Free Undercover Lover by Tibby Armstrong

remember, he wasn’t inclined to start now. The explosion and senseless loss of life. His teammates. His wife.
    His eyes flew open. “The White Tiger is dead. I saw to that myself.” The words were out before he could think to take them back.
    “What?” Simon bolted upright from his slouch and whipped his glasses from where they’d perched on the end of his nose. “I knew you’d worked the case, but are you telling me Dublin was you and your boys?”
    Günter stared at him steadily by way of an answer. He shouldn’t have even revealed as much as he had.
    “Shit.” Simon raked his fingers through his hair, making it stand on end like red shag. “Shit. You fucked up Dublin?”
    “Thanks. Thanks a lot,” Günter answered, despite the top-secret security clearance requirement.
    “You can’t tell me what happened?”
    Günter rolled and pulled the blanket up and over his back. “Good night, Simon.”
    “You’re sure the White Tiger is dead?”
    “Yes,” he said into his pillow.
    “So what’re we dealing with?” Simon mumbled to himself, fingers flying over his keyboard with a telltale clickety-click . It’d probably take him twenty minutes tops to crack the files he needed to get the answers he sought.
    He looked over his shoulder and Simon paused to meet his eyes.
    “Revenge,” Günter replied, the single word tasting like acid on his tongue. “We’re dealing with revenge.”
    * * * * *
     
    Even in his dreams he couldn’t get away from Jenny or that night he’d held her close…
     
    Günter wrinkled his nose at the stink of cigarette smoke and stale alcohol. Wearing a baseball cap and a golf shirt half tucked into his jeans under his windbreaker, he almost blended in with the other jocks and jerks vying for position in the college dive bar.
    He pried his foot free from a sticky spot on the worn parquet floor and pressed his way through the crowd in an attempt to get closer to his charge. She’d escaped his sight line when she moved to the other side of a support pole five minutes ago. When she didn’t emerge onto the dance floor he assumed she leaned against the pole, perhaps stopped to chat up some admirer.
    The idea of her flirting over the rim of her red plastic beer cup at any of these blokes had him shouldering the assembled throng out of the way. When he reached her side, she looked up at him, doe eyes just this side of tipsy, and smiled.
    His heart stopped. Whether because she looked at him directly for the first time in the three years he’d been tailing her for Tallis, or because he realized his mistake too late—never let the principal remember your face—he couldn’t say.
    “Hi,” she said when he stared down at her like an idiot.
    He cleared his throat. “Hi.”
    “Want a drink?” She raised her voice over the din and waggled her mostly empty cup at him.
    Frantic to make a quick getaway before his features imprinted on her inebriated brain, he shot back a brusque, “No, thanks.”
    Her face fell and she looked away. “’Kay.”
    “Sorry. I just…” Just what? He wasn’t prepared to talk to her for God’s sake. What was he supposed to say?
    “Hey, you’re in my accounting class.” A sandy-haired kid in a letterman’s jacket sidled up to her. Forearm braced possessively above her head he leaned in and whispered something in her ear.
    Günter stepped back farther. He’d kick some scrawny kid off a barstool and watch her from the crowd. Make sure she didn’t get into any trouble. Gather some innocuous tidbits about her life for Tallis. That’s all the job required. Nothing more. Nothing less. Unless of course she got into trouble.
    It didn’t happen too often, but every once in a while Jenny behaved in ways that confounded him. Perhaps it was just being a college student, but the girl wasn’t entirely predictable. For instance, in the three years she’d been in college he’d never seen her drink as much as she had tonight.
    He saw the coed eye her empty cup and