Leah snorted into the phone.
“Just try it,” Rex said with a laugh. “It’s true. Mike and I, we had some close calls in the field. And after a really close one, our cover was pretty well blown, so I came back home and took a desk job. But Mike, he thought the last one was just a little too close for comfort and decided to get out for good. That’s when he hooked up with Jack Price.”
“What sort of close calls?” Leah asked, squinting suspiciously at a front door desperately in need of paint.
“Now, Leah, those details would just bore you.”
“Oh yeah?” she asked, spying Brad’s laptop on a chair. She hoisted it onto the table and opened it, then punched the power button. “Just try me. I’m not the least bit bored. In fact, this is the most entertaining conversation I’ve had in a while. Oh wait, I stand corrected. The most entertaining conversation I’ve ever had was just yesterday, when Michael told me he was a spy. That was classic.”
“I wouldn’t kid you, Leah. I have no reason to. And I wouldn’t lie for him, either,” Rex avowed.
“So let me get this straight, Rex,” Leah said as she waited for the laptop to boot. “Do you seriously want me to believe that you and Michael were spies? International covert operatives? And those Sunday afternoons we were sailing on your boat, that you were playing a role?”
“No, of course not. On Sundays, we were pretty much who we were. Just a couple of guys having a good time with a couple of hot babes.”
“You mean me and your half-dozen hot babes,” Leah muttered as she Googled the CIA.
“Hey—I confess, I have issues,” he said with a laugh. “I still do.”
“You and your pal both, apparently.”
“I can’t speak for Mikey.”
Leah didn’t say anything—she was reading the mission of the Clandestine Service on the CIA Web site.
“You’re looking at the Web site, huh?” Rex asked.
That startled her, and Leah reared back, looked at the phone in her hand for a moment before putting it back up to her ear, then suddenly dipped down, looking under the table. “How did you know that?”
“Don’t freak out—there isn’t a camera anywhere. I heard the Windows music when you turned it on.”
Leah sat up and frowned. Was she honestly going to believe this? “So . . . so Michael asked you to call me and tell me that he was really a . . .” —she could hardly say it— “an operations officer or whatever you said?”
“That’s exactly what I am telling you. Look, for whatever reason, it’s really important to him that you know the truth. Hell, I haven’t even heard from him in two years—I didn’t even know how to get hold of him. I’m glad he called, because there was some stuff I wanted to tell him, but the point is, you are important enough for him to come out of the closet, so to speak.”
For once, Leah was speechless. It was one thing for Michael to hand her some lame excuse, but quite another to rope in a couple of friends. “Okay,” she said, nodding. “If I believe you—and I’m not saying I do, but if I did—then what was the story in New York?”
“We’d been out of the country for a long time,” Rex said easily. “We got called back to New York to do some consulting. But after being out of the country for a couple of years, New York was like Disneyland. And then Mike met you. I don’t think he ever meant it to go so far.”
Leah’s gut clenched. That’s what Michael had said that night in New York. I am sorry, I should never have let it go this far.
“But girl, he had you under his skin, and apparently, he still does,” Rex was saying. “Unfortunately, at the time, there were some things he hadn’t quite finished, and he knew that it was going to break eventually. I guess it took a little longer than what any of us anticipated, but when it did, he had to book,” Rex explained.
“But he worked on Wall Street,” Leah argued.
“He said he did. But if you think about it, you only saw his office once. Every other time he met you in the lobby. Let’s just say he borrowed an office to show you one day, and that was all it took.”
Damn. If that was true, that was good—she’d only seen his office once, on a day his secretary . . . “But what about Donna, his secretary?” Leah demanded. “She answered the phone every time I called.”
“Calls were routed through Washington.”
“What about his boss?”
“Bill. He called every Sunday.”
“No, that was his dad.”
“No, that was his boss. Michael doesn’t have a dad. At least not one he knows about. He has no family—he was orphaned, grew up in foster homes, and it was his boss that called on Sundays.”