Read Her Spy to Hold (Spy Games Book 2) for Free Online Page A

between establishing that they were couple and being cited for public indecency.
    Yes, his thoughts had definitely gone there.
    He lifted his head, although he didn’t let go of her. He couldn’t. Not yet. He scrambled to come up with some explanation for what he’d just done.
    She beat him to it.
    “That was very convincing.” She smoothed his shirtfront and stared at his chest, avoiding his eyes. “But you’re wasting your time. There’s no one from my office out here to see us, only the commissionaire on duty. And I’m fairly certain he’s not paying attention.”
    Kale could have told her that the commissionaire was the intended audience, and yes, he’d most definitely been paying attention. All he’d really needed to establish was a reason for being here in the mornings and afternoons, when people were coming and going.
    Instead, as he opened her car door for her, he said, “Then I guess we’ll have to try again Monday, won’t we?”
    * * *
    Irina slid into her chair at the Press Gang where her friend Beverley was waiting for her.
    By the looks of it, Bev was already a few glasses into the bottle of wine on the table. Irina could use a few drinks herself. It had been that kind of week and the intelligence officer assigned to her wasn’t improving it. He was good at his job.
    Too good. That kiss had seemed real.
    The waiter came over to pour her wine. She thanked him, her fingers trembling ever so slightly as she picked up the glass. Most nights she loved this restaurant. It was quiet and intimate, and the low-beamed room with its dark, polished wood gave a real feel for the history of the city. Halifax was an international sea port—the first European settlement here dating back to 1749—and a former naval stronghold. Irina had grown up on the Canadian prairies, so having the sea so close at hand was a novelty that never grew old.
    Tonight, all she wanted was to bury her head under her blankets until this whole mess was behind her. She had no idea who might be watching her or what harm they intended, either to her or her project. And Kale… Well, he’d completely messed with her head. She liked working with numbers and facts, not suspicions. She preferred her world neat and tidy. Her emotions too.
    The worst of it was, she couldn’t let on to her friend that anything was wrong.
    “You look like hell. I’m going to guess that work isn’t going as well as it could,” Bev said, her smile sympathetic, but she knew better than to ask too many questions. A mathematics professor at Dalhousie University, she was a number of years older than Irina—although Irina couldn’t have said how many with any degree of certainty. Her skin was too perfect and she covered the gray in her hair with a platinum rinse. They’d met at a conference in Ottawa and struck up a friendship. Women in the sciences tended to stick together.
    While Irina couldn’t get into her problems at work, Kale Martin was another matter. If they were going to be in a pretend relationship, then he was fair game when it came to gossiping with her friends. Bev had been married three times. This was one problem she could help with.
    It was new conversational territory for them however. Normally when the two women got together, they talked about the challenges of working in academia for Bev and with the military for Irina. She wasn’t sure how to approach it.
    “I met a man,” she blurted out.
    Bev looked at her over the rim of her glass. “It’s about time. I was beginning to wonder which team you played for. Not that it matters.”
    “I was starting to wonder about that myself.”
    She wasn’t, of course. She liked men. Her luck, however, hadn’t been great. The few men she’d gotten involved with over the years had been even duller than she was, and while she had no craving for excitement, there seemed little point in two people slowly boring each other to death.
    But Kale was at the extreme other end of the spectrum. Being with him