Total pages in book: 154
Estimated words: 145091 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 725(@200wpm)___ 580(@250wpm)___ 484(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 145091 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 725(@200wpm)___ 580(@250wpm)___ 484(@300wpm)
Except they were going to because if what Kim had told her was true, Drake wasn’t going anywhere.
“Beck called me early this morning.” Kim looked gorgeous with her long blonde hair framing her face. “My husband still has some serious connections. Apparently someone got the president up in the middle of the night, and suddenly I’m getting a call from the deputy director who explains that I need to get you on board because Drake Radcliffe isn’t going anywhere. I can put two and two together. He’s gone around you and made sure you can’t dismiss him.”
That overly privileged asshole. Well, he could force himself into the situation, but he couldn’t force her to stay. “Then he can have the whole op. Let’s see him deal with it.”
“You’re going to let him get his way?” Sandra walked over from the buffet she’d put together. “You know he almost always does. It would do the kid some good to get set on his ass for once.”
Sandra was a lovely woman. Her file claimed she was in her seventies, but she looked far younger. There was a vibrancy about the woman. And a certain level of authority. She would bet Sandra wore the leathers in her relationship. Her wife was a bit younger and far softer than Sandra.
“I don’t think I can call up the leader of the free world and make him change his mind.” Frustration had a stranglehold on her this morning. Morning? It had been choking her since the moment she’d realized Drake was in the house.
Sandra sank onto the chair beside her. “So you’re going to give up an op you’ve been working for months. I don’t know a lot about it, but I’ve heard you’ve been brilliant. Most people would want to see it through. What did the kid do to you?”
Kim leaned over. “I think he seduced her for info on her dad.”
Seduced was such a soft word. Fucked over was much more descriptive.
“I seduced her because I wanted to sleep with her, but I can’t make her see that.” Drake stepped into the room. His hair wasn’t slicked back like normal, and he was wearing flannel pajama bottoms and a V-neck T-shirt. He looked like he’d recently woken up and wasn’t happy about it. He glanced Sandra’s way. “Hey, I drank your whiskey last night. Sorry. It was a rough night, and that whiskey was too tempting to pass up since I couldn’t have what I truly wanted. I’ll replace it.”
Sandra chuckled. “That was Angie’s. She’s the whiskey drinker, and she’ll appreciate the fact that you didn’t call it Scotch. I prefer tequila myself. There’s coffee over there. Is Kyle as hung over as you are?”
“Kyle barely looked like he drank anything, but he had half that bottle. I don’t know where he puts it. His liver must be gold plated or something.” He put a hand to his back, looking adorably rumpled. “I think I slept on a spanking bench.”
Sandra chuckled. “If you’re in the big privacy room and you weren’t smart enough to know there’s a Murphy bed in the wall, then you probably did. Didn’t want to cuddle with the Agency suit?”
As far as she could tell Drake was the Agency suit.
That wasn’t fair. She knew about his record, knew the missions he’d been on, but he was obviously in management now and had been for a while.
Had he known his sister was going after her father? Had he been sent to Romania to distract her?
There was a leak somewhere in the Agency, and it just might be Drake Radcliffe.
She hadn’t thought about it. She’d been so dragged down by her own misery and shame that she hadn’t thought about the fact that he could be the leak. It made sense. He’d been there. He’d been the reason she’d been distracted that week.
She needed to go back over every minute of that time they’d spent together. He’d been so injured. So injured that the bullet hadn’t hit any vital organs, and he’d managed to drive himself all the way up a mountain only to have an accident that hadn’t exactly been dangerous.
What if it had all been for show? What if there had been no mission he’d gotten hurt on?
What if she’d always been the mission?
“I’m kind of mad at him,” Drake was saying. “Not kind of. I’m extremely mad at him. And I don’t cuddle with people I’m mad at.”
“No. You only do that with the ones you need information from.”
She had not meant to say that out loud. She’d intended to ignore the man completely until she figured out how to get around the whole he knew the president thing. She wasn’t giving up on getting rid of him.
He turned her way. “We didn’t get to cuddle. Brad interrupted our cuddle time, and I’m pissed about that, too. I’m an excellent cuddler, and if you knew that maybe we wouldn’t have wasted a year and a half.”