Dead by Midnight - Beverly Barton [148]
He pulled his hands out of hers and knotted them into fists. After working his hands open and closed a couple of times, he rubbed his palms up and down his robe-clad thighs.
“Sanders and I have begun going over records that date back to the inception of the Powell Agency, searching for anyone who might have a grudge against me personally or the agency in general. So far, we’ve found nothing that aroused our suspicion, but I’ve assigned half a dozen employees to go over the files and another half a dozen to work exclusively on this case.”
“You’ve already done all of that without discussing it with me.” Nic knew that by now she should be used to Griff making decisions and acting on them and then telling her after the fact. He couldn’t seem to get it through his thick skull that they were a team, as husband and wife and as business partners.
Griff frowned. “Do you object to what I’ve done?”
“No, I think you’re handling this in the best way possible, but it would have been nice if we had made these decisions together, if I’d known beforehand.”
“You know now.” He shot up off the sofa. “Damn it, Nic, I wasn’t hiding anything from you. I’m not keeping any secrets about this. I thought…” He paced back and forth in front of the fireplace.
Nic sighed heavily. “It’s all right.” She patted the sofa. “Come sit back down.”
He eyed the sofa. “If what Meredith sensed is correct, then the killer is an assassin. He’s been hired to do the killing. That probably means there is someone rich and powerful behind the murders, someone who is striking out at me through my people.”
“Meredith could be wrong.”
Griff sat beside Nic, but didn’t touch her. “I don’t think so. Yvette says that her abilities are the most powerful she’s ever seen.”
Yvette. It always came back to her, didn’t it? Yvette thinks. Yvette believes. Yvette wants. Yvette needs.
“Don’t look at me that way,” Griff told her.
“What way is that?”
“I thought we had finally worked through your suspicions about Yvette. You told me that you were going to try to be friends with her.”
“I am trying. I know she’s important to you.”
Griff grasped Nic’s shoulders. “She is important to me and so is Sanders, but no one is more important to me than you are.”
God, how she wanted to believe him. Damn it, she did believe him. He loved her with the same passion and devotion that she felt for him. She would bet her life on it. “I know,” she managed to reply in a choked whisper.
He caressed her cheek.
After clearing her throat, she asked, “So, while we have agents examining the records looking for someone from the agency’s past who might have hired an assassin, what are we going to do to find out if whoever hired the killer is someone connected to your past on Amara?”
“By retracing the steps Yvette, Sanders, and I took from the day we escaped from Amara until I returned to the U.S.”
“And will this involve your going back to Europe and Asia and searching for pieces of your past with Yvette and Sanders?”
“At this point, I see no need to do more than send agents overseas to do some in-depth digging, highly trained agents, men I trust implicitly. I plan to put Luke Sentell in charge, and if Yvette agrees, if and when he unearths something, I’ll ask Meredith to help him.”
“It seems you’ve given this a great deal of thought,” Nic said. “But there is one possibility that you haven’t considered.”
“What possibility is that?”
“That whoever killed Kristi and Shelley may be someone from my past. After all, I worked on some high-profile cases when I was with the Bureau.”
Alone in his hotel room in LA, he watched with morbid fascination as the two men cornered the woman and dragged her down to the floor. She fought them halfheartedly, her arms flaying, her head turning from side to side as one of the