Page 5 of Claimed by Him

Three

A quick butthorough shower and a cup of coffee with a bagel were enough to wake me up completely. I might be flagging by the end of the day, but right now, I was good.

My first class would be with Clay, and it didn’t matter how long he’d known me or the fact that we were sleeping together, he’d call on me if he thought I was dozing off. It was one of his favorite things to do to trainees.

It didn’t matter if he was lecturing in a full auditorium or doing a more casual class in front of only a dozen people. He demanded attention. The thing that kept him from being a total asshole was that it was always about making sure people were learning what they needed to, so they’d do the best job possible. Sometimes, that meant embarrassing the hell out of someone. I sure as hell didn’t want it to be me.

As I walked in the building, he was there. I barely glanced at him, but I felt his eyes on me as I walked past him and into the classroom. Today’s lecture was about family annihilators and what made their psychopathy different from mass murderers or serial killers. We wouldn’t be dealing with those sorts of cases much here in the FBI, but a family hostage taker could be an annihilator, and we’d need to know how to handle it differently than, say, someone who wanted something.

I couldn’t say I was looking forward to it, but I’d deal with it the same way I’d dealt with everything else in my life. Besides, if I couldn’t handle hearing about it, I’d be no good if I was called to a scene where it was the issue. As an Intelligence Analyst, that wouldn’t be my usual case, but I believed in being prepared. Besides, there was no guarantee I’d actually make it in the field I’d chosen. Best to plan for all possible contingencies.

I usually sat in the first couple rows, but before I’d gone more than a few steps, the door opened behind me.

“Quick!”

I turned around, the movement automatic the moment I heard the familiar bark of Martin Edwards, one of the senior agents at Quantico. He wasn’t the very top guy, but he was up there pretty far, and he scared the shit out of pretty much every trainee here. Not me, but I wasn’t exactly the best judge when it came to fear. Not many people intimidated me. I couldn’t think of a single one off the top of my head.

“Yes, sir?” I gave what I hoped was a polite but not too cheery smile.

He scowled at me, and my heart sank.

“Come with me.”

Shit. Had someone figured out about Clay and me? Shit, shit! We could deny it, I supposed. The fact that we’d known each other before could be a believable reason for me visiting him at his hotel. He’d been my uncle’s friend, after all.

When I was almost at the door, Agent Edwards walked away, and I hurried to keep up with him. He clearly didn’t want to walk and talk, but I was fine with that. If he was about to chew me out for fooling around with Clay, I definitely didn’t want to do it with an audience.

We made it all the way to his office without a single word being said, but as soon as he opened the door, he snapped at me, “Sit.”

My stomach twisted. This was worse than I thought. I sat.

He settled in his chair and folded his hands in front of him. His face was back to being expressionless, but that didn’t necessarily mean I was off the hook. Especially when he didn’t start talking right away. I vaguely remembered hearing somewhere that he’d been one of the agency’s top interrogators, and I finally admitted that I was in extremely deep shit.

“Rona Quick.”

“Yes, sir?”

He gave me a look that said he hadn’t wanted a response from me. He’d let me know if I was supposed to speak.

“Rona Elizabeth Quick.” He reached forward and picked up a file folder from his desk. “That’s the name you submitted on your application.”

Fuck. It wasn’t about Clay.

“Mother, Dana Quick. Father, unknown. Birthplace, Carmel, Indiana.”

My pulse raced, but I didn’t interrupt him as I tried to figure out exactly how bad this was going to be.

“Do I need to keep reading?” he asked, clearly expecting an answer this time.

“No, sir,” I said quietly.

“You were asked if you were known by another name, and you said no. At the end of the application you were asked, as was every applicant, if the contents of the application were true to the best of your knowledge. You checked the ‘I agree’ box and signed underneath it. In doing so, you also accepted that lying on the form would be a federal offense.”

I was going to be sick.

“We would normally have weeded out any discrepancies fairly early on, but you came with a letter of recommendation from one of our own–”

Shit. Clay.

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