Page 5 of Avenging Jessie
He tried to catch her eye to make sure she understood the stakes. “I did. And the fallout is already starting. That’s the real reason why Flynn is sending us together, J.”
Her lips parted, but she didn’t speak. His eyes rested on her near-perfect lips. The rest of her face was unreadable, but those lips... Yeah, he could read them like his own thoughts. “No one in their right mind wants to work with me.”
Ah, and there it was—the crux of the matter. “I do.”
Her eyes met his. Skirted away. “You’re a fool.”
His phone buzzed before he could argue. It was a text from Flynn’s assistant. Jessie’s phone buzzed right after his, probably with the same message. The flights were booked.
“Clock starts now,” Jessie muttered, tapping her smart watch to start a timer.
“Look,” he said. “I get it. You want to do this mission solo because you think this is your chance to make it right. I get that, but you don’t have to do this alone. We’re a team. Again. Like we were when Black Swan first started.”
She looked away. Not out of weakness, but because she never held his gaze for long. He wasn’t sure if it was because she knew he had a crush on her or because facing him was too raw. Too real. She couldn’t face her failures, and he reminded her of them.
And God, he hated being that reminder. What woman in her right mind would want him around if he caused her to remember the worst time of her life every damn time she looked at him?
“I work better alone,” she said.
“Maybe.” He shrugged. “But I don’t.”
Her chin snapped up. A strained silence stretched between them. He met her glare and the silence head-on. It continued to expand, taut, sharp, and threaded with the things they never said.
Finally, she brushed past him into the hallway. “I’ll meet you at the airport.”
Spence turned to follow. “We could?—”
“No, we can’t, Stirling.”
With clenched fists and squared shoulders, she left him standing there. The sound of her boots faded down the corridor.
He stayed where he was, watching her go. He could hack firewalls and trace digital ghosts across five continents. But Jessie Mendoza? She was the one code he’d never cracked.
“But I will,” he promised himself. Spencer Stirling was no quitter. Not when he wanted something. And he wanted her. “I most certainly will.”
Three
Jessie
The skyover Munich was a sullen bruise, thick with the promise of rain. Gray clouds hung low, diffusing the late afternoon light and casting the city in cold hues of concrete and steel. Jessie adjusted her scarf higher around her neck and scanned the park’s perimeter. She didn’t like meeting in open places. Too many angles. Too many ways to get dead.
Spence sat on the bench beside her, legs crossed, phone in hand, playing his part perfectly. To anyone watching, they were just another couple killing time on a stroll.
But Jessie’s pulse thrummed with that familiar edge of readiness, her gaze ticking between the dog walkers, the joggers, the man with the newspaper who hadn’t turned a page in five minutes.
A woman in a trench coat approached, her stride purposeful but casual. She dropped onto the opposite end of the bench without a word and set down a paper bag.
“It’s the only thing I could get.” Her voice was soft as she typed on her phone as if responding to a text. “Topographic layout of the compound outside Görlitz. Just remember, you didn’t get it from me.”
Jessie sat between them, digging in her backpack as she muttered, “We never met.”
The woman tucked her phone in a coat pocket. “Brewer’s got an ally in town. Jonas Keller. “
“Who the hell is that?” Jessie asked, frowning into her open bag.
The woman checked her watch. “Low-profile financier. Tied into gray-market contracts all over Europe. Berlin thinks he’s bankrolling Brewer’s projects. He’ll be at the Bundestag Initiative gala tomorrow night. His name’s on the donor list.”
Spence glanced up from his phone and yawned. Jet lag had them both in its claws. “Gala, huh? Will Brewer be there?”
