“So, it’s your choice,” he went on grimly. “You can either help me stop them or you can try to sleep at night while wondering when the next agent will be located and murdered.”
She did turn away this time. Hennessey took a deep breath and cursed him self for being such an idiot. Saying all that hadn’t been necessary. But, on some level, he’d wanted to rattle her—to hurt her. He wanted to get to her when the truth was she’d already gotten to him. He’d lost control by steady increments from the moment the director ordered him to start watching her weeks ago.
He had to get back on track here, had to keep those damned personal is sues out of this. If the director got even a whiff of how he really felt, he would be replaced. Hennessey couldn’t let that happen. He had to do this for a couple of reasons. “I shouldn’t have told you,” he said, regret slipping into his voice. As much as he’d needed her cooperation, he’d gone too far.
When she turned back to him once more, her face had been wiped clean of emotion, and her analytical side was back. The doctor persona was in place. The woman who could go into an operating room and reconstruct a face damaged so badly that the patient’s own family couldn’t identify her. No wonder she walked around as cold as ice most of the time. It took nerves of steel and the ability to set her emotions aside to do what she did.
He should respect that.
He did.
It was his other reactions that disturbed him.
“What do you want from me?”
The request unnerved him at a level that startled him all over again.
He focused on the question, denying the uncharacteristic emotions twisting in side him. “I need you to do your magic, Doc.” His gaze settled heavily onto hers. “And I need you to work with me. You knew Maddox intimately. Help me become him…just for a little while. Long enough to survive this mission. Long enough to do what has to be done.”
For three long beats she said nothing at all. Just when he was certain she would simply walk away, she spoke. “All right.” She rubbed at her fore head as if an ache had begun there, then sighed. “On one condition.” She looked straight at him.
The intensity…the electricity crack led between them like embers in a building fire. She had to feel it. The lure was very nearly irresistible.
“Name it,” he shot back.
“When this is over, I give you back your face. I don’t want you being you with David’s face.”
He wanted to pretend the words didn’t affect him…but they did. He’d be damned if he’d let her see just how much impact her opinion carried. “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” he insisted.
“Then we have a deal, Agent Hennessey. When do we start?”
Chapter 4
Elizabeth sat in her car as the purple and gray hues of dawn stole across the sky, chasing away the darkness, ushering forth the new day.
She’d managed a few hours sleep last night but just barely. Her mind kept playing moments spent with David, fleeting images of a past that had, at the time, felt like the beginning of the rest of her life.
How could she have been so foolish as to take that risk? She had known that a relationship with a man like David was an emotional gamble, but she’d dived in head first. The move had been so unlike her. She’d spent her entire life carefully calculating her every step.
She’d known by age twelve that she wanted to be a doctor, she just hadn’t known what field. As a teenager, pediatrics had appealed to her, in particular helping children with the kind of diseases that robbed them of their youth and dreams. But at nineteen her college roommate had been in a horrifying automobile accident and the weeks and months that followed had brought Elizabeth’s future into keen focus as nothing else could have.
Watching her friend go from a vibrant, happy young woman with a brilliant future ahead of her to a shell of a human being with a face that would never be her own had made Elizabeth yearn to prevent that from ever happening again…to any one.
She’d worked harder than ever, had thrown her self into her education and eventually into her work. That burning de sire to do the impossible, to rebuild the single most individual part of the human body, had driven her like a woman obsessed.
Elizabeth sighed. And maybe she was obsessed. If so, she had no hope of making it right because this was who she was, what she did. She made no excuses.
She dragged the keys from her ignition and dropped them into her purse.
But this was different.
Though she had changed faces for the CIA before, a fact for which she had no regrets, this was so very different.
Elizabeth emerged from her Lexus, closed the door and automatically depressed the lock button on the remote. The headlights flashed, signaling the vehicle was now secure.
She inhaled a deep breath of the thick August air. It wasn’t entirely daylight yet and already she could almost taste the humidity.