Survival Clause, стр. 17

The front desk was occupied by an officer in a spotless uniform, so young he probably didn’t have to shave yet. He sat behind the desk, his eyes focused on whatever was in front of him—a screen, a TV monitor, maybe a lurid novel—but they didn’t move as if anything was actually going on behind the eyes. Instead, his ears practically vibrated as he tried not to miss anything of the low-voiced conversation going on in the middle of the lobby.

It involved three people, and Rafe was one of them. Grimaldi was another. She stood, dressed in one of her usual no-nonsense pantsuits, confronting a third woman, someone I hadn’t seen before.

Like Grimaldi, she had black hair and dark eyes. Like Grimaldi, she was dressed in a dark suit. They were around the same age. And there the similarities ended. Where Grimaldi’s short heels and cropped curls spoke to her preference for low maintenance and easy movement, the other woman had paired her black pants and jacket with three inch heels, and her hair hung like a straight curtain most of the way to her waist. The pants clung to a nice posterior and flared out at the bottom, while the jacket was cut to nip in around a tiny waist. The crisp white blouse set off a perfectly made-up face with almond-shaped eyes and flawless skin.

“What’s going on?” I asked, and it might have come out a little sharper and louder than I’d intended. But I’d just come smack up against my prejudices for the kind of woman I’ve always imagined being Rafe’s type.

I know he married me, a not-skinny blue-eyed blonde, but I’ve never quite gotten over the idea that he’s supposed to be with some exotic beauty as dark and gorgeous as he is.

Here I was looking at her. And she was looking at me, with calculation in those black eyes.

“Darlin’,” Rafe said. And said no more.

Grimaldi didn’t, either. “Savannah.” She nodded a greeting before turning back to her adversary. Her nostrils flared.

No one seemed inclined to do the polite thing, so I took matters into my own hands, and stuck one out. “Savannah Martin. Collier.”

The woman took it. Her palm was surprisingly rough for such a delicate-looking creature. “Really?”

“Yes,” I said, and squeezed. She had a firm handshake, too.

She turned back to Rafe. “Your wife?”

He gave a curt nod. Uh-oh, I thought, looking from one to the other of them. An old girlfriend, or maybe more accurately, someone he’d shared his bed with at some point between high school and when he met me again? Sometime during the undercover years?

That had the potential to get ugly, if so.

She turned back to me, her smile blandly polite and her eyes flat black. “I’m Agent Leslie Yung with the Federal Bureau of Investigations.”

The FBI? Rafe had slept with an FBI agent?

“Nice to meet you,” I said pleasantly. “How do you know Rafe?”

She glanced at him. “We met in Memphis.”

During the undercover years. Check.

“Agent Yung hauled me in for questioning a couple times,” Rafe added. The flash of white that accompanied the statement was more a baring of teeth than an actual smile. “Always bothered her when she couldn’t hang nothing on me.”

Yung gave him a scathing look. “And now I see why. You might have let me know that you were working undercover for another agency. I wouldn’t have wasted my time on you.”

Ouch, I thought, while Rafe said, blandly, “That’d defeat the purpose, don’t you think? Not much point in being undercover if everybody knows you’re undercover.”

“The FBI—!” Yung began, and then seemed to think better of it. We stood in silence for a moment while she breathed heavily through her nose.

“Welcome to Columbia,” I told her when I figured she’d gotten herself under control again and wasn’t going to blow up. “What’s the FBI doing in our neck of the woods?”

As if I couldn’t guess.

“We were just discussing that,” Grimaldi said tightly. And added, with a switch of subject that made it clear that the discussion wouldn’t be continuing while I was present, “What are you doing here, Savannah?”

“Oh.” I switched gears. “I just came to let Rafe know that I saw a car pull away and leave just after he went inside. It was coming toward me, though, so I didn’t see the license plate, and the windows were tinted, so I couldn’t see the driver. And by the time I’d gotten the Volvo turned around so I could follow it, it was gone.”

There was a second’s silence. “What kind of car?” Rafe wanted to know.

“Tan compact. Nothing unusual about it in any way. Not that I could see.”

He nodded. “I’ll keep an eye out.”

It was painfully obvious that they all wanted to get rid of me, so I figured I’d oblige. “I’ll head home. Walk me out?”

Rafe nodded. “Back in a minute,” he told Grimaldi, who turned to Agent Yung with rather heavy courtesy.

“Why don’t you come on back to my office, Agent Yung. We’ll continue the discussion when Agent Collier comes back.”

The two of them headed for the door at the far end of the lobby while Rafe took Carrie’s car seat off my hands and put one of his own at the small of my back to guide me outside.

I managed to keep my mouth shut until we were beyond the doors, where the young cop behind the desk couldn’t hear us. And then I couldn’t hold it in any longer. “Old girlfriend?”

He gave me a surprised look. “Yung? Hell, no. She’s much too straight-laced to get involved with the likes of me.”

“Then what was all that tension about?” We continued down the shallow steps toward street level.

“What tension?” Rafe wanted to know, and chuckled when I slid him a look. “She had some preconceived notions I had to disabuse her of.”

“She thought you were a criminal,” I translated.

He nodded. “We went to some lengths to make it look that way back then,