Page 31

U.S. ambassador’s residence, ?stermalm, Stockholm

Yardley strode out of a ballroom full of CIA operatives. She had a problem.

In advance of this evening’s op, the team had returned to Stockholm in order to be closer to Mirabel’s compound.

They’d settled on the ambassador’s residence because it was one of the most fortified structures in the central city—essential for protecting the micro drive and Flynn, both of which Atlas and Gramercy refused to let out of their sight, by order of the president—and also because it turned out that Amanda Berg, U.S.

ambassador to Sweden, had a great deal of personal and professional ire directed toward Devon Mirabel.

The presence of his compound in her assigned country kicked up a lot of unsavory characters she was obligated to keep track of.

This left Yardley to direct a team of eleven field operatives, analysts, and tech from inside the confines of a beautiful Swedish r?dhus in one of the most delicate and terrifyingly vital intelligence missions in U.S. history.

That was not her problem.

One of her eleven operatives, a certain KC Nolan—currently in a helicopter somewhere between Norway and a top-secret helipad from which a car would whisk her back to this very r?dhus—had done so well in the Evenes briefing that Yardley had spent the entire two hours she’d observed over the comm link awash in goosebumps that were not one hundred percent professional.

Even that was not her problem. It was inconvenient to have a crush on a—technically—subordinate who she was—technically—broken up with, but not a problem .

Her problem was that she needed to talk to KC.

Not about tonight’s mission. Yardley felt the same way about tonight’s mission that she’d felt about her debut at the Cherry Hill Country Club when she was seventeen years old: overprepared and very powerful.

She needed to have the talk with KC.

Tonight, KC would walk into a four-acre semi-rural compound, accessible by one narrow road and facing a canal, to attend a party stuffed with some of the slipperiest eels Yardley had dealt with on the global stage.

Those eels were going to be more than suspicious of a newcomer.

Yardley’s intel didn’t put Cigarette and Headphones at the auction, but there was no way to be sure.

KC would be unarmed, except for the guns she tended to so lovingly at her sweaty gym, and it would be her first time in the field.

Yardley was scared.

But she was the Unicorn, as she kept reminding herself, and she was not her granddaddy. Or her nan. She was a capable, creative queer woman with excellent instincts who had made her way to the highest echelons of trust and service.

It’s not too late to do whatever it is you should’ve done in the first place if you hadn’t been afraid. That’s what her nan had told her, and Yardley’s nan was always right. So she’d asked herself, if she hadn’t been afraid of never having the chance, what would she have done by now?

They would have sat down and talked. That was her answer.

They would have taken ownership of what went wrong—and not the Mrs. and Mrs. Spy business that Flynn had pointed out, but their real problems, the ones they’d argued about at the safehouse, the ones her nan had put her finger on so precisely and without having to think hard or write a list down on a piece of paper, so conspicuous were these problems.

Holding back. Failing to say what they wanted. Never learning how to have the emotional intimacy they needed and craved, and filling the void with work and sex.

Yardley was scared, because she didn’t know what KC wanted or if there was any hope for them. But she was not afraid of this talk anymore. She was only afraid, in the bustle of this time-sensitive mission, she wouldn’t figure out a way to have it.

She braced herself in the doorway of a guest bedroom and leaned inside for a rapid survey. It was a poem of blond woods, thick rugs, and a pillowy duvet. If she used this room, they would not have the talk they needed to have. They would do the other thing they liked to do instead of talking.

She closed the door on a fantasy of red hair on linen pillowcases.

Every hall, stairwell, and nook of the r?dhus was beautiful, spare, very Swedish, and covered by discreet cameras and agency security. In her snoop around, she was stopped no less than six times by officers who wanted to ask her a question or show her how clever they were.

It was only after she’d rejected yet another inviting bedroom that she started to feel an involuntary haze of desperation and preoccupation with how KC kissed her, which was bossily, passionately, and with little interest in stopping.

Overtaken by this ardent mental image, Yardley started telling herself she needed it.

She needed how one of KC’s kisses obliterated her busy mind while also making her feel acutely alive.

Not just alive, but hungry for life, like wildflowers would start sprouting through her hair, and searching roots would find the earth from her toes.

She pressed her hand against her stomach, wishing it would stop flip-flopping along with her convictions.

First, talking. Then, if it was natural, mature, and called for, perhaps a kiss good-bye. Couples did that at the end. It was tender. A kiss could smooth the artifact of the relationship into the scrapbook of one’s life, to look back upon fondly.

Yardley found a settee in the hallway outside the ballroom to sit on and silently cry. The low Scandi design of the furniture meant that she felt awkward and oversized, but possibly that was simply a manifestation of her emotional state.

As she stared down the quiet blondwood hallway, the fancy bench made her tailbone ache almost as much as her heart.

“Do you have everything you need?” Ambassador Berg stepped into the hall from behind a silent pocket door that concealed a study, wearing flawlessly cut slim taupe slacks without a single wrinkle and an asymmetrical sweater in precisely the same color that set off her warm white bob like it was jewelry.

“I could certainly find you a more comfortable seat. Ole Wanscher was a genius designer, but he was not concerned about the health of his countrymen’s spines. ”

Yardley looked at her for so long without being able to formulate a response that it became obvious, and then embarrassing. The Unicorn was famously unflappable. Yardley, by contrast, had been torn to pieces, the scraps of herself flapping in the wind.

“I don’t want to disturb your planning.” Ambassador Berg smiled fully. “Please excuse me.”

“That’s very kind, but you haven’t disturbed me.” Yardley swallowed.

It hung between the two women. The acknowledgment of heartbreak.

“Well, now I must know.” The ambassador leaned in, her eyes very kind. She glanced toward the closed ballroom door. “It’s one of them in there? Tell me who so I can peer at this person in the cameras.”

Yardley answered with a watery laugh, visualizing the assembled agents in the ballroom. “No. It’s—”

A door opened suddenly at the far end of the hall, and Yardley and the ambassador turned to see who had come in.

KC.

The light from the bulletproof clerestory windows picked up every single shade of her improbable hair, chestnut against her neck, bright as a copper kettle where the sun had bleached it, rich mahogany where Yardley had watched her raking her hands through it during the briefing, leaving it in untidy wisps and curls.

Her heavy black jump boots, issued with her flight suit, moved as silently over the glossy floor as the feet of a feline creature who lived in the deepest part of the forest.

Dramatic, yes.

But no lies detected.

“Ah,” Amanda said with a laugh. “I see.”

Yardley sighed helplessly.

“Good luck,” the ambassador said. “There isn’t a camera on the entrance to the linen storage room on the east side of the ballroom.” And with that helpful bit of intel, she disappeared behind the door she’d emerged from.

Before Yardley had a chance to take a deep breath, KC spotted her.

She watched KC pull her shoulders back infinitesimally.

To Yardley’s credit, she didn’t run down the hallway and tackle her to the ground.

She did sit up straight and cross her legs and stick her bosom out.

Once KC started walking toward her, Yardley threw in a hair toss.

She was going to need every bit of what she’d learned from cotillion class, her sorority sisters in Chapel Hill, and at her mama’s knee.

“Ma’am,” KC said when she’d stopped in front of her, recognizing Yardley’s superior status in a clipped, neutral voice.

Oh, so it was going to be like that.

“Nolan,” Yardley returned, rising to her feet. “I trust you had a good flight.”

“Uneventful. What service should I report to?”

With that question, Yardley picked up on what KC was trying to hide, which was her excitement.

Her hyperfocus. Yardley knew that feeling of arranging every bit of intelligence from a good briefing into multiple configurations, like it was a puzzle, in order to look for possibilities, options, opportunities—or maybe missed opportunities.

“You should report to me.”

That was fun to say, but she should probably be clear.

“We should have a preamble to official report,” she said.

KC’s brow furrowed. “A preamble? Is there a pre-report step?”

Yardley shook her head. “What I mean is, can we talk?”

“Talk?”

Yardley glanced down at her gold watch. They had time. KC already knew more about the schematic of Mirabel’s estate than the rest of the officers in the briefing put together.

She looked up and realized KC had noticed the watch, which Yardley had strongly implied she’d left at home. Her heart skipped a beat.

She really didn’t want to give back this watch.

“KC.” Yardley ignored how her thigh muscles went weak and her vision had zeroed in on KC’s mouth, her breathing, and every bit of skin visible on a fully dressed woman in a coat.