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annoying voice in his head told him that if he knew all her secrets, he’d be better at keeping her safe, but he knew better than to listen to that voice. It had been leading him astray since he’d been fourteen and bunking off school on the streets of London.
    He lay in the damp grass again, binoculars held on his chest, and sighed. Was he going to listen to that voice again? Did it have an ulterior motive? Or was he going to value his job and his relationship with his boss—seemingly the only man who could bear to be around him—and leave well enough alone?
    The back door to the farmhouse slammed as they went in, and Mal jumped up. From where he stood, he could only see the roof of the house, so it was safe to go back to his car. The wind had suddenly picked up, and the temperature must have dropped at least ten degrees in the hour he’d been in the grass. It was bitter. Tiny flakes of snow drifted past him, and he couldn’t believe the abrupt change in weather. He shivered as he got to the car. And then he laughed at himself.
    He’d become a right pussy since he left the SAS—the British black-ops special forces that the United States Delta Force was modeled on. While he’d been on the job, he’d lived in a forest in the middle of a snowstorm—for a week. Now that had been cold. He’d heated water every day so he could dip his fingers into it to keep them warm enough to operate his weapons. He wondered just how hard-core he still was after the two years of private work he’d done for Baston, since he was honorably discharged after ten years.
    Baston knew Mal wasn’t easy to like and had an inscrutable past, but one of Mal’s old commanders had told him that a bunch of people had quit the SAS to return to the conventional army after Mal had been discharged, just because they didn’t fancy their chances going back on a mission without Mal having their back. And that was the only reason Baston had brought him on. And that was the reason, he’d said, that he’d chosen Mal to protect his daughter. He still didn’t know if he believed him.
    Mal felt a twinge of regret about the previous night and wondered how Baston would feel about Mal if he knew that the only protection he’d shown his daughter so far was a condom. Jesus. What was wrong with him?
    He’d never found it hard to stay away from women before; he’d been trained to walk away and not look back. It had always been imperative to the mission to be able to compartmentalize—and that meant never getting attached. But Abby. She was so contrary to appearances. Her life had seemed boring, and she was anything but boring.
    Maybe she wouldn’t want to see him again anyway, so the mental discussion with himself was moot. To be fair, most normal people—men and women—never wanted to see him again. Professionally and privately he fulfilled a need. A specific need that mostly no one wanted to be reminded of afterward. But Abby wasn’t normal, though.
    Or was that his little voice leading him astray again?

CHAPTER SIX
    A bby couldn’t help slowing down that evening as she passed the bend in the road where she’d picked up Malone the previous night. His car was gone, which meant, she guessed, he’d gotten help and managed to move it. She had wondered, briefly, what she would have done if he was there again, and she’d come to the only right conclusion—drive right past him.
    Probably, anyway. It was the right thing to do. The correct CIA field officer procedure for intimate relations: If they were more than casual, they had to be reported. And she’d never, ever had a relationship that she needed to report. She wanted to keep it that way.
    Just as she was approaching the outskirts of town, her satellite phone rang. She looked up out of habit to see the stars visible in the sky. The phone they’d given her wasn’t exactly top of the line. Unlike in movies and TV shows, they mostly had to make do with any kind of technology that held a reasonable