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Dani barged past Mr. Whitney’s secretary into his office. Her continued employment at this firm could be measured in minutes, anyway. Who cared if she ticked off the guy’s secretary? Whitney was not in his office, but she heard voices coming from the attached conference room. She thought she heard Pinter’s voice in there. Perfect. At least some of the partners were together.

She stepped into the conference room boldly, and dead silence fell in what turned out to be a full house. Not only were all the senior partners there, but most of the junior partners.

She gulped. Do not chicken out. This is for Cam .

She took a deep breath and sashayed further into the room to stand at the foot of the long conference table.

“Let me guess,” she said breezily. “The topic of conversation just busted into your sanctimonious, holier-than-thou bullshit meeting.”

Various degrees of shock, anger, and disgust blossomed on the all-male collection of faces around the conference table.

“Here’s the thing, boys. I’m on to you. I can’t believe it took this long for a female attorney to put it all together and nail you bastards.”

“You are not invited to this meeting, Miss Wellford. Kindly leave,” Whitney declared stonily from the head of the table.

“Kindly…no. And kindly…stuff it,” she said back, mimicking the man’s condescending tone exactly. “I went to all the trouble of assembling these files and affidavits from dozens of former female employees of this firm, and you’re telling me you have no interest whatsoever in knowing what’s inside them?”

She deposited the tall stack of files and papers on the corner of the conference table, giving everyone a moment to take in the size of the pile and estimate that something like two-dozen detailed dossiers were complied.

“In that case,” she continued, “I’ll just take my files and head over to the courthouse with them. You can see them when they come to you in a discovery document from my attorneys.”

She made a production of gathering up the files, adding cheerfully, “Won’t this be fun?”

She was blatantly bluffing, but what the partners didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. She always had been hell on wheels over a stack of pennies playing poker with her cousins.

She turned around with her armful of folders and made it all the way to the door before Pinter folded and called out, “Wait.”

She turned around slowly, for dramatic effect. Great legal arguments always contained an element of theater in them.

No sense giving up her tactical advantage by being the first to speak. She waited in expectant silence, staring around the room like a stern mother waiting for a guilty child to confess.

If only she had Raspy Voice’s name from Cam. Then she truly would have these assholes by the short hairs. As it was, she only had their amorphous fears and not quite enough evidence to convict them.

This time it was Whitney who couldn’t take the heat and blurted, “What affidavits?”

She waved a casual hand. “I contacted several dozen former female associates of the firm, all of whom only worked here for a year or two and rather abruptly and inexplicably left the firm. I inquired about the specific circumstances of their departures from the firm after such a short time here.”

The tension level in the room exploded. Jaws all around the table went tight, and several of the less-disciplined partners shot furtive glances at other partners.

Gotcha .

Now to play out the hand, finish out the bluff, and rake in the pot.

She said, “It was fascinating how similar their stories were. You wouldn’t believe how many of them included detailed anecdotal accounts of various…challenging…and disappointing…experiences they encountered in the work place here at WMP. It makes for riveting reading.”

“We’ll want copies of those,” Whitney snapped.

She dropped the blonde bimbo facade abruptly. “Get your own damned affidavits, Whitney.”

She looked around the room accusingly. “We all know what’s in those statements anyway, don’t we, gentle men ?” She emphasized the last syllable. “Did you know WMP is the only major law firm of its size and scope in the entire state of New York without a single senior female associate?”

A few of the more cowardly souls at the table squirmed. The others merely stared at her, stone-faced.

“What do you want, Miss Wellford?” Pinter demanded baldly

“I don’t want anything. My job is to seek the truth and defend the innocent, is it not?”

Marcos, silent up till now, spoke up abruptly. “She’s got nothing. I personally reviewed every firing we’ve made of female associates, and we’re clean in every case.”

Rats . She’d just wanted a stalemate to come out of this confrontation. A promise that they wouldn’t destroy her reputation if she wouldn’t destroy theirs. But if Marcos successfully called her bluff, she was toast.

The little voice in her head chose this inconvenient moment to pipe up. Now’s no time to lose your nerve .

For once, she agreed with the little voice.

She looked over at Marcos coolly. “Worried enough to check, were you? Fascinating. May I quote you on that at trial?”

“No, you may not,” he snapped.

“It goes without saying that your services will no longer be required at this firm, Miss Wellford.” Whitney stated.

She shot him a laser look. “Are you firing me?”

“Let’s just call this an amicable parting of the ways?—“

She cut him off briskly. “Let’s not .”

“She’s got nothing. I’m telling you. Throw the bitch out on her ear.” Marcos’s voice rose, taking on a raspy quality.

Was it him? Was he the one she’d overheard? Did she dare accuse Marcos and risk being wrong? That would be disastrous. They would go after her for slander and ruin her. She would never practice law again.

Worse, Marcos would throw Cam under the bus on the assumption that Cam had named Marcos as the raspy voiced partner. She clenched her teeth to stop herself from saying something she would regret. She was not dragging Cam down with her.

Whitney looked down the long conference table at her coldly. “If this afternoon’s little drama was designed to wrangle some sort of severance settlement out of Whitney, Marcos 2) she had to agree to have a tiny tracking device inserted under her left shoulder blade; and 3) she had to swear not to tell the doctor she would be working with that the tracker existed. Violating any one of these would result in him not paying off one penny of her student loans.

The tarp dipped ominously overhead, brushing against her hair and startling her into ducking sharply.

“Alex! The roof’s caving in!” she cried in alarm.

“I’m aware,” came the dry response from outside. “And keep your voice down. I don’t need you getting shot on your first day out here.”

“I don’t need me getting shot, either, thank you very much,” she retorted tartly.

He asked mildly enough to irritate her even more, “Can you come help me with the tarp?”

Sheesh. How was he so unfazed by having to live like this? With nothing soft or comfortable to ease his body, in a climate that swung from blistering hot to bitter cold, surviving on barely edible food, and in constant danger?

She ducked outside just in time for a cascade of dirt and gravel to slide off the tarp and rain onto her head. And down the back of her shirt. And into her eyes. And mouth. And boots.

“Hey!” she squawked, batting at the dirt and grit filling her hair. “Watch it!”

“Sorry.”

Coughing, she gave up swiping at her hair, bent over to let her mahogany—now ghostly gray—hair hang down, and gave her head a good shake. She must look like a dog who’d just been for a swim. If only. She could go for a dip in a nice, cool, clean lake.

She was still perspiring from the strenuous hike up to this spot. Which was why all her exposed skin was now coated in gray dust, as well. She must look like some sort of weird apparition.

Alex let out a snort that sounded suspiciously like laughter.

She glared up at him crouching on the steep slope above her. He wasn’t quite grinning, but that was a definite a smirk on his face.

She huffed. It was way too soon to pick a fight with the man who was supposed to keep her alive out here and get her back to civilization safely.

When the snow melted out of the high passes in spring, a short travel window opened, making the remotest regions of this country accessible to outsiders for a few months. Doctors Unlimited, an international aid organization, tried to send a doctor and a nurse up into the mountains each summer to offer medical services to villagers and farmers with no other access to healthcare. But last year, there’d been too much violence to risk sending a team.

Anticipating the need for medical care would be even more pressing this year, D.U. had sent them in a full month earlier than usual and had instructed them to stay as long as possible without trapping themselves in-country for the whole winter.

Resigned to her filth and determined to get along with her partner, she asked as pleasantly as she could manage, “Why did you push all that dirt and rock onto the tarp?”

“Camouflage.”

She muttered under her breath, “Did you have to camouflage me, too?”

He shrugged. “You want to remain hidden, too, right?”

Dang it. Her comment hadn’t been meant for his ears.

“Well, yeah,” she replied. “If the wrong people find me, I’ll be killed.”

Which was actually pretty crazy if she stopped to think about it. And it was why she was doing her level best not to think about it that aspect of this mission.

She laboriously climbed up the slope to join Alex, huffing in the thin air at this altitude. He pulled on one side of the tarp while she pulled on the other. Covered with a layer of dirt and rock, it was really heavy, impossible for her to re-stake in the hard, rocky terrain of this barren mountain. Alex successfully pounded in his stakes with a big rock— show off —then made his way over to help her.

She registered with shock that his surgeon’s hands were tanned and callused. But his touch was gentle as he brushed her hands aside and took over pounding in her stakes, anchoring the tarp firmly this time.

She eyed him sidelong as he carefully studied the valley below. He was gorgeous in a dark, brooding, tortured kind of way. She could definitely see herself getting together with him?—

She cut off that train of thought sharply.

Her benefactor had been blunt about this aspect of the job, telling her to keep things professional and stay away from any personal entanglements on this journey.

She hadn’t been sure if the man was saying all entanglements out here were off limits or if he’d been warning her specifically to stay away from Alex.

She turned her gaze to the valley. The ribbon of lighter gray road snaking through its darker gray basin was deserted, the same way it had been since they’d stopped for the day to make camp.

The stillness of this place was so huge it was hard to absorb. Only the wind made noise up here. Not even birds disturbed the silence.

Alex seemed oddly at home in this harsh place. Which made no sense to her. When they’d met a week ago in Karachi, Pakistan, he’d told her briefly that he went to Harvard Medical School, was a trauma surgeon, and lived in New York City. How did a successful, urban professional like that fit into a completely uncivilized wilderness halfway around the world from his home?

They’d spent the two days driving from the south coast of Pakistan to its northernmost corner and another two days making the slow, arduous drive east into this mountainous region. But in all that time, he hadn’t said another word about himself.

He was almost as inscrutable and remote as the country they’d been sent to. Zagistan was a tiny, isolated spot tucked between the huge land masses of India and China. Poor and with no industries to speak of except yak farming and poppy growing, it went mostly unknown and unnoticed by the rest of the world.

Honestly, the heaviness of the silence out here was getting to her already. To break it, she asked Alex, “Where did you learn to build shelters like this?”

“My brothers and I went out into the wilderness on our own from a young age to spend time.”

She frowned. “Who lets their kids wander around in the woods by themselves these days?”

“I didn’t say there were trees where I grew up.”

“Where did you grow up?”

He shrugged and didn’t answer.

He’d done that a lot in the short time they’d known each other. Whenever he didn’t want to talk about something, he just ignored her or shrugged her off. She’d been putting up with it for nearly a week, but if she had to put up with it for months , she was going to become resentful and bitchy with him. Sooner rather than later.

“Here’s the thing, Alex. It’s not polite to blow me off like that. I’m happy to swear never to tell another living soul anything you say to me out here. But I’m a social person. I’m going to lose my mind if I’ve got no one to talk with for the entire summer.”

He frowned, obviously weighing her words. It was clear he didn’t like the idea of being chatty with her, but at length he sighed and said, “My family moved around a lot when I was young. Mostly, we lived far from cities and other people, and my parents didn’t much care if we wandered. My father encouraged it, in fact. He believed in…toughening us up.”

Whoa. There was a lot of bitterness packed into that last comment. She would’ve asked him about it, but he continued speaking and she didn’t want to stop him from opening up to her for the first time.

“My brothers and I figured out how to build shelters using whatever was available, depending on where we were. We had some impressive fights over whose design idea to use and how to do it.”

“Thank you,” she said quietly. “And how many brothers do you have?”

“Two that I know about.”

“That you know about?” she echoed, surprised.

He started to shrug but stopped his shoulder mid-lift. He exhaled audibly. “I’m going to have insist on that promise not to repeat anything about me to anyone else before I answer any more questions.”

“Why’s that?”

He shot her a withering look. He clearly wasn’t planning to say anything more until he extracted a promise of complete confidentiality from her.

“All right, already,” she groused. “I promise not to repeat anything you say about yourself to anyone else.” He didn’t look satisfied, so she added, “Ever.”

He still didn’t look satisfied.

“What else do you want me to promise?”

His answer was prompt. “Not to talk about anything I say to you. In fact, don’t tell anyone about me at all. Not that you met me, nor that you worked with me. Not even my name. Can you do that?’

“Good grief. Are you some sort of fugitive super spy?”

“Do you ever stop asking questions?” he retorted.

“Not really. I’m naturally curious.”

“Some might call it being nosy.”

She scowled at him. “Fine. I’m nosy. But I can keep a secret and I promise to keep my mouth shut. About everything. Satisfied?”

His shoulder started to move, but she wagged her finger at him and said in her best threatening nurse voice, “If you shrug at me one more time, I’m rescinding my promise.”