The Blonde Identity (60)

Three minutes later he was on his second egg and contemplating another when something occurred to him. “Hey, maybe you’re a chef.”

He waited for her to say that she was no doubt the heiress to a bacon empire, that maybe she had invented toaster strudel—that she was obviously the next Julia Child and spent her days encrypting classified messages into recipes for pound cake, but Zoe stayed quiet. And if Sawyer had learned anything, it was that a quiet Zoe was very, very scary.

“What’s wrong?”

She looked almost nervous as she glanced at him over the rim of her coffee cup. “I was thinking about our trip to the bank today.”

“No. I’m going to the bank today,” he said emphatically but the look in her eyes told him he was in for a fight. He was going to need both knives and at least one gun and maybe another negligee.

“No. We’re going to the bank.”

“I’m not putting you in danger.” He grabbed the last of the bacon just for spite, but she snatched it back and crammed it in her mouth all at once.

“I’m always in danger!”

“Of choking.”

She swallowed hard and looked like she didn’t know whether to argue or kiss him—to scream or to cry. So she looked down at her hands instead. “I’ll always be in danger until we get that drive.”

Her eyes were so big and her voice was so fragile that he thought the words might break him. So he tugged until she was perched on his knee, until she was back in his arms, and he didn’t let himself think about how right she felt there.

“Hey. Listen to me, you’ve done great. Really. Even . . . this”—he pointed to her massive T-shirt and the pillow—“is genius. But you can’t just break into one of the most secure banks in the world with a pillow up your shirt.”

Sawyer expected her to argue or complain, stamp her foot or maybe even kiss him again as a distraction, but Zoe just sat there, looking at him like maybe he’d lost twenty IQ points overnight—and maybe he had—because he was in no way prepared to hear her say, “Who said anything about breaking in?”

“Zoe—”

“I mean . . . I already got the stuff.”

Sawyer felt his blood go cold. “What . . .” That’s when he noticed the pile: scissors and makeup and clothes. A platinum blonde wig. And cherry-flavored Kool-Aid.

“Kool-Aid?”

“We’re gonna have to dye the wig.”

“Well, I like the idea of a disguise, but that will just make you look even more like . . .” And then he remembered . . . “No!” But she was giving him that jaunty look, the one that said this was all a game and she was winning. She was wrong. She didn’t even know how wrong she was.

“Of course I look like Alex no matter what, but Kozlov’s guys knew she was on the run, so they were probably expecting her to change her appearance. The people at the bank won’t be, so it’s probably better for me to match her style as closely as—”

“No! I thought we agreed—”

“We can’t go to the bank and not check out the box, and the easiest way into that box is for me to be Alex. You know that.”

He had known that—back before he’d known her. Back before he’d cared for her. Back before—

“No! I’m telling you . . . Kozlov is going to have men all over that bank, and if Kozlov is there, the CIA will be there. And Interpol. And MI6.”

“And Mossad,” she added helpfully. “Don’t forget about Mossad.”

“Oh.” He huffed out a dry laugh. “Lady, I never forget about Mossad. And that’s why the answer is no.”

“But . . .” She trailed off, something in her eyes as she looked at him, calculating. Worrying. Wondering. “This is about last night, isn’t it?” He hated how small her voice sounded, how fragile and frail she seemed.

“No,” he said at the same time his gut screamed Yes.

“Because it doesn’t change anything,” she said, and he felt his heart change rhythms.

“It doesn’t?”

“Of course not.” She bristled and crawled from his lap, and all Sawyer wanted to do was pull her back. “I know what last night was.”

“What was it?” Suddenly, it wasn’t a hypothetical or a theoretical. It wasn’t any kind of . . . ethical. He needed to know . . . Except he really, really didn’t. Because putting it into words—making it black and white—was absolutely terrifying for someone whose life had always been gray.

“It was a danger bang.”

At first, he was certain he’d misheard her. “A what?”

“A danger bang. In the immortal words of Keanu Reeves, relationships that begin under extreme stress—”

“Are you quoting Speed right now?”

“—are doomed to fail. Last night was a whole bunch of adrenaline and dopamine and about a million other chemicals in our bodies getting all mixed up and going bang. That’s what last night was.” But she couldn’t face him when she said, “Right?”

He wanted to tell her she was wrong. He wanted to set her up on that table and prove it to her again. He briefly revisited the tying-her-up option because that seemed pretty useful on a number of levels, but she was looking at him like it was just that simple.