Free Risk of Exposure (Alpha Ops Book 6) by Emmy Curtis

“Doubtful. That’s my default.”
    “How is it possible that you have friends?” she said, needing a drink.
    “I try not to. Too complicated,” he murmured.
    She got some shot glasses and grabbed her bottle of contraband Grey Goose. She shoved the glass at him, making him turn around. “You know, you’d have to be fairly simpleminded to think that having friends was complicated. What else do you find complicated? Uno? Tic-tac-toe?”
    “I don’t know what either of those things are,” he said, taking the shot glass. “You don’t have anything other than vodka?”
    “Sure. Maybe Malibu would be more your thing?” she said, pouring a double shot for herself.
    Malone gave her a pissed stare and held his glass out to be filled. She did.
    Abby wasn’t sure why she kept sniping at him, except it was fun and exercised a part of her brain that had been dormant for six months. It was difficult to banter with people when you didn’t speak their language fluently.
    But she was also relieved he hadn’t left. She didn’t need his help, but she wanted it. He was obviously skilled; otherwise her father wouldn’t have employed him or put him within a mile of his daughter.
    She had no satellite communications and no secure way of contacting anyone without the call being tracked and traced. She’d already risked too much by calling Randall from her burner phone, which she’d then destroyed and thrown into the Dumpster next to the guys who had attacked her. Now she had no means of communicating with anyone until the power came back on. She felt impotent. Damn the snow. Damn those guys. She sat on the sofa, putting the vodka bottle on the coffee table.
    “Who were they?” Malone asked, sitting beside her, yet a decent distance away. He tipped more vodka into his glass and leaned back.
    “Who?”
    “They men who attacked you.”
    “Oh, them. I don’t know. I’ve never seen them before. Probably muggers.” She was proud that she’d neutralized them so easily. “They definitely weren’t professionals. More like opportunists. Snow, no one on the streets, and then they happen across a lone woman with her hands full and her purse easily accessible.” She shrugged and took another sip from her glass.
    “Then how do you know Randall?” he asked.
    She cocked her head. “Who?” She was just buying time here, and frankly she wasn’t sure why. He already knew too much to let him walk off.
    He looked meaningfully at her but said nothing.
    Oh hell. “My analyst gave me his contact number in case of emergencies. I didn’t want them to regain consciousness and then come find me. I couldn’t call the police because how would I explain? That I took karate as a kid?” She downed the rest of the vodka and leaned forward to pour more, holding it for him to offer his glass. “So are you going to stick around for a bit? Maybe help stop the next all-out ground war?”

CHAPTER NINE
    S he didn’t realize that she’d killed one of the men. There was a part of him that knew he should tell her—to prepare her should the authorities get involved. But another, bigger, part wanted to keep that knowledge from her.
    He didn’t know her. Maybe she’d killed many people, but he didn’t think so. Behind her brassy ballsiness lay an operative who, he thought, might not be fine with the fact that she’d killed someone. There was no harm in not telling her for now.
    “Well, when you put it like that,” he said, “I guess it would be rude not to.”
    “We need to get out to the site as soon as possible,” she said, looking anxiously out the window.
    “Not while it’s snowing. It’s too unpredictable. I’ve known fully trained”—he wanted to say SAS operatives, but he wasn’t going to volunteer his résumé unless she asked specifically—“men get disoriented and severely frostbitten in snowstorms. The rule is, you move when it stops.”
    “As soon as it stops,” she said. “It’s still early. Around seven?” Her