Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 144571 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 723(@200wpm)___ 578(@250wpm)___ 482(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 144571 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 723(@200wpm)___ 578(@250wpm)___ 482(@300wpm)
“Everyone who’s still here,” Kala grumbled.
“Yes, I would like to talk about what happened with Captain Reed as well,” Lena replied, frowning. “But we should start with how you were caught by the suspect’s men.”
She’d been over this a million times. Or at least once, and that should be enough. But no, the Agency needed her to go over and over it…like they were waiting for her to trip up and reveal something.
Like she was the real suspect.
Damn it. Her father had told her to take this seriously, and she was fucking up again.
“I wrote a report. Several, actually,” she replied, sitting back and mimicking the shrink. Though she was wearing combat boots and ripped jeans.
Lena watched her every move and made a note in the small book she held on her lap.
Kala could guess what was in there. The rest of the team had already done their time with her.
Louisa Ward – sweet and charming. Einstein-level IQ. An asset for the Agency, with the singular exception of her poor taste in friends.
Natasha Taggart – organized and emotionally intelligent. She’s the heart of the team as she manages to keep their big personalities in check.
Tristan Dean-Miles – makes things work despite his natural repulsion when it comes to making hard choices. An asset, though more behind the scenes and less in the field.
Cooper McKay – Captain America through and through.
Kala Taggart – morally ambiguous, with anti-social tendencies. Keep an eye on her.
At least that’s what the last one said. She should know. She’d stolen the notes. That probably played into the whole morally ambiguous thing.
“I read the report. Now I want to hear it from you.” Lena’s perfectly cut bob shook. “Or we can close this report, and I can get back to DC early.”
“I thought you were hanging around for a while.” If she could shove the Agency shrink out early, everyone would cheer her on. It would be easier than convincing Aunt Phoebe she needed to Poltergeist her pool. That’s what she would argue. Those X’ers knew how to use a pop culture reference to hammer a point home.
“I was. I’m here to gather information about more than the Montreal mission. I’m interviewing the team about Captain Reed and the possible reasons for his recent decision to…take a break from his responsibilities.”
Zach. She carefully schooled her expression. Zach Reed had been her team’s Army liaison since they’d formed. He’d been sent in to try to find the team’s weakness, but he’d become a part of them. Or at least it seemed so. Now she knew he had more secrets than she could have imagined.
Forgive me. Take care of him.
She hadn’t told anyone about the text she’d found on her personal cell the morning after the Montreal op. She had no idea why Zach would send her a message like that. She had to figure he’d screwed up and used the word him instead of them.
Which him could he be talking about?
“However, I can certainly do the work I need to do back in DC since if I decide the team needs a long time out, everything touching the Huisman operation can transfer to another team,” Lena pronounced.
Uncle Sean had a freezer. He ran several restaurants, and those had plenty of places to stash a body.
Fuck. She was going to have to go along with whatever the shrink wanted. “Fine. Do you want me to start at the beginning? It was a beautiful day in North Texas when a helicopter decided to take out my cousin’s wedding. Not the helicopter itself, of course, but the assholes inside it.”
A long huff came from the doctor. “What were you doing in the bar, Kala?”
Yep, this was going to be an ass kicking. And she’d already gotten such a heinous one. This op sucked. “I went to the hotel where the assets were staying.” She didn’t need to mention that the assets had been her cousin, Carys Taggart, and Aidan O’Donnell, one of her fiancés. Tristan was the other. They’d gotten involved in the seemingly never-ending mission to prove Dr. Emmanuel Huisman was the head of an international terrorist organization devoted to burning down the world. Carys and Aidan were doctors, and Aidan had been invited to a conference by Huisman himself. “The comms units we were using had gone out, and the big boss decided to send a couple of us there to ensure everything was all right.”
The comms units had been turned off because the threesome had been having a knock-down, drag-out fight that led to some serious sex. She’d been in the audience for a bunch of the fight but had definitely been happy to leave before the sex.
Sex. Even the word was hard to deal with. It had been oddly easy to ignore sex for years, but then Cooper McKay had come back into her life, and now it was on her brain again.