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store and I’ll see what I can do.”
    “I’m fresh out of duct tape.” There were few things in life she hated more than looking incompetent. Looking incompetent in front of Thomas Casey was one of them. Spotting the faint glow of neon signs up ahead, she prayed for a way to salvage the situation.
    “Good thing you’ve got me then,” he remarked without glancing her way. “Park over there.” He pointed to a spot away from the security camera aimed at the main door. “Got a flashlight?”
    She shook her head. “I’ll go buy one.”
    “Let me go in and ask. You stay with the car and sit tight.”
    Tight was easy to manage with her current stress level. It made sense not to leave the vehicle unattended, despite the low risk of someone managing to track them through the storm, but she couldn’t sit here and do nothing. She got out of the car, wrapped in Thomas’s overcoat once more. Underneath the lingering acrid stench of the explosives, she caught the woodsy scent of his cologne. It was almost as good as being in his embrace.
    Foolish, but she took comfort in it anyway. When they’d worked in Germany, she’d been his contact and part of his cover. He’d been her rock, her anchor. At the time, she thought she’d done well enough to have been a steadying force for him, too. But the moment they’d returned to the States and debriefed the mission, he’d disappeared from her life.
    She hadn’t seen him again until official business between the Initiative committee and his Mission Recovery division put them in the same small conference room deep inside the Pentagon one day. That had been more than two years ago and, fool that she was, she’d expected him to call.
    Walking around the car, looking for damage, she pushed those sweet memories aside and searched for more pertinent details on the current predicament. Starting with his coat. She patted pockets inside and out, but came up empty. If he was here to sell a vial of a deadly virus, surely he’d keep it on him.
    Whoever was tailing them had the skill and audacity to act quickly. It eroded her peace of mind, created a level of doubt that would swell into full-blown panic if she let it. As careful as she’d been, she’d only spotted Specialist Grant in the days preceding Thomas’s arrival in Denver.
    Nothing in his personnel record indicated dissatisfaction to the point of blowing up the director, but she was fresh out of other theories. It was hard to imagine another team watching her closely enough to take that kind of action and yet hide so effectively that she missed them. And why wouldn’t a team targeting both of them wait a few more seconds until they were both in the car? And why didn’t the enemy just shoot them when the bomb missed?
    There were no easy answers. There wouldn’t be until she could get Thomas to trust her enough to cooperate. This whole investigation had felt off since she first got wind of it back in D.C. As uncomfortable as it would be, as vulnerable as it would make her and the committee, it was time to tell Thomas everything. She didn’t see another way to determine which of them was the real target and which was convenient collateral damage.
    As she came around the back end of the car, she shivered. Not from cold. From the realization someone had marked her rental. No way the small hole drilled into the taillight was a mistake or the result of her evasive maneuvers. Too clean for a bullet, the precise hole in the red plastic brake light made the SUV easy to spot from a distance.
    Damn. She should have noticed this at the airport. She might have if her ears and the rest of her senses hadn’t been overloaded by the near-miss explosion and desperation to get to safety.
    And the sounds and scents of having him so close.
    Where the hell was he? The idea that he could be in there making a call...deciding he couldn’t trust her—
    “You shouldn’t be out here in heels,” Thomas said, joining her. “You’ll break an