Must Love Hellhounds

offered trust like this? Acceptance? She wasn’t family. Their only connection was one of the few impulsive acts Maggie had performed in her lifetime. She shouldn’t even matter to him.
    And yet . . . his acceptance and trust had begun to matter to her, too. It must have, because her throat was aching, and she wanted to say “Thank you” in return.
    But as she moved toward the bathroom, she only said, “You aren’t at all what I expected, Mr. Blake.”

Chapter Five

    She looked too soft with her hair blown dry and loose around her shoulders. She felt too soft, and so Maggie braided it into a rope before leaving the bathroom. Her only clothes were a tank and underwear, but she had no intention of looking down at herself.
    Sir Pup hadn’t abandoned his sprawl across the second bed. She studied him, wondering how to maneuver through this. Sleeping had never been an issue before.
    “It seems an easy choice, Winters. There’s hardly enough room over there for a child.”
    She narrowed her eyes at the hellhound. “He could get up. He doesn’t need to sleep. Or eat. So I don’t need to buy him a bag of sausage biscuits tomorrow morning.”
    Sir Pup yawned, exposing three sets of gigantic teeth, and rolled onto his back.
    Maggie sighed and crawled onto the bed next to Blake.
    “You caved?”
    She reached for the light and clicked it off. “He probably wouldn’t let me eat tomorrow, either. It’s a practical decision.”
    “And this marks the first time a woman has come to my bed for practical reasons. Usually, they say it’s a mistake.”
    “I don’t make mistakes.” She turned on her side, facing away from him. “Not many.”
    “You trusted James.”
    She stared into the darkness. “Yes, I did.”
    “Was that a mistake?”
    She hadn’t thought so. But she had wondered, even back then, if caring about James as a person—and as a friend—had given her a blind spot, prevented her from seeing some terrible truth. But, in the end, she’d made her decision and lied about following through on the kill order.
    The reasons behind the kill order hadn’t been given—reasons were rarely given—but the kill order itself hadn’t made sense. Operatives didn’t assassinate other operatives. Even if James had been a traitor to the country, if he’d sold government secrets, or come across sensitive information that an operative couldn’t be allowed to possess, the first step would have been to convict him. Perhaps the public would never hear of it—or even most agency employees—but there would have been hear ings. And if James fled custody and posed a security risk—which he hadn’t—Maggie shouldn’t have been the one to take him out. Someone higher up would have done it, very quietly.
    And so from the moment her superior had given her the order, her gut had told her something was off. Way off. She’d have bet her life that James hadn’t committed a breach of national security, but had witnessed someone else’s. Someone within the CIA. Someone higher up the chain of command, who could distance himself from the kill by pushing it down through the ranks.
    When she’d spoken with James on that final night, he hadn’t verified her suspicions. He’d kept his secrets as well as she did. But she’d worked with him too long, known him too long. And although she wouldn’t stay with the agency and try to discover who had betrayed them—that would have been signing her own death warrant—she wasn’t going to murder James for that person, either. So she’d told him to run.
    Behind her, Blake turned heavily over, and she heard the thump of his fist against the pillow as he punched it into a comfortable shape. She could visualize him, on his stomach and his head turned to one side. And though he could be facing either way, she was certain that if she rolled over, she’d find that he’d turned his face toward her.
    “No,” she said quietly. “I don’t think it was a mistake.”
    As soon as he replied, her instincts were confirmed: Blake was facing her . . . and was closer than she’d thought. Not invading her personal space, but not across the bed, either. “James knew how to contact you. Do you know where he was before this?”
    “I wasn’t in hiding. It’d have been easy for him to find me.” She paused, weighed the rest, and decided she could reveal it. “I didn’t want to know where he was. We’d agreed: no contact, ever.”
    “Because the agency keeps tabs on you.”
    “Yes.”