The Blonde Identity: A Novel

The first thing Sawyer thought when he opened his eyes was that he must be dead. It was far more likely than the alternative: that he had slept. That he had slept but hadn’t dreamed.

“Good morning.”

At the sound of the voice, he rolled and reached for his gun—was just starting to aim it when he felt cold air on his bare chest and remembered the room and the night and the woman who was dancing around the cabin’s kitchen, humming over the sound of frying food.

Zoe. Kitchen. Zoe. Humming. Zoe. Bathroom. Zoe. Bacon?

He uncocked his gun and rubbed his tired eyes. “What time is it?”

“Almost ten.” She glanced over her shoulder. “I must have made you sleepy.”

She looked sheepish. She might have blushed. But all Sawyer could think was no, you made me forget. And then he almost said exactly that because, evidently, sleep didn’t make him sharper. It made him sluggish and slow and sentimental—the three S’s that would probably get him killed.

When she cracked an egg in the pan, he heard the sizzle and his mouth began to water. “Breakfast is almost ready,” she called, so Sawyer pulled on his jeans and padded toward her in his bare feet, synapses starting to fire . . . slowly.

Something was wrong with that picture. His father’s cabin smelled like bacon and fresh coffee, and there was a woman dancing, humming . . . caring for him there. No one had cared for Sawyer in so long that it took his sleep-addled brain a little too long to realize—

Zoe. The cabin. Fresh food.

“Where did you get all this?” he asked, already terrified the answer would be—

“There’s a town.”

He was going to kill her. Strangle her. Tie her up and . . . tickle her? Or something. Possibly a whole lot of something depending on how the first part went. “Damn it, Zoe. You can’t just go off on your own, looking like—”

“A rogue spy on the run?” She gave a long-suffering look over her shoulder and shrugged—actually shrugged! Like he was overreacting. Him. The man who (not to belabor the point) had killed an assassin with a negligee!

She slid two eggs onto a plate then added bacon and licked her fingers and, so help him, his anger faded into a much more dangerous emotion as thoughts of last night drifted through his head.

Zoe appearing at the edge of the steam-filled room.

Zoe perched on the bathroom counter.

Zoe crying out his name.

Zoe.

Zoe.

Zoe.

But the little vixen had the audacity to say, “Trust me, no one was looking at my face.”

“You can’t possibly know . . .” he started but trailed off as she turned.

At first, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing because she was still Zoe in the morning light. Same honey-colored hair. Same mischievous smile. Same green eyes. But then his gaze slid down her body to her very large, very round, very . . . pregnant belly?

“See? No one was looking at me and thinking Ooh! There goes the most lethal woman in Europe!”

It was true, he would have admitted if his brain hadn’t been full of other, far more primitive thoughts. Like yes. And this. And mine.

And Sawyer actually felt his world tilt. He might have staggered. Because the sight of Zoe in the cabin. The thought of Zoe and his child. The very idea . . . It was ludicrous and dangerous and vicious—the way it bore right into his gut. It was salt in a wound he didn’t even know he had as he stood there, inches away from all the things he never knew he wanted and just realized he couldn’t have.

But what if he could?

No. Sawyer needed his sharpest knife. He had to cut that thought out before it spread.

“Go ahead. Say it.” She took a bite of bacon and pulled the pillow out from beneath her shirt. “I’m so good at undercovering!”

But Sawyer didn’t say a single thing. He just ate his breakfast and ignored the feelings that were pinging around inside of him because who needs feelings anyway?

Three minutes later he was on his second egg and contemplating another when something occurred to him. “Hey, maybe you’re a chef.”

He waited for her to say that she was no doubt the heiress to a bacon empire, that maybe she had invented toaster strudel—that she was obviously the next Julia Child and spent her days encrypting classified messages into recipes for pound cake, but Zoe stayed quiet. And if Sawyer had learned anything, it was that a quiet Zoe was very, very scary.

“What’s wrong?”

She looked almost nervous as she glanced at him over the rim of her coffee cup. “I was thinking about our trip to the bank today.”

“No. I’m going to the bank today,” he said emphatically but the look in her eyes told him he was in for a fight. He was going to need both knives and at least one gun and maybe another negligee.

“No. We’re going to the bank.”

“I’m not putting you in danger.” He grabbed the last of the bacon just for spite, but she snatched it back and crammed it in her mouth all at once.

“I’m always in danger!”

“Of choking.”

She swallowed hard and looked like she didn’t know whether to argue or kiss him—to scream or to cry. So she looked down at her hands instead. “I’ll always be in danger until we get that drive.”

Her eyes were so big and her voice was so fragile that he thought the words might break him. So he tugged until she was perched on his knee, until she was back in his arms, and he didn’t let himself think about how right she felt there.

“Hey. Listen to me, you’ve done great. Really. Even . . . this”—he pointed to her massive T-shirt and the pillow—“is genius. But you can’t just break into one of the most secure banks in the world with a pillow up your shirt.”

Sawyer expected her to argue or complain, stamp her foot or maybe even kiss him again as a distraction, but Zoe just sat there, looking at him like maybe he’d lost twenty IQ points overnight—and maybe he had—because he was in no way prepared to hear her say, “Who said anything about breaking in?”

“Zoe—”

“I mean . . . I already got the stuff.”

Sawyer felt his blood go cold. “What . . .” That’s when he noticed the pile: scissors and makeup and clothes. A platinum blonde wig. And cherry-flavored Kool-Aid.

“Kool-Aid?”

“We’re gonna have to dye the wig.”

“Well, I like the idea of a disguise, but that will just make you look even more like . . .” And then he remembered . . . “No!” But she was giving him that jaunty look, the one that said this was all a game and she was winning. She was wrong. She didn’t even know how wrong she was.

“Of course I look like Alex no matter what, but Kozlov’s guys knew she was on the run, so they were probably expecting her to change her appearance. The people at the bank won’t be, so it’s probably better for me to match her style as closely as—”

“No! I thought we agreed—”

“We can’t go to the bank and not check out the box, and the easiest way into that box is for me to be Alex. You know that.”

He had known that—back before he’d known her. Back before he’d cared for her. Back before—

“No! I’m telling you . . . Kozlov is going to have men all over that bank, and if Kozlov is there, the CIA will be there. And Interpol. And MI6.”

“And Mossad,” she added helpfully. “Don’t forget about Mossad.”

“Oh.” He huffed out a dry laugh. “Lady, I never forget about Mossad. And that’s why the answer is no.”

“But . . .” She trailed off, something in her eyes as she looked at him, calculating. Worrying. Wondering. “This is about last night, isn’t it?” He hated how small her voice sounded, how fragile and frail she seemed.

“No,” he said at the same time his gut screamed Yes.

“Because it doesn’t change anything,” she said, and he felt his heart change rhythms.

“It doesn’t?”

“Of course not.” She bristled and crawled from his lap, and all Sawyer wanted to do was pull her back. “I know what last night was.”

“What was it?” Suddenly, it wasn’t a hypothetical or a theoretical. It wasn’t any kind of . . . ethical. He needed to know . . . Except he really, really didn’t. Because putting it into words—making it black and white—was absolutely terrifying for someone whose life had always been gray.

“It was a danger bang.”

At first, he was certain he’d misheard her. “A what?”

“A danger bang. In the immortal words of Keanu Reeves, relationships that begin under extreme stress—”

“Are you quoting Speed right now?”

“—are doomed to fail. Last night was a whole bunch of adrenaline and dopamine and about a million other chemicals in our bodies getting all mixed up and going bang. That’s what last night was.” But she couldn’t face him when she said, “Right?”

He wanted to tell her she was wrong. He wanted to set her up on that table and prove it to her again. He briefly revisited the tying-her-up option because that seemed pretty useful on a number of levels, but she was looking at him like it was just that simple.

Like that was all it had been . . . for her.

Sawyer knew how to protect himself. What to guard and where to shield and all the little ways to keep from bleeding out. But right then . . . He’d never felt more vulnerable in his life.

“Okay.” He stood. “Fine. But you’re still not going to the bank.”

“You said—”

“I said we’d check it out. That means recon, maybe a good old-fashioned stakeout.”

“But—”

“They want to kill you!” The words were already echoing off the high ceiling and frosty glass. “What about that do you not get? They want you dead. They want Alex dead. If anything happened to you . . . If you think I’m letting you walk into a place they are absolutely watching, then—”

“How do you know they’ll be watching the bank?” she shot back. “Did you know Alex had a box there? Heck, do we know Alex has a box there? For all we know, that could be where I store my first edition Pride and Prejudice or my collection of autographed baseball cards or the top secret potion I’ve been making in my lab because I’m the world’s foremost love scientist.”

“Love scientist?” He really hated how much he wanted to laugh.

“How do you know? Tell me.”

It shouldn’t have been so hard to say, “I didn’t know Alex had a box there. No. But—”

“Then they probably don’t know either!”

Sawyer couldn’t look at her smirking mouth without wanting to kiss it. “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.” He glanced down at the clothes on the table. “Where did you get black leather pants? Correction. Why did you get black leather—”

“I’m trying to look like a spy.”

“Spies don’t actually . . .” But he trailed off and shook his head. “You know what, never mind.”

He dropped into a chair. Sure, he’d had more consecutive hours of sleep in the past day than he’d had in the past year, but he was the kind of tired that sleep itself wouldn’t fix. And Zoe was too. He could see it in her eyes and the set of her shoulders, in the way she had picked at her fingernail until it was red and sore.

“I have to do this. Don’t you see? If the world is trying to kill me because they think I’m Alex, then, narratively speaking—”

“That’s not a real thing—”

“—the only way out is for me to be Alex.”

She couldn’t have been more serious. And, worse, a part of him was terrified she was also right. “How are you supposed to be a sister you don’t even remember?”

“Easy. You’re going to teach me.”