It’s Sunday, which means it’s time for another installment in my weekly romantic suspense serial!

We ended the third chapter of In Her Sights with Beth coming to the realization that the stranger across the street may not have been so much of a stranger, after all. And, unfortunately, he knows all about what happened in Baghdad a year ago—the incident that turned her from her life as a company assassin to a quiet, solitary art student in Chicago. From this week’s chapter, “Baghdad”:

There you are. She smiled slowly beneath the light scarf she wore over most of her face as she spotted her intended target. He was heavier than he’d looked in the grainy black-and-white picture in his file, his dishdasha oversized to accommodate his thicker torso. He didn’t glance around his surroundings, instead entering the open doorway beneath the awning with his head down and his jaw clenched. He disappeared into the building, and she waited, the sight attached to her rifle trained on the sole non-boarded-up window of the third floor.

And…yes. She disengaged the safety and settled into the slow, familiar deep-breathing pattern she’d learned years earlier. Her finger curled around the trigger.

A flash of reflected light crossed the path of her scope. Lifting her head, she squinted into the distance and saw it again. One flash, then two—a signal of some sort.

She gaze back through her scope again, checking to make sure al-Fariq was still at the window. He was, his back to her, presenting the perfect bull’s-eye.

Gritting her teeth, Beth shifted her sight line until she caught another flash of light, and immediately zoomed in…on none other than the man she shouldn’t have even had to think about today. In his hand, he held what appeared to be a coin.

She adjusted the sight again, zooming in further.

It was the shiniest British pound coin she’d ever seen in her life, the face of Queen Elizabeth clearly defined on its gleaming surface.

And Beth knew, as surely as she knew her own name, that he was signaling her.

2012 © by Edie Harris

We’ll be out of the past and back to the present next Sunday, where Beth might just find out who, exactly, her neighbor is—and has always been.