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Katie was alarmed when they ditched the SUV in front of the FBI headquarters in New York City. But when Alex pointed out that no one would take special notice of its government plates, it made perfect sense.

Alex ducked into the first drug store they came across as they walked away from the FBI building. They bought hats, scarves and cheap raincoats that they pulled over their clothing. Appearances changed, they emerged back on the street.

She opened her mouth, but Alex held up a hand to forestall her. “I know,” he murmured. “Now what?”

She grinned up at him from under her Yankees baseball cap.

He answered his own question. “Now, a crowded, public place.”

“Central Park crowded, or subway at rush hour crowded?” she queried.

“Subway. Good idea.”

Stunned that he liked any idea she suggested, she followed him down the steps into a subway station.

They caught a train headed northbound out of Lower Manhattan, and managed to snag a pair of seats.

She kibitzed as he pulled out the stolen cell phone and took a brief look at it.

Although, was it still stolen if its owner was dead?

Alex pulled out his own cell phone and initiated some sort of Internet search. “What are you doing?”

“Reverse phone book. Getting a name for the owner of this phone.” His phone dinged an incoming message. “Voila. The guy’s name was Brian Remolatto. Now. We do a quick search on him.”

“Why?”

“Looking for addresses and birthdates.”

“Because…”

“I need his numeric password for his phone.”

“Ahh.” She held her hand out. “Give me your phone. I’ll suggest numbers while you type.” He passed her his phone and she started rattling off old addresses, and the names and birthdates of various people associated with Brian Remolatto.

Alex made a sound of satisfaction and then muttered sarcastically, “How sweet. The guy used his mother’s birthday as his passcode.”

He scrolled quickly, cruising the dead man’s phone for useful information. He announced under his breath, “Huh. Here’s the mission tasking to eliminate us with extreme prejudice.”

“Both of us?” she asked, shocked.

“Looks that way.”

“Who sent it?” she demanded, aghast.

“An excellent question. Sadly, it came from a numbered ISP address.”

“What’s that?”

“Without waxing technical, it’s an anonymous Internet location that will be untraceable.”

“What about his contact list? Have you checked that out?” she asked over his shoulder.

“Well, lookee, here,” Alex crooned, “A contact labeled ‘Boss.’”

She chuckled. “That’s either his CIA supervisor or his wife.”

“Given the number of women in his contact list, and the number of X-rated texts in his message folder, I’m going to postulate that young Brian was single.”

The train stopped, and they climbed the stairs into Grand Central Station. The place was mobbed with commuters striding in every direction across the cavernous space.

“This crowded enough for you?” she asked under the din.

Alex nodded and unwrapped his headphones from around his cellphone. He put one ear bud into his ear and passed her the second one. She huddled close to him to listen as he dialed the phone number of Remolatto’s boss.

A male voice answered. “Go ahead, Remolatto.”

Alex replied easily, “This isn’t Brian. It’s Alex Peters.”

“Peters?” the man exclaimed. “What the hell?”

“Hey, I need to get in touch with the director of the op. Something’s come up and I need to have a face-to-face conversation with the top brass.”

“Christ, Peters. I had no idea you were read in on the op. I thought you were a blind asset.”

“Obviously not. Brian said you could hook me up, though.”

“Kane left the office about an hour ago. She’s on her way home if I had to guess.”

Katie’s jaw dropped. As in Claudia Kane?

An icy chill passed over her. Alex’s mother was the director of the entire Cold Intent operation?

Even Alex seemed staggered. He physically shook himself, swallowed convulsively, and then said more lightly that she’d have been able to pull off, “I guess I’ll just have to call her there. How long will it take her to get home?”

“Well, she’s got to get all the way out to Fairfax. I’d give her an hour. Traffic’s a bitch at this time of year. Damned tourists flock to Washington and clog up all the roads.”

“No kidding. Can’t get a parking spot or restaurant reservation to save your life,” Alex griped.

The guy at the other end snorted in commiseration.

“Okay, well thanks, anyway, dude. Brian and I will take it from here.” Alex disconnected the phone. He passed her his ear bud, and she wound the thin wire around her hand while Alex deftly pulled out the phone’s battery and sim card.

“Killing it so they can’t track us with it?” she murmured.

“Yup.” He stowed the pieces in his pocket. “C’mon. We need to get to Washington.”

“Crud. Do we have to go back into the bad guys’ sandbox?”

“It’s my sandbox, too,” he replied grimly.

They spent the next hour getting to a car rental agency and using one of Alex’s seemingly endless supply of fake I.D.’s to rent a car. They headed out of the city at a snail’s pace as rush hour ripened into a full-blown mess.

Finally, as they inched forward, she said, “Did you have any idea your mother was in charge of Cold Intent?”

“My father said as much. But I didn’t have confirmation until just now. It makes sense, though. The op is centered around screwing over my father.”

“So this has all been a feud between your parents? Are you kidding me?”

Alex rolled his eyes at her. “I suspect there’s more to it than that.”

“Well, yeah. They’re trying to destroy each other. And they’re freaking spies. That could get pretty violent.” She added wryly, “Divorce, CIA style. How appropriate for your family.”

Alex just looked grim.

They drove late into the night and stopped somewhere in Pennsylvania to sleep for a few hours.

Katie could seriously have used a cuddle and some comforting after the previous day’s trauma, and she expected Alex could use a little TLC after finding out his mother was behind his troubles.

But no sooner had she climbed under the covers than Alex stretched out on the floor beside the bed.

“What on earth are you doing down there?” she demanded over the side of the bed.

“If you busted into this room looking for a shoot out, would you expect someone to be down here?”

“Well, no. But won’t you be uncomfortable?”

“Hmm. Comfortable or dead,” he said by way of an answer.

Well, hell. She sighed. “Do I need to sleep down there, too?”

“If you want.”

“Yippee,” she muttered. She dragged her pillow and a blanket down on the hard, drafty floor beside him. “The things I do for love,” she grumbled.

“Your choice,” he murmured, already half-asleep.

She was sleeping on the floor of a hotel room with a perfectly good bed right beside her. It was a fitting metaphor for her life. She really liked normal. She liked waking up in the morning and feeling comfortable and safe…in her own bed.

Was she really up for this lifestyle, forever? Her idea of roughing it was a Holiday Inn instead of a Marriott. Who was she trying to kid? She wasn’t cut out for the floor of the freaking Motel Hell.

Deeply conflicted, she wrestled with her choice until she passed out sometime before dawn. She woke up aching from head to foot and half-frozen. Alex was already gone from beside her. The shower cut off as she rolled over and sat up, groaning.

Alex spun out of the bathroom naked and wielding a pistol. She lurched, alarmed. “What’s wrong?” she gasped.

“I heard you moan.”

“I wasn’t in trouble,” she explained hastily. “I’m just sore from the floor.”

He made a disgusted face and retreated into the bathroom She heard the faint scraping of a razor.

Huh. He hadn’t shaved in several days. She’d figured he was using the dark beard stubble on his face by way of a disguise.

Why the careful toilette today? Did he want to look nice for meeting his mother, perchance?

God, how weird must that be? Today he could meet the woman who’d given birth to him for the first time in decades.

When Alex finished in the bathroom, she took his place and grabbed a deliciously hot but all too short shower.

Funny how for granted she took the act of bathing until she couldn’t do it.

When she emerged from the steam room she’d turned the bathroom into, Alex was distracted and uncommunicative.

Obviously, his brain was in overdrive. She left him alone as they headed downstairs to the front desk.

It was almost laughable how easily Alex charmed the hotel’s desk manager into letting him use her computer terminal. Katie took a seat in the lobby to wait for him, but he wasn’t online long.

She stood when he rejoined her with a terse nod. He said merely, “I got an address.”

They hit the road, arriving in the rural outskirts of Fairfax, Virginia in the early afternoon.

“So what are you going to do,” she asked. “Walk right up to her front door, knock, and say, “Hi, Mom. It’s me. I’m home”?

“I’m treating her as a hostile until indicated otherwise. We’ll set up a surveillance and information collection detail and see what we learn. Then we’ll formulate a plan from there.”

“Won’t she be pretty good at spotting surveillance?” Katie asked dubiously.

“Undoubtedly. We’ll just have to be better.”

Katie gulped. Suddenly she felt a great deal like a minnow swimming with a pack of sharks. Sharks who wouldn’t hesitate to turn on each other and attack in cold blood. She didn’t belong in the company of these experienced operatives jockeying against one another.

“What do you suppose she looks like?” Katie asked.

“We’ll find out soon enough.”

He guided the car to an address on a country road.

A modest, two-story farmhouse stood well back from the road.

It was white clapboard and traditional, with a broad covered front porch and a red barn behind it.

A pair of horses and a dozen beef cattle grazed in a pasture around the place.

Several mature shade trees cozied up to the house.

It was all very placid and normal looking.

Alex drove on past without slowing down and continued several more miles along the road before turning, going a mile or so to the west, and then turning back to the north on a parallel farm road to place them behind his mother’s house.

Seeing what he was doing, Katie grumbled, “We’re going to have to hike again, aren’t we?”

He smiled over at her a little.

“You’re a sadist, Alex Peters.”

“You have no idea.”

“Someday, you’re going to quit talking the talk and walk the walk,” she retorted.

He glanced over at her in surprise. “Haven’t you figured it out, yet? It’s really about keeping a woman off balance. I don’t have to cause women any pain, or do anything at all for that matter, as long as they don’t know what’s coming next. The fear and anticipation does all the work for me.”

Her eyebrows disappeared into her hairline. “Are you actually giving away your trade secrets to me? Since when?”

He pulled the car off the road and parked it behind an abandoned barn that looked like the next strong wind would blow it over. He half-turned in the seat to face her.

He said grimly, “Since you killed a man. There’s blood on your hands, now. And it won’t ever wash off. Whether you planned it or not, you’ve crossed a line in to my world. You can’t go back, now. I figured I might as well throw you a few survival tips.”

And with that, he opened the door and got out of the car.

Gee. That was…humanitarian…of him. Jerk.

Except in the next breath, she had to admit she could use all the survival tips she could get. She was a literal babe-in-the-woods out here, running around playing spy.

She stared at his back as he dug around in the trunk of the rental car. She heard plastic bags rattle--the supplies he’d picked up at a superstore somewhere in rural Maryland, earlier. Was he right? Was she irrevocably consigned to his world?

Dismay and terror tore through her. No! She didn’t want this! She wanted to settle down with him in some small, quiet town. To raise their adopted daughter together and have a few kids of their own. She wanted rocking chairs on a porch and big family get-togethers on holidays.

A sob rattled silently through her chest as it dawned on her that the men she and Alex had killed would never get that with their families. She wasn’t a murderer.

She wasn’t! She was a good person. Kind. Considerate of others. Moral, for God’s sake.

And yet, the facts shouted otherwise. She was no better than Alex.

The thought froze her in her tracks. Had she really thought herself better than him all this time? Had she subconsciously been judging him? And knowing him and his brilliant perception, he must have sensed it, or even recognized it outright.

God, no wonder he wouldn’t commit to a relationship with her. She was no better than any of the other women in his life. They’d all judged him and condemned him. Just like she had.

Well, at least that problem was solved. She’d gotten down in the emotional muck of his shadow world and wallowed around it shamelessly. She was every bit as dirty as him, now.

What had she done to her life? To all of their lives?