Secret Agent Groom (The Bridal Circle #2) Page 2

  Alex Waterstone pulled into the restaurant parking lot and got out of his car—a book of poetry in his hand and his regulation SIG-Sauer .380 automatic in his ankle holster. Relaxed and in control, he strolled into the diner. Life was good. After spending interminable months setting up his cover, the damn investigation was finally getting in gear.

  Two fellow agents were sitting in a booth in the back. Dressed casually in short-sleeved cotton shirts and slacks, their nondescriptness made them blend in perfectly. Alex slid into the booth to join them. No one in the diner paid any attention to them.

  “Any problems?” Fitzgerald asked under his breath.

  “You weren’t spotted, were you?” Casio, Alex’s supervisor, asked.

  The vinyl bench felt sticky and Alex had sudden visions of being forever cemented in place. Permanence, the ultimate horror. A lifetime ticking away a micromillisecond at a time. But he just grinned. “Problems? Why would a respected professor of literature at Midwest University have any problems?”

  Casio groaned. “Don’t start. We can’t afford to be here all night.”

  “The only problem I have is what rhyme scheme to use for my next poem.” Alex left his poetry book on the table for effect, then glanced at the menu left at his place. He really wasn’t hungry at all, still riding high on adrenaline, but when the waitress came over, he ordered something anyway. “Iced tea and the salad bar.”

  The waitress took his menu and went into the kitchen, leaving the three men isolated in the back corner of the restaurant.

  “So what’s the word?” Alex asked.

  Casio pushed his half-eaten salad aside. “It’s a go for tomorrow.”

  “Hot damn.” It seemed like they’d been waiting forever.

  He’d needed to play it safe to build his cover, but it had been too safe for too long. If things hadn’t started soon, he would have been back to racing across the seawall in a storm for excitement. But would it have been the same thrill at thirty-four that it had been at fourteen? He pulled over the folder of photos Casio had brought. “Now, who’s who here?”

  For the next hour, while they ate, they pored over pictures and background sketches of all the known thugs in this operation, what they knew of the gambling setup, how they could best infiltrate it. And how they could minimize the risks. These guys were known to shoot first and ask questions later.

  “I’m ready to go tonight,” Alex said. “Why are we waiting until tomorrow?”

  “Writing poetry isn’t exciting enough for you?” Casio asked.

  “My granny always said to be careful what you wish for,” Fitz said. “There is such a thing as too much excitement.”

  Alex took a deep breath. They didn’t understand. “I’m craving to get these guys behind bars. That’s all.”

  Casio laughed. “Yeah, right. You just want to retire to Chesterton and spend your days writing poems about The Wizard of Oz.”

  “Hey, maybe he’s got an eye on some coed,” Fitz said with a snicker. “Or maybe he wants to put down roots with some single neighbor lady who bakes him cookies.”

  Alex’s stomach tightened up. Even after working together for five years, they sure didn’t know him. Retirement was for those who’d lost their nerve. Roots were for those who wanted to be hurt.

  But he just smiled at his fellow agents. “Mrs. Fallon lives to the south of me. She’s a sixty-five-year-old widow who never gives me anything but her dead husband’s advice. A younger single woman lives to the north but she hasn’t talked to me since grade school. She doesn’t bake me cookies, either.”

  “Maybe she’s got the hots for you but is shy.”

  Alex pulled over the stack of photos they’d been studying. “Maybe you need a life.”

  He forced them back to their casework, annoyed with himself and with his partners. They should know him better and he shouldn’t overreact to their stupid jokes. It was all proof that he needed a jolt of action. Everything was getting to him lately, including—or maybe mostly—living in Chesterton.

  The agency’d thought going back to his hometown would be the perfect cover, but they hadn’t thought through all he’d have to do to blend in. Everything from renewing old friendships to serving on committees for the Wizard of Oz festival held each September. Even Heather Mahoney and her silence was getting to him. She had been standing right next to him for a good part of the poetry reading last week and had barely said a word. Action on this case had come at the right moment.

  “We all set then?” Casio asked.

  “Two o’lock tomorrow.” Alex carefully folded up the scrap of paper with the address and put it in his pants pocket. “I’ll be there.”

  It was dark by the time they parted, each leaving separately and going in different directions. Alex kept to a careful speed, just below the limit, but his heart was racing with excitement.

  Phase one of the operation was going smoothly. He was set in his role as a professor at Midwest University, newly appointed to handle the tutoring program for the athletic department. His student tutors had already started helping the football players keep up with their schoolwork.

  Now phase two was set to start tomorrow. If things went right, he’d gain entrance into the private gambling club and prove himself to be a heavy better. In a week, he’d be deeply mired in gambling debt, borrowing heavily and losing more. In two weeks, just about the time Midwest’s first football game would be played, he should be approached to put a few key players on academic probation. In a month, he’d be expected to guarantee certain games would be a loss. In two months, indictments would go down and some of the world’s worst scum would have their gambling operation shut down, cutting off a major source of funds for their other corrupt activities.

  Alex grinned. This was better than the seawall at its stormiest. It was the life he was born to. He wished he had discovered it sooner, before he’d spent four years in grad school on a degree his mother wanted more than he did. But she’d seemed so desperate to believe that Alex had outgrown his wild streak, that he’d done what he could to make her happy.

  But had it been a wild streak he could outgrow, or part of who he was?

  Alex turned onto his street, glad to be nearing home. He should go jogging tonight and spend an hour or so lifting weights. He wanted to be ready for tomorrow. Even as he planned out the rest of his evening, he peered through the darkness, automatically checking out his house in the block up ahead. He hit the scanner button on the security monitor clipped to his car visor. Not that anyone had ever—

  The monitor buzzed. Alex was stunned for a second, then glanced at the small LED panel. The perimeter system had been breached, not the house system. Someone had gone into the yard. He hit another button. The system had been breached only once, at 9:55 p.m. So whoever had come into the yard was still there after ten minutes. It probably wasn’t a kid getting a ball that had accidentally gone into the yard.

  His heart racing, he turned at a side street and pulled into the alley a block south of his house. His movements quick and sure, he slipped out of the car, silently closing the door, then stepped into the cover of some overgrown bushes as he pulled out his gun. Damn. This couldn’t be a coincidence. Not the night before the operation began. Could he have been followed? Or had he been made earlier?

  He crept down the alley toward his house, his feet crunching ever so slightly on the sparse gravel. Music came from one house, the sounds of a TV from another, dancing lightly in the moist evening air. He moved from the bushes to the deep shadow of a garage to the high stockade fence behind Mrs. Fallon’s house. The lighting in the alley was spotty and it wasn’t hard to stay hidden.

  Unless someone was watching for him, of course.

  Just past Mrs. Fallon’s yard, he squatted down to watch his house, looking for the slightest movement. His yard was enclosed with wire fencing and he could see his house from his distant vantage point. A high pole light with an automatic switch lit up the yard at night. But he saw nothing. Could the alarm have
malfunctioned? Accidentally set off? Possible but not likely.

  So what had happened? Had his cover been blown? And, if it had, by whom? An icy calm seeped through his veins. It didn’t matter who, not right now. What mattered was that he wasn’t some wet-behind-the-ears rookie who would get caught unawares. He knew what he was doing.

  He heard a sound, sensed a movement coming from behind his detached garage, and smiled slowly. He couldn’t have asked for a better spot. With the garage on one side and the fence and bushes on two others, there was only one way out of that small corner. And that’s where he would be.

  Using a low branch from a tree, he vaulted quietly over the fence and into his yard. The movement continued without pause. He hadn’t been noticed. Closer and closer he crept. It was almost too easy.

  That thought made him halt and pull back into the shadows. But there were no signs of anyone else, and he’d have his back to the garage so he wouldn’t be vulnerable. Two final steps and he swung out into the open, his gun drawn and pointed at the figure behind the lilac bush.

  “Freeze,” he cried.

  In the lights from the alley, he saw blond hair pulled into a braid and then blue eyes flashed up at him. Wide startled eyes that reminded him of a deer caught in the headlights of a car.

  His body turned to ice for a moment, then anger, fury, rage raced over him. He lowered his gun.

  “Heather?” he bellowed. What the hell was she doing here? He could have shot her. Didn’t she have any sense? But he took a deep deep breath, cleared his throat and tried to find a professorial voice. “What an unforeseen delight! Might I be of assistance to you?”

  Heather just stared at Alex. And at the gun in his hand. Her heart had stopped and in a moment she would be dead. If she was lucky, that is. Otherwise, Alex would certainly—

  She gulped and blinked and when she looked again, he was tying his shoes and there was no gun. Of course, there wasn’t. He was an English professor, for goodness sake. A poet. He wouldn’t have a gun. She had imagined it. Her stomach always tightened up around him and now her brain was, too, dreaming up things that weren’t there.

  She gulped and blinked again, since it had worked the first time, but she was still in her pajamas sitting on the damp ground in Alex’s backyard and he was still frowning at her.

  “Heather?” he said as he stood back up. “Did you mislay something?”

  She realized suddenly he wasn’t just frowning at her, he’d been talking to her. Action was required, or at least some response. Great, now what? She tried to stand up, but her knees didn’t seem to want to support her. If she’d been one of her kindergarten kids, she would’ve cried, or blamed one of the other kids, or talked about something else.

  “Great poetry reading last week,” she said brightly but it came out dimly. More like dumbly. That was the all-time stupidest remark that had ever come out of her mouth.

  “Yes, it was quite edifying,” Alex replied. His voice was cautious, as if he wasn’t sure if she was dangerous or not. “Might I inquire the reasons why you are reposing out here in...”

  “My pajamas?” she finished for him. They looked like a T-shirt and shorts, but she knew the snoozing kitties all over them gave it away.

  “Uh...” He paused, almost as if he was at a loss for words. “I had thought to say ‘out here in the darkness.’”

  “Oh.” He hadn’t known, not until she’d told him. She closed her eyes briefly and sank up to her chin in mortification. Where were the poisonous spiders when you needed them?

  Opening her eyes, she looked back up at Alex. He was the handsomest male in all of Indiana—dark hair falling slightly over his forehead, tall and broadshouldered—and he scared the wits out of her. Somehow, since he moved back to Chesterton last year and accepted the professorship at MU, he seemed even more dangerous than he had as a kid, which was crazy.

  “I saw a kitten run into your yard,” she admitted. “I tried to catch her earlier this evening and couldn’t. I didn’t think you’d mind if I followed her to try again.”

  “A kitten?” He sounded only slightly exasperated and squatted down next to her to peer under the bushes.

  “She’s back in there.” Heather got onto her hands and knees and picked up her flashlight, holding it so that the light filtered gently through the leaves and just barely showed the tiny creature in the mouth of the pipe. “There’s some kind of drainage pipe that she’s sitting in.”

  Alex moved closer to her. Too close, actually. As he leaned forward to look under the bush he brushed against her arm—just her arm, for heaven’s sake! But her whole body blushed a bright red, while her temperature soared.

  Good heavens! She couldn’t react this way to Alex. He was the last man on earth she could be attracted to.

  “The kitten’s quite small,” he said.

  Heather moved over a few inches—to a spot that she could see better from—and looked in also. The little gray kitten was barely visible in the deep shadows, but Heather could feel her fear.

  “The poor baby,” she said. “She must be—”

  Alex reached in and grabbed at the animal. There was a hiss and a tiny snarl—then Alex drew back quickly.

  “Hey!” he said as he sat back on his heels. “She bit me.” He shook his hand as if it stung.

  “Oh, it’s my fault,” Heather cried. “I should have told you right away she was feral. You didn’t realize it since I wasn’t using a trap. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have let you reach in there like that.”

  She took Alex’s hand and looked at the narrow streak of blood on his palm, feeling a rush of relief. Or was it a rush of something else? Her cheeks felt as if they were aflame suddenly and she quickly let go.

  “It’s just a scratch, not a bite,” she said. “We’ll wash it up but I don’t think it’s anything to worry about.”

  “I wasn’t worried,” Alex informed her. “And you didn’t exactly ‘let’ me reach in, you know. I did it myself.”

  His voice sounded brusque, but she didn’t blame him. He probably was tired, and annoyed to find her here.

  “Are you sure the kitten did it?” she asked. “Maybe it was a stinging nettle. They can be poisonous sometimes, you know, and once I think I found one in my yard.”

  He was staring at her again with that same look of exasperation. Or maybe pity. “It was the kitten,” he said. “Honest. She was telling me to bug off.”

  Bug off? This was staid, dignified Professor Waterstone? No, it sounded more like Alex “Just Watch Me!” Waterstone. The boy who jumped from the Sheridans’ oak tree to the Cauldwells’ garage while she was screaming at him not to. The teen who liked to go snake hunting around Lake Palomara and bring boxes of his catches to show around the neighborhood. The high school senior who spray-painted Go Chesterton on arch rival Valparaiso’s water tower.

  She wished he would go inside his house or would remember he needed something at the store. He was making her nervous just by sitting here next to her. She took a deep breath and turned to peer back under the bush.

  “I hope you told her we weren’t going to bug off.” Heather set the flashlight in the bush, facing away from the pipe so that only a soft light was thrown around the kitten. “And that a certain little kitten is going to be sleeping inside tonight.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Alex said. “All that and more.”

  Heather just concentrated on opening the little can of tuna from her rescue kit and tried not to think about Alex watching her. Or about the fact that these pajamas were not made of very thick material. Or that catching a feral kitten was more interesting than Heather could ever be.

  She dumped the tuna onto a small plate. Do what you came to do, she ordered herself. Then get back home where you belong.

  She pushed the plate slowly toward the drainage pipe. “There you go, sweetums,” she said softly. “Doesn’t that smell yummy? I bet you’re hungry, aren’t you?”

  A soft little cry came in response and the kitten poked her small head ou
t of the pipe.

  “That’s the idea,” Alex said. “Come on out and chow down.”

  Heather started slightly. Alex was laying on the ground next to her, peering under the bush also. He was going to help her?

  No matter how she tried not to care, the idea made her warm, both inside and out. She turned her own attention quickly back to the kitten. At least she knew what she was doing there. Trying to understand Alex—or any man—was way beyond her.

  “You want some yummy tuna?” she coaxed and cooed to the kitten. “Come on, sugar pie. You don’t have to be afraid. I won’t let mean old Uncle Alex get you.”

  “Mean old Uncle Alex?” he repeated under his breath.

  Heather didn’t reply because the kitten was inching out of the pipe, drawn by the smell of the fish, and she needed to focus on that. Thank goodness, for she didn’t know what had possessed her to say that out loud. She never did things like that. Maybe she had been pricked by the poisonous nettle and was acting irrationally. She needed to get this kitten and get back home.

  “Come on, little honey,” she murmured and shifted her weight slightly. “You just come over and eat.”

  The kitten was almost all the way out of the pipe. Another step and she was out. Another step and she was almost to the plate. One more and she was sniffing the tuna cautiously. Then—

  Heather swooped in, grabbed the kitten by the scruff of the neck and, despite her loud protests, put her into a terry-cloth bag. Once Heather’d closed off the neck of the bag with her hand, the kitten went silent. Heather got to her feet.

  “That’s it?” Alex said, standing also. “Want me to carry that?”

  Heather tightened her hold on the bag as she bent down. “No. thanks. I’ve got it.” Just how was she supposed to escape her weird reactions to Alex if she didn’t get away from him? “I’ll just get the rest—”

  But he got her flashlight before she could. And the plate of tuna. “Should I just dump this?”