This would be so much easier if he didn't like her. Love her still, if he was being honest, but this wasn't the time for that. This was a professional meeting, and he had to keep it that way, whether or not her scent in the room made his heart beat faster, whether or not the bracelet hung beside her bed. The look on her face the night he'd shot Stas had told him she still loved him. He was here to use that, not give in to it.

No matter how much he wanted to.

"I'm not sure whether I apologize first for leaving you in Sri Lanka or for breaking into your home."

She took no pity on him. "Sri Lanka," she murmured, the hurt that he hadn't been masochistic enough to face two years ago clear and soft as she looked at him. Honesty, then. He could comfort her a little before he laid down his trail of breadcrumbs for her to follow.

"Leaving you was the hardest thing I ever had to do."

"Had to?" she challenged.

Of course she didn't understand; how could she? He'd never been able to tell her, and sure as hell no one else would. He placed the matchbook carefully, weighing his next words, balancing truth and discretion. "You changed... things for me, Annie." Everything. You changed everything for me.

"And you left me. I was in love with you, and you skipped out with a note."

"If I would have stayed any longer you would have been in danger." A poor excuse then, when he'd lied to her from the beginning, but a good one now that she was lying, too. He felt a thrill of excitement that they were nearly on the same page, glimpsed a fleeting fancy of what they could do, hand-in-hand, now that she'd been inducted...

"From what?"

"My mission. I was with the agency." There was a joy in finally justifying his decision to slink away like a thief in the night. It wasn't his fault that their paradise came to an end. Well, not his alone...

"I knew it." She stepped in, her whisper running like fingertips along his skin. "With Stas on the train tracks – it was you who saved me."

He stifled the urge to touch her, to tell her that as long as he was alive she would have a guardian angel with an arsenal. Tonight was about a job. "I was tracking him," he admitted. A nice segue into the mission at hand. "I'm on my own now."

"And somehow that's my responsibility?"

She sounded annoyed, which annoyed him. "I was in love with you, Annie." I gave up everything to become the kind of man you wouldn't despise, knowing that you'd never even know I did it. That love changed me forever...

He couldn't tell her that those few weeks in Sri Lanka were the lynchpin on which all his sins and his redemption hung. She wouldn't believe him. She had a right to her anger and her suspicions. He watched her perfect lips as she chastised him, letting reality settle back in. She wasn't a partner or a girlfriend, she was an asset, and he was here to flip her.

"Why are you here? Now."

Straight and to the point, the way Annie liked things. "The Cole painting at the auction."

"You marked it on my program," she realized.

"There's more there. Keep digging. Just... push it hard."

He felt the mistake even before her face fell. Ben Mercer was a gifted handler, cynical as he may be about the talent now. He told himself that he wasn't distracted by the memory of her breath on his neck, that he'd just misjudged her resentment and the depth of the residue of trust between them. He'd come here prepared to tell her more if he had to, knowing he'd probably have to. She was not a woman to take only what she was given.

"There's an arms dealer," he said, and she stopped walking away. "Seref Murat. The auction is one of the ways he moves his money."

He could see the dogged intellect the agency must love kindling in her eyes. "That's why that guy overbid so much."

"Murat's number two, Russ Hilburn. He wasn't just buying a Thomas Cole painting. He was buying a Cole and schematics for a Russian missile-guidance system."

"That doesn't make sense," she protested, turning to face him fully again. "The CIA would want to stop that. Why would-"

"They want to control it," he interrupted vehemently, a decade of anger and guilt spilling hot into the words. "They want to control him. I want to stop Murat."

"So, just to be clear... you're not asking for forgiveness. You're asking me for a favor."

Forgiveness? She said it like it was something she might actually grant, as if it were somehow possible for them to... to what? Make up? Be friends? Ever speak to each other again without endangering each other's lives? Could this have gone differently if he'd come to her as a man, a man who'd spent the last ten years getting closer to the edge, his back against the wall...? He stared at her, the words jamming in his throat.

"What do you want me to do?" she sighed.

He could drink to might-have-beens later. "Go to Sophie Jacklin, the Bramble's director. Ask her about February twenty second, lots nineteen and seventy five. It may take some coaxing but I think she'll come into Langley with you. And if you have to use my name, you use it." That should get them both to safety and the information where it needed to be.

"You know her?"

"Call her Mona Lisa and she'll know you're not bluffing."

Betrayal, all over again – he could see it in her eyes. Not only wasn't he here to apologize, he'd come for another woman. So be it. He owed Sophie, and needed her, too, to put Murat out of business. This was the deal he'd made the night he left Annie sleeping on the beach. It was way too late to back out now.

She shook her head, a blanket denial. "No."

"Annie, I know this is a lot to take in-"

"The CIA-"

The naivete that had been so charming in a seasoned traveler would get her killed as an agent. "Forget protocol." Anger sharpened his voice again, all the things he wanted to say to his 'superiors' bubbling on his tongue. Annie was not a pawn for their games. "The agency is using you to get to me. You can't believe anything they say about me or anything I've done. Do not trust Joan and Arthur."

Too far; he'd misjudged the step again, spoken the truth when he should have played it cool. When he'd practiced this in his head he'd been more convincing, more rational. Of course, he hadn't had her dark eyes staring at him then.

He grabbed her arm before she could stalk away, forcing her to meet his gaze. Truth and emotion were what he had, so he would work with them. "Maybe I don't deserve this. But I'm asking you to trust me. Trust the man you fell in love with in Sri Lanka."

For a moment he was afraid she wouldn't be able to; it hurt more than he expected. But then she was looking at him with an expression he'd last seen with the Indian Ocean crashing in his ears, her face inches from his, and it wasn't the op he was thinking about any more.

What else might she forgive?