gravity in his voice. She nervously rubbed one thumb with the other.
“What’s the matter?” James asked.
“Well, the good news is we worked out our problems like Meyers wanted us to.”
“I guess the bad news is now that we’ve, ah, cleared the air between us, things have gotten a bit more”—he paused and gave her a significant look—“complicated.”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s look at it this way. This isn’t a vacation. It’s a CIA op. We’re going to London to figure out what’s going on with Ben.” The seriousness in his tone told her CIA operative Anderson was speaking. “We need to stay focused on that. Any distractions, personal or otherwise, can’t be a part of this.”
That was exactly the reset she needed. “I agree. From here on out, it’s all about the mission. You and I will be nothing more to each other than professional partners, right?”
“Right.”
“Like the way you and Ben are partners.”
“Exactly. Although Ben and I’ve never made pancakes together.”
“We’ll have to make pancakes with Ben after we track him down so he won’t feel left out.”
For the first time since he sat down in front of the fire, his smile reached his eyes. “Now that’s a plan.” His phone rang and he answered it with a curt “Anderson.”
Quinn watched James’s gaze roam the room as he listened. “Depending on the snow, it would be about”—he drew out the last word as he glanced down at his watch—“two and a half hours or so at the most. Traffic shouldn’t be an issue since it’s Sunday.”
When his eyes settled on her, she mouthed, “Where?”
“Airport,” he replied silently. “It’ll be cutting it close, but we’ll be there,” he said into his phone. After another moment, he said, “I understand,” and then ended the call. He tossed the pillow onto the couch, shrugged the blanket off his shoulders, and stood. “Grab your stuff. Our flight to Heathrow leaves in five hours.”