Free An Affair of Vengeance by Jamie Michele Page B

into a door and entered.
    The small, tidy room buzzed with electrical equipment. A bespectacled little man seated behind a desk looked up as McCrea entered.
    “It’s about time,” said the man.
    “Work is harder when you actually have to do it, Lamb,” McCrea snarled as he pulled out a chair and sat down, pressing his fingers to his temples.
    “Tough day at the office?”
    “Tougher than yours. Do you have information on the waitress?”
    Lamb clucked. “I’ve never heard you so interested in a woman before!”
    “She followed me from the hotel. She was all over the Ménellier meet.”
    “Really?” Lamb frowned, pushed his eyeglasses up on his nose, and shuffled through the papers on his desk. “She’s… she’s nobody, just another waitress from California, been here a few years. Lives in the Noailles quarter above a Tunisian takeaway, very few known acquaintances. She’s been seen with Serge Penard several times—it seems she’s quite chummy with some of the Marseille crooks—but other than that, she’s nobody.”
    “She’s hounding known criminals around town. She’s hounding
me
. She’s somebody. She planted some kind of wired toothpick on me last night. I tossed it into a stairwell, easily recovered.Could be nothing. Could be CIA issue. See if they have anyone working Penard.”
    “Of course they have agents in Marseille, but even if we ask, they won’t tell us a bloody thing. You know that. Friendly nations or not, we don’t share intel.” Lamb’s voice was soothing. “But more importantly, we can’t tell
them
a bloody thing.”
    McCrea cursed and leaned back, crossing his fingers behind his head as he stared at the brown-stained ceiling. A desk fan waved a cooling breeze across his chest.
    His old friend was right. He usually was. Even if the waitress was a foreign intelligence officer, and even if her agency would admit to it, McCrea couldn’t risk letting another group get a whiff of his mission, especially not now that he was so close to implicating Lukas Kral.
    “I’m not going to sit around while she runs roughshod through my op,” he said.
    “Fine, fine. I’ll check with the Yanks. I doubt they’ll give us a peep back. But in the meantime, you can’t hurt her, you know. If she is foreign intelligence, the Home Office would throw a fit if you tossed her off a roof.”
    “I’m meeting her for drinks.”
    Lamb’s eyes narrowed. “Keep your friends close, and your enemies…?”
    “In your crosshairs.”

    Hidden from public view and practically bug-proof, the old storehouse was normally an ideal meeting spot, but today its dark, oppressive clamminess was too stark a contrast to the breezy summer day outside. Evangeline sat in the empty room on a rickety metal folding chair. Every shifting of her body was accompanied by a screech several decibels too loud for the small gray chamber.
    The adrenaline rush of the morning’s chase had emptied from her system, leaving nothing but a strange, jittery fatigue. She stared at the walls. She still didn’t understand why McCrea had let her leave on her own accord. He hadn’t seemed to believe her, and yet he was content to let her go free.
    Why?
    He was undoubtedly a monster, a terrorist of the worst sort, a man buying an arsenal of missiles that could be used to take down commercial airplanes.
    In short, he was a bad, bad dude.
    And yet Evangeline couldn’t forget the comforting smell of his shirt. When he’d cornered her in the market, she’d expected to feel a sharp knife or the cold muzzle of a gun poking into her back, not the warmth of his breath on her neck.
    Her body hummed at the memory.
    Stop it
.
    She ought to smack herself for getting caught up in the masculine physicality of his presence. He’d turned the tables, morphed her from hunter to hunted. What had he called her? A little mouse? It was an accurate enough assessment. And he was an amber-eyed cat, watchful and deadly, playing with his prey. After all, he