Free All Due Respect by Vicki Hinze Page A

Drive and General Mayes Boulevard, he braked at the four-way stop. A blue truck crossed the intersection. His headlights shone against its door.
    The silence in the Lexus was deafening; even the blinker flashing sounded like thunder. This wasn’t the companionable silence he and Julia had enjoyed. This silence was stone-cold, tense, and anything but comfortable.
    Seth punched down on the gas pedal, hooked a left, and fell into line behind the truck. He couldn’t blame her for doubting him. After all, he had trained her to doubt—particularly on security-breach incidents. Julia always had seemed wary of others’ motives, but he couldn’t fault her for that, either. Long before he had joined the Special Forces, wariness had proven its value as an essential survival skill.
    So, she doubted him. He couldn’t condemn her for it, and he hadn’t. Not verbally, anyway. But she sensed it; hence, the silence. He wasn’t being fair.
    Bent on making things right, he passed the credit union and stopped at the traffic light by the service station. He glanced at the dashboard clock, and then over at Julia. Still stiff and wooden. “It’s nearly seven. Do you want to grab some dinner?”
    “I don’t think so. It’s been a long day and my head is killing me.”
    He shouldn’t have asked but, damn it, he wanted the tension between them to end. And he wanted answers. He needed answers. She worried about trusting him, but he worried about trusting her, too. His financial and professional reputations were on the line—even more so now than when he had gone to her for help. “Maybe you’d feel better if you ate.”
    “I’ll pass, Seth.”
    Dead end. He couldn’t force her to tell him anything, and odds were she wouldn’t, but he had to ask. It didn’t take much of a stretch to imagine Julia being radically different from the person she had been three years ago.
    Is she different?
    Torn between wanting to know and fearing what he would discover, Seth accepted that he had no choice but to find out. Because he had met with one other person both before and after the briefing. One other person who had both access and the opportunity to pull the double switch with the badges. One other person he would be a damn fool not to consider a viable suspect, because she had wanted to keep the sensor theft quiet.
    Julia.

Chapter Five
    The migraine won.
    Julia crawled into bed moaning, sank back against the pillow, and draped a cold washcloth over her forehead and eyes. Her stomach rolled, her every pulse beat throbbed with the force of a hammer strike against her temples, at the backs of her eyes. If she moved to pull up the covers or turn off the nightstand’s lamp, she would throw up. And that would trigger an all-night vigil of vomiting and pain. Taking the oral medication Dr. Flynn had prescribed would be an exercise in futility. She had waited too long. Now a muscle in her left arm knotted, raising a lump the size of a lemon, and it throbbed, too.
    You know better than to get stressed. You know better.
    “Oh, shut up.” The headache would run its course, as so many had in the past three years, and the muscle spasms in her arm and shoulder would eventually stop, too. Until then, she was damned to suffer them both. Just one more challenge in a long list of them. Some legacy.
    One breath at a time.
    At least Seth hadn’t pushed her for answers tonight. But he had again assured her that he hadn’t copied the sensor codes and he had confessed that, when in his office, he often kept his badge on his desk. He took it off because, when he worked at the computer, it dug into his arm. And he had wrangled a commitment from her for dinner at An
    tonio’s restaurant tomorrow night after work.
    His questions would come then.
    They were inevitable. She might as well let him ask the damn things, and have it done and over. But, God, she didn’t want him to look at her with pity. Or with morose curiosity. Or without the respect she had always seen