Pawn. Carla Cassidy

change when she’d learned of his true purpose in working for her godfather. Now he saw disillusionment shining from her unusual eyes.

      He tamped down his regret. He was here to do a job and he couldn’t allow emotion or memories to cloud the issue.

      He stood. “They aren’t going to let you go, Lynn. They need you, and what they need you for is in the interest of national security.”

      “I don’t care why they need me. They can’t make me go back to work for them.” She swiped a strand of her shiny, reddish-brown hair behind an ear, a gesture he remembered that indicated stress.

      “That’s where you’re wrong. They can make you. These people who contacted you, they aren’t your ordinary Feds. They’re hybrids, working for a splinter agency but under the guise of FBI. Trust me, these aren’t people to screw around with.”

      He took a step toward her, unsurprised when she took a step back, wary suspicion playing in her eyes. He hated them for making him do this, for using him to get to her.

      “How did your computer work this morning?” he asked. “Have any problems?” She stared at him, a pulse beating rapidly in the hollow of her throat. “This morning they gave you just a little taste of what they’re capable of. Maybe nothing else will happen today, but maybe tomorrow or the day after, your Web sites will begin to experience difficulties. Mistakes will appear on sites you’ve already built, errors that make you look careless, that make you look incompetent. And, that’s not all they’ll do to you.”

      Her gaze narrowed and the pulse in her throat beat faster. “You might as well tell me all of it,” she finally said.

      “They’ll destroy what you’ve built with your business, screw around with your finances to ruin your credit. And if none of that works, they have enough charges pending against you that they can put you in prison and throw away the key.”

      She moved back to the chair opposite the sofa and sat down hard. For a moment she stared at some indefinable point just to the left of where he stood. When she finally met his gaze, her eyes once again blazed with an anger that stunned him.

      “You promised,” she said, her voice low and barely audible. “You promised me that if I helped bring down Jonas, then all those charges would be dropped. That was the deal, that my record would be clean. So, you lied to me.” Bitterness hardened her voice.

      “No, they lied to me,” he said. “At the time I told you that, that’s what I was being told. We were both lied to.”

      She leaned back in the chair and released a weary sigh. “Why me? Why can’t they get somebody else to do whatever it is that needs to be done?”

      “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “They didn’t tell me what they want you to do or why they needed you specifically to do it. They only told me it involved national security. My job was to come here and see that you understand that you have no alternative other than to cooperate with them.”

      Her hard gaze held his for a long moment. “How nice, that they could use the emotional baggage of my past to try to bend me to their will.”

      Nick drew a deep breath and swiped a hand through his dark hair. He didn’t want to remember the passion that had once filled him for her, refused to remember the love he’d once felt for her.

      There was no point in going back there. At the moment his life was more complicated than it had ever been. There was no place in it for memories, for emotional weakness, for Lynn.

      “I didn’t want to do this to you,” he said. “I didn’t want to be a party to screwing up your life, but I had no choice in this, either.”

      One of her chestnut eyebrows rose slightly. “And what are they holding over your head, Nick?”

      His chest tightened as he thought of the threats that had been leveled against him, against what was left of his family. “I’m just doing my job.”

      “Just like you did a year ago?” Bitterness was once again rife in her voice. “Just like you were doing your job when you seduced the boss’s daughter in order to get closer to the boss?”

      Those had been Nick’s orders when he’d been working undercover to bring down Jonas White. He’d gotten a job as head of security at the mansion where Jonas lived, but when it looked as though he was as close to the man as he could get, Nick’s orders had been to get close through Lynn.

      What had begun as a job had become much more. He’d found himself enchanted by Lynn’s innocence, charmed by her humor and stimulated by her intelligence.

      “You know better than that,” he now said vehemently. “No matter what has happened since, I didn’t pretend anything that I felt for you then. You knew what I felt for you was real, not just some assignment I’d been handed.” He held her gaze intently. “You were the one who left, Lynn. You were the one who walked away.”

      She stood once again, her posture stiff and chin lifted in defiance. “And you know there were things I needed to figure out, things I had to find out about myself and where I came from.”

      “I know,” he said softly. “And that was then and this is now and one way or another, they’re going to get you. You might as well make it easy on yourself and find out what they want.”

      He pulled a business card from his pocket and laid it on the coffee table between them. “There’s a number written on this. It will ring directly to Mr. Blake, who is waiting to fill you in. Call him, Lynn.”

      She looked at the card as if it were a Gila monster that had crawled up on her coffee table and taken up unwanted residency. When she gazed at him he once again saw a steely core of strength shining from her eyes.

      “Message delivered,” she said, then shot a pointed gaze toward the front door.

      There were a million other things he wanted to say to her, a hundred regrets he’d liked to have voiced. He wanted to tell her that thoughts of her had often played in his head, that he’d always hoped he would see her again.

      He wanted to ask her if she’d come to terms with the pain of Jonas’s betrayal, if she’d found all the answers she’d been seeking when she’d left him behind. And, he wanted to know who Leo was and had she meant she wouldn’t sleep with him today, or she wouldn’t sleep with him ever?

      But, what was the point? He wasn’t inviting himself back into her life. He had a plane to catch and a shadow life filled with bad guys waiting for him.

      “Despite the circumstances, it was good to see you again,” he said as he walked toward the front door. She didn’t walk with him, but remained standing by the coffee table.

      He opened the front door then turned back to look at her, waiting to see if she was going to say anything more to him.

      She didn’t.

      As Nick stepped out of her apartment and pulled the door closed behind him, he wondered what the agency wanted with her, wondered if he had just handed her a death warrant. Because he knew more than anyone that the men who wanted her played for keeps.

      Chapter 3

      She made the call two hours after Nick walked out her front door. It had taken her that long to process everything he’d said and everything she’d felt at seeing him again.

      She knew he was right. If they wanted her, somehow, someway, they would get her. They could make her life miserable and still sleep well at night.

      At four o’clock that afternoon she got into her car to head to a meeting with the enigmatic Mr. Blake. The last thing she wanted to do was give the FBI another minute of her life. But she wasn’t stupid enough to think that she could fight them.

      As she drove to the warehouse where they had taken her the night before, she tightened her hands on the steering wheel as she thought of the threat of imprisonment.

      Breaking and entering, theft