just can’t place where.”
Kat’s cup hesitated halfway to her mouth as she glanced at him. The waitress came back with ketchup and Tabasco. She set the bottles on the table and moved away again.
“Why did you come back to the park?” Kat asked in a quiet voice as she set her cup on the table.
Pete bit the inside of his lip as he mulled over her question. He’d been asking himself that same thing since he’d jumped on that bike and raced through the trees looking for her. And he still didn’t have an answer he liked. Because the only one that came to mind went against his better judgment.
“It was the right thing to do,” was all he said.
Their eyes held in the silence that followed, and then she said in an achingly soft voice, “For whatever reason, thank you. You saved my life.”
His heart thudded in his chest, a reaction that both confused and ticked him off. “Thank you for saving mine back in New York. I’m still not entirely sure what went on there, but I have a feeling if you hadn’t stepped in, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”
Emotions he couldn’t read rushed across Kat’s face, and she opened her mouth to speak, but the waitress returned with an armful of plates, interrupting her. It took the woman two more trips before Pete had his burger and the rest of Kat’s order was overflowing the table.
Kat picked up her fork and looked down at her food. “It was no big deal. Really. I just…surprised them.”
She didn’t look like she wanted to give details, so he didn’t press. She dove into the food like a woman starved, and Pete almost chuckled as he reached for the bottle of ketchup. Same old Kat. The first few times he’d taken her to dinner in Cairo he’d been shocked by how much she could put away. Then he’d been pleasantly thrilled when she’d spent the remainder of the night working the calories off with him between the sheets of his bed.
Damn. He shifted again on the bench seat in discomfort. Clenched his jaw at what the memory did to his pants and the little bit of gray matter left between his ears.
“So Minyawi,” he said as he picked up a fry and tried to forget about his raging libido. “If we go by what this Halloway said in the park, he’s the mastermind, not Busir. And he knows we’re together. It’s possible he’s tracking us with my credit card.”
Kat swallowed around a mouthful of food. “I hadn’t thought of that, but I guess it’s possible.”
“Not likely, though,” Pete went on as he picked up his burger. “The more likely scenario is he’s got someone on the inside who’s connected to Slade, but we’ll use cash from here on out just to be safe.”
Kat set her fork down, lifted her coffee and took a long sip. Something in her eyes said she wanted to ask him a question but didn’t know how to broach the topic.
“What?” he finally asked when his curiosity got the best of him.
She reached up to run her fingers over the medal at her chest. “What happened in Afghanistan?”
Ah, so that was what the mood was about.
Pete leaned back and carefully wiped his mouth with his napkin. As he did, he glanced around the restaurant. The cook had come out from the kitchen and was now deep in conversation with the waitress and the man still seated at the lunch counter. The elderly couple who’d watched them with curious eyes earlier was standing to leave. No one was listening to their conversation or paying one iota of attention to them anymore.
Which was a good thing. Except it left way too many opportunities for intimate questions such as this.
How much should he tell her? How much did she already know? She’d once accused him of buying and selling on the black market, which he knew wasn’t too far off the mark. So what did it matter if he told her the truth now?
It mattered, he realized, for the same reason it had mattered back then. Because somewhere inside he didn’t want her to know the whole truth about him.
“I got delayed,” he said, figuring that was the safest answer he could come up with.
“What were you doing in Afghanistan in the first place?” She lifted her fork again and resumed eating, but he could tell by the set of her chin she was curious and she wasn’t