LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter Five

      Jade headed out the door without a backwards glance. The apartment door banged behind her. She never checked if it was locked or not. It didn’t matter. She wouldn’t be back.

      Irrelevant.

      They needed to get moving. She had to brief Zafir. They needed to get wheels on the road and find Stanley.

      As she stepped back into the parking lot ten minutes later, Zafir pulled up in an arctic-blue Pathfinder. Top of the line. She wouldn’t have expected less. The metallic paint gleamed in the dull light. She’d had to wait for him, but she hadn’t wasted any of that time. She’d gathered what evidence she could in the ten minutes it took Zafir to get here.

      What she knew was that Stanley had been in a hurry. The evidence of that was a cover for one of his precious camera lenses, lying where the van had been parked. He was frightened, panicked even, but considering what had happened, she couldn’t fault him. She ran the lens cover between her fingers.

      Zafir stepped out.

      “Stanley’s gone,” Jade said grimly.

      He closed the driver’s door. His gaze never left her face, and his eyes told her what he didn’t. That he was waiting for her to fill him in.

      “He took off while I was securing the balcony. No more than fifteen minutes ago.” There was no sugarcoating the information. There was just getting it out and getting moving. “Took everything but his camera lens with him.” She held it up with a look of irony. “He’ll miss that.” She stuffed it into her pocket.

      “I don’t believe this,” Zafir said. A dark brow arched and his chiseled lips were flat, disapproving, as if this had all been her fault. “Foul play?”

      “No. At least, I don’t think so.”

      Silence beat between them, and with it, so many implications. Had she watched him closer, would this still have happened? Had she kept the keys for the van out of his reach, had she...

      She met Zafir’s troubled gaze. “There was no sign of scuffle. In fact, only one set of footsteps in the snow, and those are disappearing fast.” She wiped snowflakes from her brow with the back of an ungloved hand. “Tire tracks indicate he was heading west. They disappeared within fifty feet of his first turn.”

      Jade glanced to the street as if the van would miraculously appear. But there was nothing, no worn white van. If they didn’t find him quickly, it would be too late. She knew that as surely as she knew that she’d had cereal for breakfast. Her stomach grumbled.

      Her body was obviously not on the same page as her head. Now—there was no time for food. They had to get moving.

      “I was on the balcony. He was in the apartment, or so I thought. He took the van while I was securing the area.” She brushed a strand of hair off her face.

      “He couldn’t have gone far. There wasn’t enough time,” Zafir said. There was no inflection in his voice. There was no judgment, either. Somehow that made it all worse.

      “You’re right, and there’s a chance he might return on his own. He’s more than likely only frightened and has taken off to get away. Maybe he’s thinking of taking some photographs. An hour or two in the countryside to calm his nerves.” She shook her head. “Not going to happen,” she said.

      “It already has,” he said, his lips compressed.

      Now she could see the disapproval in his eyes.

      She ignored that. It was true. Stanley had disappeared on her watch. But it was also true that she’d get him back, and then they’d move on to the next step, securing Stanley in another location. “Look, he’s familiar with me. I can take your Pathfinder and retrieve him. You stay here in case he returns.”

      “No.”

      “No?”

      “We’ll go after him. Together.”

      “We?” Dread dropped into the pit of her stomach. That hadn’t been what she planned even when she’d reported the code red. Somehow, she’d thought that she’d continue on in the case. Alone. That she’d keep Zafir informed as it progressed. That he’d assign another agent as backup.

      “There’s no one else available,” he said as if reading her mind. There was a hard inflection in his voice that clearly told her this was nonnegotiable.

      She took a breath. She was on edge, and it wasn’t the situation. Zafir on paper was intimidating enough but in reality, even more so. She’d admired him for too long. Now she was scared that he was the one man who had the ability to pull her off her game. She took a deep breath. There were more important things to think of than her admiration for one of her employers.

      She had to remember who he really was. He was a man like any other despite his legendary status with Nassar. She struggled with that, with staying focused on the job and not on him. But to her he was like no ordinary man. The cases he’d closed amazed her. She’d been in awe of what he had done, what he had faced and how he’d succeeded. She had to bring her adoration down to earth. Working with him had to be like working with any other man. She had no idea how to make that happen.

      She took a breath and felt his dark eyes on her; the passion and intelligence in them was hot and commanding. She turned away. This was no time for such thoughts, and yet she had to allow them before she could discard them.

      She had to remember that he was a womanizer, if office rumors were to be believed. For even now, he was looking at her with more heat than one would look at someone who was only a business partner. Worse, she wasn’t immune.

      Darn him, she thought.

      * * *

      “WHAT’S YOUR TAKE on Stanley?” His eyes drilled into hers and he knew that he probably seemed focused on her response like it was all that he had on his mind. He knew that it was all he should have on his mind. He needed to get his head in the game, for he found everything about Jade to be distracting. Her photograph, as he’d thought earlier, on first meeting her, hadn’t done her justice. A photograph couldn’t reveal biting intelligence or a body that was meant for...

      Outrageous, his internal monitor roared at him. She was a gorgeous woman but more important, she was a business associate. The reminder wasn’t much help.

      His eyes went to her face. That was a safe place to remain except for the fact that her eyes—her eyes were hypnotic, and her lips... She was muddying the waters of his normally clear mind worse than a sandstorm in the Sahara.

      “He didn’t seem to know how to act with a woman. I mean, he acted rather like a starstruck teenage boy rather than the middle-aged man he is. It was rather strange. Manageable, but strange.” She looked at him and then followed everything she had said with a contradiction.

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