More Than a Mission - Caridad Pineiro [12]
“A little unclear,” Lucia advised.
A harsh sigh escaped him before he said, “It’s clear to me. This was one of Mitch’s favorites.”
Chapter 4
Elizabeth stretched a kink out of her back. Just a few hours to go until the start of the dinner service and everything was in order and ready. Which meant that she’d better take her afternoon break.
Natalie and Susanna, another of her assistants, had already left for some rest. Both young women lived nearby, as did most of the staff she employed. Which made her question where Aidan would drift?
She ambled toward the front of the building, but he had already departed. Not out of the ordinary, but she got a sense of something not right with him. It made her wonder if he was in trouble. If that was the reason he moved from place to place, never putting down roots. She made a mental note to ask him for some references if he survived his first night on the job.
Closing up, she went to her cottage, changed into jogging clothes and checked out the tide. Low enough still that she could run along the shore instead of the hard asphalt road toward the center of town.
Even though she stayed on the wetter hard-packed sand, her heels dug deep with the force of her strides and so she pushed a little harder. Her arms pumped as she ran, passing behind the main buildings in town and the public access ramps to the beach. As she skirted a protective stone jetty close to the old Roman bridge before turning around, a fine sweat glistened on her bare arms and legs from her exertions.
“Elvis has left the building,” Lucia called out from the central area of the suite.
Aidan put down the microchip he had been laboring over and walked out to view the now-empty rooms of the restaurant from the monitors Lucia had set up in the common space of their quarters.
Grabbing a set of binoculars, he rushed to the corner of the hotel room, grateful that Corbett Lazlo had thought to rent a space with windows that faced the shore and the restaurant. Scoping out the area with the high-powered binoculars, he tried to locate the Sparrow, but couldn’t.
“Damn. I’ll have to get something in the cottage so we can monitor her better.”
Lucia joined him at the windows, another pair of binoculars in hand. “Is that where you think she is?”
Aidan looked at his watch. “It’s only three, so she’s got a bit of time until she needs to get dinner going. She could be anywhere, but my money is on the cottage. She strikes me as a homebody.”
“When she isn’t busy being an assassin?” Lucia tossed out.
“So you’re finally convinced it’s her?” he asked and glanced over at his colleague.
Lucia shook her head before bringing up the binoculars once again. “Either that or there’s a hell of a lot of coincidences.”
“Hmm.” He turned his attention to searching out the grounds of the restaurant and the cottage, but he could see nothing.
A moment later, however, Lucia chuckled loudly. “A homebody, huh?”
Aidan stepped to her side and tracked the line of sight of Lucia’s binoculars. He caught the blur of movement along the shore. Training his binoculars on the area, he increased the magnification until he could finally identify Elizabeth.
She was running. He couldn’t call it jogging since the pace was too fast. Almost punishing. Her arms pumped smoothly while the hair swept up in a pony tail bounced in rhythm to her long and graceful strides. A cropped dark-maroon T-shirt was plastered to her body by a combination of sweat and a breeze.
She was cold.
He grew increasingly interested as he noticed even more about her. The firm muscles at her midriff and legs shifting and bunching. The running shorts she wore weren’t scant, but her legs were long for her height. Very long, which brought disturbing visions of what she could do with those legs.
He groaned.
“Aidan?” he heard from beside him and realized Lucia had been talking to him.
“What? I’m sorry. I was concentrating.”
“You are such a guy,” she teased with a wide smile.
He had to shake his head and laugh. There was just something