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your sources are dead wrong.”
    He stared at her for several long moments, one dark brow lifted as he studied her, his expression flat. She knew her eyes gave away nothing; she’d been in this business long enough not to lose her poker face under pressure. But beneath the table, her left knee bounced up and down with a nervous tic that was giving her hell.
    Finally, Charlie moved, leaning to the side yet never looking away as he reached into the pocket of his suit coat and pulled out a card-sized envelope with an embossed vellum invitation inside. He took his time, holding her gaze while removing the auction announcement and sliding it across the table.
    Georgia wanted to choke.
    The paper told her exactly what information he had, information he’d somehow used to connect her to Duggin. But it didn’t mean he was aware that she knew the location of the dossier. It couldn’t mean that. Not when she was days away from closing the book on this nightmare.
    While Georgia tried to quell her rising panic, Charlie called over his shoulder to the waitress, “A cup of coffee please, black.” The waitress, Tracy, nearly fell off her stool to comply. Georgia cringed.
    The waitress, the cook, the cool-car hottie who’d made that heroic dive across the counter—none of them deserved this. Even Finn, who had done nothing more than end up in the wrong place at the wrong time, now had the barrel of a shotgun aimed at his head.
    For not the first time in the past three years, Georgia questioned the cost of her search—to her physical health, her mental health, to Finn. But to have three strangers staring into the face of danger—a face named Charlie Castro—was more than she knew how to deal with.
    Tracy arrived then with the coffee, having poured it under the watchful eye of one of the goons. At Charlie’s clipped “thank you,” she hurried back to the stool where she’d been sitting.
    With Georgia facing away from the others, the waitress was the only person she could see. She gave Tracy the warmest smile she could muster, and the other woman fluttered her fingers hesitantly in response.
    Charlie sipped at his coffee, returned the white stoneware mug to the table, then reached for the invitation and pushed it closer to her side. “You may not have found it yet. But you will have by the end of the weekend.”
    “Is that so?” And even as the words left her mouth, nerves coiled in her belly like a rubber band ball. Anyone interested enough could have made the connection between her, her father, and TotalSky.
    But Duggin had been out of the picture since senate hearings had cleared his name almost twenty years before—hearings that had been closed, the records sealed in the name of national security.
    There was no way Charlie could have linked her to the General without a lot of digging. Or an inside source. And for the first time, she wondered if she’d run into a situation with which even Finn couldn’t help.
    “Yes. It’s so.”
    “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she hedged.
    “Then let me spell it out.” Charlie pushed his coffee mug to the side. “A missing dossier detailing the TotalSky scandal. My sources tell me it will be available for bid at this auction.”
    The very thing she’d been trying to get her hands on for three years, begging the general, scouting around to see if it might possibly have found a new home. And he knew almost as much as she did.
    The criminal element had all the luck. “Not all rumors in this business turn out to be true, Charlie. You know that as well as I do.”
    “You’re going to help me prove this one true or false.”
    The rubber bands in her stomach began twanging. “And how am I going to do that?”
    “I have a client interested in laying claim to the file.”
    She gave an indifferent shrug. “The auction is open to the public. Have at it.”
    “Crowds aren’t my thing.”
    “Surely it’s not a matter of money.” She lifted a brow. “I hear you run