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brother’s sake, I’m asking you to accompany her to Dallas while she retrieves an item of interest to me.”
    Her knee stopped bouncing. Her anger rose. “This is between you and me, Charlie. Leave Finn out of it. Leave everyone out of it.”
    “Make up your mind, Georgia,” Charlie said with no small hint of sarcasm. “You just told me you couldn’t do it alone. I’m giving you the help you said you need.”
    “If you want to give me help, then give me Finn.”
    “Remember what I said about the right motivation? I keep your brother. You bring me the dossier. As long as you’re back here by Monday, no one will get hurt. Otherwise, your brother will.”

 
     
    1:00 P.M.
     
    “Pull over. Let me drive. I know where we’re going.”
    “You? Drive this car?” Harry snorted. “Maybe in another lifetime.”
    “Then speed it up. If we don’t get to Dallas and fast, we won’t have any lifetimes left to worry about.”
    “Dallas I can do,” he said, and pressed the accelerator to the floor. The huge car surged ahead.
    He still couldn’t get over the scene in the diner after Castro had delivered his not-so-veiled threat to Finn McLain. Georgia had come up out of her seat like a pouncing tiger, growling and scratching and clawing and mad.
    Harry’s first reaction had been to help her, to take out the bad guys like he’d been trained to do. Playing the part of the innocent bystander had required a lot of restraint and a lot of patience, and had left him feeling foul.
    Once Castro’s dark-haired goon had pulled her out of the boss’s face, he’d escorted both Harry and the hellcat outside. Under the thug’s watch and orders, she’d grabbed a duffel bag and backpack from her brother’s pickup, and tossed both into the open backseat of Harry’s car.
    He’d been under the same watch, the same orders, but since he’d wiped out his water glass during his lunge across the counter, he’d taken two minutes to dig through his own things to find a dry shirt. That had apparently been too long for Miss Hiss and Spit to wait.
    Sunglasses in place, she had stood there, her weight cocked, tapping the fingers of one hand against the opposite arm where she’d crossed them over her middle. He wasn’t sure if she was trying to hold herself together or if she was really as aggravated as her stance made her seem.
    That was when his foul mood worsened. He’d wanted to tell her not to worry, that he wouldn’t let anything happen to her brother. But he couldn’t tell her that without revealing things about who he was that she didn’t need to know.
    What was important right now was getting her to Dallas—and getting her to talk. That was the only way either of them would survive the weekend. It was also the only way to guarantee his mission’s success.
    He cast her a sideways glance. “You want to tell me what all of that was about back there?”
    “No.” The exact response he’d expected.
    “You have a history with that man, Castro?” Charlie Castro. A name Harry would be transmitting to the SG-5 ops center at the first opportunity that came his way.
    “Not a personal history, no.” She relaxed a bit, her shoulders dropping as tension drained. “I’ve run into him in the past a time or two.”
    Not personal. That made it business. “You both hunt down antiques?”
    “Something like that.”
    Harry ground his jaw. This lack of real information was getting him nowhere. He pressed, needing details. “I saw the auction invitation on the table. Whatever this man wants from you is something going up for bid?”
    “It might be.”
    “But you don’t know.”
    “I haven’t seen the auction brochure yet. But, yeah. It could be there.” She didn’t say anything else for several seconds, leaving Harry to wonder exactly what she was keeping to herself. If what she did know was worth prying for. Whether another few hours would matter. If he could afford to wait for her to tell him on her terms.
    Options weighed,