Page 37 of Radar (Iniquus Certified Cerberus Tactical K9 #2)

Xander considered that for a minute. “Let me talk to Elyssa, and I’ll be right over.”

The team left, snicking the door shut behind them.

“FBI, CIA, DIA, and you’re on their team. Who do you work for?” Elyssa asked.

“The Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon.”

“You’re a military spy.” Elyssa hissed. “You told me you were an analyst. These are not the same things.” She painted the word spy with so much disdain that it dripped onto the floor near Xander’s boots.

“Are you sure that they’re not? Spy. I mean …” Xander thought about it and, yeah, he kind of was a spy of sorts. He’d never thought of himself in that context.

“Spy. It’s such a disconnect.” She was kneading Radar’s ears, and Radar was blissing out. “You have such a choir boy who loves his mother look about your eyes.”

“I don’t sing much, but I do love my mother. Choir boy?”

“Your eyes. You don’t have trained killer vibes.” Elyssa’s frown was deep and heavy. “Have you?”

Xander’s brows drew together. “Have I what?”

“Killed someone?” Elyssa’s voice conveyed the “How dare you?” without her having to say it aloud.

“I was in Afghanistan for three tours,” he said quietly.

“I am so confused by all this.” This was her rugby face. Elyssa was fierce. “I’d never have slept with you if I’d known.”

“Known what? That I work for the Pentagon?” Xander tried to step away from his DIA role, which seemed to bother her.

“That you were so dangerous.” She pulled at the neck of his Henley that she was still wearing.

And he wondered if she remembered what she had on.

“I’m feeling an existential threat. Internal.

I don’t think you want to hurt me. But still, you’d think that I’d be able to sense that you’re a killer.

I can’t trust my own instincts. I made such poor choices. ”

Killer. Xander had never thought of himself in that way, either. He was trying to line himself up with this conversation. He could support her best—no matter what her role turned out to be—if he maintained rapport. “Your instincts?”

“I mean in bed.”

Xander sat in one of the plastic chairs, so he wasn’t looming over her. “I’m not particularly comfortable with the juxtaposition of being called a mama’s boy one minute and then jumping to sex.”

“I agree. Gross, right?” She drew in a deep breath.

“Dangerous men tend to be selfish and self-absorbed.” She slid her ring on and off her finger, and Xander let her sit with that thought, hoping she’d give him some insight.

“I mean, there’s a woman’s truism about going to bed with a man for the first time, an orgasm isn’t expected.

My orgasms weren’t expected last night.”

Xander’s mind was on the possibility that the Zorics had tried to down their plane, that someone had kidnapped Elyssa’s friends, and there were Zoric goons in the hallway. But Elyssa had no idea why she was in this room, and so she was assessing the time she’d known him.

That made sense.

She was talking about orgasms.

Plural.

A smile spread across Xander’s cheeks, then he forced his face into something neutral as Xander wondered why that seemed like a sticking point for her.

It was as if the disconnect came from her belief that killers and spies were incapable of giving a woman an orgasm.

And since she told him he was both a killer and a spy, maybe she thought she should have been left unfulfilled.

And so, somehow, he was lying to her? Was that it? “What are we talking about, Elyssa?”

“Is this being watched or taped or something? Am I being interrogated?”

“Interrogated,” Xander shook his head slowly, “No, we want to figure out—”

“Are you filming this?”

“Yes. But not because we believe you did anything wrong. But we do have some questions, and we want a way to go back and think about what you’ve said.”

“Surely, this isn’t about us screwing around. And it can’t be about the guy grabbing me in Lumberjack because the White woman and the Hero guy are from intelligence agencies. Hero, that’s a made-up name, right? Like, you originally called yourself Ender?”

“Hiro, H-i-r-o, not hero, h-e-r-o. Hiro is his last name.”

“Intelligence agencies gather international information, right?” This was the Elyssa from the tapes he’d watched on Eddie’s social media last night, with Elyssa’s bare ass pressed into him as she slept.

This was the woman who would take no shit from the competition. “Tell me why I’m here,” she said.

“There appear to have been two attempts to kidnap you in Lumberjack. Someone tried to break into your room last night, but Radar alerted me because my room was right next to yours. We took care of it.”

“That’s why you were wearing pants,” she said as if his pants had been a major question in her mind. “And I didn’t wake up for that? Don’t answer that.” She held up a hand. “Answer this instead. Purposefully? You took the room expressly so you would be next to mine? That wasn’t happenstance?”

This whole next chapter was going to be really hard on Elyssa, and Xander hated like hell that this was happening to her. He’d ease her in by mentioning her great-uncle now.

“Reservations were made for me. I was placed in the closest room available so I could get to Orest Kalinsky.”

“Uncle Orest?” She startled and drew her chin back, genuinely perplexed.

“I had no idea you had a connection to him. Nor did I know that room was yours.”

“Did you have sex with me as part of an operation? Like,” she snapped her fingers, “what do they call it?”

“I don’t know what they call it. But I had sex with you because I very much wanted to. My target, Orest Kalinsky, was asleep, so I was on my own time. I discovered that you were associated with him later.” He let her have the smallest taste of what was coming, and he watched her reaction.

“Your target ? You’re going to explain that to me? You must be kidding if you think my Uncle Orest is someone a spy should watch. That’s absurd.”

“I’ll have more information for you after my team brings me up to speed.” He didn’t like being called a spy. It sounded like someone without ethics who lurked in the shadows.

“But you knew I was his great-niece,” she insisted.

“Not until after we were together.”

“When they tried to break into my room?”

“Earlier.”

“I had put my information into your contacts on your phone. Then, I went to the bathroom.” She looked at her lap. “Well, that explains your shitty moodiness when I got back in bed, doesn’t it?” Elyssa looked up. “Is this about drugs?”

“I wish it were,” Xander said gently.

“That sounded ominous.”

“I don’t want you hurt.” And Xander had never said a truer sentence in his life.

“Me neither. You think I might be?” Elyssa jumped up. “Whew.”

Xander reached out to guide her back to her seat. “No sudden shifts, please. I know all of this is startling. For your safety, we have a paramedic right outside if you think you need someone.”

Elyssa stared at the door, so Xander got up and opened it. “Ma’am?”

The uniformed woman lifted from the wall and took a step forward.

After he was sure that Elyssa had seen her support, Xander said, “Just making sure you were here.”

“Yes, sir.”

He closed the door and turned to Elyssa. “I need to get caught up on the case. I’ll be right back.”

“Before you go.” Elyssa waited until Xander sat back down. “I hate being lied to, and you have to be lying. You slept with me because you wanted to manipulate me. It has to be that.”

Xander placed a hand over his heart. “I would never do that, Elyssa.”

“You knew who I was last night before you slept with me,” she insisted.

Xander shook his head.

“You did. You must have. You must have done some research on me, too. You saw I was shaking and ordered nachos, and you placed the saltshaker directly in front of me that way. I didn’t put it together because I don’t live in a spy thriller.

I’m a plant engineer. A plant plant engineer.

I mean, I design plants for growing plants.

” She waved her hand in the air. “Never mind. If you knew about the salt, you already knew what I did for a living and had researched me enough to know I had POTS despite HIPAA.”

“I didn’t, Elyssa. Radar told me about the POTS.

Listen, Radar was at a training facility in Oklahoma, and I was able to adopt him as my dog because he had been released from their service dog program.

Radar is a great working dog, just not a good fit for a medical alert lifestyle.

Now, how they train the service dogs is to start their puppy training in a family that does that as their good works in this world.

” He pointed to her wrist. “It’s their little bit. Okay? Following?”

“So far. But you seem to want that to explain the salt.”

“Though Radar was trained as a seizure alert K9, the family where Radar was puppy training had a friend who had POTS. That friend had a POTS service dog who would boop her on the leg when there was a change in the woman’s blood chemistry.

This service dog would assume a particular posture of concentration as she paid close attention to her handler.

Radar learned that behavior when he lived in his puppy trainer’s house. ”

Elyssa pressed her lips together like she wasn’t buying this. And Xander needed Elyssa to trust him.

“The salt was pre-boop,” she said.

“Yes, like I said, before the boop, which is the alert, the service dog’s posture would change as she focused on her person. I recognized Radar’s attention and posture when you were at the bar. This was when you were dealing with Gaston.”

“That’s not his name. I have no idea what his name is.”

Xander grinned. “Gaston. That’s marvelous.” He caught her gaze. “That is such a Belle put-down. You remind me of that character.”

“Do I? How?”

“I’ll tell you later. Right now, you need to trust that I guessed that you had POTS because of Radar’s behavior, and you were shaking and drinking electrolytes. I had a small inkling of how to help because of the way I saw that woman deal with her situation and how those around her supported her.”

“But then you got on my flight and followed me here.”

“Actually, you got on my flight. And I live here.”

She looked around. “And now, I’m in a confessional in D.C., Xander. And I still don’t know why.”