A Fare To Remember_ Just Whistle_Driven - Vicki Lewis Thompson [58]
She hadn’t. They’d found no proof whatsoever. Neither he nor the Agency suspected her any longer. Intelligence sources suggested that a third party was inserting the images after the designers turned their work over for post-design production. The minute Rachel had been cleared, Roman should have dropped all contact with her. But he hadn’t.
Sleeping with her, knowing her, caring about her, had simply been too wonderful to stop.
He’d made mistakes in judgment before. All agents did. But none of his had ever put a civilian in danger. And he had nothing to blame but his own selfishness and insatiable libido.
If Rachel got hurt now—physically, permanently—because he hadn’t had the strength and self-discipline to stay out of her life, he’d never forgive himself.
“What are my orders?”
Domino gestured to the safe.
Roman crossed the room, knelt down, then keyed in a series of universal Agency codes. Once the door popped open, he extracted a digital recorder and pressed a second series of numbers. Only then did the device play and let him know what the Agency expected him to do next.
The orders, essentially, came down to one word.
Disappear.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN HE disappeared?” Rachel asked, incredulous.
She hadn’t had a chance to talk to Mario after he’d taken off the night before. By the time he’d come back to her apartment, Iris had forced a second Xanax down her throat and she’d been out for the count. She’d woken up alone but downstairs, had found both Mario and Iris running the coffee stand. Since it was nearly nine-thirty on a Sunday morning, there were few people around.
Mario pulled a note out of his pocket and handed it to Rachel. There, in black and white, in Roman’s even handwriting, was a message that made her clutch at her throat.
The shooters have been apprehended. Rachel is safe. Tell her I’m sorry. Roman
“What about his safety? Are they hunting him?”
Mario didn’t reply.
Rachel stormed away from her friends and wondered how the hell she’d gotten to this point in her life. She’d been in New York a few years, but her circle of friends wasn’t very big. Jeannette was still on the West Coast. Her workout friends and poker buddies weren’t the type you trusted with such outlandish tales. She was grateful to both Iris and Mario, but they were older. She couldn’t keep putting them in the middle of a dangerous situation.
But she needed them. Mario had proved more than capable of holding his own. And Iris was probably the strongest woman Rachel had ever met. They’d want to help her, just as she’d want to help them if they were in trouble.
She swung back, trusting she could rely on them one more time. They already knew the story. Besides, her needs focused more on Roman the man than Roman the criminal or cop or whatever the hell he was.
“He can’t just be gone,” she insisted.
Mario looked at her with eyes that bespoke a lifetime of experience and just as much caring. “You’re better off, Rachel. You said it yourself. You don’t know what the man is mixed up in—and you don’t want to know.”
“I didn’t yesterday. But I was scared and angry and dizzy as hell from being tossed to the ground while bullets whizzed by. Now I’m thinking more clearly and I want to know. I want to know the truth about Roman. He would have told me the truth yesterday, I think. But I was too angry to listen.”
Mario and Iris exchanged glances that told her they didn’t want her to pursue this further. Rachel sighed and for the first time since she moved to the city, felt lost and unsure.
She’d walked down this street a million times. She was home, in the part of New York City she knew best of all—and yet, this afternoon, nothing looked familiar. Not the coffee stand, not the nearby falafel booth, not the facade of her building. In all her travels, Rachel rarely took more than a few hours to acclimate to her surroundings and feel as if she’d lived in Jakarta or Tokyo or Sydney all her life.
But losing Roman had left her more damaged than she expected. The hurt ran deep—too deep