Breach Of Trust

LETHAL REUNION

Meghan McGuire’s ready to put her military career behind her and start her dream job helping troubled children—until a man from her past reappears. Tate Walker is supposed to be dead. But now he’s standing on her doorstep, telling her she’s in danger. Tate never thought he’d see Meghan again…and certainly not as the target of the hacker he’s trying to bust. With both of their lives in danger, they have to work together to hunt down the criminal. But when Tate learns about the past Meghan’s been hiding, he’s not sure if she’s still the woman he once loved. Or if he can trust her with his survival—and his heart.

There had to be a way out of this.

Even with her military training, a fight against someone who knew her and her background would be a lot more difficult than an altercation with a neighborhood punk. There was no way to know how many intruders were in the building or how heavily armed they were. No intel meant an unfair fight.

The beeping of the alarm gained speed. All she had to do was hang tight and stay hidden for another five minutes. The police tended to arrive quickly once the alarm notified them. After last year’s break-in and vandalism, they didn’t play when it came to this school.

“We should have waited till it was dark.” The twanging on the edges of the voice was somehow familiar. Somehow, somewhere she’d heard that voice before. Meghan dug for a memory, for a face, but came up empty save the bizarre feeling she shouldn’t be afraid.

JODIE BAILEY writes novels about freedom and the heroes who fight for it. Her novel Crossfire won a 2015 RT Reviewers’ Choice Best Love Inspired Suspense Book Award. She is convinced a camping trip to the beach with her family, a good cup of coffee and a great book can cure all ills. Jodie lives in North Carolina with her husband, her daughter and two dogs.

BREACH OF TRUST

Jodie Bailey

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.

—Isaiah 43:18–19

To my cousin Ben.

Who else?

Without your manual push mower, Tate—and this book—never would have existed.

Here it is forever in print: you were a trendsetter with penguin firefighters before they were cool.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

About the Author

Title Page

Bible Verse

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

EPILOGUE

Dear Reader

Extract

Copyright

ONE

Meghan McGuire dragged her fingers through her short dark hair and scanned the computer screen, fighting an uncharacteristic cold sweat at the message swimming in blue on the display.

It’s time for round two.

He’d returned. The short series of numbers he used as a signature followed the message, leaving no room for doubt. More than a decade of silence, enough time to stop looking over her shoulder...and still he’d returned. Here. On her last day as technology director at a tiny private school on the outskirts of Flint, Michigan.

If she’d left yesterday, her official last day... If she’d denied principal Yvonne Craft’s request to run through the system one more time... If she’d left at seven, the way she’d planned... Any of those things, and she’d be at the farmhouse, painting window casings with Phoebe instead of sitting here, her life crumbling right as she was about to step into her dreams coming true. Right as she was about to start a whole new season.

At thirty-one, she’d had plenty of those already. But when it came to this one? Aside from the day she’d joined the army, this had been the first she’d really been excited about. Working with her friend Phoebe Snyder’s charitable foundation, Meghan was putting the finishing touches on a foster home for the most desperate of lost children.

And she wasn’t going to let the past steal it. Not without a fight. Rolling her neck to the side to stretch out the tension, she reached for her backpack and an external drive. She could download an image of the system and—

A sudden series of thuds bounced along the hallway and the alarm panel by the front door started its incessant beeping, demanding someone feed it the correct code before it called the police.

“We’ve got about two minutes before the cops start this way.” The voice, coarse and unfamiliar, scraped into the office and grated against Meghan’s ears.

Her fingers tightened around the straps of the backpack. No one she knew was supposed to be in the building this late.

And no one she knew would worry about the police, either.

Meghan slipped to the closed office door and pressed her back tight against the wall to listen, recalling long-unused training to keep her breathing even. The church housing the school wasn’t in the best of neighborhoods, and they’d suffered one other break-in, when vandals nearly destroyed the school. Her car parked under the awning by the front door should have been a clue to any aspiring burglar trying for an easy score that the building was occupied.

But maybe that was the point. If they were hoping to find someone in the building...well, that was more than she wanted to think about. And she’d be sure to give them a fight they never anticipated.

It had been a long time since she’d been involved in a physical altercation, but she’d been trained well. Meghan stiffened her stance, charged by the prospect of action. Anybody who broke into this building had no idea what they were in for.

“Her car’s out front. She’s here. Find her.” The rough masculine voice echoed from the hallway. “Get her into the van. I’ll take care of the alarm.”

Meghan’s stomach tightened, and she balled her fists, automatically preparing for combat. This wasn’t a burglary. This was a targeted plan, and she was at the center of it. She should have anticipated this. If she’d been smart, she would have headed for the door the second the horrible message popped onto the screen, but she’d been too shocked he’d appeared again after this much time had passed.

There had to be a way out of this. Even with her military training, a fight against someone who knew her and her background would be a lot more difficult than an altercation with a neighborhood punk. There was no way to know how many intruders were in the building or how heavily armed they were. No intel meant an unfair fight.

The beeping of the alarm panel gained speed, demanding a code before the whole system went off. All she had to do was hang tight and stay hidden for another five minutes. The police tended to arrive quickly once the alarm notified them. After last year’s vandalism, they didn’t play when it came to this school.

“We should have waited till it was dark.” Another voice followed, deeper than the first, twanging the edges of something familiar. Somehow, somewhere she’d heard that voice before. Meghan dug for a memory, for a face, but came up empty save the bizarre feeling she shouldn’t be afraid.

A lie if her mind had ever told her one.

“If we’d waited till dark, she’d have been gone. We have one shot at this. And unless you want to be the one facing the pain if we blow this job, you’ll grab her before she figures out we’re here.” A string of curses stampeded from the hallway. “Stupid alarm. There’s no way she’s not hearing it. You go that way. And make it quick. If I don’t have the right code, we’ve got about fifteen seconds before the stinking alarm goes off and triggers the cops.”

They had the alarm code. Meghan’s muscles tightened with readiness as she searched her windowless office for a way out. Help wasn’t coming. She was on her own.

And she was defenseless. The cell phone in her hip pocket had never gotten a signal in her small office deep inside the first floor of the steel-and-concrete building. Her gun was locked in the safe at the house. She hadn’t carried a weapon for personal defense since she left the army four years ago. All she had was herself, her training and a backpack full of books and random technology. While she’d been trained well, that wouldn’t get her far against no less than two men determined to haul her out of here. Into a van.

Such a cliché.

Dropping the bag silently beside her feet, she slid closer to the door, keeping tight to the wall, listening for footsteps, watching for shadows as an early Michigan evening cast weak light into the hallway.

The alarm stopped beeping, severing any hope of the cavalry’s arrival. A small number of people were privy to the code, and none of them sounded anything like the men stalking the building now. None of them would want to shove her into a van or be worried about police presence.

She had to get out. Fast.

Meghan walked the familiar building in her memory. From the front lobby, the building branched off into three directions. From the muffled sounds of footsteps and distant murmuring, the men hadn’t headed in her direction yet, which meant she had about one minute to figure this out and save her skin. Easing around the door, she peeked into the hallway.

The front door was out. Even though it was about a hundred feet away, it was part of the central hub in the main lobby. Whoever was hunting her would have to pass it again soon, and if she got caught dead to rights in the middle of the hallway, there was nowhere to run.

She glanced left. The fire exit was half the length of the building away, opening to the back school yard and a small wooded area on the other side. If Meghan could hit the door running, she might make it to the highway on the other side of the trees before they caught her, though the blaring door alarm wouldn’t allow her much of a head start.

There was a lot of open ground to cover in the hallway, then between the building and the woods. Once she was out, the door would lock behind her. She had her keys, but unlocking the door to get back into the building would cost her valuable seconds if she burst outside into the face of a waiting kidnapper. Worst-case scenario, the exit would bring her out on the opposite side of the building from the front parking lot and, if they caught her, they’d have to drag her all the way around in full sight of anyone driving by on the busy road in front of the school.

The fire exit wasn’t perfect, but it was all she had.

Closing her eyes tight, Meghan tried to listen over the pounding in her ears. The only sounds were the thumps of doors opening and closing on the far side of the building. She exhaled and hit the hallway at a dead run, bursting through the door to the earsplitting shriek of the fire alarm.

She stumbled on her flip-flops, kicked them off and kept running over soft grass, freshly sprouted after the long winter.

A shout echoed behind her. If she could make the woods and get through to the highway, surely they’d leave her alone in such a public venue.

They had to.

Dry mulch from the nearby playground dug into her feet as she pressed faster, bruising skin accustomed to winter shoes.

Footsteps closed in behind her, and then a force caught her lower back, driving her knees into the ground, her upper body pitching forward, dirt and grass pressing into her mouth. She spit and fought the weight pinning her legs as it shifted away.

Hands grasped her arms and hauled her to her feet, turning her to face her pursuer. She hardened her gaze, determined to memorize her captor’s face. Struggling to free a fist and throw a punch, Meghan caught a good look at him and went limp, her fight dying.

Green eyes.

Familiar eyes.

The eyes of a dead man.

* * *

Tate Walker’s grip loosened, then tightened again. He scanned their target’s face, skimming familiar short dark hair and deep brown eyes that no one who saw them could ever forget. He nearly choked on nothing more than air.

Meghan McGuire was their mark? What would a hacker who was threatening national security want with her?

She jerked once, hard, breaking the connection and twisting her arm as she tried to pull away from his grasp. “You’re not real.” Her voice was raw, and although the words were low, they carried the force of a shout. “Let me go.”

He couldn’t. If he released her and she ran or, worse, stood there and vented the anger burning in her eyes, his cover would blow sky-high and they’d both be dead in the next ten seconds. Glancing over his shoulder, he figured he had about that long to explain before Isaac rushed out of the building, if the other man wasn’t watching already. “I’m under cover. Follow along.”

Her nostrils flared and she pulled again, struggling against him. Meghan had always had fight. It had made her a partner other operatives in their small specialized military unit had envied. More than once she’d been offered other teams, other assignments, but she’d always stuck close to their partnership, loyal until the day she walked away without even offering him a goodbye.

Right now, her fight was about something more than self-preservation. She had the wild-eyed, caged-animal fight of someone who thought she was losing her senses. “This isn’t real. You’re dead. Ethan told me you died. There was a funeral. Everything.” She twisted her body, trying to free herself, but her eyes stayed on his. “You’re—”

The fire door crashed open behind him, and Isaac’s shout echoed off the trees. “You got her?”

Time was up. Tate winced and fired one last plea at Meghan. “Trust me.” That was a lot to ask of any woman. Especially one who’d believed he was dead for four years.

But she had to trust him. His heart hammered. He’d had his cover compromised one other time, and it had left him close to death in a pool of his own blood under a hot Pennsylvania sun. The moment had changed everything about his life. His chest ached empty even now, his breathlessness a testament to the physical price he’d paid at the hands of a traitor.

He wouldn’t land himself there again.

After shooting a warning into Meghan’s angry and confused expression, he whipped around, keeping his grip tight and her close, tucked slightly behind him. “Yeah. I got her when she busted out the fire door. Go get the van and bring it around to the back lot.” He pointed toward the corner of the parking lot barely visible on the other side of the low brick building, praying Isaac wouldn’t decide to take issue with Tate giving orders. “It’ll keep us from dragging her out into the open by the road. Too many chances for somebody to see us if we try to take her out the front. She’s a fighter.”

Meghan pulled again, growling low. Whether she was helping to sell his story or truly trying to escape, he couldn’t take the chance and ease up. If she ran while Isaac was present, the man would shoot her before she made cover in the wood line. Isaac wasn’t a man with a whole lot of patience. Short, stocky and prematurely balding, he covered his perceived inadequacies in front of his small band of ruffians with a lot of bravado and a notoriously hot temper.

Isaac’s volatile personality was of the dozen reasons Tate didn’t look forward to the consequences of what he was about to do. On a normal day, a man like Isaac wouldn’t even make him blink. But when Tate had to keep cover and couldn’t defend himself? Things could get ugly. Fast.

Isaac hesitated, assessing the situation. He scratched the back of his head, clearly unwilling to let his prey out of his sight.

Come on. Go. Tate’s muscles tightened. He hadn’t been a member of Isaac’s ring long enough to gain the man’s full trust, and he was severely testing a fragile thread right now.

The pause felt like an eternity, but Isaac turned and tried the door.

Locked.

He tossed a disgusted smirk in Tate’s direction and took off at a slow jog around the corner of the building.

Tate nearly sagged in relief. Turning fully toward Meghan, he kept a firm hold on her wrist. After reaching under his T-shirt at his waist, he pulled his clipped holster free, holding the pistol out to her grip-first. “Take this.” He’d count it a blessing if she didn’t shoot him with his own weapon.

She stared at him in wide-eyed shock, an expression he’d never seen in all the years they’d worked side by side. Seeing him living and breathing had to make her question everything she thought she knew about reality.

He laid the holstered pistol on her palm. “Stay with me, McGuire. Just get through the next few hours and I’ll give you answers.” The ones the government hadn’t classified, anyway.

She swallowed hard, the lines around her mouth deepening. At least she was losing the panicked-deer look; her expression morphed into the concentrated stare of a warrior. This was the Meghan McGuire he knew. He’d smile if the situation weren’t so desperate. And if she wasn’t so uncharacteristically silent.

She was listening. And she hadn’t started running. Yet.

Tate fought the crazy urge to pull her into a hug before he let her go. “You have keys to the building?”

“I do.”

“Take my gun. Go inside through the fire door. Isaac will assume you’re locked out and you ran for the woods. Get in your car and get out of here. Go as far as you can. Don’t go near your apartment because there’s two more guys waiting there for you. Get out of town and don’t call the police. We can’t blow this operation wide-open yet.” This mission was too important. If their target figured out they were onto him, he’d pack his toys and vanish by nightfall. Tate was too close to shutting the door on an op they’d been running for more than two years, an op that had left several broken lives and untimely deaths behind it.

He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and slipped it into hers. “Don’t answer it, no matter what. I don’t care what number comes across. I don’t care what text messages you see. Do not answer. But don’t lose it and don’t turn it off. I’ll find you.”

“Stop talking to me as though I’ve never done this before.” The words were coated with sass thick enough to choke them both.

Ah. There was the blowback he’d expected. He grinned in spite of himself. “Then stop looking at me as though you’ve never done this before.”

She drew her eyebrows together, pulling her keys from her pocket and stepping around him, prepared to make a run for the building. “You have so much talking to do, you’re going to be hoarse by the time you’re done.”

Tate grabbed her elbow and glanced over his shoulder. “I promise I’ll find you and explain later. Right now I need you to...” He was fully, painfully aware what he was about to ask of the woman he’d trained himself. “Hit me. Pretend you hate me.”

If the silent anger she fired at him was any indication, this might be the worst punch he ever took.

Meghan pulled in a deep breath, her posture easing into the one that knew this business was life or death.

The part of her that knew Tate was a dead man if they couldn’t sell her escape.

TWO

Tate Walker was alive. And Meghan couldn’t decide whether she hated him or loved him for it.

As directed, Meghan had avoided her apartment and run here, to the house owned by the Snyder Foundation, the one place that couldn’t be connected to her. She paced the length of the darkened living room, the old hardwood creaking beneath her feet. The midnight wind sang through the trees, ruffling new leaves and brushing branches against the old white farmhouse. Normally, the solitary sounds of the house settling for the night brought comfort. This place had a story, and though Meghan had no idea what it was, she’d love to find out. With the age on the little farm nestled in the midst of the woods, there was no telling what it had seen.

She might not know the past, but she knew what it would see in the near future. Hope. A place where kids beaten down the way she had been could find refuge and acceptance. The bouncing from foster home to foster home would end at this front door. There would be love here, love that defied thievery or deception, that carried on no matter what mistakes the kids made or what they felt they needed to do to get attention.

But it wouldn’t happen if Meghan couldn’t keep herself out of trouble long enough to finish the renovations. Her past had come for her, and no one would want a woman with a target on her back working with troubled children.

At the window by the front door, Meghan lifted a slat on the plantation blinds and peeked through, hoping to see headlights but finding only moonlit shadows.

She should have stood her ground against Isaac, should have stayed with Tate to have his back if things went south. You didn’t abandon your partner. By following Tate’s directive and fleeing instead of staying behind to see what happened, she’d certainly abandoned him.

Except he was no longer her partner. And standing her ground would have probably gotten them both killed, especially with her edge worn off by his reappearance.

Hard as it was, taking refuge was the right course of action. Meghan slipped the phone from her pocket and slid her thumb across the screen, concrete proof his appearance wasn’t the product of an overactive imagination. From her time chasing cybercriminals in their small clandestine army unit, she had no doubt the tech in the device could track her to the nearest meter. So where was he? She’d failed him once and believed her failure had left him dead. If her pseudoescape today had cost him his life...

Unfamiliar nausea swirled, and she dropped the slat, dragging a finger along the grip of the revolver holstered at her hip, refusing to think anymore. To keep from being traced, she’d pulled the battery from her cell phone and locked it with Tate’s gun in the small safe in what would be her bedroom when the house was finished. She’d pulled out her own weapon, wanting the familiar heft of her Ruger. The revolver was on her at all times when she worked on the property, but it was usually to make her feel better about the remote possibility of coming across a snake.

Her skin tightened. Kidnappers, she could handle. Snakes? They were the one foe she feared.

Headlights danced across the front windows, and Meghan laid her hand on the pistol, heart revving, ready for confrontation. If this wasn’t Tate, things were about to get real ugly, real fast.

The headlights flickered three times, paused, then flashed twice more.

Tate.

It was an old signal they’d worked out years ago, one she’d thought she’d never see again. One she’d longed for in the darkness many nights, wishing he were still alive.

Never dreaming he actually was.

She loosened her hold on the pistol and cracked the door open, stepping onto the wide wraparound porch. The diesel on the old pickup rattled as Tate killed the engine; then he climbed out, his figure in the moonlight a silhouette against the trees.