Page 7 of Shadow Burn

Priss followed him to the door, Katherine bringing up the rear. The cat sat on the welcome mat as if to ensure he made it across the threshold, while Katherine watched Jasper leave without a backward glance, his truck pulling away from the curb a moment later.

Jasper Perault hadn’t taken the case. He’d refused her terms and walked out without a goodbye.

She picked Priss up off the mat. The cat was warm and heavy and entirely unrepentant. “You,” Katherine told her, “are a terrible judge of character.”

Priss purred.

Katherine carried her back to the kitchen, set her on the counter, and dug out the fur ball’s favorite treats.

Days—it might be days before she heard from him. She’d be a ball of nerves until then.

As she pacified Priss with her treats, Katherine’s mind spun. What if he said no? Would she risk pushing through on her own?

Or would she mark the letters classified and hide them away inside Langley?

What did it matter if someone had faked their death and continued working for the Agency? Was it worth throwing away her good name and career over it?

Had Vance died because of it?

If the CIA gets wind of us investigating a spy they don’t want exposed, we’re all in danger. Jasper’s words rang in her head.

Katherine went to her phone and scanned through her pictures of Emma and the twins. Her sister, brother-in-law, and six-year-old nieces were all she had left of her family, enjoying a normal life in Virginia. She didn’t want to put anyone, especially them, in danger.

She tossed the phone down with a huff. She was just doing a bit of investigating, that was all. Jasper Perault had put the idea in her head that this was dangerous, but that was ridiculous.

Wasn’t it? It might be dangerous to her career, but if they were careful, no one would know. And once she found the data she wanted, she didn’t have to go any further with it if it would put Emma and the girls in danger.

Priss nudged her arm. She scooped up the cat, staring at Jasper’s empty mug. “What are we going to do, Priss?”

The cat purred.

CHAPTER TWO

The road was where he thought best.

This morning, the road wasn’t enough.

Three miles up the highway from Katherine Townsend’s rental, Jasper pulled his truck off at a turnout and killed the engine.

He let his hands rest on the wheel and stared at the mountains. September had pushed the aspens into their gold, and the wind moving through them sent yellow light flickering across the windshield. He liked that color. It was one of the small, ridiculous reasons he’d let himself stay in Montana past the first year.

He should be running her case through his head right now. The reclassified flag, the two Vance letters, the fact that the second letter was dated the day Vance died. That last detail had pulled him up short at the kitchen table, and he’d worked very hard to keep his face from showing it. He should be running all of that. Instead, he was running her.

Not the archivist. Katherine. The curve of her hips when she’d led him to the kitchen. The way the cuffs of her blazer didn’t quite cover the small bones of her wrists when she reached for her coffee. Hazel eyes that had stayed level on him through every part of the meeting, flecked with the kind of green that only showed up in good light.

Her teeth that had worried at her bottom lip exactly once, when he’d said if I take your case. She’d caught herself and smoothed her face. He’d filed the moment under things he had no business filing.

He drummed his thumbs against the wheel. She was pretty. Not in the way that announced itself across a room—in the way that sneaked up on a man over the course of a twenty-minute conversation and made him want to see her again.

He’d kept his initial attraction to her suppressed until she’d forced him to sign the NDA. Why the hell was it sexy that she hadn’t even blinked at his resistance? He’d seen the eagerness she was trying to hide in her face, in the rigid line of her posture. Hope, contained by force of will.

When she’d opened that black notebook, he’d been dragged in even deeper. It wasn’t the system she’d built—although her system was the kind of work he might have spent a quiet hour appreciating under different circumstances—it was how she read the stories behind the words. The way her finger had paused on her own timeline at the gap she’d flagged, as if she were re-examining the assumption every time she touched it. The way she’d turned the notebook to face him, instead of reading aloud or summarizing—as if he deserved the same access to the source she’d granted herself.

She trusted documents; she didn’t trust people. Yet she’d shown him a piece of the system she trusted most, and somehow he’d come away from her kitchen feeling like she’d handed him something fragile.

That feeling was a problem.

His professional read of the case said walk away. The reclassification of her flag was the kind of move someone made when they had reach and exposure in roughly equal measure. Whoever had buried that flag was senior enough to scrub the routing log without leaving fingerprints, and worried enough to do it fast. That was a person with the means to kill a retired Station Chief and the motive to keep killing if the secret continued to be threatening. If Katherine kept pulling the thread, that person’s next move would be larger than a reassignment. If Jasper helped her pull it, he became a thread of his own.