Both Kane and Melinda looked skeptical, but Melinda gave his theory the benefit of the doubt by saying, “Maybe. But that still means it’s someone who wanted to protect Leila. To try and prevent what ended up happening when Kane inadvertently let them know she was responsible for the gun supply drying up.”
“No matter how you look at this,” Kane said, his gaze steady on Davis, broadcasting that he thought Davis was in way too deep, “someone Leila cares about is behind all of this. And they’re the reason her father is dead.”
“ARE WE GOING to talk about this?” Melinda demanded. She stood in the doorway of the conference room, one hand on each side of the frame, blocking Kane’s exit.
Davis had left an hour earlier, not wanting Leila to leave the office alone. Melinda and Kane had dug through backgrounds on Joel Petrov and Eric Ross after he’d left, trying to find any indication one of them was making millions of dollars off-book. Then, Kane had looked up at her, the exhaustion in his eyes not doing a thing to hide the anger, and announced he was calling it quits until tomorrow.
“I’m not finding anything in either of their backgrounds,” Kane said, and she knew he was purposely misunderstanding her question. “Our best chance to figure out who’s behind this is the guy who needs a crash course in undercover work.”
“Davis is in a tough spot.” Melinda couldn’t stop herself from arguing, even though she knew Kane had been egging her on, trying to get her to fight about something else. “He’s got real feelings for Leila.”
“It’s one of the biggest dangers in undercover work,” Kane told her, flicking away hair that had fallen down over his forehead. “If you’re any good, you have to inhabit the skin of someone else. That means it’s easy to become what you’re pretending to be. It’s easy to see the humans behind the criminals. No one is one hundred percent bad. But you cross those lines and it’s hard to step back, watch them all get arrested and walk away.”
“How do you keep doing it?” Melinda asked softly. It was something she’d always wondered about Kane. The profiler in her knew part of him craved the danger, craved the chance to disappear inside a persona and escape himself. Escape into the skin of others, over and over again, until maybe the things he was running from in his own life wouldn’t be there anymore.
Melinda didn’t know the details of what had happened with him and Pembrook’s daughter. But she did know he’d never be able to run away from the guilt he felt over her death.
“Simple,” Kane answered, taking her hand and pulling it away from the door frame. “I always go alone.”
He slipped past her, his gaze holding hers for a brief moment before it flicked away. The man was the very definition of tall, dark and handsome. He was dangerous and mysterious in a way she would have swooned over as a foolish teenager.
But she was an adult now, with way too much education in psychology not to recognize exactly what he was doing. She turned around in the doorway, holding her ground. “You think I blew your cover.”
He spun back toward her, the anger on his face so harsh she almost backed up. Almost.
“Yeah, I think you blew my cover. I also think you blew Dougie as my CI, as an FBI resource. I also think...” He sighed heavily, not finishing his sentence.
But he didn’t have to. He thought she’d almost gotten them killed.
His judgment stung, even though she thought the same things herself. She’d had no idea that the very fact that she was Asian would be enough to bring his cover crashing down. But how could she? He’d hidden it all from her, hidden that there even was a meet. She’d had to follow him, sneak glances at his phone, to figure out the when and where, because she’d known from the minute he’d walked out of the room to take the call from his CI what he was doing.
“Don’t you think that if you’d just been honest with me, we could have come up with a plan for the meet together? Then you would have had backup and I would have known not to go in that way.”
“We didn’t need to come up with a plan together,” Kane snapped. “I came up with a plan myself. I work alone. I always have.”
“Not always.”
Melinda knew it was a risk referring to Pembrook’s daughter, but she didn’t expect the level of fury that lit in Kane’s eyes. She had to brace her hands in the doorway again to keep herself from backing away.
“You have no idea what it’s like to watch someone you care about die like that. So, don’t give me your profiling BS about how I’m not a team player when you’re the one who blew that meet.”
Melinda saw the instant Kane realized he’d gone too far, the moment the raw fury in his gaze turned to regret. She also knew why.
He’d seen it on her face that she did know. “You’re right that I’ve never lost a partner,” Melinda agreed, stepping away from the doorway. Her hand twitched toward the ring she always wore on a necklace hidden beneath her shirts, but she resisted the urge to touch it. Her personal life was no one’s business, least of all Kane Bradshaw’s.
In Tennessee, only Pembrook knew she’d once had a husband, had a son, had a life outside of work. The chance to escape the pitying looks of colleagues who knew about her loss was why she’d accepted