Safe in His Arms by Renee Rose

was nothing more than a glorified stalker—a man who looked into their lives like a peeping Tom, who had made them into something significant to fill the emptiness of his own pale existence. A ghost.
    She spent a long, miserable day cooped up in the apartment with Parker, and was relieved to call it bedtime at 9 pm. Just as she plugged her cell phone into the charger, it buzzed with a text message.
     
    I’m sorry. I will always love you. Do not reply.
     
    Do not reply. Damn him! Hot tears burned her eyes. She hadn’t gone there. She’d made it through the entire day without pretending anything they’d had had been real. And now he’d sent her a stupid text saying he loved her. A sob escaped her lips. No. You cannot love a man you do not know. You cannot love a man you do not trust, who is not even a real man. You cannot love a man you can never see again.
    Wiping her tears, she sniffed and quoted the Bard out loud, “Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more, Men were deceivers ever, One foot in sea and one on shore, To one thing constant never.”
     
    * * *
     
    “Anything to drink, sir?” the flight attendant asked, smiling and moving along when he shook his head.First class to Paris under the alias Zack Moore, a business development manager for a tech company, he read all the background material for his mission. He was headed to Helsinki to investigate the disappearance of a key alternative power scientist. The chat box launched on his screen with a message from Beatty.
    Stinger: Civilians deposited safely. You’re off their surveillance, permanently.
    He popped his cursor in his chat box.
    Ghost: Negative. Sir.
    As if adding the “sir” would soften his insubordination. Beatty would probably read it as sarcastic, anyway.
    Stinger: You are already skating on thin ice with me.
    Ghost: They are my responsibility. Taking me off detail will not stop my watch. Don’t force me underground.
    He could almost feel Beatty’s beady stare as his boss considered the complexities of the situation. He was 60% sure Beatty would throw him a pass on this. Zac was a top performer, with clean, successful missions. He had overthrown regimes, rescued hostages, eliminated undesirables, and transported the most sensitive data. He knew enough of his country’s secrets to make him extremely dangerous if his loyalties were ever bought or swayed. If Beatty forced him to break with the organization, Zac would go on their hit list. Agents in his position generally only left the organization as an unnamed body in a box.
    Stinger: I want your mind on your mission.
    He’d conceded. He didn’t think Beatty would be ready to cut him loose over this.
    Ghost: It will be, sir.
    The chat screen disappeared and Zac sat back, exhaling a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.
    He hit an icon and the security cams in Becca’s apartment came up. She and Parker were both where they should be—Parker sleeping in his bed, Becca sitting on hers with her laptop. He relaxed at the sight of them, though he’d been 99% sure Beatty wouldn’t harm them, he never trusted anyone completely. He hit a different icon to see what Becca was reading. Domestic discipline blogs, her nightly routine. She only lurked, never commented, so he couldn’t tell what she really thought about them. Did she want a domestic discipline relationship? Or was she just turned on because they described spankings? This was the missing piece of the puzzle he’d made out of analyzing Becca’s life. He knew his obsessive surveillance of her bordered on unhealthy, not to mention immoral, although working for Black Ops had taught him moral flexibility. Still, she and Parker were an anchor to him, helping him remember what it is to be human.
    He opened his browser and pulled up the banking information from one of his off-shore accounts. Punching in the numbers, he set up a series of transfers to cloak a trail to Becca’s account and hit “complete action.”
    One hundred thousand