5
Two weeks later
FBI Resident Agency Office
Asheville, North Carolina
The musclesin Olivia Westcott’s neck and shoulders were so taut that if someone had hailed her from behind, she would have had to turn her whole body to acknowledge them.
Thanks to an accident on I-240, her annoying ten minutes late had turned into WTF Westcott? late.
Maybe she’d get lucky and Mitch would be in a meeting and have no idea what time she had arrived. She tried to tiptoe past her SRA’s office and would have succeeded if Peppy Patsy hadn’t zipped by her at that precise moment.
“Morning, Olivia.” Patsy tapped her own earlobe. “Love your earrings. They go great with that top.” She kept walking at the speed of a Maserati. “I put the information you were looking for yesterday on your desk.”
“Thanks, Patsy,” Liv said through clenched teeth.
“Westcott,” Senior Resident Agent Mitch Lawson called from inside his office.
Closing her eyes briefly, she drew in a bracing breath before pivoting toward his open door. “Sorry, sir. I—”
“Save it. Get your pretty earrings in here.”
Rather than pounding away at his keyboard, Mitch was standing. His blond head angled down, searching for something amongst the mounds of case files on his desk. Already, he’d rolled up the sleeves of his white dress shirt and loosened his blue, white, and black striped tie. In the two years she’d worked under his supervision, she had never beaten him to work. Callie teased her about never leaving work. Liv wondered if Mitch ever actually went home.
Setting her heavy handbag just inside his door, she paused by the pair of chairs facing his desk, clasped her hands together, and waited.
“I had hoped to brief you on this yesterday, but you’d left by the time my meeting ended.”
He made it sound like she’d slinked out of the building early, when in fact she hadn’t packed up her things until after six-thirty. Given he was already irritated with her, she kept this bit of clarification behind her teeth.
Lifting his attention from his desk, he looked at her in that familiar, unnerving way of his. Part indifferent, part exasperated, part something that shouldn’t arise in a supervisor’s gaze. She hoped for both their sakes that he never let go of the tight hold he kept on whatever was brewing behind those green eyes.
“Anything you need to tell me, Olivia?”
“A transportation issue at home, sir. It won’t happen again.”
“Since when did your son start driving?”
Her clasped fingers strangled each other. “My sister Callie is living with me at the moment. Her car is at the shop.”
“I suggest she get a rental or Uber tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir.”
He handed her a thick file folder. “Go drop off your belongings and meet us in the conference room.”
Her heart skipped a beat. “Us?”
“That’s all.”
As punishments went, it was effective. She turned to leave with her proverbial tail between her legs. When she bent down to grab her bag, he said, “Special Agent Westcott.”
Shit. He really was pissed to use her title like that. She met his gaze.
“Not a word in the meeting. You’re there to observe.”
A ball of dread dropped into her stomach. Unlike other times when she’d been asked to sit in on meetings for informational purposes, this one felt different. Something in his eyes told her she wouldn’t like what she was about to hear. “Yes, sir.”