She hesitated, her lips thinning, but she agreed. “Fine. Yes. I’ll tell you. It wasn’t hard. The drug I used makes you pass out within ten minutes of contact with the skin.”

Holy hell. Blake didn’t even want to think about how dangerous that could be in the wrong hands. His simple mission to kill Alvarez had just gotten as complicated as reading a map after a bottle of bourbon. “What drug?” he demanded tightly. “I need a name.”

“I don’t know the name.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Right. We have trust issues. You’ve told me.”

His jaw tightened. “Start with how and when you used it on me.”

“It comes in thin white strips. You can rub them on any surface of an object or directly on the skin. Once a person touches it, the drug absorbs into the blood stream. So…you see. I was telling the truth before. I didn’t have to stay with you that night in Denver. I could have placed the drug on the folder and left right after I got to your room.”

Their eyes locked and held, the air crackling with electricity. Blake let this fears over this new drug slide away, his need to know where she was going with this suddenly all that mattered. “And yet you didn’t leave.”

“No,” she said softly. “I stayed.”

“Why, Kara? Why did you choose to stay with me?”

Chapter Nine

CHAPTER

NINE

Why?

Blake’s question hung in the air and Kara didn’t know the answer. Why hadn’t she left that Denver hotel room without sleeping with him? She’d contemplated that question over and over in the past week, unable to stop thinking about him. She didn’t have an answer besides that she’d been feeling alone, as if the world was on her shoulders. She was alone. No one was helping her. Whatever she made happen, she made happen. And in his eyes, she’d seen pain and torment so like what she felt, that she had actually believed, if only for one night, they might just save each other. And they had, or he had her. He’d taken her away, made her feel whole again in a way no stranger should be able to. She’d needed it and him.

“Kara,” Blake prodded.

Her gaze snapped back to his, from the floor where it had settled. “I stayed with you and I didn’t have to. It’s the only answer I have. I just…I don’t want you thinking I slept with you to get that file. And I didn’t want to drug you. I struggled to go through with it.”

“But you did,” he observed again, but his eyes were softer now, his voice gentler.