“Someone as beautiful as you shouldn’t be eating that piss-poor excuse for dinner.”
The words registered, and Olivia turned to find a pair of blue eyes staring her way. The guy was twenty-five, tops. The sunburn on his face and the way he wasn’t completely steady on his feet suggested he’d been out day drinking and continued the party into the night. His eyelids closed halfway and had a hard time opening back up.
The man wasn’t interesting enough to even respond to.
Olivia turned away from the refrigerator and toward the checkout.
“Wow, not even a hello?”
She kept her eyes forward and didn’t look back.
He was still behind her when she set her stuff on the counter.
Her neck tingled, and she looked toward the open doors.
“Is this all?” the clerk asked her.
She offered a tired smile and one quick nod. From her back pocket she removed a twenty-dollar bill and handed it over. All the while the hair on her arms stood up. Much as she wanted to look behind her, she didn’t.
She accepted the plastic bag and her change and started toward the door.
The man who’d been watching let out a low whistle.
Let it go, Olivia.
She made it a block outside the store when the chill on her neck made her stop and turn around.
Her spidey sense ratcheted up another ten notches when she didn’t see the object that was watching her.
The streets were loud, with people everywhere and cars cruising the Strip, music blaring into the southwestern air.
Her intention was to zigzag back to her hotel so long as the neck tingling went away.
With a twist of her heel, she turned around and stopped dead in her tracks.
Leo stood two feet away, eyes glued to her.
“We meet again,” he said, his voice calm and even.
She paused . . . shocked to see him. “Are you following me?”
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and then he opened his mouth and lied. “No.” The corners of his mouth lifted, and a smile that could only be described as flirtatious manifested on his face.
This was not happening. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?” she asked him, knowing damn well he did.
Her question pulled some of the tension out of his shoulders. “As a matter of fact, I do.”
She looked him dead in the eye. “So, go there.”
He paused, let that flirty smile expand. “What’s your name?”
A car horn sounded from the street.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” The man was trying to pick her up.
He cocked his head to the side. “You’re beautiful, you’re not wearing a ring . . .” He shrugged. “What’s your name?”
For a moment she stood in shock. In her line of work, she didn’t believe in coincidences. So what were the chances of Grant not knowing whom he was talking to?
Considering she’d sniffed out his earlier lie, and the one he just delivered by saying he hadn’t been following her . . . no, Leo Grant wasn’t that great of an actor, even if she knew he was capable of taking on the persona of someone he wasn’t. Undercover federal agents had a knack for things like that.
In an attempt to deliver the same message to him as she did to the guy in the convenience store, she shook her head and walked past him.
He followed. “Wait.”
She stopped, did a quick pivot, causing him to step into her personal space. “Go away!”
“You don’t mean that. I see something in your eyes . . .”
“You see me being . . .”
Car horns blared.
Olivia shifted her gaze from Leo to the street.
In an instant, she saw the barrel of a gun pointing out of a car, the face behind it.
“Get down!” she yelled.
Everything happened all at once.
Surprise on Leo’s face as she dropped her bag and lunged for him.
Her knees buckling as she attempted to become a smaller target.
And a flash of light from the tip of a gun that fired without a sound.
CHAPTER THREE
One minute she was growling at him, the next she was grabbing his arm, and they were both down on the dirty sidewalk of the Las Vegas Strip.
He heard a horn blaring and tires screeching.
Leo rolled over to see the taillights of a car speeding off and around the corner.
“What the hell?”
Then someone screamed, pulling Leo’s attention to the woman at his side.
She was still.
Too still.
The small jacket she was wearing had moved enough for him to see blood coming from the left side of her chest.
Adrenaline surged and he pushed himself up to hover over her.
“Hey,” he said, gently touching to see if she would open her eyes.
Nothing.
He leaned down, put his ear to her lips.
The air on his face said she was alive.
Leo reached for his phone and dialed 911 as the crowd surrounded them.
He took the liberty of lifting her jacket to see if there were any other holes in her and then did a scan of her body with his eyes and fingertips as the phone rang and rang.
“Come on, damn it. Answer the phone.”
Not finding more, he moved to her shoulder. He wanted to turn her over, see if there was an exit wound, but she was out cold, and moving her wasn’t an option.
“911, what’s your emergency?”
“Special Agent Leo Grant. I need an ambulance. Single gunshot wound to the chest, female, approximately thirty years old.” He looked up. “We’re in front of the Venetian on the sidewalk.”
“Is the victim breathing?”
“Yes, but unconscious. Hurry.”
His breath came in short, fast pants. What the hell had happened?
A drive-by, of course, but who? She must have seen the gun and reacted. If she hadn’t, he’d likely be the one on the ground and not her.
Security guards from the Venetian showed up first. Then a local black-and-white.
Between them, the crowd was pushed back to keep Leo and the woman from being stepped on.
Leo disconnected from the 911 operator and stared down at the woman who’d taken a bullet aimed at him. All because he found her attractive and intriguing and wanted to know who she was.
He’d hung around the Wynn for more than two hours, watching those coming and going in an attempt to find who it was that had generated the call from Claire.
“You’re following Navi at the hotel,” she’d told him once he’d picked up the phone the second he left the restaurant.
“Do you have a bug on me?”
“No. We have one on him. And you’re messing up our intel.”
“You know that’s not your job here.”
Claire worked for a security detail that had been essential in flushing out Mykonos and all the sordid details of Marie Nickerson’s case. And while they weren’t the ones protecting the woman at the moment, he knew Claire’s team was just as invested in seeing Mykonos locked away. So having Claire call him wasn’t as much of a surprise as it would have been in any other case.
“I’m a private investigator, licensed in the state of Nevada,” she reminded him. “Navi knows who you are, but not who we have on him. So get out of there.”
“I liked it better when you were the student and I was the teacher telling you what to do.” When he met Claire, he was undercover as a high school teacher and she was in his class.