Free Fall (Elite Force #4)(60)
Author: Catherine Mann

“Why should I be mad?” Pride kept her spine straight and her voice steady.

“I lied to you for a year.”

Damn straight he had. But at least he’d been on the side of a friendly government. What if he hadn’t, and she’d missed the signs that he was working undercover? The children could have been in danger and she was losing her touch.

Yet, she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of seeing her wince. “You had a job to do. Believe me, I understand all about lying in the line of duty.”

Although she’d sure as hell never kissed anyone while undercover. Did he think he was some kind of Egyptian James Bond?

“Yes, my job was to watch over you, although I am not technically a field agent of your level—or rather, your previous level.” He sounded so believable, so earnest. “I am a scientist and a teacher. Traveling for my job has facilitated my ability to go where I’m needed. Our governments worked together through different intelligence agencies to protect assets. Very simple.”

Could she believe him? Buried professional instincts fired to life and she studied his every move, twitch, and blink. Maybe Melanie Carson wasn’t buried as deeply as she thought. “Why did they decide to start watching me this year?”

“You have been watched since the day you assumed the new identity.”

His words spoken so matter-of-factly rang true and stunned her silent until a turbulent bump jostled her. Fourteen years.

“This whole time? Who?” She searched her mind for all the faces and clues she must have missed. What if someone had been trying to kill her? Would she have seen it coming? And there wasn’t a thing she could do about it now except be glad she hadn’t exposed her family to the risk. “Teachers or janitors… I guess it’s all in the past now. They don’t matter, although I don’t understand why I matter.”

“Melanie…”

“Call me Annie,” she said quickly, needing that separation from the past. “That’s who I am now. At least they gave me a name that had a part of the old me…” Oh God, she hadn’t even considered… “What about you? Is Samir your real name?”

“It is.”

Would he even tell her if it wasn’t? His eyes looked honest, familiar.

Enticing.

Damn it. “I feel like I don’t know anything about you, although I guess you know everything about me.”

“The facts.” He tapped his glasses in place. “That’s all.”

“That’s all?” She laughed—at herself and her whole messed up life. “That’s everything.”

The more she thought about it, the more frustrated she felt, even violated. Yet, she’d given up her right to privacy when she’d willingly signed on with the CIA.

Sam tipped his head to the side, his eyes curious behind those round glasses. He sat with a zen kind of stillness, but with an edge now. “There are many things I do not know, things I have wondered about you but was not free to ask.”

“Such as?”

“What led you to this line of work?”

It had been so long since she made the decision, sometimes she couldn’t remember either. She toyed with a bead bracelet Khaali had made in art class and given to her as a gift. “How does anyone land a job? You pursue what you want to do with your life.”

“You just walked up to the CIA and asked to be an operative?”

Memories started flooding back. She hadn’t allowed herself to think about these things in so long. In the beginning, it had been a matter of survival. Eventually, it had become habit.

“Freelancer. Off the books.” At first, but once she’d gotten a taste, she wanted in deeper, envisioned herself changing the world. “I was already active in the area. The aide work was real, not a cover, not in the beginning. After my husband and I graduated from college, we joined the Peace Corps. When our oldest son was born, we tried to keep up the lifestyle, the work. And we managed pretty well even through the birth of our second child—both were born here in Africa.”

Her heart ached with memories—the visions of their infant faces, the smell of baby shampoo, the feel of a tiny cheek resting against her chest. She’d tried so hard to be a good mother in spite of feeling ripped in two by a call to action against injustice.

“We had only been back in the States for a few months when the CIA approached us, just a short-term freelancing assignment. My parents helped with the children. And God, we enjoyed it, the adrenaline rush of making a difference in what felt like an even bigger way.” Although in the end she’d felt like such a fool for not realizing the mammoth gift of a sticky hug from her child. She’d learned too late to appreciate what she’d lost.

“What changed?” he asked, even though he had to know from her file.

Still, it felt good to talk about the past, not to guard every word out of her mouth. “We found out I was pregnant again. My husband said he wasn’t into the whole ‘Kumbaya’ lifestyle anymore. He wanted a regular roof over our heads and meals at a family table.”

“So you relocated back to the States permanently.”

“We did. I went back to work in the classroom, had another child, our only girl. And I tried, I really tried to tell myself I could wait until the children grew up to help over here…”

An air crewman walked by on his way to the back and she paused until he passed.

“Until one day,” she continued, “during a parent-teacher conference, I was talking to a student’s mother and she mentioned her husband’s work overseas. He was in the Army. For weeks I thought about that father fulfilling his call to serve, and I couldn’t deny the strong desire I felt to go back again. I needed to make a difference in the world.”

“What did your… husband say?”

She tried not to read too much into the way he seemed to stumble over the word husband. She was overanalyzing, just wishful thinking.

“He told me I was being selfish. That I was screwing up our family, that I was breaking the agreement we’d made when we got married.” That awful argument, the rage in his voice, the pain she’d caused, all came back to her as real as if she’d just walked out the door of their little red brick house. “We’d promised each other we were a team. Where one went, the other would go.”

“Yet you left anyway.”

After all the angry—but logical words—he’d shouted at her, it was the strangled pain in his final question that haunted her most to this day. Who the f**k’s gonna braid Stella’s hair?