Rafe Sinclair's Revenge. Gayle Wilson

he was very good at what he did. Still, there had been a niggling guilt in the back of his mind that he might have been responsible for giving away her location.

      “Is it possible this is Jorgensen?” she asked.

      “No,” he said, urging her forward again.

      He had told Griff the truth. He had watched the bastard die. He was willing to concede this might be a protégé or a colleague, someone Jorgensen had trained, but it couldn’t be the man himself. He was sure of that.

      The fact that whoever it was had been watching Elizabeth all week was significant, however, because nothing had happened until he’d shown up. Whoever this was had been waiting for him to arrive.

      The explosion had been for his benefit. Arranged so that when Rafe heard the noise and smelled the smoke, he would believe exactly what he had believed—that this time Elizabeth had been the victim.

      “Then who set off that explosion?” she asked.

      “Someone who wanted me to think you were inside that building. If this had been Jorgensen, believe me, he would have made sure.”

      There was a small hesitation, and then she said, “I should have been.”

      “What?” He had been only half listening, wondering if the bomber could possibly know why his ruse had been so successful.

      “I should have been in the office this morning. He knew that because he’d been watching me all week. He knew what time I get there every day. And then…this morning I was late.”

      A coldness settled in Rafe’s stomach as he began to understand the implications of what she was saying.

      “It should have been deliberate,” she went on. “Being late, I mean. I thought yesterday that I’d fallen into a routine. They always told us that was dangerous.”

      It was. If you had any reason to believe you might be a target for someone. After all these years Elizabeth shouldn’t have had reason to believe that. He hadn’t.

      “He could have set his damn watch by me,” she said bitterly. “I turn the key in that lock every morning at precisely nine o’clock. Except this morning—”

      “You were late,” he finished for her, beginning to accept the idea that the explosion might not have been for show. Perhaps the bomber had been waiting for him to arrive, but maybe what he had prepared for Rafe to see wasn’t what had occurred.

      Elizabeth’s mouth tightened. “I couldn’t sleep. I forgot to set the alarm. And then a logging truck pulled out onto the highway ahead of me. Normally there would have been plenty of time despite that, but this morning…” Again her voice faded. “I should have been there,” she said softly. “In the office. I would have been if it hadn’t been for that truck.”

      And if it hadn’t been for him showing up at her house yesterday. She wouldn’t admit that, but the truth of it had been revealed by her admission that she hadn’t slept and by her failure to set the alarm. He didn’t really need to hear her confess the reason those two things had happened.

      It would be a step back to the personal. Back to things he didn’t want to talk about any more than she did. Back to the need for some explanation of why he’d left.

      He could make one. He could tell her all the things that he’d never been willing to share before. He had thought about doing that a thousand times.

      Even if she knew, even if she understood, it wouldn’t change a thing. Nothing could.

      He had always known that one night, as he took her into his arms, feeling the sensual slide of sweat-moistened skin against his, she would suddenly become the woman from the embassy. The woman with the silent scream. The woman who had died in his arms.

      And when that happened, she would know everything he had come to know about himself. That was the one thing he had known he couldn’t live with—what would be in her eyes when she looked at him then.

      THE CAB he’d called before they left the emergency room had been waiting at the back entrance when they finally made their way through the maze of hospital corridors. The driver, an elderly black man, had been eager to talk about the explosion in Magnolia Grove.

      According to him, everyone was buying into the fire chief’s explanation that it had been caused by a gas leak. From their perspective, that was probably a good thing, Rafe decided.

      It wouldn’t stand up to an arson investigation, of course. And he’d be willing to bet that the methodology used in this bombing, the so-called signature of the bomber, would be identical to that used in those that had precipitated the CIA security alert Griff had shown him.

      By the time that had all been determined, he’d have Elizabeth away. With the care the CIA had taken in destroying any link between the people on Griff’s team and the agency itself, no one would ever connect Magnolia Grove, Mississippi, or Beth Anderson to those acts of terrorism.

      Rafe had every confidence that he could keep her safe. The most dangerous aspect would be getting her out of town, simply because that’s where the terrorist was. Or maybe he was wrong about that. Maybe this guy wasn’t one of those who waited around to glory in the results. And maybe pigs can fly.

      “Drive around the block,” he instructed the cabbie as they approached the motel.

      Despite the ongoing excitement a couple of streets away, the parking lot looked reassuringly empty in the early-afternoon heat. Most of the cars that had been there when he’d pulled aside the drapes this morning had since disappeared, moving on to their next destination.

      His own sat fairly isolated among the remaining vehicles. It looked the same as it had when he’d parked it there last night. Of course, looking the same and being the same were vastly different.

      All kinds of things might have been done to it in that time frame. Something could have been attached to it, for example. A device set to explode when he turned the key in the ignition. Or when he unlocked the door.

      “Want me to drive around again, boss?” the cabbie asked after he’d made the slow circuit of the block.

      Not much point, Rafe decided. There was only one way to tell if the room or his car had been tampered with. “That’s okay,” he said. “Pull up near Room 18.”

      “You got it.”

      The cabbie maneuvered his ancient sedan into one of the parking spaces that had opened up in front of the room since Rafe had left it on foot this morning. Rafe added a generous tip to the fare and handed it to the driver across the bench-type front seat. “Thanks for coming all the way out to the hospital.”

      “Glad to do it. Ain’t nothing else happening around here. Not with all that commotion going on. Least the air-conditioning in the car works. Cooler here than at home,” the old man said, carefully folding the bills and putting them in the breast pocket of his cotton sports shirt.

      Rafe didn’t argue the point, although the air inside the cab wasn’t appreciably cooler than that he stepped out into. He had thought it was hot this morning, but the afternoon’s heat was a physical assault.

      He glanced at Elizabeth’s face as she slid across the cracked vinyl seat and climbed out, using his hand for support. The nearer they had gotten to town, the quieter she had become. Now her expression was closed, her face still colorless, the features pinched with the strain of the last few hours.

      She waited until the cab had driven away before she revealed what she’d been thinking during the ride back. “I need to call Darrell. If this is what you think it is, then I’m responsible for what happened to the office.”

      “Your partner?”

      She nodded. “Semiretired. I handle most of the cases now. It’s what he intended when he took me into partnership. He’s been very good to me, Rafe. At the very least I owe him some explanation—”

      “You don’t owe him