Betrayed by a Kiss by Kris Rafferty

can stop now. The more butterfly bandages I use, the smaller the scar.” She had long, delicate fingers. Piano fingers, his wife used to say. Alice and his daughter played, took lessons. Before.
    She was still opening more bandages. It was a scratch, for shit’s sake. Why was she making such a big deal of it? He felt ungrateful and defensive, but he needed her to back off. She was too close. “A man could die of blood loss waiting for you to fix him.”
    “It would take more than a few bandages to fix what’s wrong with you.” She pressed a little harder than necessary against the last bandage. “There.” He winced. “I’m done.”
    She grabbed more from the kit, lifted his borrowed T-shirt, and gave him a front-row seat to her injury—three inches long and a half-inch wide—and her slim waist. She was more muscular than he’d expected. It explained why someone who looked so frail had the constitution of the Energizer Bunny. She pulled the two sides of the seeping wound together, taped it shut with three bandages, and then pressed her hand over it.
    “Tell me about the files,” he said.
    Marnie sighed. “Okay. I guess the honeymoon is over.”
    “Honeymoon?” There it was again. That visceral attraction that flared at the least provocation. It linked them whenever their gazes met, and a sort of sizzle happened in the air when she was close. He didn’t trust it. Wouldn’t. But he wanted to. Whatever she had to say next would probably decide whether or not he decided to bring her to the safe house. His family had to come first. He’d make sure Marnie Somerville remained safe, but he had enough connections to do that without bringing her into his tight circle of trusted people. “Stop messing with my mind and spill your guts, please.”
    She smiled, and he liked it.

Chapter Five
    Marnie sat stiffly, trying to ignore her discomfort, her injury and being soaked to the bone. “I found notations in your records that indicated addendums were in Ian Whitman’s personal, encrypted network. They were pertinent to a line of query I was pursuing, but no one gets to see those files. Whitman’s network is off-limits for a reason, and employees know better than to ask. But I wanted in, so I broke in.”
    Her arrogance surprised him a bit. “Rules aren’t meant for you?”
    “I wanted to see the addendums.”
    “Why bother?”
    “What?” It was as if she couldn’t fathom his point.
    She’d committed a felony because she had questions about an addendum to his records. Her job was to tail him, get dirt on him. Addendums indicated information already discovered and logged. “You didn’t know WE was dirty. What information could have motivated you to risk your job and commit a crime against a cybertech company that specializes in security?” She squirmed in her seat, and he thought she wasn’t going to answer. “What was in the addendum? The secret to world peace?” He checked the rearview. If a car was tailing him, he couldn’t tell. There were three directly behind them and one in the distance. He’d hit I-93 south soon and was running out of time to make a decision. Could he trust her near his family, or did he need to drop her off at the nearest police station?
    “There were rumors you and your wife were estranged.” She glanced at him. “Were you?”
    He didn’t see the connection. “How could that information help you?”
    “Were you?”
    “Yes. If she hadn’t been killed, we would probably have gotten a divorce. She hadn’t been happy for a while.”
    “She cheated on you?”
    “Do you know something I don’t?” He wouldn’t be surprised. Any hurt that news might have imparted was dwarfed by her murder. He’d prefer Alice cheating with a hundred guys and alive than her chaste and dead. If only for Elizabeth’s sake.
    “I was trying to find out.” She said it so matter-of-factly. Something that had torn into him since before Alice’s death was a piece of trivia in a file somewhere,