Chapter Fourteen
Angela’s phone rang. For a single, panicked moment, she thought she’d slept through her alarm. She scrambled to answer the call despite the ungodly hour. “Hello?”
“Up and at ’em,” Sawyer demanded as though it weren’t the middle of the night.
“What?” She fought the invading wakefulness. This had to be a nightmare. “It’s still dark outside.” Not even a crack of daylight shone from around her bedroom curtains. “Go away.”
“You can sleep when you’re dead.”
God, what time was it? She’d been up all night, trying to fall asleep. Now that she had, Sawyer was torturing her. Angela fell back into bed, phone pressed to her ear, and grumbled. “What do you want?”
“Breakfast.”
She groaned. “Microwave a breakfast burrito.”
A knock pounded on her front door. She would have closed her bedroom door if she had had the presence of mind last night. That might have muffled Sawyer’s attempt to roust her. “You’re such a bully.”
He pounded on the door again.
“You’re going to wake the neighbors.”
He scoffed. “I brought coffee.”
Angela rolled onto her side. “You’re lucky I’m a caffeine junkie.”
“That’s what I was counting on.”
She hung up on him, tossed the phone, and tied her robe around her waist. Finger-combing her hair into something that bore less resemblance to a banshee’s, she answered the door and snagged her coffee.
Sawyer followed her inside. “You’re looking well-rested.”
“Bite me.”
He parked against the wall and sipped his coffee while she guzzled hers.
“Sawyer.” Her patience was short. The caffeine hadn’t had nearly enough time to hit her system. “Why are you here?”
“To get you out the door. Go get dressed.”
Angela’s eyebrows arched.
“Go get dressed.” He shooed her toward her bedroom. “Get ready to go Stateside.”
Angela maneuvered past him. What was he talking about? Right now? She had to get dressed to “get ready”? Come on, caffeine. She needed her brain to kickstart. “That’s not helping.”
After a minute of sitting on the edge of her bed, she heard his footsteps approach the bedroom. “You dressed?”
“If you mean not naked, then yes.”
He walked in. “Get out of bed.”
“I’m not in bed,” she protested. All of fifteen seconds had passed. What more did Sawyer expect of her before the sun had risen? “I don’t know what we’re doing, so I don’t know what to wear.”
Sawyer plucked her coffee from her hand—if she were more awake, she’d have protested or at least defended herself—then took her hand and pulled her to her feet.
“I don’t think I like you very much right now,” she muttered as he dragged her toward her walk-in closet.
They stopped in the middle of a small room. Shoes lined one wall, dresses another. Angela had her skirts and blouses near a vanity that held accessories. A fainting couch and matching upholstered bench held court in the middle of the space.
Sawyer let out a low whistle. “There’s a ton of crap in here.”
“Not how I’d describe it, but yes.”
“You’re very organized.”
“Very,” she agreed. “But it’s not helping me out right now. I don’t know what we’re doing, so how can I dress for success?” She cringed. The sentiment was true, but her control-freak personality was coming on a little too strong.
Sawyer snorted and turned from the rows of skirts arranged by length. “There’s not an outfit in here that’s going to make everything run smoothly.”
“You don’t know that.” She tugged haphazardly at a couple of options. “We need an agenda. How else am I supposed to know what to wear?”
He snickered. “Who knew you were so dramatic before coffee?” He took a long sip and wandered toward the vanity counter, where he studied the granite as though their day’s agenda were hiding in the flecks of white stone. “Look, I’m sorry I took off like that last night.”
She no longer needed caffeine to wake up. Her brain jolted to an unfamiliar level of hyperawareness. Angela smoothed her hands down the side of her robe as a wave of last night’s abandonment crashed over her. She tried to ignore it. “It’s fine.”
He scrutinized the vanity. “My head went to a dark place, and I just needed to roll.”
She hated he wouldn’t face her. Hated that she wanted him to explain more. But more than that, she wanted to bury the emptiness that arrived when he’d left and kept her tossing and turning all night long.
He looked into the vanity’s oversized mirror and studied her.
“Let’s forget it,” she offered then retreated for her coffee. Angela used the seconds-long reprieve to settle the disjointed tension in her chest and returned to her walk-in closet.
Sawyer perched on the edge of her vanity. He held her gaze and then looked around. “Your closet is the size of a living room, you know that?”
She laughed, happy he’d moved on. “Working for Titan has its perks.” Angela folded herself onto the fainting couch and tucked her legs underneath her. “All right, we’re getting ready to go to the US. Why don’t you tell me everything you know? Then I can get dressed and pack a bag.”
“Parker pinged me. We have briefing books ready and a jet booked to take us to North Carolina.”
Her mouth parted. Booking planes and organizing briefing books? Those responsibilities were her job. “Who did that?”
Sawyer shrugged. “What’s the matter?”
“I’m supposed to do that.”
The corners of his lips lifted upward. “Actually, right now, you’re not.”
Disentangling herself from her regular job was worse than figuring out how to dress for the unknown.
She didn’t know how to handle the situation.
Jared wouldn’t know the first thing about making transportation arrangements.
Parker was too busy. Angela often worked in proximity to Amanda, but their jobs didn’t overlap.
Even if they did, Amanda had too much on her plate at the moment.
“Ange.” Sawyer watched her. “You can’t do both jobs well. You have to let Titan do what Titan does.”
She agreed—but who? How? Suddenly, the immensity of her haphazard job switch hit her.
Angela pressed her hands against her temples.
“Oh my God. What have I gotten myself into?” She didn’t know a damn thing about gathering intel.
She knew how to arrange for safe houses—and, oddly enough, that was because she’d studied for it in a way.
Her college degree had been in event planning and hospitality.
She was an organizer. She could manage agendas and facilities.
Could she do what Jared needed her to if she hadn’t spent four years studying?
And somehow, she thought she could just hop into the field and investigate? Sawyer had been right.
Their phones pinged. It was too early in the morning for a message to be related to anything other than the job.
She hurried out of the closet and found her phone.
“It’s Parker.” It was getting close to the middle of the night on the east coast of the US.
She returned to the closet and saw Sawyer’s expression had darkened as he glanced up from his phone.
Her stomach lurched. “That look doesn’t bode well.”
Sawyer’s eyebrows arched, apparently in agreement that it wasn’t good.
She opened Parker’s message.
The Feds were sniffing around. Your mother looped them in.
Angela could’ve predicted that would happen, and her mother could’ve held out for longer, but Angela didn’t expect much from the woman who day-traded information.
“Keep reading,” Sawyer grumbled.
Special Agent John Patterson will be in the hotel lobby in an hour to meet with Angela.
“Great. The Feds want to tell me I’m wrong and crazy all over again.” She tossed her phone aside and groaned. “At least that helps me figure out what outfit to wear.”
Sawyer snorted.
The phone pinged again. Angela rolled her lips together. Intuition said that the news would only worsen. “What’s it say?”
Sawyer quickly skimmed the message. His expression landed like a sucker punch into her gut.
“What?”
The muscles in his neck tightened, turning the crank on her punched stomach. “Sawyer?” She didn’t wait and grabbed her phone.
Special Agent John Patterson is a shrink.
Angela’s chin snapped up. “A shrink?”
Sawyer blinked as though the message had been written in an alien vernacular. “What the hell?”
Her breathing quickened. “I cannot believe she’s doing this.”
“Your mother? What—why?”
Angela pressed her fingertips to her temples and calculated when the federal agent would have left the United States if he intended to meet with her in an hour.
“She had other plans for me. Remember? Getting married, yada, yada.
" An ache drilled at the back of her skull. “They can’t keep me from this job.”
“Maybe that’s not why they want you to meet with someone.”
“Wishful thinking.”
Angela sat at the conference table as the orange glow of the morning sun rose over Abu Dhabi. The rich aroma of expensive coffee filled the well-appointed office suite. She tried not to fidget. Every minute felt like five.
Amanda, filling Angela’s typical role, opened the conference room door and escorted their guest inside. John Patterson was lanky. His rumpled suit matched his tired eyes. She stood to greet him as Amanda ushered him into the conference room.
“Angela Sorenson,” Amanda said by way of introduction, “this is Special Agent John Patterson, FBI.”
“John.” He extended his hand. “Thanks for meeting on such short notice.”
They shook. John’s firm, sure grip was far more enthusiastic than she expected for a man who had hopped on an airplane and gotten halfway across the globe before she’d gone to sleep the night prior.
Did her mother and the Feds mean to catch Angela off guard, or was this simply a matter of miscommunication?
She’d spent the last hour talking herself into a tizzy and back to a calm, rational explanation.
“I’m sorry that you had to take the red-eye.
I’m sure we could’ve handled whatever you need to know over a video conference. ”
“Call me old-fashioned, but...” John gestured for her to take a seat. “I like to sit face to face.”