She hadn’t been for the first few weeks. It was one of the ways she’d known to take a pregnancy test.
He moved to the screen door, going light on his feet so Nell might think he was at his computer. She wanted her new hero to be a former Interpol officer, so Henry was busy pulling together all he could about the international agency. He could have simply sat her down and told her that he’d worked with them many times and they were difficult because they had all sorts of rules that tripped up an agent.
“I don’t know. I think you should see Caleb.” Logan was right in front of him now, and Henry put a finger to his lips, silently asking for quiet. If Logan had come running, he would have brought Nell into the conversation. He would have had Nell call the sheriff.
But he hadn’t. Logan had snuck up, and he clearly had his radio. So he didn’t need someone to call the sheriff. He’d likely already done it.
That meant he needed help, and not from Nell. Not from Henry either.
He needed John Bishop. There were only a few people in all the world who knew his secret, and one of them was Seth Stark. If Seth was in trouble, he would have sent Logan for him.
“I need some rest. That’s all,” Nell continued. “Caleb would try to prescribe things, and you know how I feel about big pharmaceutical companies.”
If he didn’t distract her, she would hear Logan, and then he would have to make decisions he wasn’t ready to make. He’d been able to deal with that man from Gemma’s past quietly, though he knew Caleb Burke had questions about the way the man had died.
Henry had split the man’s spine at the top of his neck. It was a neat and bloodless kill, one he’d perfected over the many years he’d worked for the CIA.
“They’re not all bad.” He said the words to get a specific reaction out of Nell, knowing she wasn’t even halfway through her kneading process.
“Not all bad? I recently read an article about this terrible company,” she began.
She would be at least five minutes. It gave him the opportunity to slip out on the deck. “What’s going on? I caught you running across the yard with a gun in hand about thirty seconds ago and then that big guy stepped out onto your porch. Have you called Nathan?”
His gut was in knots. Why now? Why was everything seeming to come to a breaking point right as he and Nell had managed to make it past that first awful six weeks of this pregnancy. He’d felt like someone was watching him, like something was bearing down on him.
Nell was going on about some pharmaceutical company with a German-sounding name as Logan leaned in. “Yeah, though I think this is your problem. You tell me something and you tell me now because my partner and my wife are being held by some sort of drug lord. Did you work for them before you came to Bliss?”
Now his gut took a deep dive and he felt bile at the back of his throat. And he knew why he’d felt eyes on him. The cartel. They’d found him? “They’re from a cartel?”
It was his worst nightmare. The Agency finding out John Bishop wasn’t dead was only his second worst-case scenario. The cartel was the worst.
How the hell had they found him? How had they figured out he wasn’t dead?
Did they know about Nell? That was the real question that went through him. Was he about to cause the death of the most precious person in the world to him?
“I could be wrong. They could be mob. They could be a traveling circus. I don’t give a shit because they’re going to kill my people and I think they’re here for you. So I’m going to ask the question and you’re going to answer. Are you on the payroll?” Logan asked the question low, his tone hard. It was the tone of a man who thought he might be about to lose everything.
Henry knew the feeling. He forced his panic back down. There was no place for it here. If the cartel was at Seth’s place, then he needed to be cold as ice. He could make this work. After all, Seth had known who he was for years. Seth had kept his secrets. Logan could keep them too.
Or the time had come and he had decisions to make.
“No. The cartel was the target. If it’s who I think it is, they were mixed up with a terrorist cell. I was CIA and then I wasn’t. Damn it. They’re supposed to think I’m dead.” Telling Logan was all right. Especially since if the cartel had Seth, Logan was about to find out how good he was at killing.
It was odd because there was no anxiety about what he was about to do. He knew how to kill quickly and quietly, and cartel assholes were fairly easy to take down. They only tended to know how to shoot things, and he didn’t intend to even let them know he was there until it was far too late to pull the trigger.
“They seem to have caught on.” Logan’s gaze went back toward the cabin as though he could see it. He couldn’t. Not standing here. “Nate’s on his way, but I don’t have time to wait so I need you to get your freak on. You owe Seth. You owe him, Henry. And you damn well know it.”
He owed the whole town of Bliss, and that meant he couldn’t hesitate. He nodded Logan’s way and walked back into his cabin, into the place where he was happy and safe. It was the place where he lied to his wife so he could stay happy and safe.
Was it the place where he would lose her?
Henry moved to his desk. It didn’t have
