Garrett’s flirtatious smile and gave him one of my own. Of course, the guy had to be gorgeous. It seemed I’d been surrounded by good-looking people since I’d been ushered up to the inner sanctum of Z Corps.
“Have dinner with me?” Garrett blurted.
What the what?
My eyes flared at his invitation but before I could figure out a way to decline the offer a stack of papers slammed down on Garrett’s desk and my insides froze.
“Owen asked me to drop these off,” Gabe seethed.
Yes, seethed. His tone was lethal and there was no missing it.
“Thanks.” Garrett’s voice was smooth, unruffled, and completely calm when he went on. “Has Myles checked in?”
“Yeah, they’re still Richmond. No sign of Delilah Watts,” Gabe returned his voice to tight and gruff.
For a man who wanted nothing to do with me, he sure sounded mad that he’d walked in on Garrett asking me to dinner.
Call me crazy, but Gabe glaring at me made me want to smile. At least he was paying attention to me. Especially since he’d practically dumped me in Garrett’s office as soon as we got to Z Corps, and the one time since then when I saw him in the breakroom he’d fled like I had a nasty case of genital warts and he was afraid they’d magically jump from my vagina and infect his penis. Okay, so perhaps I was exaggerating about the warts but he certainly was avoiding me like I had the flu.
“She’s smarter than I am,” I complained.
Gabe’s piercing stare felt like a steel blade to my chest and I no longer felt like smiling. He was really pissed. And if I didn’t know any better I’d say there was some hurt mixed in there with all his irritation.
“Why do you say that?” Garrett asked.
“She hasn’t used her credit cards, her phone, hasn’t traveled by plane, train, or bus. You haven’t found her on traffic cameras. She hasn’t been home. She’s not staying with friends. And she hasn’t gone to her parents’ house. To me that says smart. She probably had one of those go-bags Gabe was telling me about packed and full of cash.”
“She could be dead,” Gabe added.
That would be a problem. We needed Delilah Watts alive. She had the answers we needed. And besides, since I’d calmed down and looked through clear eyes at the emails she’d sent me, what I’d taken as threats now made me wonder if she was trying to help me.
Her messages consisted of “they’ll find you” and “you need to watch your back.” One even said, “the deeper you go down the rabbit hole the more danger you’ll find.” All of the emails had pictures attached. It was the pictures that had scared me. All three women in the images had suffered greatly. Kalee had been presumed dead. Anaya had almost been killed by rebels in the village. And Piper had narrowly escaped the attack on the orphanage.
Delilah might have been warning me to be careful.
But why? And where did she get the pictures?
“I wonder who took the pictures,” I mumbled.
Now my mind raced with possibilities. Did Abrams send someone to Timor-Leste to scout the land? Did the rebels have cameras? That would be weird, right? A rebel walking around taking pictures. Abrams made more sense. Or maybe the prime minister. He wanted to lease the land. No, the president sending someone to take pictures of the village and the Peace Corps volunteers smiling and working together would be more like it. The president could present the pictures as a reason not to lease the land.
The village wasn’t thriving per se but the volunteers were making a difference. And the countryside orphanage was a thousand times better than the ones in the city that were full of corruption.
“What?”
“I’m making this more difficult than it needs to be,” I told him.
“What are you making more difficult?”
“All of it. I’m overthinking the situation and looking for a scandal. Abrams wanted to lease the land. When there was pushback from the president of Timor-Leste, Abrams paid off the prime minister. The prime minister paid the rebels to destroy the village. That was what was holding up the negotiations. The president didn’t want to displace the locals. Kalee, Piper, and Anaya got caught in the crossfire. Simple as that. I keep looking for some crazy conspiracy but there isn’t one. I bet Delilah found something on the Abrams servers and when she saw me poking around a couple of hundred times she thought she’d