chapter Eleven
J.D.—or whoever he was—choked on his coffee. Good. He deserved much worse for lying to her, keeping things from her, trying to control her. She’d had enough of that to last a lifetime.
“Well?” She whipped the sheet off and swung her legs over the side of the hospital bed, planting her feet on the floor. “Who is Zendaris?”
He placed his coffee cup on the table next to hers and brushed his hands together. “Where did you hear that name?”
“From your own lips.” Those lips that had felt so warm and inviting against her own. Those lying lips.
He tilted his head, and a lock of tawny hair fell across his forehead. Even liars could look sexy.
“When did I mention Zendaris?”
“Right after the crash last night. You must’ve thought I was unconscious, but I wasn’t—not yet. I heard you blame Zendaris for the accident.”
She’d also remembered his vow to kill Zendaris if anything happened to her. But that didn’t erase his deception. Who the hell was he, anyway? Why had he finagled his way into her life? Into her heart? And why had she let him?
That almost cut deeper. He’d been playing up to her, coming on to her, making her believe they had some emotional connection. And all this time he’d been leading her on for some nefarious reason—because he had nefarious written all over his handsome face.
He blew out a breath on a whistle. “You heard that, huh?”
“I heard it but didn’t remember until last night after you’d left. I thought I may have imagined it since the voices in my head were coming fast and furious, but everything I heard had actually happened. I wasn’t dreaming or hallucinating. Besides, why would I come up with a name like Zendaris?”
“Not a very likely name to dream up out of thin air, I agree.”
“Stop stalling.” She stamped her foot on the cold linoleum. “Who is he, and why would he be after me? And more to the point, who are you?”
“My name is J.D.” He spread his hands in supplication. “That’s not a lie.”
But everything else was? Including those intimate looks, the kisses, those soothing touches?
She grabbed a pillow and threw it at him. He ducked, deflecting it with his hands, and it hit the bedside table. One foamy latte keeled over.
Picking up the cup, he said, “Whoa. I’m going to tell you everything. In fact—” he licked his fingers “—I was going to tell you everything this morning, even though I’m sure you don’t believe me now.”
“You’re right.”
The nurse bustled into the room. “I brought your release forms. Is this strong guy gonna take care of you?”
The idea of J.D. caring for her would’ve turned her insides to sweet marshmallow twelve hours ago. Now it made tears prick the backs of her eyes.
Noelle hunched over the clipboard and scribbled her signature while J.D. answered.
“I sure am. What does she need?”
The nurse rattled off a list of instructions, and J.D. peppered her with questions.
Noelle ground her teeth and hardened her heart. You don’t have to pretend anymore.
Noelle handed the clipboard back to the nurse with her signature on several forms. “I can leave now?”
“Yes, ma’am.” She shook her finger in Noelle’s face. “You do exactly what this man tells you to do and you’ll recover nicely.”
“Exactly.”
J.D.’s grin had the knuckles of her fist itching to punch him in the gut.
She clenched her jaw instead. “I’m going to get dressed now. Leave.”
“I’m expecting the rental-car company to deliver a car to the hospital for me. My truck was totaled. I’ll go down and see about that and pick you up outside the main doors of the hospital. Then we’ll talk.”
“Whatever.” She had to get home somehow, and she still had to grill him about Zendaris...and his own identity.
When J.D. and the nurse left the room, Noelle nibbled on the scone and sipped the remaining latte while she got dressed. Applying some lip balm, she inspected herself in the mirror. The crash had given her both a cut and a bump above her right temple. Those wounds were nothing compared to the one J.D. had inflicted on her heart with his deception.
The orderly insisted on wheeling her out of the hospital in a wheelchair, so she sat back and closed her eyes. Maybe this all had a silver lining. If that lying hunk of...hunk knew who was after her, she had a fighting chance.
Maybe not for the relationship she’d been foolishly imagining with J.D., but a chance to confront her stalker head-on. She touched her bandage—maybe not head-on either.
The orderly waited with her on the sidewalk in front of the hospital until J.D. drove up in a rental, a silver SUV.
He and the orderly each took one of her arms and walked her to the passenger side of the vehicle. J.D. helped her up and into the seat, and they both thanked the orderly.
As soon as J.D. hit the driver’s seat, Noelle snapped, “Tell me.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to wait until we get back to the ranch? You might need to be more comfortable than you are now to hear this story.”
Her stomach rolled, and she pinned her folded hands between her knees. “Just tell me.”
He reached into the backseat and tossed her hat into her lap. “I saved this from the wreckage, along with your bag with your laptop in it.”
“Thanks. Now talk.”
He adjusted the mirrors and glanced at her. “Nico Zendaris is an international arms dealer.”
Her jaw dropped, and she turned to stare at his profile. “You’re kidding.”
“Would I lie about something like that? Wait, don’t answer that.”
“He’s an arms dealer? Why would an arms dealer be after me? That’s insane. I don’t believe you.”
“You had a roommate in D.C., Abby Warren.”
“How do you know about Abby?” A chill crept across her flesh.
“Not from you. Every time I’d ask you a leading question about unusual occurrences lately, you never brought up Abby—not until yesterday. Isn’t the sudden disappearance of a roommate unusual? Or does that happen to you all the time?”
She ground her teeth together. “If you knew about Abby, why didn’t you just ask me? In fact, why all the lies and deceit?”
“I’ll get to my lies and deceit in a minute. Do you want to hear about Abby’s lies and deceit first and her connection to Zendaris?”
“Abby has a connection to an international arms dealer?”
“Had. Abby Warren is dead.”
Noelle covered her face with her hands. “This is crazy. How? Who? This is too much.”
“One thing at a time. Abby’s twin sister, Beth, worked for Prospero, an undercover intelligence agency. Through her twin, Abby met a few people, learned a few things and developed a lunatic crush on one of the agents.”
She jerked her head up. “You?”
“Not me—my buddy, Cade Stark. Abby was also a computer whiz, but maybe you knew that already.”
Cade Stark. Noelle drew her brows together. That name sounded familiar for some reason. “I knew she worked as a private IT consultant. She went after hackers mostly.”
“Takes one to know one. She hacked into Stark’s computer and nabbed some plans that he had just stolen from Zendaris. To make a long story short, she contacted Zendaris in the end to let him know she had the plans.”
“Did he kill her?” Noelle’s eye twitched.
“No.”
“Did you kill her?” She wanted to know what kind of man she was dealing with—what kind of man she’d been falling for.
“No.” He shot her a quick look.
“Where are the plans now?”
“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it, darlin’?”
Widening her eyes, she jabbed a thumb against her chest. “Me? This Zendaris thinks I have the plans?”
“Either that or he thinks you know something.”
“And so did you.”
“What?” It was J.D.’s turn for the look of openmouthed surprise.
“That’s why you kept me in the dark all this time. You thought I was in cahoots with Abby or something. You thought I had the plans—maybe you still do.”
“You’re quick but not completely accurate.” His knuckles whitened as he gripped the steering wheel. “I never believed for one minute you had anything to do with Abby’s crazy scheme, not after I’d met you.”
“Someone did.”
He nodded, a quick dip of chin to chest. “Someone whose job it is to be suspicious, but I convinced him otherwise. I told you the truth when I said I was ready to spill everything this morning.”
She wedged her boots against the floor of the car. How could she trust him when she didn’t even know who he was?
“What’s the rest of the story? Who are you, and why are you in Colorado?”
“I thought I’d made that clear. I’m an agent with this intelligence organization—with Prospero.”
“You’ve been watching me? Following me?”
“As soon as we found out about Abby Warren’s secret life, we dug into her background and discovered you. We’ve had our eye on you ever since.”
“You probably know more about my life than I do. You obviously knew about my husband’s murder.” Did he also know Alex had become a control freak, bordering on emotionally abusive?
“I knew about your husband’s murder.” He covered her hand with his. “Sorry.”
If J.D. was sorry, he probably didn’t know about Alex’s obsession with tracking her every movement. She inched her hand away from his warm grasp. Was his name even J.D.?
“What’s your name?”
“J.D.” He held up two fingers like the Boy Scout he wasn’t. “I swear.”
“Is that for Jim Davis?”
“Uh, no.”
At least he had the decency to blush. “What is your real name? I have a right to know the name of the man who’s been following me around for a month.”
“Jared Douglas.” He held out his hand for a shake.
She ignored it.
“Would I have discovered anything more about Jared Douglas than I did about Jim Davis from a search on the internet?”
“You ran a search on me? Good girl.”
Her lips twisted into a snarl. “Don’t patronize me. I ran a search on Jim Davis.”
He shrugged. “You wouldn’t have found much more on Jared Douglas—fewer of us—but it’s not like I frequent any social networking sites with my occupation and hobbies listed.”
Noelle slumped in her seat and turned her gaze to the landscape, blanketed in freshly fallen snow. She had bigger problems than the identity of her ranch hand turned spy.
She and Abby hadn’t been close at all. She’d found her roommate closed off and distant, and that had suited her. The primary requirement she’d had for a roommate after Alex’s murder had been neatness—and Abby had fit the bill.
Abby had shared very little of her life. She certainly didn’t tell Noelle where she’d hidden some plans she’d stolen from a dangerous arms dealer.
“No more questions?” J.D. had pulled his rental off the highway and onto the road leading to the ranch.
Should she kick him out now? No. He’d kept her safe the past few days, and she still needed...his protection. Of course, now she knew why he’d been so attentive—he was doing his job. Couldn’t let the bad guys get their hands on a prime witness, could he?
“Can’t we just tell them?”
“Tell who what?”
“Tell Zendaris and his flunkies that I don’t know anything about the plans. They’ve already searched the apartment in D.C. They’ve searched my place here. They didn’t find anything or they wouldn’t have pulled that stunt last night. You’d think they’d just give up and go on to plan B.”
The line of J.D.’s jaw hardened as he swung through the gates to the ranch. “Zendaris doesn’t give up, Noelle. He wants to question you, and then he’ll destroy you.”
He threw the SUV into Park and they sat side by side, his words hanging in the air between them.
“Should I leave Buck Ridge?”
“Where would you go?”
“I have some money. I could hide out somewhere, move to a different city.”
“And be looking over your shoulder every minute of the day for the rest of your life?”
“What would make Zendaris stop? What would make him leave me alone?”
“A bullet between his eyes.”
One look at J.D.’s chiseled profile, and she knew he’d want to be the one to do it. Hugging herself, she said, “I’m sure your agency would’ve done that by now if they could. Is he that untouchable?”
“He’s hard to find, well protected, moves around a lot. We don’t have any good pictures of him. We suspect he goes out in disguise most of the time.”
“Seems like you’d have more luck catching a shadow.” She drew a tic-tac-toe board in the condensation of the window. “If you can’t catch him, how are you going to stop him? When am I ever going to be free of his scrutiny?”
“I know something else that would make him stop harassing you.” J.D. yanked the keys from the ignition.
“Besides his death or mine? What? What would stop him?”
“If we got our hands on those plans.”
* * *
J.D. HELD HIS breath as Noelle dragged her finger through three diagonal X’s on her game of tic-tac-toe. “Do you really think I know where they are? I thought you believed me.”
“I believe you think you don’t know where they are.”
She shook her head, and her dark ponytail swayed from side to side. “This is getting too confusing for me, and it has nothing to do with the bump on my head. I told you. I have no idea what Abby could’ve done with those plans. I didn’t know of their existence forty-five minutes ago. Heck, I didn’t even know Abby well, and it turns out I knew even less about her than I thought I did.”
“You lived with her. You at least knew her habits, her hangouts, her moods.”
She turned her deep violet-blue eyes on him. “Is this how Zendaris would question me?”
Her barb pricked his conscience. “Trapped in an icy-cold car after just getting released from the hospital? Probably just his style.”
Probably much, much worse.
Punching a button, he unlocked the doors of the SUV and reached in the back for her bag. “Let’s get you warmed up inside. I’ll get you something hot to drink and another ibuprofen.”
“That sounds about right.”
This time she stayed in the car until he came around the passenger side and helped her from the vehicle. She clung to his arm when her boots hit the ground.
“Are you okay?”
“A little dizzy.”
“I can’t imagine why.” He’d clobbered her with so much information on the drive back to the ranch, he’d probably induced another concussion.
When they got inside the chilly house, he parked her on the love seat to the right of the fireplace and began stacking cords of wood on the grate. He lit some crumpled newspaper beneath the wood and straightened up, wiping his hands on the seat of his jeans.
“Coffee, tea or...hot chocolate?” The me hovered on the tip of his tongue, but he didn’t want to push things with her. When she’d discovered his lies, her eyes had flashed fire. She’d softened some when he had explained the situation to her, but her body language still screamed hands off when before her ready touch and luscious lips had invited him to explore further.
“Tea is fine.” She waved a hand toward the kitchen. “There’s a kettle on the stove, and I keep tea bags in the cupboard to the left of the stove.”
“I’ll find everything. Sit back and relax.”
“And start thinking about Abby and her habits?”
“Not right now. Give your brain a rest.” He didn’t want to elicit any comparisons with Zendaris from her again.
When the kettle whistled, he poured the bubbling water over the tea bag in Noelle’s cup, where it turned a light green. He sniffed it and wrinkled his nose—bland and tasteless. He didn’t see the point in drinking the stuff even if it was supposed to be good for you.
He returned to the living room, holding the steaming mug in front of him. “How long do you leave the tea bag in?”
“About five minutes. Can you please get me a saucer?”
He grabbed one from the cupboard and paused in the kitchen. “Do you want something to eat?”
She dunked the tea bag into the water several times. “No, thanks. The hospital fed me, and I finished off that scone you brought. Don’t you want some tea?”
“No.” He tapped the side of his head. “How’s the head feeling?”
“It throbs when the ibuprofen wears off, but other than that I’m okay.” She sipped the tea through the steam rising from the cup. “What if they had killed us last night? They wouldn’t be getting any answers.”
“They knew precisely where to run us off the road. It’s not like we were going to tumble off the mountain at that spot, and I was driving a big truck. They wanted to shake us up.”
“Do you still think they were planning to snatch me from the wreckage?”
J.D. dropped to the floor at her feet. “Not if I had anything to say about it.”
She hunched forward, elbows digging into her knees, black ponytail swinging over her shoulder. “Do they know who you are, J.D.? Do they know I’m being protected by a secret agent?”
“Zendaris is aware of our agency. We’ve foiled his schemes before—in a big way, one that he’ll never forget. He knows we stole the plans. Up until a few months ago, he thought we still had them.”
“But does he know what you look like? Does he realize you’re here in Buck Ridge?”
“I’m not sure.” The fire crackled and spit out a shower of sparks. J.D. hitched up to his knees and prodded the logs with a poker. “He probably knows I removed the cameras from your house, but it doesn’t take a covert-ops agent to find a few hidden cameras.”
“If he has his guys following me, then he has to figure your agency is doing the same thing.”
“But he may believe we’re doing so at a distance. He knows our agency keeps a low profile.”
She tilted her head. “What is Prospero, anyway? Something I would’ve heard of on the news? Something like the CIA?”
“We’re deeper cover than the CIA. You won’t hear about us on the evening news or read about our exploits on a website.”
Sitting back against the love seat, she curled her legs beneath her and dropped the tea bag onto the saucer he’d placed on the table next to her. “If you can find these plans, what will you do with them? What are they for?”
“I’d rather not tell you.”
“You already made that clear, but if you want my help finding those plans, you need to give me something to work with. How will I know what I was supposed to see?” She took another sip of tea, watching him over the rim.
She was good. And she had a point.
Dragging in a breath, he pushed off the floor and perched on the arm of the love seat. “The plans are for an anti-drone, a weapon that can take out our drone missiles, crippling their effectiveness.”
“Oh my God. That’s big.”
“You got that right. That’s why it’s so important that we find those plans before Zendaris does. He has the means to build the weapon and then sell it on the open market to any terrorist group or rogue regime that coughs up enough money.”
“Where did he get them in the first place? Can’t the person who developed those plans just whip up a new set?”
“The person who developed those plans is on our side now. He’s not going to be working for Zendaris, or any other weapons dealer or terrorist, anymore.”
“Once you find and destroy those plans to keep them out of our enemies’ hands, that’s it?”
“For now—until the next threat.”
“I can help by trying to figure out where Abby stashed the plans.” She swirled the tea in her cup, gazing into it as if she could find the answer in some tea leaves. “Are they on paper? Computer disk? Flash drive?”
“The plans weren’t on paper, so if they are now, she printed them out. She hacked into my coworker’s computer. She could’ve put the plans on a disk or flash drive. She could’ve made copies for all we know.”
“That could get messy.”
“I don’t even want to think about that possibility.”
Noelle set her cup on the table and rose to her feet. “You’ve given me a lot to think about. Maybe something will come to me in the shower. I feel hospital-icky.”
“Are you sure you feel okay to hit the shower?”
“I’m not dizzy—except from all the info you told me about arms dealers and covert agencies and my unassuming, computer-nerd roommate.”
He cupped her elbow. “Do you understand why I had to keep my identity a secret?”
“Sure.” She broke away from him and called over her shoulder, “Maybe you should stay here...just in case.”
“Of course. I’m not going anywhere.”
She slammed the bathroom door on his last syllable.
Sure didn’t seem like she understood.
* * *
NOELLE STOOD AT the bathroom mirror scraping at the edge of the tape holding her bandage. She tugged the tape from the skin of her forehead and peeled back the bandage. Still snowy-white. At least the bleeding had stopped.
Leaning in closer to the mirror, she traced the stitches with the tip of her finger. The doc said she could let the wound breathe if she felt comfortable without the bandage, but she’d leave it on in the shower to protect her new stitches.
She cranked on the water and shed her clothing, stepping out of her jeans.
How had she gotten mixed up in something like this? Wasn’t one traumatic event per lifetime enough? She’d paid her dues. Let someone else have the drama.
The warm water beat between her shoulder blades and streamed down her back. She closed her eyes, replaying scenes in her D.C. apartment with Abby.
Abby hadn’t entertained at all. Noelle had met only one of her friends in the almost two years they’d shared space—a quiet, almost shy man who’d picked up Abby for a date.
Abby had spent a lot of time in her bedroom, which she’d turned into an office with a bank of computers against one wall. The police had removed all those computers after she’d disappeared. Maybe that should’ve clued her in that Abby’s disappearance had a sinister aspect to it.
This was the kind of stuff J.D. would want to hear about—Jared Douglas. He’d done a good job making excuses for his lies. How much of what he said and did was faked?
His touches? His kiss?
She turned off the shower without washing her hair, patting the damp bandage in place. Grabbing a towel from the rack, she stepped out of the tub and rubbed a circle in the condensation in the mirror.
Abby’s computers... Surely the D.C. police had turned those over to J.D.’s agency. His agency probably ordered the police to remove them. Abby spent a lot of time on her computers.
Her cell phone buzzed against the porcelain, and she snatched it before it vibrated into the toilet.
She swiped the phone against the towel and glanced at the display—a text message from another unknown number. Her heart picked up speed and blood throbbed against her stitches.
Had Ted picked up his new phone?
Her thumb trembled as she hit the button to read the text. She read the words, blinked her eyes and read them again: We have your brother.