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“Not particularly. I’m not crazy about leaving Dawn, and frankly, I could do without being shot at again.”

“I won’t let you get shot at.”

“You can’t promise me that,” she retorted.

Alex frowned. “I need to go.”

“Why?”

He glanced at her brother, who was unabashedly taking in the exchange. “We’ll need to discuss that in private.”

“Aww, c’mon,” Ian complained. “We’re family. And you owe me after you almost gutted me.”

“I saved your life after I gutted you. We’re even,” Alex retorted.

“You stole my ride and abandoned me in the middle of nowhere,” Ian shot back.

“I got your baby sister out of Zaghastan alive.”

Katie looked back at Ian for his rejoinder and was amused when he huffed. “Fine. We’re even.”

Katie sympathized with the pained look on Alex’s face. He wasn’t used to dealing with a big, nosy family like this. She took pity and nodded toward the back porch. “Let’s go sit on the back porch.”

Ian protested, but he could get over it. This was between her and Alex.

They stepped into the screened in three seasons room behind the family room.

Alex pointedly turned his back on the house’s windows. Good call. A couple of the McCloud men could read lips.He murmured, “There’s more to this trip than just treating hurricane victims.”

“There always is, isn’t there?” she replied rhetorically.

He merely rolled his eyes at her.

When he didn’t speak, she demanded, “You’re not seriously going to put your neck on the line again, are you? I thought we agreed this stuff was over. For both of us.”

He sighed and moved toward the edge of the big deck. “Things have changed. My…role has changed.”

She wanted to shout at him that his role was to be Dawn’s dad and her lover, maybe eventual husband. But she bit the words back.

He continued, “Cargo ships have been seen making unscheduled stops in small ports along the east coast of Cuba. No offloads or onloads have been observed. We’ve been asked to poke around. Talk with the locals. See if they know something about any smuggling that might be going on.”

“What kind of smuggling?”

“No idea. Could be drugs, weapons, human trafficking…hell, it could be outbound cigars for all I know.”

She snorted. “If the CIA wants to send us in to have a look, they think it’s more serious than cigars.”

He exhaled hard. “You always have been too smart for your own good.”

She took a step closer to him where he stared out at the woods. “It’s not our problem, any more. Other people with a death wish can go check it out.”

“But I’m uniquely qualified…” he started.

“Why? Because you’re practically a Russian agent, yourself?”

He spun to face her. Something dark and cold emanated from him. This was the side of James Bond the movies never portrayed. They might get the fun and games right, but the movies mostly ignored what it meant to be a trained killer.

A couple of her brothers were trained killers. She knew the signs of it in the way Alex held himself, now. In how he watched everything and everyone, in the way he moved, always coiled, always ready to spring. He was a living, breathing hair trigger.