Page 17 of The Agent’s Curvy Seduction

I hadn't thought about that conversation in months. I'd chalked it up to him being sentimental, missing my mom's mother, who'd passed the book down to her. It hadn't meant anything.

I run my thumb along the spine now, and that's when I notice it.

The leather along the spine is slightly raised in one spot, a seam that doesn't quite match the wear pattern of the rest of the binding. I press my thumb against it. It gives slightly, like something underneath has been pried loose and pushed back into place.

My stomach drops.

I carry the book downstairs so fast I nearly trip on the last step.

"Hudson."

He's just coming in from outside, sleeves rolled up, a light sheen of sweat on his forearms from the axe. He takes one look at my face and drops whatever he was about to say.

"What's wrong?"

I set the recipe book on the counter and point to the spine. "This has been opened. Somebody took this apart and put it back together."

He's beside me in two steps, all business now, examining the seam with the same focus I've seen him use scanning a tree line. He runs his fingers along it exactly like I did, feeling the give.

"Get me a knife," he says. "Small one. Paring knife."

My hands shake as I hand it to him. He works the blade carefully along the seam, patient in a way that doesn't match the tension radiating off him, and slowly peels back the leather binding.

Something small and dark falls onto the counter.

A microdrive. No bigger than my thumbnail, black casing, a tiny reinforced edge like it was built to survive being crushed, submerged, thrown from a car window doing eighty on a mountain road.

I stare at it. My whole body goes cold.

"What is that?"

Hudson doesn't answer right away. He picks it up, turns it over in his fingers, and there's an expression on his face I haven't seen before—something between grief and fury, banked low and controlled.

"Hudson." My voice comes out sharp. "What is that?"

He sets it down on the counter like it's something that might detonate. "It's encrypted storage. The kind used to move information somebody doesn't want found."

"Whose information?"

He looks at me before he answers, and I already know, somewhere underneath the shock, that whatever he says next is going to change everything.

"Your father's."

The room tilts. "What?"

"Your dad worked at Michaelson Strategic Logistics. He was a forensic accountant." Hudson's voice is steady, careful, the way you talk to someone you're afraid might shatter. "Eight months ago, my task force started investigating the company. Weapons smuggling, laundered money, all of it running through legitimate government contracts. About a month later, your father found discrepancies in shipment records. He started digging."

"No." I shake my head, like refusing it hard enough will make it not true. "My dad did taxes and spreadsheets. He didn't—he wasn't involved in anything like that."

"He wasn't," Hudson says. "Not at first. He thought it was embezzlement. Then he saw something he wasn't supposed to see, and he understood exactly how much danger that put him in. He contacted my task force. He contacted me."

The floor is gone. I'm standing in the kitchen holding onto the edge of the counter because I need something solid and there's nothing solid left.

"You talked to my father."

"Several times. Over about a week and a half." His jaw tightens. "He was terrified, Willow. But he kept feeding me information because he wanted to do the right thing. He told me he'd made copies of everything—financial records, shipment manifests, even security footage. He said he hid a second copy somewhere his daughter would keep safe without knowing what it was."

I look down at the little black drive sitting on the counter between two piles of flour, and something in my chest cracks wide open.