Which might be later rather than sooner, he acknowledged, because the FBI had run the license plate on the truck the man had used...and it had turned out to belong to a Honda minivan in Maryland and not a Chevy truck in DC. The plates had been stolen the day before, while the minivan was parked outside a grocery store. And there was no camera covering the parking lot...only one on the store entrance and several inside. So Shane wasn’t holding out hope the man would be spotted on surveillance footage.
If the FBI couldn’t—or wouldn’t—keep the protection on Carly indefinitely, he’d have to find another way to ensure her safety.
When Carly finally spoke, though, it wasn’t what Shane had expected. “How did they know the bombs had been planted?” she asked as if it had just occurred to her.
Shane knew, but he wasn’t going to say. Not because she was a reporter and he didn’t trust her, but because he’d called in a huge favor from someone who was technically AWOL—if that terminology was used outside the military. There was no way he was chancing that getting out and negatively affecting the man’s career. So he temporized. “Someone must have been watching our houses. After the incident with my car the other night...”
“You need an affidavit for a search warrant...except in very circumscribed circumstances,” Carly insisted. “So how did they know about the bombs?”
“Yeah, well... I’m not going to complain. Are you?”
“It’s the principle of the thing,” she argued. “I totally get that in this case we got lucky, but Big Brother isn’t supposed to be spying on people who haven’t done anything, and—”
He kissed her to distract her. Okay, not just to distract her, although that was part of it. He kissed her because it still terrified him how close he’d come to losing her. If that bomb in her town house had exploded while she’d been inside...he couldn’t even bear thinking about it.
Shane deepened the kiss when Carly kissed him back, and he slid his hands down, over her hips, to pull her body flush with his. When he finally let her go, his heart was pounding and he was hard as a rock. Her breathing was as ragged as his was, and that pleased him to no end. He didn’t want to be the only one vulnerable here.
But then Carly drew away from him and said, “We have to talk about something.”
He desperately wanted to make love to her and she wanted to talk? Stand down, he ordered his body. The lady has something to say before you see action. “Okay.”
She jumped to her feet suddenly and walked away, pacing nervously. And Shane knew whatever it was she planned to tell him was a hell of a lot more serious than he’d first thought.
“We have to keep a certain...distance,” she said finally.
“Distance?” The word didn’t compute. Not where he and Carly were concerned. “How distant can we be if we share the same bed?”
“I don’t mean sexually. I mean...emotionally.”
He didn’t know where she was going with this, but he already knew it was a load of crap. She’d run to him this evening. She’d been as terrified for him as he’d been terrified for her. That didn’t equate to emotional distance. But all he said was “Uh-huh.” As if he was following her logic.
“We... I...can’t... That is, I was engaged years ago. Did you know that?”
He’d known...but only because of Dee-Dee’s in-depth report. The one he’d asked her to compile the day he met Carly. That was another thing he wasn’t about to reveal, but he wouldn’t lie to her. “I’d heard.”
“If you heard, then you probably know Jack...died,” she added in a rush. “And it was my fault.”
What the hell? That was all he could think of in that instant. Because he knew the story. It had all played out on the six o’clock news, had been plastered across the bottom half of the front page of The Washington Post. Jack Tremaine, rising star in DC politics, and his fiancée, Carly Edwards, a war correspondent for a prominent cable news network, had been in a horrific car accident involving a drunk driver, an icy road and a faulty airbag.
But Carly hadn’t been driving. And Jack Tremaine hadn’t died in the crash, anyway, so... “How was it your fault?”