Before she could recall who’d been around that might have done so, she worried that whoever was listening might think they were on to him. She said in a sultry voice, “Was it as good for you as it was for me?”
Finn turned to look at her, his expression briefly astonished until she pointed at the bug. He grinned. “You have to ask?”
Her face flooded with heat that spread throughout her body. He was just too damn good at playing the seducer’s role and making it sound genuine. She wondered how many women he had seduced in the name of keeping the nation secure. She quickly scolded herself for even going there.
He sat for some time, staring at the cars parked in the lot of the dealership. She wondered what he was waiting for, but she didn’t dare ask because of the bug sitting on the console between them.
After what seemed an eternity, he finally grabbed the handle and opened his door. “Stay here.”
Okay so she wasn’t Miss Super Spy. She didn’t have the training for covert military operations, or civilian ones either, and she didn’t have a top-secret or even run-of-the-mill secret security clearance, but he could at least take her with him or tell her what he was doing. She glanced down at the bug. She kept feeling like it was a minicamera and that whoever had stuck it in her pocket was watching her every move.
She thought back to Imposter Joe and tried to remember when he had been close enough to slip the listening device into her pocket. Master thieves could do things like that, but they often used a distraction.
And then she had it. When Finn had exited the bathroom towel-drying his head, the rest of him dripping wet and na**d, that had distracted her. Imposter Joe had slipped closer to her, one hand on the rifle, the other briefly brushing her backside as if reassuring her he’d take care of her.
He was taking care of her all right. The bastard.
Finn caught her eye as he stalked across the parking lot, waved at her or maybe at his Hummer, and then brought out a checkbook.
She frowned. What was he up to?
He came back to the vehicle, opened her door for her, and said, “Come on.”
When she hesitated, he hauled her out of the car, shut the door, and whispered into her ear, “We’ve got some new wheels.”
“What?” She felt a chill cascade down her spine. Finn must know they were being followed.
He escorted her inside the dealership where his Hummer had been taken inside, she assumed for an inspection to give him a trade-in price.
“What? Why are you getting another car?”
“I like new cars.” He held her hand as if they were married or seriously engaged and pulled her into the finance office where they took seats in front of a desk. An hour later, after Finn paid for the vehicle and transferred his car insurance to the new one, they were back on the road.
“I don’t understand. The assassin knew what you were driving, right?”
“Yes.”
She stared out the window of the new Hummer as he sped further south. “But you got the same kind of vehicle. Same color and everything.”
“It doesn’t have any of the bugs. The other could very well have had a tracking device in a couple of hidden locations and a couple of listening bugs that would take too damned long to find. Plus the one he stuck in your pocket is now on the visor. This one is bug- and tracker-free.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You might have let on. I wanted him to think we didn’t know he had planted the devices on the Hummer. Besides, it was time I upgraded my vehicle.”
“You could have told me. I can act, you know. I thought I’d put on a pretty good show already.” She gave him an irritated look. She might not be one of them, a SEAL, but she could play games like these.
He wore a silly smirk. “Your acting is top-notch. In fact, I’d say it felt so real that it would have taken a miracle for anyone to know the difference.”
She stared at him for a minute and then sat back in her fresh leather seat. That’s why he had waited so long to leave the car after their “show.” He probably could hardly walk until the blood that had all run south had finally returned to his brain.
“Why didn’t you just remove the bugs?” she asked.
“He could’ve spotted me doing it. While they have my old Hummer inside the building, the man following us will think we had to have it repaired. At least that’s a possibility. He would have been hanging back, not wanting to get too close. He’d think he could track us without any difficulty. And he did for nearly a half hour. Most likely, he’ll suspect that if we got another car, it wouldn’t look anything like the one I already had.”
“You still could have told me. And you should have let me drive so you could get something to eat.”
“We’ll stop before long.”
“But I thought you planned to drive all night.”
“That’s what I wanted our listener to think. We’ll spend a few days at a furnished, unoccupied home just up the road. It has a garage and is off the main road. Hopefully, one of my friends had time to stock the refrigerator.”
She could just see them getting arrested. “So now we’re going to be house-sitting illegally?”
“I called in some favors once I arrived in this part of the country and before you came home. The house is ours for as long as we need it.” He drove for another twenty minutes and then slowed down as they came upon a group of homes overlooking the ocean. Minutes later, he was driving into a walled-in estate with a circular drive, although it had no security gates.
Knowing how expensive homes on the coast were, and as large and new as this one looked, she figured it had to have cost a fortune. Why would anyone allow perfect strangers to stay here? “Whose place is this?”
“You don’t need to know.” He drove into the driveway of the whitewashed Cape Cod house. What shocked her next was that he pulled a garage door opener out of his pocket and punched the button. The garage door opened and he drove inside, then quickly closed the door again.
“I made arrangements to use it when I located Hunter and thought I was rescuing the two of you. It’s a safe house of sorts. While no one knows where we are, it’s safe.”
“What if the guys were part of your secret society? Wouldn’t they know where your safe houses are?” She shoved the car door open.
“No. This place isn’t on the list of safe houses. It’s strictly a friend of a friend of a friend’s.”
She eyed the oversized two-car garage: neat and orderly, but obviously in use as evidenced by the tools hanging on a wall, all neatly organized on pegboard. She was certain the owners would be unhappy if she and Finn messed the place up. On the other hand, they probably had maid service and gardeners, if they could afford a place this fancy on the coast.
“Now that we found the bug, do you think Imposter Joe was the assassin?” she asked, as she followed Finn across the garage, carrying her bag while he carried his duffel bag and her rifle.
“No.”
She joined him at the door leading out of the garage to what she assumed was the house. “How can you be so sure?”
“He wanted you.”
Her lips parted, and then she laughed. “Right.”
“Yeah, he did.” Finn sounded a little more disgruntled than she would expect him to be. “If he’d been a real assassin, he would have attempted to kill the both of us. No. This guy was someone else. As soon as I can get one of our men to check out the other Joe, we’ll try to uncover just who this other guy really was.” He opened the door, which revealed a sparkling tiled kitchen.
Everything was sunny yellow, from the floor tiles to the walls. The table and cabinets were all in a honey-oak wood, and the countertop had gold and yellow streaks running through the faux marble. A bay window offered a panoramic view of the ocean, and she paused to take a look at the pines rising far above the house from way down below and the frothy waves hitting the sandy beach and striking boulders scattered along the shore. Her scenic view was different—the beach smaller, the trees framing the house even more, which she preferred because it gave more of a woodsy feel—but she liked the bay window.
“He did lie about who he was. Then the other Joe ended up dead. I just don’t see how the imposter could have been the good guy,” she continued, wanting to explore the beach, to look for seashells, to feel the sand between her toes.
She watched with fascination the way the water swirled in little eddies at the edge, pulling the sand out and tossing it back inland again, exposing precious seashell treasures in its wake.
Finn glanced over his shoulder at her. “What I want to know is how he got the bug into your pants without you knowing about it.”
She felt her face heat up all over again. “I was distracted.”
“Oh?”
She couldn’t believe Finn didn’t realize that he had been the perfect distraction.
“Yeah. Some na**d guy had just taken a shower in my bathroom. And Imposter Joe, I believed, was my protection. He sort of swept his hand over my back pocket, and I thought it was a gesture aimed at reassuring me.”
Finn snorted. “The guy palmed your butt, and you don’t think he’s interested in you?”
“Right! He stuffs a bug in my pocket, and that shows how much he’s intrigued with me?”
“If he didn’t care for you, or if this was strictly a job, you would never have felt his hand on your ass.”
She took a deep breath, trying to settle the way her stomach had tightened over Finn’s irritation with her and what Imposter Joe had done. She would have argued with Finn further, but she suspected he would probably know better about matters like that. And that made her feel even more uncomfortable about Imposter Joe.
She glanced at the sunny living room off the kitchen, with its large picture windows letting in light and the walls covered in paintings of sunny daffodils, fields of sunflowers, drifts of daylilies, and the rising sun. The tile floor was yellow, too, continuing the yellow theme from the kitchen and dining area. She wondered if the bedrooms were all yellow also.