Free Her Spy to Have (Spy Games Book 1) by Paula Altenburg

fell asleep in his car seat. The girls chattered with each other, occasionally firing a question into the front for the adults to answer.
    After they got home and unloaded the van, he excused himself.
    “I have a few emails to respond to,” he said, and abandoned Isabelle with the children.
    Upstairs, in his suite, he checked to see what her recent online activities had been. She’d read the CSIS Act. How…boring. Bet that put her to sleep. Then he frowned at his computer screen. For a woman who didn’t like to shop, she spent a lot of time in online stores. She’d been on one site at 7:36 a.m. She appeared to appreciate handcrafted gold jewelry, the stuff that was one-of-a-kind, yet he couldn’t recall her ever wearing a single item of it. He hadn’t seen any jewelry when he’d gone through her belongings, either. The belly ring appeared to be all she possessed.
    He dug a little deeper into her browser history, but found nothing unusual. She’d clicked a link for one of the cheaper rings, but it was on backorder and she hadn’t lingered, or tried finding one similar to purchase, instead.
    I’m not much of a shopper.
    He flipped the screen closed and drummed his fingertips on the laptop. Maybe she just liked to look, but he didn’t think so. If there was a hidden message, however, he wasn’t getting it.
    He didn’t get anything about her.
    He heard voices outside and went to the window. Two of Peter’s teenage nephews, who lived on the farm, had come over to use the pool to cool off after their work in the fields. Beth, Chelsea, and Kiefer were begging Isabelle to let them swim too, never mind that they’d spent the better part of their day in the ocean already. Isabelle was laughing at something one of the older boys, Chris, was saying to Beth. The wind caught the skirt of her pretty yellow sundress, lifting it enough to show plenty of tanned thigh, and Garrett watched the boys’ gazes shift to her legs, just for a second.
    It seemed the pool wasn’t the only attraction around here for sweaty, teenage boys.
    Isabelle left Chris and his brother Max in charge of their younger cousins while she walked toward the house, no doubt to get towels.
    Garrett turned away from the window. While he knew Chris and Max well, and they were really nice guys, they weren’t little children. At seventeen, Chris was already taller than Garrett. He should probably go down and make sure she wasn’t uncomfortable having them here.
    The pain in his leg tweaked as he headed for the door of his suite, reminding him of how her fingers had felt on his skin as she’d worked the muscle. The memory of the way she’d tasted as he’d kissed her, pressed against the wall in this very hallway, came back all on its own. He paused at the head of the stairs. Maybe he had been the cause of her preoccupation today after all, a possibility that raised an unpalatable question: How far was he willing to go to get information from her?
    Touching her—kissing her—weren’t part of the job. Those were things he’d done on his own, for pleasure, because he’d wanted to. Isabelle, on the other hand, wasn’t in the best position to be able to tell him she’d rather he didn’t. Her last employers had let her go without pay for this very reason. She had no reason to think that wouldn’t happen to her again.
    Somewhere below, he heard a door close. She’d likely gotten whatever she’d come for and gone back outside. He changed his mind about joining her at the pool. He hadn’t been planning to go outside for her peace of mind, but for his. If she could handle Khao San Road late at night, she could manage the harmless attentions of two teenage boys.
    Later on, when they both had a few free minutes, he’d talk to her alone, only this time, he’d come on less strong. He’d make arrangements for them to go running together again, and for giving her driving lessons. He’d ignore all that smooth skin. Those wide eyes. The full lips. He’d work