Page 76 of The Blonde Identity

Zoe crying out his name.

Zoe.

Zoe.

Zoe.

But the little vixen had the audacity to say, “Trust me, no one was looking at my face.”

“You can’t possibly know...” he started but trailed off as she turned.

At first, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing because she was still Zoe in the morning light. Same honey-colored hair. Same mischievous smile. Same green eyes. But then his gaze slid down her body to her very large, very round, very...pregnantbelly?

“See? No one was looking at me and thinkingOoh! There goes the most lethal woman in Europe!”

It was true, he would have admitted if his brain hadn’t been full of other, far more primitive thoughts. Likeyes. Andthis. Andmine.

And Sawyer actually felt his world tilt. He might have staggered. Because the sight of Zoe in the cabin. The thought of Zoe and hischild. The very idea . . . It was ludicrous and dangerous and vicious—the way it bore right into his gut. It was salt in a wound he didn’t even know he had as he stood there, inches away from all the things he never knew he wanted and just realized he couldn’t have.

But what if he could?

No. Sawyer needed his sharpest knife. He had to cut that thought out before it spread.

“Go ahead. Say it.” She took a bite of bacon and pulled the pillow out from beneath her shirt. “I’m so good at undercovering!”

But Sawyer didn’t say a single thing. He just ate his breakfast and ignored the feelings that were pinging around inside of him because who needs feelings anyway?

Three minutes later he was on his second egg and contemplating another when something occurred to him. “Hey, maybe you’re a chef.”

He waited for her to say that she was no doubt the heiress to a bacon empire, that maybe she had invented toaster strudel—that she was obviously the next Julia Child and spent her days encrypting classified messages into recipes for pound cake, but Zoe stayed quiet. And if Sawyer had learned anything, it was that a quiet Zoe was very, very scary.

“What’s wrong?”

She looked almost nervous as she glanced at him over the rim of her coffee cup. “I was thinking about our trip to the bank today.”

“No.I’mgoing to the bank today,” he said emphatically but the look in her eyes told him he was in for a fight. He was going to need both knives and at least one gun and maybe another negligee.

“No.We’regoing to the bank.”

“I’m not putting you in danger.” He grabbed the last of the bacon just for spite, but she snatched it back and crammed it in her mouth all at once.

“I’m always in danger!”

“Of choking.”

She swallowed hard and looked like she didn’t know whether toargue or kiss him—to scream or to cry. So she looked down at her hands instead. “I’ll always be in danger until we get that drive.”

Her eyes were so big and her voice was so fragile that he thought the words might break him. So he tugged until she was perched on his knee, until she was back in his arms, and he didn’t let himself think about how right she felt there.

“Hey. Listen to me, you’ve done great. Really. Even... this”—he pointed to her massive T-shirt and the pillow—“is genius. But you can’t just break into one of the most secure banks in the world with a pillow up your shirt.”

Sawyer expected her to argue or complain, stamp her foot or maybe even kiss him again as a distraction, but Zoe just sat there, looking at him like maybe he’d lost twenty IQ points overnight—and maybe he had—because he was in no way prepared to hear her say, “Who said anything about breaking in?”

“Zoe—”

“I mean... I already got the stuff.”

Sawyer felt his blood go cold. “What...” That’s when he noticed the pile: scissors and makeup and clothes. A platinum blonde wig. And cherry-flavored Kool-Aid.

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