The Alias Agenda

by Holly James

Genres: Humor & Satire; Romantic Suspense

Synopsis

In this modern blend of heisty hijinks, romantic tension, and madcap mystery for fans of Ally Carter, Catherine Mack, The White Lotus and Oceans Eleven, an undercover operative with a rookie handler who’s as hot as he is blundering must infiltrate a suburban mom smuggling ring while dodging a killer from her past…

She’s had dozens of identities—but none of them have ever fallen in love.

In this action-packed thrill-ride of suspense, humor, and heartfelt romance, an undercover informant and an out-of-practice field agent delve deep into an investigation and become entangled with a most unlikely band of criminals, a ruthless killer—and hopefully, each other, if they can survive long enough . . .

When confidential informant Erin Daniels is abruptly pulled off an insider trading investigation and sent across the country with just a few hours’ notice, she’s definitely not expecting her new assignment to involve infiltrating a smuggling ring in a . . . suburban mommy group? She’s also not expecting to meet a clumsy field agent who is hot as hell—or to hear that the man who handled her assignments for the last 10 years is dead.

Erin’s spent the last decade as a secret operative for the intelligence agency that arrested her con artist father—and ostensibly is keeping her safe from retribution. With her former handler the only constant in a life spent on the move, inserting herself into dangerous situations, Erin has to adjust to newcomer Cal Bray, and his sometimes-blundering attempts to protect her—all while trying to deny her growing attraction to him.

But before they can get too far into the mommy ring, a vengeful figure from Erin’s past reappears, bent on killing her—and coming uncomfortably close. Drawing on her years of experience and Cal’s best instincts, Erin is determined to exorcize her ghosts for good, and find out what a real life, on her own, is like—and if Cal is willing to lend a hand . . .

Release date: April 28, 2026

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

Vivian Martel’s phone woke me with a start. I would have been annoyed with her if I hadn’t been pretending to be her. And if I’d actually been asleep.

Peaceful rest evaded someone with my lifestyle. Too much time away from consciousness was dangerous. It took no more than a voice, a car door, a heavy footstep—things often signifying run—to snap me awake. Or the case that rarely signified good news—the one happening at the moment—a phone call in the dark pit of night.

I slithered a bare arm from beneath the sheets soft as butter and snatched the phone off the nightstand, not daring to wake the man in an enviable state of oblivion beside me. I knew he was out, really out, thanks to the pill I had slipped in his drink, and I was hoping to catch a little shut-eye for myself in the cocoon of his high-rise bedroom before I had to finish the job and make my escape. But still, I needed to be quiet.

His blood was as blue as it came, and his hands were filthy. A Wall Street stereotype so deep into insider trading, he was lucky they’d sent me to extract the incriminating evidence and not someone with a tire iron.

Unknown flashed on the phone’s screen, and as soon as I saw it, I wanted to go back to sleep even if it was restless and fleeting.

I knew who was calling. There was nothing unknown about it. Every time I got a new phone, I saved his contact information under Unknown because it was safer that way. And on the rare occasion it truly was an unknown number calling to offer me a free estimate on refinancing the auto loan I didn’t have, it made for a pleasant surprise.

I blinked a dry eye at the time and was not amused. The contact lenses I’d been wearing to turn my blue eyes brown scratched like sandpaper. The same as the brunette wig squeezing my scalp, I couldn’t wait to throw them in the trash.

“It’s three a.m., Wallace,” I hissed when I answered the phone.

“We’re moving you.”

The gruff voice came down the line with the same detached authority I had known since I was eighteen. I had heard that phrase more times than I could count, and every time, it upended and replanted my life somewhere new. Perhaps it was my semiconscious state, or maybe the city lights staring in the cold window at me, but the phrase sent a tingle down my spine. Something ominous flickered inside it.

“What? The job’s not done. I’m still—”

“Then finish it. Now. You’ll be in California by morning on the West Coast.”

I glanced over my shoulder at the sleeping man beside me. The sharp nose, the pale flesh of his throat. He looked stuck-up even passed out. He had gone to schools I had only seen in movies and was driven around in cars my dad had taught me how to hotwire before I hit puberty. He had snob written all over him, and having spent my life in the shadow of privilege, I didn’t mind slipping that pill in his pinot and hacking his laptop while he slept.

But I wasn’t finished.

The computer had bio security, and I needed his fingerprint. I could get it easy enough once he was passed out—and I knew he’d be passed out for a solid four hours given the dose of that pill. But I was tired from the weeks of earning his trust that had led to this night and had planned to spend three and a half of those four hours curled into his luxury linens before I swiped the files the man on the phone needed and disappeared from his life as easily as I had come.

“What’s in California?” I whispered.

I heard wind through the phone, sounds of walking, perhaps at a hurried pace. Wallace was outside somewhere.

“Your next job,” he said. “Travel arrangements are at the usual drop. Your flight leaves at six a.m. Don’t miss it.”

I glanced at the time and considered whining about it, but that had gotten me nowhere as a smart-mouthed teenager and no further as an adult. After ten years together, I knew Wallace’s boundaries like guardrails on a cliff. He was quick to remind me of why he owned me. Of why I wasn’t in prison and how he could put me there faster than I could even consider running.

I swallowed my complaint and slipped from the bed, my bare feet pressing into the chilled hardwood floor. I straightened the little black dress I’d worn to dinner from where it had twisted around my hips. “What do I do with the files?”

“Leave the drive at the drop. It’ll be collected.”

The wind whistled again. I thought I heard something catch in Wallace’s throat, a scrape of a shoe on pavement. I glanced out the yawning bedroom window at an American flag hanging perfectly limp on the rooftop across the street. The spring evening stood quiet and calm. Wherever Wallace was, it wasn’t the Upper East Side.

“Where are you?”

I listened to his footsteps as his breathing grew heavier. Even nearing retirement, Wallace was in excellent shape. The tremor in his breath reminded me not of someone sucking air for being unfit but of someone breathing at a rate related to emotion, namely an emotion I had felt many times over the years thanks to positions he had put me in.

Fear.

“Are you all right?” I asked him as I tiptoed from the bedroom toward the office. I had to collect the laptop and return for a fingerprint.

Wallace ignored my question and asked his own. “Can you finish the job before you go?”

I rolled my eyes as I passed a towering vase in the entryway crawling with ornate, hand-painted roses, which looked like it should have been on display in a museum. It was hideous, and probably priceless, and I considered pushing it over on my way out.

“I’m working on it.”

I rounded into the office and caught a glimpse of the man’s safe mounted low in the glossy floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. The thought of cracking it flirted with my focus, trying to lure me away from the job I had to do. The chance it held what I needed—the thing I’d spent ten years searching for—was impossible, as was the case with every home safe I saw. I might find a Rolex in there, some heirloom jewelry, maybe a gun—helpful things, but not what I needed. But still, every locked door signaling keep out made me wonder.

I shook off the thought and continued around to the desk. I jumped, but not at my ghostly reflection hovering in the black windows. A loud crack rang through the phone, and Wallace sucked in a breath. I couldn’t place the sound. A breaking branch? Something clattering onto concrete? Something … worse?

“Get the job done and get to the airport,” he demanded.

The dark edge in his voice put a skip in my step. I hurried back to the bedroom and crawled up onto the bed. The man still wore what he’d worn to dinner too, minus his shoes and the tie I’d seductively unwound from his neck as I pulled him into his bedroom. He lay flat on his back, one arm curled above his head and gentle snores coming from his parted lips. I had kissed his lips once, and it had been a good kiss as far as deceitful kisses went. He had already swallowed the pill at that point, and the kiss would be the last thing he remembered before waking to the authorities pounding on his door later that morning.

A pang of regret snapped through me that on the rare occasions I got a kiss, it was never real. There’d been a few between-job hookups, sure, but nothing lasting because that was impossible for me. I tried not to dwell on it as I pressed the sleeping man’s index finger into the pad on his laptop. The lock screen dissolved into the password prompt, and I tapped in the code I had recovered with some covert spying.

Alas, access.

I pulled a flash drive from my clutch on the nightstand and shoved it into the laptop.

The man grumbled in his sleep, and I froze, my hands splayed across the keyboard. I knew he was knocked out, but perhaps he could sense his secrets being extracted like gold from a digital mine. I felt a moment of pity for him, then took one glance around the ostentatious room: the sleek flat-screen TV, the marble-top furniture, the original art—all things he’d procured by stealing other people’s money—and changed my mind.

“Got it,” I told Wallace and shut the laptop with a soft click.

I stood from the bed and searched for my shoes. The night that had led to drugging the man in his own home began with a five-star dinner, in heels and a dress he would want to peel off of me, and if Wallace wanted me to get to the airport on time, I hoped he had stashed a change of clothes at the drop because an extra pit stop was not in the cards. No way was I flying across the country in stilettos and a cocktail dress, though it wouldn’t have been the most inconvenient thing I had done in the name of staying out of prison.

“Good girl,” Wallace said, and I gnashed my teeth at the phrase.

He had been saying it like I was a trained poodle since I was a teenager, back when I first became his pawn. I hated it, and he knew I hated it. And we both knew it served as a reminder of who was in charge.

I left the laptop on the bed. It would be a dead giveaway something was off when the man woke to his computer in my place, but it didn’t matter. I would be in the wind. A ghost. A sweet memory turning sour as the gravity of what I had done to him took hold.

With a final look at him, I tiptoed from the room. I sighed. “See you in California, I guess,” I told Wallace.

A long pause filled the line. The wind kept whistling until a car door sharply cut it off. Wallace’s voice came back with the rounded resonance of someone speaking inside a small space. He took a deep, wavering breath. “Don’t miss your flight, Erin.”

He hung up, and I froze by the hideous vase in the entryway. I stared at my phone, shocked by what I had just heard.

No one had called me by my real name in ten years.

Wallace had in fact left a change of clothes at the drop, and by the time I landed in California, my gratitude for the yoga pants, hoodie, and sneakers was overwhelming. My head ached; my body craved sleep. Or caffeine. Whichever I could get my hands on first.

The DSA didn’t fly anyone first class unless the covert occasion called for it. I had spent the past six hours wedged in a middle seat, head bobbing between a guy with a man bun who smelled like patchouli and a woman who somehow managed to read a book with her whole body. She sighed, gasped, jerked in surprise, bent the poor spine until it broke, and laughed out loud more than once. Great to know it was such a good book, but did it need to be read at the crack of dawn on a cross-country flight beside someone who hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in a decade?

No. No, it did not.

The full-body read-a-thon paired with the patchouli-scented hippie who had to be returning to his yurt in the weed-growing California redwoods left me in a spectacularly foul mood.

You pulled out all the stops for this one, I planned to tell Wallace as soon as I saw him.

I did my best. It was last minute, he would say and maybe mean it but probably not because he would have flown in on something chartered. Or maybe he had already been here when he called me last night, I couldn’t say.

I also intended to ask him the reason for the last-minute move, and fully expected him to grumble something about urgency and DSA priority, which I knew was less the reason and more a reminder, again, that I was at his mercy.

That day ten years ago when my father had gotten arrested by the FBI and I, his accomplice, had been intercepted by an agency so off-the-books no one knew about it, I had no idea what I was walking into. I had fled the hotel room where our job had gone terribly wrong and ended up on a stormy street in the pouring rain with blood on my adolescent hands and a gun pointed at me. I may well have made a deal with the devil. Desperate and completely alone, I’d handed over my life to the government rather than follow my father to prison.

Sometimes, I wondered if prison would have been the better option.

No one even knew the DSA existed. I certainly hadn’t until working for it became my life. The Directorate of Secret Affairs was the interstitial tissue between organizations the likes of the FBI and CIA but with fewer rules and more secrets. It filled gaps the others couldn’t. Sidestepped funding pipelines and operated invisibly other than to those in the know. I was more in the know than I ever wanted to be but still often in the dark. Wallace doled out only the necessary information to me, which was why I had to trust he knew what was going on when he told me what to do.

I usually got a break between jobs. A spell of reprieve to get out of Dodge after whatever hammer I’d been helping to lower dropped. I’d ditch the disguise—wigs, contacts, whatever wardrobe fit the role I’d been playing—and go back to being me, Erin, whoever that was. Wallace would set me up in a small apartment or house with some flat-box furniture and the occasional bloodstain under the rug from whatever DSA purpose it had previously served, but never for long enough to feel like home.

I hadn’t had one of those since my mother died when I was twelve.

I really wasn’t sure what the rush was all about this time, but ever faithful, I made the drop and caught my flight.

Once I deplaned, I exited the airport like every other wearied traveler. I toted only the backpack Wallace had stuffed with the essentials: ID, new phone preloaded with accounts in my new name, address, the key to whatever new set of four walls would serve as my living quarters.

Would it kill him to pack me a snack?

The coffee cart near the exit caught my eye, and seeing I had no idea how far a drive it was to the rendezvous point, I decided to fuel up.

“Name?” the bouncy barista asked from behind the counter, pen hovering and ready to ink.

A tangle of identities pulsed and retracted inside my mind. My trained tongue patiently waited for permission to shape around the correct choice. I had gone to bed in New York as Vivian and arrived in California as someone else.

The fleeting moment in between I had spent as myself, when Wallace uttered my real name before ending our call, had stuck like a seed in my teeth. I wasn’t sure why he’d done it; maybe another reminder of the girl I once was, that day in the hotel and the choice I made. I couldn’t be sure, but hearing it was a haul back to memories that haunted my plane ride as I slipped in and out of consciousness. Promises, lies. The sweet smile my father trained me to wield as a weapon, which would ultimately lead to my downfall.

I shook the thoughts away and gave the barista a smile.

“Lauren,” I said, using the name on my new fake ID stuffed in the bag.

The double espresso scorched my tongue when I impatiently sipped it. I waited at the curb for my rideshare as a never-ending stream of cars passed like different shaped beads on a string. Wallace sent me to Silicon Valley, where the ratio of electric vehicles to standards was truly something to behold.

My own driver pulled up to collect me in a nondescript gray Prius and returned to the stream of curbside traffic as smoothly as a raindrop into a river. I gazed out the window as we navigated a complicated knot of freeways and exits. My knowledge of the local geography was basic at best, but I knew I was at the bottom of the bay, and San Francisco waited somewhere to the north with its foggy shores and impossible hills.

And just north of that, clung to a picturesque shoreline, was the prison housing my father. I hadn’t seen him since that hotel room ten years ago and had no intention of getting near, regardless of whatever reason Wallace had brought me to the area. Still, I could feel his presence pulsing like a wound in the distance.

Thankfully, we weren’t heading up the peninsula, but rather across the lower belly, down by where its appendix would be. After nearly an hour, my driver stopped on a street lined with more electric cars, hedgerows, and giant oaks swaying in the breeze. The trim lawns shone a deep shade of emerald and the flower borders popped like colorful confetti. We’d pulled up outside a small apartment complex sitting at the top of a T intersection, and diagonally across the street from some of the most beautiful houses I’d ever seen.

“Ma’am?” the driver awkwardly asked. “This the right spot?”

I caught myself gaping in a daze. I had no idea how long we had been idling at the curb.

“Yes, it is,” I said, trying to sound like Lauren, the woman who had been driven home from the airport and not like the informant in a hoodie who had landed in Pleasantville with a fake name. “Thank you,” I told the driver. I climbed out into the air, which smelled like freshly clipped lawn and baking bread.

The driver pulled away as I spun in a slow circle, taking it all in.

It was a street from a storybook. Charming homes, each similar but unique, as if they came from the same cookie factory but had been stamped with a different cutter. Shiny cars, dogs on leashes, strollers, children’s laughter on the air. The apartments were spitting distance from the mansions, and yet seamlessly blended into the neighborhood.

It was a far cry from the places Wallace had sent me before. I’d seen dumps, hovels, crack houses with bullet-riddled walls. My last job landed me in the lap of Manhattan luxury, and I had been a few similar places before, but this place, this street, was like nowhere I had ever been. Standing on the sidewalk beneath a mighty oak felt like a warm, protected embrace, and I couldn’t imagine what lurked beneath that warranted Wallace sending me here.

I stopped spinning and matched the address in my file to the apartments. The boxy beige building was U-shaped with two stories, outdoor staircases, and front doors that opened to outside. Based on the apartment number in the file, I’d be living in the first-floor corner space. It was nothing like the Manhattan apartment I’d spent last night in, but it still looked upscale and welcoming.

The espresso in my veins and my lack of sleep had me jittery—more jittery than usual when I began a new job. I never knew what Wallace had in store for me, what file he would slap down on the table to lay out the plan: the targets, the stakes, the goal. It was my job to get information he couldn’t. I slipped into cracks where he didn’t fit.

We could help each other, he’d said to me that night so many years ago.

At the time, it sounded like a good deal: Go undercover or risk going to prison until I was forty. If only I had known how imbalanced the each other part of that deal was. If only I had known how much more help I would be providing than receiving. Although Wallace had kept his word. I hadn’t ever seen the inside of a cell. But in exchange, I had become a nomad informant. A true specter in the wind.

The truth was, when he’d looked at me that night my father and I got caught, he not only saw someone desperate, but he also saw someone useful. A blond, doll-eyed key with a sweet smile who could fit into locks a middle-aged man with a mustache that screamed Authority couldn’t.

Exploited, would be a proper description.

I followed the little sidewalk bisecting a trim green lawn and leading to the building, and pulled out my key. Right as I reached for the door to my new place, the neighboring door swung open.

A young woman stepped out backward, humming a soft tune and bouncing. She pulled her door shut, and turned to reveal a baby attached to her chest by a complicated tangle of fabric. Two pudgy brown legs sprouted from the bottom of the little sack, softly kicking against her abdomen.

“Oh!” She stopped short but instantly smiled a row of shockingly white teeth. “You must be the new neighbor!” Her cheeks pulled like rounded plums toward her dark eyes, setting her whole face aglow with welcome. She wore running leggings and a bright yellow band in her hair, which matched her sneakers. She marched over, managing not to break stride with the bouncing, and held out a determined hand. “I’m Alisha. I’m so happy to meet you!”

I spent enough time lying to know when people were telling the truth, and Alisha’s welcome was nothing but genuine.

“Hi. I’m … Lauren.”

The name took a moment to recover, perhaps because of the disorienting kindness radiating off my new neighbor, or perhaps due to my lack of sleep and the espresso drilling a raw hole in the pit of my stomach. I hoped Wallace stocked the fridge.

“It’s so nice to meet you!” Alisha squeaked. “And this is Jeffrey!” She leaned forward, holding her hand to the back of the tiny head bobbling inside her harness. From inside her pouch, enormous brown eyes blinked up. A tiny bubble popped from Jeffrey’s bow lips.

I had precisely zero experience with babies, and very little interest to be honest, but even I couldn’t deny Jeffrey was cute.

“He’s sweet.” I dutifully smiled.

“Yes, we just eat him up!” Alisha’s voice turned into something between a dog’s squeaky chew toy and a feral animal in heat. “Anyway, we saw them bringing in new furniture the other day, so the girls and I assumed we’d have a new neighbor soon.” She paused to look up and down the street for signs of a moving van as I made note of the new furniture comment and sent a silent thanks to Wallace.

I gave her a tight smile. “The girls? Do you have more than just Jeffrey?”

She tilted her head in confusion before nodding in understanding. “Oh, Jeffrey is not mine. I’m his nanny,” she said, still bouncing, and waved one hand over her head in a loop. “I meant the other girls in the complex. This is basically nanny central.”

I blankly stared at her, unsure how to respond. Luckily, she kept the conversation flowing. “I work for the Wilson family.” She pointed over my shoulder, back down the storybook street. “Jeffrey and I were out for a walk, and I remembered I’d left something at home, so we stopped by. I’m glad I ran into you! Welcome to the neighborhood!”

“Thank you,” I said, hoping she wasn’t about to ask me more about my reason for being here.

I could lie, sure I could—and I was really good at it—but I usually never had to until after Wallace briefed me on my new identity. All I knew about Lauren was her address and that she had a very friendly neighbor named Alisha.

Alisha kept smiling at me. “I’m sure you’re excited to get started with—”

“Ms. Thomas?” someone said from the sidewalk.

We both turned to see a tall man in a suit with a leather messenger bag looped over his shoulder. I immediately clocked the telltale but discreet bulge at his hip.

“Lauren Thomas?” the man said as if it were a statement and a question at once.

“Yes,” I said, recognizing my new name and feeling more certain this man had arrived to help me.

“Hi. I’m Age—nt.” He caught himself with a deep blush, glancing at Alisha. “The agent. I’m the real estate agent.” He recovered with a smile that wobbled at the edges and gave him a boyish look. The sun glossed his wavy brown hair into a shine. An eagerness rolled off him, which I could feel from a distance.

Alisha looked between the two of us, confused, and I silently begged her to go away.

“Right, yes. I forgot we had a meeting this morning. Please, won’t you come in,” I said to the man on the sidewalk.

Alisha, mercifully, took her cue to leave. “I’ll see you later, Lauren. It was so nice to meet you.”

I gave her a small wave as the man in the suit approached with wide steps in shiny shoes, which softly clicked on the pavement. When he arrived on my doorstep, I smelled soap and mint and realized he was a lot taller than I had thought.

My key was suddenly sweaty in my hand, and I hoped I was right about the man with a gun I was about to let into my new apartment.

The door opened to a small entryway. A sunny living room sat to the right, furnished with a suede couch, pale wood end tables, and a pile of cream-colored throws and pillows, which looked like clouds.

I took it in with an approving nod, noting Wallace had taken care to supply the caliber of furniture fit for the neighborhood. No flat-box anything in Lauren Thomas’s place.

I turned to my left and saw a kitchen with a high-top dining table, a hutch hanging with colorful coffee mugs, stainless steel appliances, and a fridge I hoped contained food.

I dropped my backpack and turned to my guest.

He closed the front door behind him and gave me a stiff smile. I had taken in his height on the doorstep, but up close and inside, the size of his body beneath his suit became apparent. His shoulders strained the slim lines; the fabric left little mystery about the shape of his biceps. He was large and strong and probably looked fantastic in a tight T-shirt. The angles of his face, though sharp, landed easy on the eyes: knives for cheekbones, ski-slope nose, eyes the color of a foggy day at the beach. And lips. Lips that made me wonder what one kiss would feel like, real or not. The only break from the symmetry was a small scar near his jaw. A jagged slash that looked like it had been deep once upon a time.

As I stared at him with curiosity blossoming somewhere deep in my belly, I noted he was not gazing around the space like someone would upon visiting another’s home, which more likely than not meant he had visited this home before.

He took a step toward me, and I held my ground though reflex told me to step back. I wanted the upper hand.

“Hi,” he said, sounding more uncertain than I expected for a man of his size. “Sorry about that out there. I didn’t mean to slip in front of your neighbor. I’m not your real estate agent. I’m—”

“I know who you are.”

He paused and tilted his head like he really wasn’t sure. “How?” His jacket gently flapped when he adjusted his bag, and I saw my chance to really take the upper hand.

I stepped forward, reducing the space between us and feeling the warmth of his body. Another whiff of his clean scent hit me, and I wondered what I smelled like after donning clothes stuffed in a backpack and taking a cross-country flight.

“Well, first, you called me by a name that until eight hours ago was hidden in a locker only two people know the combination to. So, you either intercepted some highly classified information, or you’re already privy to said information.”

He blinked long lashes at me, looking legitimately surprised, and I felt a pang of tenderness at his innocence.

And then I dove on my opportunity.

Without dr. . .