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call.”
    She disconnected and shoved the phone back in her pocket. “Must run,” she told the Secret Service agent. “Thanks a bunch for your help.”
    As she hurried off the back porch and into the shadows of the yard, she prayed a gun-happy FBI agent didn’t shoot her and a pissed-off Michael Stone didn’t catch her.

Chapter Three
    Arlington , an hour later
    The bed jiggled and Conrad Flynn slit one eye open to watch the half-naked woman and love of his life slip out from under the sheets. In the pale moonlit room, he watched her long brown hair slide across the pale skin of her shoulders as she crept, silent as death, across the carpeting to the spot where the jeans he’d peeled off her earlier lay in a heap.
    Lying on his stomach, he kept his face partially buried in the pillow and feigned sleep as she tiptoed past his side of the bed on her way out of the room. Wherever Julia was going, he didn’t want to stop her. Nor did he want her to know he knew she was sneaking out again.
    Several times in the past week, his wife had risen in the early hours of the morning and left their apartment. For what purpose he didn’t know, but his gut tightened every time he thought about the possibilities. As an FBI agent, she worked many assignments. Was this an undercover job she couldn’t share details about? Was her life in danger?
    Even though she was experienced and more than capable of handling anything the FBI threw at her, he still worried about her every time she put on her navy blue jacket and went to work.
    Her training was impeccable. Under his tutelage, he’d taken her through the CIA’s Farm and then through his own brand of spy craft. As a rookie Feebie, she’d spent hundreds of hours at the gun range and in hand-to-hand combat. Add to that her calculating mind and quick reflexes and she was a priceless weapon no matter whom she worked for.
    But beyond all her training and experience in and out of the field, Julia’s gut instincts were spot on every time. Like she had a sixth sense about danger, she knew when to take one more risk or pull out of the game. If only she still called Langley home. What he wouldn’t do to have her under him in his group of super agents as well as in his bed.
    Conrad had been promoted—if you called leaving the field of operations behind for a desk job at CIA headquarters a promotion—when he’d faked his death to flush out a mole in the organization with his best friends, Smitty and Ace. Julia had been there too, working beside him but not fully trusting his actions or his words until the end. Riding the high of his success, however, he’d whisked her away to an island and proposed marriage. She’d accepted.
    What once he feared would be a living hell, marriage had actually been more like heaven. Because I married Julia . She made my dreams come true .
    He knew her like he knew the internal components of his gun, and just like the Beretta fit in his hand, Julia fit in his heart.
    But for the past week, it felt like he’d married a stranger. She was hiding something. Something big. Her focus was off and she’d been riding a rollercoaster of moods. One minute she was laughing at Conrad’s teasing, the next she was slamming doors because he’d left the toilet seat up and changed the station settings on the kitchen radio.
    A soft rustle whispered from the kitchen. Julia was putting on her FBI windbreaker. If she followed her normal pattern, she’d be back in the apartment by dawn, humming in the kitchen as she boiled eggs and toasted bagels for breakfast. Her face would light up when he joined her at the sink, as if she truly loved him. As if he were the Prince Charming of her Happily Ever After, even if she wanted to kill him for leaving the toilet seat up again. Conrad knew it was too good to be true. Nobody in his world ever got the happily ever after, but somehow he’d scored the lottery in that department.
    He’d almost stopped her and demanded an explanation for her