Something was wrong with that picture. His father’s cabin smelled like bacon and fresh coffee, and there was a woman dancing, humming . . . caring for him there. No one had cared for Sawyer in so long that it took his sleep-addled brain a little too long to realize—
Zoe. The cabin. Fresh food.
“Where did you get all this?” he asked, already terrified the answer would be—
“There’s a town.”
He was going to kill her. Strangle her. Tie her up and . . . tickle her? Or something. Possibly a whole lot of something depending on how the first part went. “Damn it, Zoe. You can’t just go off on your own, looking like—”
“A rogue spy on the run?” She gave a long-suffering look over her shoulder and shrugged—actually shrugged! Like he was overreacting. Him. The man who （not to belabor the point） had killed an assassin with a negligee!
She slid two eggs onto a plate then added bacon and licked her fingers and, so help him, his anger faded into a much more dangerous emotion as thoughts of last night drifted through his head.
Zoe appearing at the edge of the steam-filled room.
Zoe perched on the bathroom counter.
Zoe crying out his name.
Zoe.
Zoe.
Zoe.
But the little vixen had the audacity to say, “Trust me, no one was looking at my face.”
“You can’t possibly know . . .” he started but trailed off as she turned.
At first, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing because she was still Zoe in the morning light. Same honey-colored hair. Same mischievous smile. Same green eyes. But then his gaze slid down her body to her very large, very round, very . . . pregnant belly?
“See? No one was looking at me and thinking Ooh! There goes the most lethal woman in Europe!”
It was true, he would have admitted if his brain hadn’t been full of other, far more primitive thoughts. Like yes. And this. And mine.
And Sawyer actually felt his world tilt. He might have staggered. Because the sight of Zoe in the cabin. The thought of Zoe and his child. The very idea . . . It was ludicrous and dangerous and vicious—the way it bore right into his gut. It was salt in a wound he didn’t even know he had as he stood there, inches away from all the things he never knew he wanted and just realized he couldn’t have.
But what if he could?
No. Sawyer needed his sharpest knife. He had to cut that thought out before it spread.
“Go ahead. Say it.” She took a bite of bacon and pulled the pillow out from beneath her shirt. “I’m so good at undercovering!”
But Sawyer didn’t say a single thing. He just ate his breakfast and ignored the feelings that were pinging around inside of him because who needs feelings anyway?
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.”