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Yeah. Incredibly lucky that a surgeon with experience treating gunshot wounds happened to be a few yards away from her when she got shot.

Incredibly lucky that he had actually turned around and came back to help her.

Incredibly lucky that he kept a crash pad nearby and usually traveled with a wide array of medical gear in his luggage.

“Thanks for saving my life, Alex.”

His answer was quick. Sharp. “Don’t thank me. I only came back because I thought the sniper was using you as bait. I needed him to take another shot so I could get a position fix on him.”

Seriously? She stared at him in disbelief.

What a jerk .

But after that reflexive reaction, she paused to actually consider what he’d said, tilting her head to study him. Was he being honest, or was he just covering up the fact that he’d cared enough about her to come back for her?

God, he was harder to read than ever. She was really getting tired of that emotionless shell the real Alex was hiding behind.

“Now what?” she asked.

One corner of his mouth turned up reluctantly. She supposed it was just like old times for her to ask him that.

He answered, “Now, I do some poking around. Figure out who wants you dead.”

“What kind of poking around?”

“Computer poking to start with.” To that end, he moved past her, being careful to avoid physical contact. Was he being considerate of her injured shoulder, or was he just loathe to touch her?

Frowning, she followed him into the living room. He sat down on the sofa, propped his feet on the coffee table and cranked up a laptop computer.

“Can I help poke?” she asked reluctantly. She was still furious with him, but the guy had saved her life. It was hard to hate him after that.

He shook his head absently, already typing away. Truth be told, he probably did know just about every important detail of her life, already. Her life was pretty simple, and she’d always been an open book to him.

She picked up the TV remote off the coffee table and channel-surfed, bored. Every now and then fiery pain knifed through her shoulder, but she suffered in silence. She would be damned if she’d whine to Alex Peters. Sometimes, having the McCloud stubborn streak truly sucked.

In between dealing with the bouts of pain, she fretted over Alex’s earlier accusations back at the condo.

She was an anchor around his neck? Had he been wrong to trust her?

Was it possible she had betrayed him in some way without realizing it?

She didn’t have the first idea how to convince him he was wrong, now that he’d fixed the ideas in his head as fact.

Personally, she didn’t think she’d performed too badly in Cuba. Things had gotten pretty dicey there, for a while, and she’d followed his instructions and pulled her weight while they were together.

Not to mention, she had managed to make her way to Guantanamo all by herself, too, which was no small feat. And then there was his rescue. Although it was probably an unrepeatable, minor miracle that she’d pulled it off, still, she’d pulled it off.

Now that she stopped to think about it, she hadn’t done half bad for being just a nurse with no fancy spy training. A trained field operative couldn’t have done much better.

“Tell me something, Alex. How could I have performed any better than a trained spy in Cuba? I stayed alive, I didn’t get you killed, and furthermore, I managed to rescue you. What else did you want from me?”

He stared at her silently, a stubborn look on his face. She would take that as tacit admission that she had a point.

As for the rest of it, the not trusting her and believing so easily that she would betray him—those accusations concerned her more. They spoke to his core distrust of all women.

She was more convinced than ever that she had to find his mother and unravel that mystery if she was ever to salvage him from the morass of his broken soul. Of course, he would tell her to forget trying fix him. To let him stew in his own private corner of Hell.

It was tempting to walk away from him. His problems loomed larger than she felt like she could conquer. And his verbal attack earlier at the condo had been almost more than she could absorb.

She might have been strong enough to save his life in Cuba, but she doubted she was strong enough to save his soul.

But then, just when she thought she’d lost him to the great darkness in his soul for good, he had to go and save her life like this. To come back for her after she‘d been shot.

The McCloud men took owing someone their life pretty seriously. And no surprise, it turned out she felt the exact same way. Even if Alex was doing his best to deny the debt she owed him.

How could one man send so damned many mixed messages in so short a time? She fell asleep fretting about it on her end of the sofa and without finding any answers.

When she woke up, the apartment was silent and dark, lit only by the flickering light of the television. Alex was nowhere in sight. Alarmed, she bolted to her feet and raced for the bedroom.

She skidded to a stop in the doorway, her shoulder screaming in protest. He was sprawled across the bed, his naked, muscular back as beautiful as a statue in the peach-hued streetlight coming in the window. An alarm clock beside the bed said it was a little before six a.m.

Restless and uncomfortable, she gave up on sleeping and carefully, painfully, put on a shirt she found in Alex’s backpack.

It was big on her and she had to roll up the sleeves.

But, it fit over her bulky bandages. She found a notebook and tore out a piece of paper.

She laid it on the hard kitchen counter to write a note to Alex.

That way, an impression of her note wouldn’t be left in the notebook.

Hah. She’d learned a few spy tricks from hanging out around him.

She wrote quickly, trying not to second guess herself. I’ve gone out to take care of something important. I’ll talk with you about it when I get back. Please be here. She underlined the please and signed the note with a K.

She took her pocketbook from the kitchen counter where Alex had left it. It must have been in the front pocket of her sweatshirt when she bolted from the condo last night. She crept out of the apartment quietly.

Where was she, anyway? Thankfully, her cell phone, which had been in the pocket of the jeans she’d pulled on when she ran after Alex last night, had a mapping app. It placed her in northern Virginia.

She wandered a couple of blocks until she found a bus stop. It took studying the map inside the bus stop’s shelter to figure out how to get to Langley using public transportation, but in about an hour, she stepped off a bus a few blocks from CIA headquarters.

She called Uncle Charlie’s cell phone, which he didn’t answer, and left a brief message naming the coffee shop she was sitting in. She finished with, “We need to talk. Off campus.”

Her uncle surprised her by striding into the café not even a half-hour later. Wow. That was fast.

Charlie slid into a chair across from her at a tiny table and asked without preamble, “What’s up?”

She noted that his lips barely moved. Was he worried that someone was watching them on a security camera? She did her best to emulate him, murmuring from behind a frozen half-smile, “You tell me.”

“What do you mean?”

She spoke quietly enough that her uncle had to lean in closer if he was going to hear her, saying, “I got shot last night. Was it one of your guys?”

He leaned back hard in his seat, visibly acting shocked. She wished she could believe his reaction. Crud. Alex’s paranoia was rubbing off on her.

“No!” Charlie exclaimed. He amended, “Well, not that I was aware of.”

If that wasn’t genuine surprise, he was a fantastic actor.

He asked quickly, “Are you okay, Katie?”

“I’m fine, only because a surgeon was right there to stop me from bleeding to death and took care of my injury.”

“Mmm. Lucky,” was Charlie’s noncommittal answer.

“Alex said it was a pro. Used some sort of Teflon-tipped round preferred by snipers to shoot me.”

“Christ, Katie. What’s that all about? How are you, really?”

“I’ve been better. Good news is I’ll live. As for what this is all about, that’s what I’m hoping you can tell me.”

“Thank God you’re safe.” He reached across the table to squeeze her hand in what she took as a real gesture of concern. Then he asked casually, “How was your trip?”

“Interesting. Did André tell you what we found?”

He frowned slightly. “No. Should he have?”

She lowered her voice even further, even though no one was sitting near them. “I have no idea what your chain of command is. We found Sarin or something similar, after a release of some of it killed several dozen locals.”

Charlie stared at her intently, clearly assessing the truth of her words.

“We went looking for the source of the mystery illness with symptoms like nerve gas poisoning and found a bunker. With a lot of barrels inside it. The labels were printed in Arabic.”

Charlie visibly paled before her eyes. He leaned forward to mutter under his breath, Did you get proof?”

“We collected samples of the liquid in the barrels and we took air samples. But we lost it on the way out of the country. We do have pictures of victims, the bunker, and the barrels stored inside it.”

“And you told Fortinay about all this?”

“Yes. I told him nearly a week ago.”

Charlie’s gaze went hard and opaque. So. André, or André’s boss, had kept that little bombshell under wraps, huh? Maybe that person was waiting for the proof to come out of Cuba before her or she blew the lid off of it.

Or maybe the White House was using the delay in releasing information about her and Alex’s find to prepare for a coming showdown with Cuba and big brother, Russia. All of it was way, way above her pay grade.

“Where’s Alex, now?” Charlie fired at her.

“Safe house.”

“Any idea who might have shot you?”

“None. I’m a nurse, Uncle Charlie. I thought you might know.”

His eyes, so like her mother’s, were troubled.