Evidence of Passion (Shadow Agents 7)

While I was stuck in the hospital. Now she knew exactly why he hadn’t stayed with her at the hospital. He’d been busy working to get her sent down to Atlanta.

The door opened with a squeak. Rachel was in Dylan’s chair. She pushed with her feet, making the chair roll so that she faced the door. And him.

I gave myself to you, Dylan. Why did you do this to me? Why?

He stared at her a moment. Then he stepped fully into the small office and shut the door behind him. “I guess you’ll be heading out soon. Your flight—”

“Is tomorrow,” Rachel managed to say in an almost normal voice. “Yes, that’s what I’ve been told.” She would not lose control in front of him. But she would get to the bottom of the mystery that was Dylan. Something that Mercer said kept nagging at her. “Thanks to you, of course.”

He crossed his arms over his chest. “EOD agents get transferred to new assignments all the time. It’s part of life here, you know that.”

Seriously? He was trying to play that card?

They were alone. No eyes on them. No ears. So she said exactly what she was thinking. “We had sex, Dylan. It was supposed to mean something.” It had sure meant something to her.

He glanced away from her. “There’s us, Rachel, and then there’s the EOD. The missions we have to take... We both knew that when we crossed that particular line—”

“The line that made us lovers?”

“We wouldn’t be able to stay in the field together.”

Her breath caught. “You...told Mercer?”

“No.”

That was something.

“But the transfer was going to happen, no matter what.”

She wanted to shake him. This wasn’t the Dylan she knew. Rachel jumped to her feet. “Stop it!”

He blinked at her.

“What is going on with you? I thought... We work together, Dylan. You and I. There’s no one closer to me than you. There’s no one I trust like I do you.” But that trust was shaking. He’d requested she be sent away, even knowing how important this particular case was to her.

He didn’t respond. Damn him.

“Why are you on this case?” And it was back again, the twisting suspicion that Mercer had planted with his words.

He’s been after Jack since long before you even joined the EOD. He’ll do what is necessary to bring the killer in, you can count on that.

“I’m after him because the EOD wants the threat Jack poses to be eliminated.”

That answer sounded rehearsed. Like he was just spewing some line he’d been taught before. “When I first met you..

.you were hunting Jack then.”

His gaze slid back to hers.

She struggled to put the pieces of this puzzle together. She’d read all of the case files on Jack and she knew... “You’d been hunting him for six months before that. I remember reading it in the reports.”

He nodded. “So you know that I won’t stop until I—”

“Why were you the agent in charge back then? How’d you get landed with Jack’s case?”

He pushed back his shoulders. “Mercer assigned me to the case.”

Rachel had worked intimately with Dylan on so many cases, and because of that she knew him very well. She also knew all of his “tells”—the signs that he gave when he twisted the truth. Or when he just flat-out lied.