It’s only a three letter word but I’m in so much agony, I’m not sure I’ll be able to get it out. “Why?”
She looks at me like I’m the stupidest man on earth. “Because I’m not that selfish!”
We stare at each other in silence while the heart monitor goes fucking nuts. Finally, I can’t take it anymore. “Tabitha. You just came out of a very long surgery. Your head isn’t working right—”
“My head is fine!”
My voice rises. “Then what the fuck are you talking about?”
She’s quiet for a moment, and then it all comes out in a blurted rush.
“I know the CIA is here, Connor, I heard the nurses talking! It was nice that they’re letting us say good-bye, I don’t know what you had to promise them to let them do that, but I know they’re going to walk in here any second and put handcuffs on me and take me away and I’ll never see you again so if you think I’m the kind of woman who would ask you to spend the next twenty years waiting for me while I rot in a federal prison somewhere then you don’t know me very well at all!”
She cuts off abruptly, breathing hard, shaking, her face bright red.
And now I understand.
I start to weakly laugh. Relief washes over me in waves.
“This is funny to you?” she asks, outraged.
I pull her toward me and kiss her, very softly, on the lips. “Sweetheart. The CIA isn’t taking you anywhere. They want to talk to you as soon as you’re up to it, but you’re not going to prison.”
She blinks a few times, falling still in my arms. She whispers, “What?”
I shake my head, kiss her again. Her lips are cold. Need to fix that. “O’Doul. He wrote your letter before he went to Miami. Emailed it to his boss, the Director of the FBI, and sent another copy to the NSA. Said any website cracking you did on the job was at his direct request. He honored your agreement.”
“But—but—I went into the NSA’s servers after…”
“Doesn’t matter. He said you were an integral part of the investigation, detailed what you’d done to help, even went so far as to recommend they bring you on as a systems security consultant. Had four agents sign as witnesses so no one could claim it had been faked. Add to that all the intel the CIA got from debriefing everyone involved about what went down… You’re clear. Although I think the NSA really wants to know how you did it.”
Her lower lip trembles. She looks at me with this amazed, disbelieving expression like…well, like she just got sprung from jail.
I grin at her. “You still gonna break up with me? ’Cause I’ve just gotten used to having you around, busting my balls. Would be a damn shame to let all that hard work you did breakin’ me in go to waste.”
Tabby drops her face into her hands and leans into my chest, whimpering.
I gather her in my arms. “Deep breaths, princess. They’re gonna think you’re having a heart attack in here.”
She whispers, “I am. I really think I am.”
I rub slow circles on her back, inhaling the scent of her hair, her skin. She smells like antiseptic, but beneath that, the warm, sweet scent that’s all her.
“Well, before you do, I have a question. It’s something I’ve been dying to ask.”
Slowly she pulls away, gazing at me with enormous eyes. The heart monitor skips a few beeps, and then starts back up even more furiously. With a little hitch in her voice she asks, “What is it?”
“How did you signal your location?”
She blinks, looking confused. “My…what?”
“Your location. In Alaska. You know, how we knew where to look for you. Did you gain access to S?ren’s computer, or—”
“Hello Kitty.”
The answer alone is enough to confuse me, but the flat, embarrassed tone of her voice does too. I’m missing something, and I think it might be important. My brows climb. I wait patiently for more of an explanation.
She shakes her head, lets out this wry little laugh, and looks away, her cheeks flaming. “My watch. I installed a GPS chip in it, made some mods to the Google Earth software installed on my machine so they’d talk.”
“Wow. I’m impressed.”
She shrugs, still avoiding my eyes.
I gently take her chin in my hand. “Tabitha. Why aren’t you looking at me?”
“Nothing. It’s nothing.” She looks down at the thin blue blanket covering her legs and starts to pick at it.
Looks like I’m going on a fishing trip. “Did you think I was gonna ask a different question?”
When she bites her lower lip, it comes to me in a flash that takes my breath away. “Wait. Did you think I was gonna pop a question? Like, the question?”
When she says, “No!” all flustered and embarrassed, I know the real answer is yes.
I take her face in my hands and get so close our noses are touching. Looking into her eyes, I say gruffly, “Do you want me to ask the question?”
She sniffs. “I want you to want to ask the question.”