Charmed: A Masters and Mercenar - Lexi Blake Page 0,77
middle.
“Hey, Nina, give me a second. I’ve got the cab coming through for Jordy. I need to make sure they don’t leave too quickly. Sandra is almost to Drake.”
“I’m good here,” she replied.
She took a deep breath and waited. The lifts had been slow earlier in the day. Even if Hutch missed Deanna getting out of the lift in real time, there were enough cameras covering the halls that he would be able to tell where she was going.
It was going to be all right. If Deanna disappeared into a room, they would stake the room out.
She would because Sandra and Drake would be following their other suspect. Did she want to split them up like this? Hutch would come running if she needed him to, but it could take him valuable minutes. Hutch seemed to think the spy wasn’t on property, but there were any number of ways for a smart operative to sneak in.
She had to make sure they couldn’t sneak out again.
She waited, every muscle in her body tense.
Maybe she was getting too old for this because a nice desk job seemed perfect right now. No one would wake her up in the middle of the night and drag her out of a warm bed so she could stand in a creepy stairwell waiting to see if someone would start shooting at her.
What was she going to do about JT? Was she really going to walk away? She couldn’t stay, and she wasn’t sure some weird long-distance thing had any shot of working.
What was taking Hutch so long?
“Nina, we have a big problem. Two, actually. Someone’s piggybacking my feed from the outside. It’s a pro because I should have caught it hours ago. That’s how good this job was. I wouldn’t have caught it if I hadn’t needed the computer to deal with the gate. Someone else is watching.” Hutch sounded breathless.
Fuck. It had to be the spy. “You said we had two problems.”
“Deanna went to the fourth floor. She’s got JT.”
Nina’s heart threatened to stop and she began to run.
* * * *
JT felt the moment Nina left the bed, but he remained perfectly still, determined to not blow this again. He knew there was only one reason she would leave the room and that was to work. Her cell had buzzed. Someone on her team wanted to talk.
She didn’t need him trying to play the white knight. She was a professional and he would let her do the job.
Still, as he heard the door close his stomach was in knots. He slid out of bed and jumped into the shower. He wouldn’t sleep until she came back.
Helpless. He felt completely helpless, but it was also the first time he’d had to lie here and pretend like she wasn’t going to do something dangerous. Maybe he was looking at this the wrong way. So much of life was about adjustment, and he hadn’t had time to adapt. He just had to get through about a hundred nights of praying no one shot the woman he loved and then he would be used to it.
He turned off the shower and grabbed a towel. He would never get used to it, but maybe he would be better about hiding how worried he was. He would find a way to put her at ease.
For now, he would make a pot of coffee and sit up waiting for her.
She might be mad, but he wasn’t going back to bed. They would have to find a compromise because he couldn’t let her go.
He pulled on a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt and thought seriously about going down to the gym. He had a key. Maybe he could run his worry off.
But he quickly discarded the idea because she would want to talk to him if something had gone down tonight. He was the client in this case, and he might have decisions to make.
About people he’d known for years. He made his way to the coffeemaker and started a pot. It was still nauseating to think someone so high up in his organization could betray the company like this.
Deanna would be the worst. They weren’t friends. They didn’t hang out, but he had relied on her for years. He’d made sure she was the highest paid assistant in the business.
Although he couldn’t help but think about what she’d said when he’d hired her.
I’m not going to be an assistant forever, Mr. Malone. You will promote me and I’ll be running