Although she was nearly incapacitated with arthritis, her mind was as sharp as any twenty-year-old’s. “Hello, Lucy, dear.”

Lucy stared, dumbfounded. “Do you two know each other?”

“We do now,” Mrs. Pfluger said. “He came to my door, and when he explained you were in danger from some terrorists, and that he needed my help so you could escape…” She shrugged helplessly, as if to say, Well, you know how these things are. Like they happened every day.

“But the wall. He ruined your wall,” Lucy said.

“He handed me a wad of cash to pay for it.” She turned back to Casanova. “Now, while you were busy searching Lucy’s apartment, I gathered the things you would need.” She gestured toward an old shopping bag. “They’re clothes and other things from my fat days. I won’t need them back.”

Casanova inspected the contents of the shopping bag, then grinned and looked at Lucy. “Excellent. Lucy, put these things on. You’re about to become Bessie Pfluger.”

Bryan Elliott, aka Casanova, tried not to grin as he watched Lucy Miller wiggle into a pair of huge orange polyester stretch pants and pin them at the waist.

She’d turned out to be a surprise.

He already knew a lot about her from the background information he’d obtained-where she grew up, where she’d gone to school, her employment history.

He’d pegged her as the perfect mole to work inside Alliance where the embezzling was taking place-dutiful, conscientious, intelligent. And she was all those things. Over the past few weeks she had proved amazingly helpful, downloading tons of information onto the supercapacity memory stick, following his instructions without question.

In person, though, she was surprisingly feisty-and damned efficient at defending herself. With the proper training-No, he shouldn’t even think about that. He’d let himself get sucked into a life of lies and shadows, and he was in so deep now he could never lead a normal life. He didn’t wish that on sweet Lucy Miller, who, by all accounts, was ignorant of the uglier side of life.