Chapter Eighteen
Him
Sawyer peered through the crack in the draperies, looking over the banks of the Seine. The Eiffel Tower was far behind them by that point, the Louvre and the Ritz a million miles away. Hopefully they’d left Kozlov’s men in the Shimmering Sea’s glistening wake as well, but he wasn’t going to bet on it. He didn’t bet with anything but his life.
So Sawyer stayed behind the gauzy curtains of the honeymoon suite, listening to the sound of water. And humming.
In the five years he’d known Alex he had never heard her hum, but her sister did it all the time when she thought no one was listening. Also when no one was shooting at them. Which, to be fair, hadn’t been terribly often in the hours that he’d known her. But now she was locked away in a bathroom that looked like something from a very old movie about very rich people, so she must have felt safe because she’d been humming for five minutes.
But Sawyer . . . Well, Sawyer checked his Go Bag and his guns.
When the bathroom door opened, he had just finished reloading the Glock and was sliding it into his coat pocket.
“Good timing. You ready?”
He headed for the door. According to the ship’s itinerary, they wouldn’t dock until tomorrow morning, so they were either going to have to jump or hitch a ride on another low-hanging bridge. There should be one coming up and he didn’t want to miss it.
But the new Fake Mrs. Michaelson was stumbling out of the bathroom, looking a little more alive but a lot more exhausted and he had to remind himself that adrenaline might be a powerful drug, but the crash was a kick in the teeth if you ever let it happen.
So he grabbed the backpack and repeated, “You ready?”
“For what? To sleep a hundred years?” She threw out her arms and crashed onto the king-size bed and sighed. “Ooooh. Thread count . . . Can you make sheet angels?” She moved her arms and legs out and together over and over . . . soft sheets against bare skin. She sighed and moaned. “Ooh, this is nice. You’ve got to feel—”
“No!” His voice was rougher than he intended. “Come on. We gotta . . . Where are your shoes?” He started looking around for them. “Get up. Stay with me. Come on.”
“Noooo.” She sounded like a petulant child and he felt like a cranky stick-in-the-mud but that didn’t change things.
“We’ve got to keep moving.”
She pushed herself up on one elbow. “We are! We are literally moving right now. See?” She pointed to the countryside that was drifting past those gauzy curtains. And she was right; of course she was right. They were moving. And they were sheltered. But that didn’t change the fact that Kozlov was the least of their problems.
“We’ve got to go. Now.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Because Kozlov might not know where we are at the moment, but the guys who work for him? They’re not gonna give up. And if that’s not bad enough, any minute now a whole lot of agencies are going to retask a whole lot of satellites and, lady, once that happens, there won’t be anywhere to hide. So we can’t stay here.”
“Why not?” She sounded wide awake and ready for a fight. “Is this one of your safe houses?”
He looked around the opulent suite. There were mirrors on every surface and literal mints on the pillows. He’d never been more insulted in his life.
“No.”
“Is this someplace you’d come on your own?”
“No.”
“Someplace you’ve been before?”
“Of course not.”
“Is this something a seasoned undercover operative would do?”
He tried—and failed—to bite back a laugh. “Not hardly.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Then this is exactly where we should stay. Predictability is death, right?”
He prowled closer to the bed, but she just smirked up at him—like this was some kind of verbal Krav Maga and she could use his own force against him.
“Now look—”
She scrunched up her face and lowered her voice. “Streets bad. Shelter good.”
“Hey, I don’t sound—”
“I thought we were supposed to keep moving?” She climbed up on her knees as he leaned down, the two of them suddenly eye to eye, skin flushed, heat pulsing between them.
“We are!” he said a little too loudly.
“I thought we were supposed to find shelter?” She was shifting on her knees and inching closer, like she might launch herself at him at any minute.