Page 25 of What Started In Deception

He shook his head. “Not really. Agents go where they’re needed and assigned. I’ve been lucky to get big cities both times.”

“What’s it like to work on bank robberies?”

“It can be intense, especially when you know that they’re patterned and violent, and it’s only a matter of time before the unsub strikes again.”

She shook her head. “Unsub?”

“Unknown subject. Sometimes it’s more than one.”

“Got it.”

“I don’t know if you remember that string of robberies a couple of years back on the west side of DC…”

She nodded, pausing to look at him as she finished the last mushroom. “That was horrible. Those poor tellers who got killed.”

He nodded this time as he turned on the front left burner, then added a splash of oil to the pan. “It was pretty bad. I was lucky to be on the task force that brought those fuckers down.”

She made quick work of cutting up the onion, combining the slices with the mushrooms in a bowl. “How did you get involved with the undercover stuff?”

He grabbed the bowl, dumping the onions and mushrooms in, listening to them sizzle. “Some of the agents I worked with out in LA and up in DC did the undercover ops for the task forces I worked on. It seemed interesting, so I volunteered.”

“Huh,” she said again, leaning her hip against the counter, now that the prep work was done. “You mentioned at lunch that you went to undercover school. Do they teach you how to act and stuff?”

He grinned as he added the peppers to the pan, then twisted the salt and pepper grinders several times. “Not quite. I spent a few weeks back at Quantico unlearning how to act like an FBI agent.”

She frowned. “What does that mean?”

“Criminals can spot a cop a mile away. I needed to remember how not to look like one. The way we scan rooms and carry ourselves. Stuff like that.”

“Oh.” She moved to put the cutting board in the sink. “What kind of undercover stuff have you done? If you’re allowed to tell me.”

He nodded. “I’ve done some murders for hire and gone under for a few of our bigger drug operations.”

She paused with her hand on the faucet. “Murder for hire? Like a hitman?”

He stirred the vegetables before he looked at her. “Yeah.”

Her eyes grew wide. “You pretend you’re going to kill people?”

He nodded. “I wear a wire while someone tells me how they want the murder to go down. Once I have what we need, the team arrests them.”

She stared at him—more like scrutinized him—as she frowned. “You don’t look like a hitman.”

“What does a hitman look like?”

She shook her head as she shrugged. “I don’t know. Uglier and much more violent, I guess.”

He laughed, thoroughly enjoying their conversation, not minding it at all that she had a million questions as they tried to figure each other out. “I let myself get pretty scruffy, and I wear different clothes. My black leather jacket makes me look pretty tough.”

“Interesting,” she said as she turned on the water and wiped down the counter. “So, you spend a lot of your time pretending to be someone you’re not.”

He shrugged. “I spend my time being who I need to be to get the information that I’m looking for. Going undercover is a fact-finding mission.”

“What if there aren’t any facts to find? Like in my family’s case?”

He raised his brow at her.

She raised hers back. The challenge was there in her eyes for him to see. There was definitely a sassy side under her sweetness.