He quickly slid the balcony door closed and joined Kyle, who was leaning against the balcony railing.
“Hey, I have good news and bad news.” Hutch set the bottle on the table.
“Oh, I always want the bad news first.” Kyle stared down at the street before.
It did not surprise Hutch in the least that Kyle was a bad-news-first kind of guy. “Cara apparently hates the two of us, me in particular.”
“That’s not bad news.”
Hutch had more. “And our downstairs detective is probably working undercover with the feds.”
That got Kyle to turn around. “Are you serious? Shouldn’t that have been the lead, man? You’ve had hours to tell me that and you spent it cooking and seducing a woman you’ve already been to bed with?”
Well, he had to seduce her if he wanted to get back into bed with her. There was a logical reason he hadn’t mentioned what Tag had uncovered to Noelle. “Taylor’s investigating someone, and I can’t be sure it’s not Noelle.”
Kyle’s arms crossed his chest. “If that woman is…” He sighed and shook his head. “No. I’m not going to say that. She could be bad. Anyone can be. She could simply be excellent at covering and a good actress. I’m impressed with you, Hutch. I would have thought you would be that guy who told her because you have feelings for her. I didn’t suspect you would know how to play the game so well.”
Oh, he knew how to play the game, and he knew when someone had no idea any games were being played at all. “Noelle is innocent. I didn’t tell her because I don’t want her to worry about some federal investigation that might or might not be real. Now don’t you want the good news?”
Kyle huffed, a predatory sound. “The Scotch, I assume.”
Hutch poured out two fingers each. He’d started as a beer guy, but his appreciation for a 12-year single malt, as many things in his life, had been taught to him by Big Tag. He’d choked it down the first time and had only tried it again because Tag had seemed so pleased to share it with him.
He was right back to Ian being the father he’d never had. Now he had to navigate this tricky situation for the man. He had to start to get a real handle on who Kyle Hawthorne was.
“Of course.” Hutch passed him a glass. “This is an excellent Scotch.”
Kyle took a long swig. “Yeah, I hear that from my stepdad a lot. He’s all about the Scotch. I can’t tell the difference between Scotch and whiskey. Or bourbon, for that matter. It’s all one long burn to my belly. So, you are a naïve idiot when it comes to women. Crazy doctors aside, of course.”
Most of the military guys saw him that way. He was the funny one, the one who looked younger than he really was, the computer geek. “I’m not naïve. What I am is pretty damn good at figuring out who will hurt me and who won’t. I learned that while I lived on the streets, and then I learned it in prison. I learned it when I was on a CIA team.”
“Then you should know that you can’t be sure of anyone.”
“Of course I can. You’re sure about your family, right? No one could ever say anything to you that would make you doubt your mom?”
Kyle sank down to the sofa. “Of course not, but they’re my family. I’ve known them all my life. This isn’t the same thing at all. My mother and my brother are above any suspicion.”
Hutch noted that he’d left an important person off that list. “You don’t trust your stepfather?”
Kyle shook his head. “Not true. I trust him in a lot of ways. I trust him with my mother, with my brother. With my life. But Sean’s a hard guy still in a lot of ways. I don’t think he trusts me entirely, and that means I can’t totally trust him.”
“Why do you think he doesn’t trust you?”
“That’s a longer story than I’m willing to get into with you because despite your penchant to go deep as fast as you can possibly go, I don’t swim that way. I don’t know you, Hutch.”
He found it interesting what Kyle wasn’t saying. He trusted Sean with everything but his secrets. He wanted to press but he was good at this, was good at sensing when to take a step back. This was as far as Kyle was willing