Agent Undercover. Lisa Childs

rang in her ears, and she trembled in the aftermath of the close call. Maybe he was right. Maybe the man hadn’t been shooting at her. But she’d thought Ash had been hit, which had been entirely too close for her.

      She had actually touched him, just to check his chest to see if a bullet had struck his heart. But he’d been wearing a vest. She’d felt the hardness beneath the softness of his sweater. Maybe she should have checked beneath the vest, too. At the thought of pulling up his sweater and peeling off that vest, her pulse quickened. Would his chest have dark hair that would be soft to her touch? Or would his muscles be all sleek and smooth beneath her palms? Her breath caught at both images.

      “Is something missing?” Agent Stryker asked.

      Her face heated with embarrassment that he had caught her daydreaming about him when she was supposed to be checking her ransacked office to see what could have been missing. Why would someone break into her office?

      The power was on her computer but her files were untouched. Nobody would have been able to bypass her security passwords, though. And once they’d sounded the alarm and shot the guard, they wouldn’t have had time to even try to figure it out.

      What were they so desperate to steal from her?

      She reached for the snow globe paperweight that sat next to her monitor. She shook it and watched the flakes float onto the pond, a tiny figurine of a father skated around with the tiny figurine of his daughter perched high upon his shoulders. Her breath shuddered out in relief. “It’s okay.”

      “You were worried about a paperweight?” he asked, his blue eyes narrowed with skepticism.

      “Have you ever seen anything like it?” she asked as she held it out toward him.

      He shrugged. “It’s a snow globe.”

      “It’s special,” she said with a soft sigh as sweet, old memories rushed over her. “My father gave it to me.”

      “Is he dead?”

      She gasped at the horror of such a loss. “No!”

      He reached for the paperweight, engulfing the delicate glass globe in his big hands. “I don’t see what’s so special about it,” he said as he studied it more closely, “unless you hid a flash drive inside it.”

      Afraid that he might smash it onto the floor to look for something hidden inside, she grabbed for it, her fingers sliding over his as he gripped the globe. “Don’t break it! My father had that specially made for me.” To commemorate a perfect day. Of course it had been just the two of them...

      Maybe she shouldn’t have gotten so upset when her mother left them since she had never really spent that much time with them anyway. And Claire probably wouldn’t have if her father hadn’t gotten so upset. He had been in so much pain that she’d had to lash out. She sighed again, but this time with regret.

      “He’s not dead,” Ash reminded her.

      “Does he have to be?” she asked. “Why can’t something he gave me be important to me while he’s alive?”

      Ash just shrugged again.

      Her heart sank as she had a grim realization. “Your father’s dead.”

      He jerked his head in a quick nod, as if he was embarrassed to admit it.

      “I’m sorry.”

      Now he shrugged off her sympathy. “It happened a long time ago.”

      She doubted that would have lessened his pain very much. If something happened to her father, she would miss him forever. “That must have been tough on you and your mom.”

      “My mom died with him,” he said.

      Her hands still covered his, over the snow globe, so she squeezed, offering sympathy and comfort. “That must have been horrible for you. To lose them both...”

      For a while she had felt like she had, too.

      Ash focused on her now, as if he’d picked up on the tone of her voice. “You lost your mom.”

      “Yes,” she said but then hastened to add, “but not like you did, though. She’s alive. She’s just gone. When I was sixteen, she left my dad and went to live in England with a man she’d met online.”

      His eyes widened, and then he nodded with sudden realization. “That was when you hacked into that bank.”

      “It was the bank that he used and the only money I took was from his account,” she said. For some reason she wanted him to know that greed hadn’t motivated her. But was it any better that spite had?

      He chuckled. “And if I remember right from what I read in your file, you donated that money to a charity called Family First.”

      She couldn’t chuckle. Even after all these years, she was still kind of bitter. Probably too bitter. “I wanted to hurt him.”

      “Instead you’re the one you hurt,” he said. “Because he pressed charges.”

      And yet her mother had stayed with the man. Clearly Bonita Molenski had made her choice when she’d left them, but still it had hurt Claire that her mother had cared so little about her that she would have let her go to juvenile detention. But then the FBI had offered Claire another option.

      “You’ve definitely read my file,” she mused. Either he’d read it a few times, or he had a photographic memory. She glanced around her ransacked office. “It hasn’t been all bad, though. I actually enjoy what I do.”

      “You do?” he asked doubtfully, as if he couldn’t understand why.

      She laughed at his skepticism. “Yes, I do. I’ve not only been given permission to hack, I’ve been encouraged to do it. It’s fun.”

      Or it had been until she had realized that her job was pretty much all she had. Of course she’d spent time with her dad when she hadn’t been working. But he was finally over her mother and had moved on, so it was time she did the same. That was why she’d joined the dating service—one she’d trusted to make sure that none of the participants were already married like her mother had been. That hadn’t been the case at the speed dating event, though. But maybe, like Ash, some of the others hadn’t been there to date, either.

      He sighed and released the snow globe to her hands. “You’re not selling a flash drive with inside information on how to get around security firewalls.”

      So that was what he’d thought she was selling. “I would never sell that kind of information,” she assured him.

      After her arrest all those years ago, she had learned to control her impulsiveness and consider the consequences of her actions before she acted. Ironically, learning that had actually made her a better hacker.

      Knuckles rapped against the glass wall of her office. “Hey, Boss, what happened here tonight?”

      She turned her attention to her young assistant, who leaned now in her open doorway. His bleached white-blond hair was all mussed up as if he’d been sleeping and his eyes were red-rimmed as if he’d been out partying before he’d fallen asleep. Maybe Martin Crouch wasn’t as young as she thought—he just dressed and acted young. Peter Nowak must have called him in to help her look through her ransacked office.

      “The building was broken into and Harold was injured,” she said. As soon as they had arrived at the company, she’d learned the name of the injured guard. Ash had checked in with the hospital again and had assured her that Harold was out of surgery and in stable condition. Fortunately, he would fully recover.

      “Is—is he going to be okay?” Martin asked.

      He must have been as shocked and horrified as she was. Despite checking security for banks and the government, the company had always been safe and secure—probably because most people didn’t realize exactly what kind of computer consulting they did.

      “Yes, he