So he did. Drew a deep breath and purged. It felt like a bloodletting, and he didn’t stop until he’d spilled every last drop.

When he finished, along with the relief of unloading, he also felt a landslide of shame.

“About time you got that off your chest.”

He blinked at Gabe. “You knew? Jesus. The guys? Do they all know?”

Gabe lifted a shoulder. “We knew something had gone sideways for you. You were career Navy all the way, back in the Task Force Mercy days. And then after Afghanistan, suddenly you weren’t. The next thing we heard, you were hiding out in South America, playing fast and loose with your little cargo business and supporting the local pisco trade.”

Mike stared at the top of his soda can. That pretty much summed up his first couple of years post-Afghanistan. “Couple of years of that hard drinking was all I could take. So I sobered up.” Except for one day each year. And except for wanting a drink every single other day of every year.

“We knew that, too, or we’d never have tagged you for the Sierra Leone mission. You should have come to us,” Gabe added. “We could have helped.”

“No,” he said. “You couldn’t. I was too…” He thought of all the things he was, none of them good.

“Stupid?” Gabe suggested.

In spite of himself, Mike grinned. “Yeah, that, too.”

Gabe lifted a dismissive shoulder. “We all have ghosts. Nut up and get over it.”

This prompted a laugh. “How touchy-feely of you. I’m tingling all over.” He held out an arm. “See? Goose bumps.”

Gabe gave him a rare smile. “What can I say? I’m a giver.”

Mike looked up at his friend, who clearly didn’t think less of him, who absolutely had ghosts of his own.

Gabe hitched his chin toward the apartment again. “Want me to run a check on the mystery woman?”

Mike’s phone pinged. He held up a finger and fished it out of his pocket. It was a text from Joe with a document attached. “Funny you should mention her,” he said, “because it looks like Joe came through on that front.”

“Good to know you’re thinking ahead. I’ll go check and see if she needs me to move any furniture so she can look behind it.”

Mike was barely aware that Gabe walked back inside the apartment. He was already engrossed in the background on his mystery woman.

“And we have a winner,” he said under his breath and quickly read the file on Eva Salinas. Good to know she was actually capable of some truth.

Holy crap. Her sheet read like the overachievers handbook. A little reading between the lines and it became clear that little Eva Montoya had been born on a mission. Her parents had set the bar high. From the time she could crawl up on her attorney mother’s lap or charm her JAG attorney father, whose service in the Navy had apparently prompted her to pursue her own career in service to her country, she’d been setting wrongs right.

Girl Scout, student council president, captain of the debating team at University of Virginia and graduated summa cum laude, top of her class at U of V law school. Impressive.

And while she did not follow her father’s hellishly big footsteps into the military, she’d had instructor-level credentials in Muay Thai—no wonder she’d made such quick work of him in the alley—and was an expert marksman rank in both long gun and pistol. In short—she was kick-ass.

Right out of law school, she’d joined the CIA as an attorney in support services out of Langley, where she’d met Ramon Salinas, fallen in love, and after a whirlwind courtship, married him.

Should have been a happily ever after, Mike thought. A woman like her sure as hell deserved one. Ramon would have ripped her heart out and stomped all over it, but Mike wasn’t about to tell her that she wouldn’t have gotten that Cinderella ending. He would not talk trash about a dead man to anyone. Sure as hell not to his widow.

He only looked up when he heard the terrace door slide open again and Gabe stepped back outside.

“Everything okay in there?”

Gabe nodded. “I offered her a shower and she jumped at the chance. You look like you could use one, too.”

“For a fact. Might wake me up. We’ve been on the move for longer than I care to remember.”

“That would explain the need for the ugly shirt. Sucker’s so loud it would keep a narcoleptic awake.”

“Listen to you. Another joke from the Archangel. Jenna really has mellowed your ass out.”

“I suspect she’d say that she straightened my ass out. Come on. You can use the shower in our bedroom. Give you a chance to change into something that doesn’t shout South Pacific.”

“I’ll let that pass.”

“As if you could do anything about it.”

Gabe headed back inside, his limp reminding Mike what he’d given up in service to his country and for Jenna. He had saved her from a bomb blast, taking shrapnel in his leg that eventually resulted in amputation below the knee.

“That way.” Gabe pointed down the hall.

Mike hesitated and for a second considered hunting up Eva’s purse and digging around for the flash drive. He’d been itching to plug it into Gabe’s computer and read the information that had driven her to Lima to find him.

But that might break this fragile trust they’d developed and frankly, right now, he wanted a shower more. And he wanted to think about the information Joe had turned up on Eva Salinas, who was not Pamela Diaz or Emily Bradshaw.

The woman was nothing if not inventive.

“Here.” He handed Gabe his phone. “For your reading pleasure. It’s the lowdown on your other houseguest—aka CIA legal eagle.”

16

It wasn’t often Eva was given license to snoop. While she wasn’t a pro, she’d searched as much of the apartment as she could manage under the ruse of using the restroom before Gabe had stepped back inside and offered her the use of the guest shower.

Not that she’d found anything. Not that she’d expected to, she conceded as she stepped out of the shower and into the bedroom. A good operative—and despite the evidence of a toddler in residence, Jones had operative written all over him—would never leave anything in plain sight. What she needed was access to her CIA database so she could find out who, exactly, he was.

What she got, however, was Jones, alone on the terrace, loading salmon steaks on a grill.

“So… I figure you have questions,” he said, without turning around. “I know I’d have them if I was in your position.”

Then he gave her the last thing she’d ever expected: full disclosure. And she immediately felt ridiculous for not recognizing who he was the moment she’d met him.

Jones wasn’t merely an operative. He was a member of Black Ops, Inc. Everyone in the intelligence community knew about Nate Black’s band of merry men who, until a few months ago, had run covert ops for Uncle off the grid out of Buenos Aires. The team had recently relocated to Virginia, where they were now a sanctioned entity under the direction of the Department of Defense.

Jones was not only a linchpin on the team, he was a legend in the intelligence and black ops community. She should have tuned in when Brown had called him Angel Boy. He was the Archangel.

Holy, holy God.

Jones had gotten his nickname for his deadly skill with an Arc-Angel butterfly knife—solid titanium, razor sharp, ten inches fully open. No one but a master could handle it the way it was reputed that Jones handled it.

The Archangel and his ilk were the ultimate shadow warriors, rogues who played by their own rules and damn the consequences, often skirting around the dark fringes of international law. Until this past year, when the Black Ops, Inc. team was made legitimate.

“Why?” she asked, opting for wine when he offered her a choice.

“Why tell you who I am?” He extended a glass of chardonnay. “Like you weren’t going to figure it out?”

She gave him a narrow-eyed look.

“You’re CIA. It was just a matter of time.”

“It’s that obvious?”

He adjusted the fire under the salmon. “Relax. You didn’t give anything away. Mike had Joe run your sheet. There are no secrets among spies.”

She joined him by the grill. “I’m not a spy. I’m an attorney.”

One corner of his mouth drew up in a ghost of a smile. “It’s your story. You can tell it any way you want to.” He glanced at her then. “From the sound of things, you’ve been telling a lot of stories.”

Because he hadn’t said it unkindly, she relaxed a little. Apparently Mike had also told him about Lima, which meant he must also know about Afghanistan.

“Where is Brown?”