Книга - Overnight Male

Overnight Male
Elizabeth Bevarly


Is there any mission more dangerous than a hot one-night stand?In the world of international espionage, Lila Moreau is as tough as they come. But she’s finally ready to trade in her secret double life for domestic bliss. That is, after she takes care of one last vendetta: to bring in rogue agent Adrian Padgett before he unleashes disaster.But to find him and his band of merry hackers, Lila must infiltrate small, snooty Waverly College. All while breaking in her sexy new partner, Joel Faraday. Sounds like a challenge – even for a superspy.Soon Joel starts to distract her in more ways than just the professional. And he’s determined to lure Lila into the most impossible mission of all…love.







Dear Reader,

I’d like to thank everyone for their patience while Overnight Male found its place in the schedule. I know from your e-mails how anxiously you’ve been waiting to see the book in print (as have I). I did have a very good time getting Lila and her experiences down on paper. And I think I fell in love with Joel right along with her. Here’s hoping you do, too.

Happy reading,

Elizabeth Bevarly


More delicious “special deliveries”from Elizabeth Bevarly and MIRA Books

EXPRESS MALE

YOU’VE GOT MALE




Overnight Male

ELIZABETH BEVARLY











www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk/)


For Wanda Ottewell,

who made every book better.

Thanks.




CHAPTER ONE


Darkness had always been Lila Moreau’s best friend. Throughout her life she had used different kinds of darkness to aid her in different kinds of ways. As a child, she knew the darkness under a bed or in a closet could protect her from her mother’s hurtful words. As a teenager, she felt the shadows of the city could shelter her from people, especially men, who wanted more from her than she was willing to give. As an adult, she used her shady character to keep others from getting too close. But this, the darkness that came with nightfall, was Lila’s favorite. Nighttime was when all the best stuff happened. It was when the world—or at least her world—came to life.

“Hey, lady, ya got a hundred bucks to spare? I ain’t been laid all week, and it ain’t cheap in this part ’a town.”

Lila growled her exasperation at having her profound—and kind of cool and gothic, if she did say so herself—musings interrupted. Okay, so maybe some of the life in her world was more of the low variety than it was of the high. She knew how to deal.

She turned from where she stood on the corner of N Street and Potomac in Georgetown and glared at the lowest-of-all-life who had emerged from the shadows behind her. He was maybe half a foot taller than her own five-four and probably outweighed her by a 150 pounds. Since he was dressed in double-knit sans-a-belt trousers and a shiny polyester shirt that was stained under each arm with perspiration, and since he clearly hadn’t bathed in days—also considering the way he’d just greeted her—he was too poorly dressed and not articulate enough to be a pimp. So Lila concluded he must just be a big scumbag. This part of the nation’s capital didn’t usually attract people like him, since it drew such a large tourist and college crowd and was home to so many of the city’s movers and shakers. (Well, okay, maybe there were one or two scumbags. Not to mention pimps.) But neither was it unheard of to find someone in Georgetown who wasn’t exactly the cream of Washington society.

“Uh, I think you’re a little out of your element here, guy,” she said to the, ah, guy. “Bubba’s Booty Barn is in Cheverly. But good news. You can take the orange line straight there and you won’t have to switch trains at all. Metro station’s that way,” she added, pointing in the general direction of Foggy Bottom, and hoping he’d take the hint.

Of course he didn’t. That would have been too easy.

Instead the guy grinned and said, “On second thought, sweetheart, maybe I won’t need that hundred bucks. You look like the kinda woman who’d be up for just about anything.”

Actually, dressed as she was from head to toe in black, complete with knit cap and gloves, what Lila looked like was a woman who was about to break in to someone’s home. Of course, there was a good reason for that. She was about to break in to someone’s home. Nevertheless, she hated it when men just couldn’t get the gist of the most basic fashion statement. Duh.

Damn. She really didn’t need a distraction like this right now. She had her schedule tonight timed down to the last second. There wasn’t any available room in it at all for a maiming.

But she knew it would be unavoidable when the guy winked at her, nodded his head toward the alley she’d been about to enter, and asked, “Whaddaya say? Do a good job, sweetheart, and I’ll give ya back half of the hundred bucks you’re gonna gimme, too.”

She smiled at him. “Oh, gosh, just keep the whole hundred, big guy. I mean, I should pay you for the privilege, shouldn’t I? A great-looking, charismatic man like you? C’mon.”

His flabbergasted expression in response to her enthusiasm was almost worth the interruption he was causing her. Almost.

It was a testament to his stupidity that he followed Lila into the alley without a speck of hesitation or suspicion. It was a testament to her skill that she unmanned him in even less than her usual five seconds. Oh, he’d still be able to father children someday. Unfortunately. After he regained consciousness. And, you know, found a woman who had the IQ of a piece of lint.

Now, then. Where was she? Oh, yeah. Darkness had always been Lila’s best friend…blah blah blah…the darkness that came with nightfall was her favorite…blah blah blah…nighttime was when all the best stuff happened…blah blah blah…that was when Lila’s world came to life.

Got it.

Brushing off the last lingering remnants of disgust at having come into contact with Mr. Scumbag quite literally, Lila looked around and assessed her situation. The alley between two rows of sleepy town houses was deserted this time of night, save the occasional unconscious—and unmanned—scumbag, and silent save the soft sigh of a late spring breeze that nudged a stray piece of newspaper from one side of the narrow pathway to the other. She gazed up at an unlit window on the third floor of one of those town houses—the one through which she would momentarily be crawling—confident that the occupant was by now fast asleep.

It would be a pretty standard breaking and entering, even though many Georgetown residents were protected by private security systems, this one included. In fact, this residence was even better protected than most, thanks to its owner’s occupation, and might prove a challenge to someone else. Someone who wasn’t familiar with sophisticated protection devices that ran on arcane power sources.

Fortunately, Lila knew everything there was to know about sophisticated protection devices. And she liked to think that she herself was something of an arcane power source.

She flexed her fingers inside the snug black leather gloves, then tucked an errant strand of blond hair back under the black knit cap she’d tugged low over her eyes. The long-sleeved, skintight turtleneck and pants hugged her body like a second skin and served two purposes. Not only did they keep her warm in the cool April night—and, it went without saying, looked fabulous on her—but there was no part of her attire that might slow her down, tangle her up, or offer purchase for a pursuer.

Not that Lila expected to be pursued—never mind purchased—but one always had to be prepared for the possibility. Never, though, had she been caught. At least, not when she didn’t want to be. She certainly wasn’t going to screw up something like this.

Effortlessly and without a sound, she scaled the side of the big brick building, finding footholds by turns in the mortar between the bricks, the rainspout and the thick ivy growing up the side. Having already dismantled the exterior part of the alarm system in the front of the town house, she was lifting the window and pushing herself over the sill within seconds. She paused, standing motionless for a moment to survey her surroundings and ensure everything was as it was supposed to be.

Enough pale blue light emanated from big, illuminated numbers on the nightstand clock to reveal a man’s horizontal form in the bed beside it. He was hunched deep under the covers, sound asleep, completely unaware of her presence. Had it not been for the low, regular thrum of his breathing and the steady rise and fall of his shoulders, Lila wouldn’t have known if he was even alive. Well, had it not been for that, and the fact that she’d scoped the place out yesterday and had seen not a single corpse lying around.

She smiled. She was about to enjoy her favorite thing about being a spy: the takedown. Silently she retrieved a pair of handcuffs tucked into her belt at the small of her back and crept across the room.

It was only after she had launched herself at her quarry that she sensed something wasn’t quite right. Unfortunately, her body was in motion by then, and although Lila Moreau was a woman of many talents, defying gravity wasn’t one of them. Before she could recover and retreat, the man who should have been sleeping was wrapping her in the covers, wresting the handcuffs from her grasp and snapping them—chink, chink—first around her wrist and then around the thick metal spokes in the wrought-iron headboard.

Immediately Lila began to fight, throwing herself completely into her assault. And even one-handed, Lila Moreau could wreak the havoc of ten men. But it quickly became evident that her adversary was more insidious than ten men, because he had her pinned to the mattress in record time. After more frantic struggling, she decided her assailant couldn’t possibly be human. And after still more frantic struggling, she knew she was right. Because she realized then that what had finally brought Überspy Lila Moreau to her knees—or at least facedown into a mattress—was…sheets. And a blanket. And a couple of fluffy pillows.

Damn. This was not going to look good on her report.

Eventually she managed to extricate herself—well, kind of, since she was still handcuffed to the bed. But even though a light had been switched on in the corner, she saw as she shoved the bedclothes off herself that there was no one in the room except her.

The furnishings were what looked like period antiques, but they seemed to be more functional than they were collectible, because all were clearly well used. Likewise, the Oriental rugs were richly colored but worn in spots, the hardwood floor beneath them polished but scarred in places. A fireplace on the other side of the room smelled faintly of burned wood, indicating it had been put to use recently. Its mantelpiece was crowded with models of wooden boats, and bisected floor-to-ceiling bookcases that were crammed full of old books. The remaining walls were hung with what appeared to be commendations of some kind and childishly executed works of art in baroque frames.

As masculine lairs went, this one was something of a departure from the ones Lila usually saw. Of course, most of the masculine lairs she saw had been decorated by men who were morally bankrupt, so there was a chance she wasn’t really in a position to judge the decor. It was nice, though, she had to admit. It made her feel…calm. Until she remembered she was shackled to the bed frame, wherein she felt more than a little pissed off.

Wondering where her target had disappeared to, she reached down into her sock for the spare handcuff key she always hid on her person for just such an emergency and had never had to use.

And discovered it was gone.

Dammit. It must have fallen out while she was trying to subdue the counterpane in the ass. No way could anyone have lifted it without her realizing it. She began to search furiously through the bedclothes as far as she could reach, but there was no sign of the key anywhere.

Great. Now she was going to have to gnaw off her hand to get away. She hated when that happened.

“It’s on the nightstand.”

She whipped around at the sound of the deeply timbred voice and saw a man lounging in the doorway. Although they’d never met personally, she knew who he was. She didn’t go around breaking in to the houses of total strangers. Who knew what kind of germs you’d pick up doing that? Lila only broke into the homes of her closest friends and enemies. And although Joel Faraday, code name Virtuoso, wasn’t exactly either of those, she did know him—as an archivist for her employer, the Office for Political Unity and Security. He was also her captor, she reminded herself. Which might cause a bit of trouble, considering the fact that he was her partner, too. At least for a little while.

What he wasn’t was what she’d expected. In all her years at OPUS, Lila had met only one archivist before tonight, but that one had been pretty much what she’d suspected all of the OPUS archivists were: a timid, wrinkled, eccentric little man she could sling over one shoulder. Joel Faraday was none of those things. Well, except for being a man. That part was obvious. Too obvious, in fact.

She guesstimated his age as mid-thirties, even though there was an air about him that suggested considerable life experience. His thick, dark brown hair hung almost to his shoulders and was shoved straight back from his forehead by a careless hand. Behind trendy, black-framed glasses his eyes were even darker than his hair, and the lower half of his face was shadowed by more than one day’s growth of beard. Slumped against the doorjamb as he was, she could only guess at his full height, but it certainly topped six feet.

And every last inch of it was very nicely put together. Broad shoulders strained at the seams of an otherwise baggy white T-shirt, and black hair sprang from the deep V-neck. Loose, dark blue striped pajama bottoms ended in bare feet, feet that were large enough to make her wonder about another fabled part of the male anatomy whose size was often compared to those, ah, appendages. One big hand was settled indolently on his hip, while the other cradled a half-empty snifter of something the color of rich amber.

“The far one,” he added, dipping his head toward the nightstand on the other side of the bed from where she was lying.

She turned her head to look where he indicated and saw the small metal key sitting on the farthest edge of the nightstand, just—

“Out of your reach,” he said. Then he grinned. “They told me you always do this. So I confess I had a little advance warning. If I hadn’t…”

He lifted a shoulder and let it drop, but left the statement unfinished. Not that it mattered. Had he not had his advance warning, he, not Lila, would be handcuffed to the bed. They both knew it. As he said, that was the way she broke in all her new partners. It was just her little way of letting them know up front that she would be the one in charge.

Not that Joel Faraday would be her partner for long. And no way would he ever be in charge. Well, not once the handcuffs were off, anyway. He would be on board for this particular part of her most recent assignment only long enough to reveal some information, impart his evaluation and share her speculation. As soon as she had everything she needed from him, she’d be completing the rest of the assignment on her own. And then she hoped to go back to working with her regular partner—which largely involved flying solo, just the way she liked it.

As she jerked her wrist against the cuff snapped snugly around it, Faraday’s grin widened. And the sooner she got back to flying solo, Lila thought with a silent growl, the better.

“I cannot believe I fell for this,” she muttered aloud.

“You were overconfident,” he said. “I’ve heard that about you.” Very matter-of-factly, he added, “And overconfidence will get you killed in this line of work.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

“What else have you heard about me?” she asked. Even though she was reasonably certain she already knew. Like checking one’s credit report from time to time, it was always a good idea to ensure one’s badass reputation was in order.

He gazed up at the ceiling, feigning deep consideration, swirling his brandy expertly in his glass without even bothering to make sure it didn’t slosh over the side. “Let’s see now,” he said thoughtfully. “What have I heard about Lila Moreau, code name She-Wolf?”

He lowered his head to look at her now, pinning his gaze on her face in a way that made hot little explosions ignite in the pit of her belly. Interesting.

“Probably,” he continued, “the same things everyone else has heard. That you’re one of the best agents—if not the best agent—we have. That you were recruited by OPUS before you even graduated from college. That until recently, your record was spotless.” When she opened her mouth to object, he quickly added, “Oh, but hey, that pesky attempted-murder thing has been all cleared up, and now you’re back to tabula rasa.”

“If I’d attempted murder, you can be damned sure I would’ve succeeded,” Lila said. “I never tried to kill anyone. Least of all him.”

Him being the big man in charge of OPUS. Or, as he was pseudo-affectionately known in the organization, He Whose Name Nobody Dares Say. Mostly because nobody knew what his name was.

“Not that everyone in OPUS hasn’t wanted to put a bullet in the guy at least once,” she qualified. “But that whole attempted-murder thing was just a desperate, trumped-up charge they hoped would turn up the heat and flush me out.”

“Yet still you managed to stay under their radar,” Faraday murmured.

“Like you said. I’m the best agent OPUS has.”

He grinned again. “I’ve also heard you’re not modest.”

“Modesty is overrated. Especially when it isn’t warranted.”

He neither agreed nor disagreed with her assessment of herself, and that bugged the hell out of Lila. What bugged her even more was that she actually gave a damn whether he agreed or disagreed with her assessment of herself.

“And I’ve heard that you’re smart and focused and dedicated,” he went on, sounding genuinely impressed, something that dulled the edge of her irritation. Which also bothered her. What did she care if he was impressed by her or not? “And that your number one goal in life right now is to bring Sorcerer to heel.”

Sorcerer was formally known as Adrian Padgett, and at one time had been an agent for OPUS himself—before turning to the Dark Side and choosing a life of crime. He’d been on their list—and on the lam—for years, and Lila was only the most recent agent trying to bring him in. So far he’d eluded her, something that had only served to make her more determined, but this time he wasn’t going to get away. Of that she was positive.

“And I’ve heard that if anyone can bring him in,” Faraday continued, “you can. Because I’ve also heard that you don’t quit until the job is done. And I’ve heard that you scare the hell out of most people. Oh, and I’ve also heard that you’re arguably the most dangerous woman in the world.”

“Arguably?” Lila echoed dubiously.

“Well, I certainly wouldn’t argue with it,” he assured her.

Smart man. “And do I scare the hell out of you?” she asked.

His eyes never left hers as he reminded her, “You’re the one handcuffed to the bed. What do you think?”

She opened her mouth to reply with a quick retort, then realized she wasn’t sure how he’d meant his remark. Was he saying he’d cuffed her to the bed because he was terrified of her? Or was he saying that since it had been a piece of cake for him to cuff her to the bed, she wasn’t scary at all?

Wow. A man she couldn’t get a read on. Lila couldn’t remember the last time she’d met one of those. In fact, she wasn’t sure she ever had.

“So you’ve heard quite a bit about me,” she said, deciding to ignore his last comment. For now. Considering the way he’d listed all her attributes, she figured her badass rep was still pretty much in place. “Do you believe it?”

This time his gaze drifted from her face and sauntered down her entire body, all the way to her toes and back again. And every last inch of her began to tingle and grow hot under his scrutiny. Wow. It had been a long time since she’d felt that, too. That immediate shudder of sexual awareness that started in the pit of her stomach and exploded outward, demanding satisfaction.

Damn. This really wasn’t a good time for her to meet a man who could do that to her. Especially one who could do it so quickly after meeting him. And do it with such amazing thoroughness.

“Well, handcuffed to my bed like that, you don’t look too dangerous,” he said. Ironically, there was something in the way he said it that made him seem very dangerous indeed.

Lila shoved her errant thoughts and feelings and tingling sexual awareness to the back of her brain and smiled at him. And she hoped like hell it was a convincing smile, and revealed none of the nervousness still quivering in her belly. “Good. Then why don’t you come over here and unlock me?”

He laughed softly as he lifted the brandy snifter to his mouth for an idle sip, taking his time to draw the liquor into his mouth, and savoring it for a moment before swallowing. Lila watched fascinated as he completed the action, wondering why she found such a simple gesture so provocative, and why it suddenly felt as if she, not he, was the one who had consumed something that seared her insides with heat. He didn’t answer her question, but when he remained rooted in place, she gathered that was pretty much all the response she was going to receive from him.

“I’d offer you a cognac, too,” he said, “but I’ve also heard you don’t drink. However, I stocked up on decaf green tea in anticipation of your, ah, arrival. If you’re interested.”

“Maybe later,” she said, thinking news traveled fast. She’d voiced that no-drinking policy and preference for decaf green tea at her sister’s house only a couple of weeks ago, and only in the presence of one other OPUS employee. “We need to go over the assignment,” she told him. She tugged at the handcuff again. “Come on. Unlock me. Joke’s on me. But now the joke’s over. Let me go.”

“Right,” Faraday said. “So you can kick my ass from here to Abu Dhabi. I’ll unlock you in a little while.”

“I’ll still kick your ass from here to Abu Dhabi,” she told him matter-of-factly. “It’ll just hurt more later.”

He considered her in that thoughtful way again as he enjoyed another sip of his drink. Another slow, thorough, fascinating, provocative, heat-inducing sip that went straight to Lila’s head. If he kept this up, she was going to be under the table soon.

“Maybe,” he finally said.

It took a minute for her to realize he was talking about the ass kicking, not the under-the-tabling. No maybe about that first one. She’d totally kick his ass, she thought. But she kept it to herself.

“So tell me what you know,” he said.

“Did you read my report?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Then you know everything I know.”

“Reports only cover the facts,” he said. “Not gut feelings. Not impressions. Not theories. So what are your gut feelings, impressions and theories on this thing?”

Faraday didn’t need to identify the thing any more than he had. Adrian Padgett had been the focus of Lila’s job for some time. Before she’d come along, he’d been arguably OPUS’s best agent. He’d operated by his own rules, to be sure—kind of like Lila, come to think of it—but he’d still stayed within the parameters of Doing the Right Thing. OPUS itself often bent its own rules to ensure political unity and security, so no one had really bothered to rein in Sorcerer, even when he started overstepping those parameters. He always collected exceptionally good intel, always bagged the bad guys, always got the job done. So who cared how he went about it?

Eventually, though, he began to stray so far beyond the parameters that there was no coming back. Several years ago Sorcerer had decided to become a free agent of sorts, and blackmailed the organization who employed him, threatening to expose it and many of its agents if he wasn’t paid millions of dollars and left alone. Had he not been such a good agent, the threat would have been laughable. OPUS was built on a framework of secrets—so many secrets that there were few in the organization who could honestly describe how it all worked.

With Sorcerer, though, as good as he was, the risk was too great to ignore the threat. Even so, before OPUS could amass the cash necessary to pay him off, Sorcerer leaked enough information to compromise dozens of assignments and agents. One assignment was so badly compromised, in fact, that the agent completing it ended up dead. Maybe the man hadn’t died by Sorcerer’s hand, but he’d died by Sorcerer’s actions. The agent had been the father of Lila’s regular partner, so there was a bit of personal vendetta involved in her desire to catch him, too.

She was surprised Faraday would want to know about her gut feelings and impressions and theories with regard to the assignment, since facts alone were the lifeblood of an archivist’s existence. There were twelve OPUS archivists in all, all headquartered here in Washington, and it was their job to keep records of every assignment ever conducted by OPUS. They were the ones who completed the final analysis and wrote up the final reports for every assignment. They looked at what went right and what went wrong during an operation and figured out why. Then they filed it all away somewhere, in case there was ever a need to reference a case again.

A case like, oh, say…Sorcerer. That guy probably had more paper and megabytes assigned to him than any other agent or event in OPUS’s history.

“You want to know my gut feelings about Sorcerer?” Lila asked. “My impressions? My theories?”

“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t want to know,” Faraday replied.

She nodded. “Then maybe I’ll have that tea after all. And you might want to refill that cognac. And make yourself a sandwich. This could take a while.”




CHAPTER TWO


JOEL FARADAY ENJOYED another taste of his cognac and watched the woman handcuffed to his bed daintily sip tea from the mug in her unbound hand. He hadn’t bothered with a sandwich. Something else he’d heard about Lila Moreau, code name She-Wolf, was that she minced partners, not words. Despite her assurances to the contrary, this wouldn’t take long. And he was reasonably certain he should keep at least one hand free at all times.

She wasn’t what he’d expected. He’d been hearing about her for years, just like everyone else who worked for OPUS, but the stories had made her sound like a larger-than-life legend. A brisk, brassy bombshell with a big mouth, bigger cojones and no moral fiber to speak of. A woman who put the job before anything and did anything to get the job done. Joel had pegged her as a tall, voluptuous siren, whiskeyvoiced and two-pack-a-day redolent, with the hard eyes of a woman who was edgy and brittle and coarse.

Instead, she looked like the girl next door. Small in stature, slender in frame, pretty more than beautiful in an almost wholesome-looking way. She’d removed her knit cap, and a mass of pale blond hair now cascaded down to her shoulders, scooped back from her face with a careless hand. Although the clingy fit of her clothing revealed some very nice curves, she was by no means the bump-and-grind type. Her voice was a clear, euphonic tenor, and as he’d wrestled with her on the bed, he’d noted the faint scent of lavender about her. As for her eyes…

Well, now. The eyes were certainly something. A clear sapphire-blue that shoved Joel completely off balance. Her eyes were indeed the stuff of legend. With them, he could see how Lila Moreau had earned her rep as a woman who could glean just about anything she wanted from any man she wanted, be it information or something else entirely.

But he detected no edge to her, nothing bitter or coarse. She didn’t even seem all that brassy, truth be told, threats to kick his ass notwithstanding. She’d spoken of that as if it were a simple statement of fact, which, he had to admit, it probably was.

Nevertheless, the realization that this woman, who was a good foot shorter than he and probably almost half his weight, had earned herself a bona fide, justified reputation as the most dangerous woman in the world certainly gave a man pause.

The jury was still out on the moral fiber thing—she had, after all, broken in to his house for the express purpose of imprisoning him and showing him who was boss—but he was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Besides, morality, like so many things, was relative—and fluid. His own moral history being what it was, he was the last person to make a judgment call on something like that.

He’d managed to leave her tea on the nightstand closest to her without losing a limb, so he figured they were off to a pretty good start. Still, he’d completed the action in record time and immediately retreated to the opposite side of the room when he was done. Now he leaned back in his wooden desk chair with an ominous creak, swirled his cognac in its snifter and never once took his eyes off Lila Moreau.

Instead of offering him the information he’d requested of her a little while ago, however, she asked him a question of her own. “Do you know exactly where Sorcerer is right now?”

“I haven’t pinpointed his exact position, no,” Joel admitted. “But I’ve gotten pretty close.”

“And do you know what he’s doing?”

He shook his head. “Not really. That’s your job.”

She nodded. “And I’ve done my job. I know exactly what Sorcerer is doing.”

Her intimation being, of course, that Joel hadn’t done his job, since he didn’t know exactly where Sorcerer was. Not that he cared about impressing her. Although it might come as a shock to Lila Moreau, she wasn’t the one in charge of this operation. Nor was she the most important cog in the machine. Naturally, he didn’t tell her that. He only said, “You didn’t include your discovery in your report.”

“That’s because it’s a theory,” she said.

Joel narrowed his eyes at her. “You just told me you know it for a fact.”

“No, I said I know exactly what he’s up to.”

“But—”

“I just don’t have any proof. Yet.”

He leaned back in his chair again. “Then you don’t know exactly what he’s up to. Like you said, it’s still a theory.”

She set her tea back on the nightstand and met his gaze defiantly. “No, it isn’t.”

“But you just said—”

“I know exactly what he’s doing,” she repeated.

“You can’t know for sure if you don’t have proof.”

“Yes, I can.”

“No, you can’t.”

“Yes. I can.”

“No. You can’t.”

“Can.”

“Can’t.”

“Look, Faraday—”

“Call me Joel.”

He could practically see her back go up when he said it.

Obviously she didn’t like addressing her coworkers by their first names. Or, more likely, she resented being told what to do. Which was too damned bad. Because Joel was going to be giving her a lot of instruction in the days ahead. And she’d sure as hell have to get used to following orders.

“Virtuoso,” she amended, using his code name instead.

Which was strange to hear spoken aloud, since archivists were a pretty chummy bunch and rarely referred to each other by their code names. They were supposed to do so in professional situations, but…They were left so much to their own devices that over the years they’d splintered off into their own group within the organization, with their own practices and policies. Joel and the other archivists just weren’t as formal as the rest of OPUS.

But fine, he and Lila could compromise on this one. Compromises weren’t such bad things. Joel just liked being the one who offered them, not the one who agreed to go along with them. He’d be magnanimous. This time.

“Whatever,” he replied, telling himself he did not sound ungracious when he said it.

She grinned at him, smugly, and it surprised Joel how much he wanted to walk over to the bed and do something about that smugness. What surprised him even more was that the something he wanted to do was in no way professional. He’d learned a long time ago to temper his knee-jerk reactions and not to let his emotions get the better of him. Lila, he was beginning to realize, could jerk a hell of a lot more than a man’s knee. And he didn’t want to think about what she could potentially do to a man’s emotions.

“Between what I know about Sorcerer and his comings and goings the past couple of years,” she continued, “and what I learned over the past few months, I can safely say that what the guy is trying to do is take the entire planet hostage.”

Joel narrowed his eyes at her. “What are you talking about? How can he take the entire planet hostage?”

She picked up her tea, sipped it carefully, swallowed slowly, sipped it again. And never once did her eyes leave Joel’s. She was baiting him. Trying to make him impatient for whatever information she might have. Trying to make him lose his cool. Trying again to show him who was in charge. Well, as she’d said earlier, the joke was on her. If there was one thing Joel Faraday had in spades, it was patience. He could wait all night if it came to that. At least he could take bathroom breaks. The way Lila was sipping her tea, she’d figure out soon enough who was really calling the shots here.

Finally she lowered her cup and said, “Sorcerer’s trying to create a massive computer virus that will infect systems around the world with enough velocity, tenacity and toxicity to cripple the entire planet’s commercial, political and financial momentum. Not that he necessarily wants to unleash it,” she quickly qualified. “Since taking advantage of the planet’s commercial and financial arenas is one of his favorite pastimes, and watching its political machinations is his greatest source of amusement. He’s greedier than he is power mad. What he’d rather do is blackmail the planet into paying him billions of dollars not to unleash it.”

Joel thought about that for a moment, weighing her information with what he knew himself. He’d developed his own theory about what Sorcerer was doing, but hers made more sense, since, ultimately, it was infinitely more profitable. “So it’s your classic Mafia neighborhood protection racket,” he finally said.

“Yep,” she replied. “Except that Sorcerer has brought it into the twenty-first century with global, high-tech potential. Pay up or be burned to the ground, figuratively speaking.”

“I suppose it’s possible that’s what he plans to do,” Joel said. “But frankly, something of a scope that massive doesn’t seem possible to effectively execute.”

“Maybe not,” she agreed. “But if anyone can pull it off, it’s Sorcerer.”

“Unfortunately, I can’t argue with you about that. And even more unfortunately, what you just described fits well with what we learned about him while we still had him in our sights in New York.”

For years, Sorcerer had been popping up in various parts of the country and causing trouble, then disappearing just as quickly without OPUS getting any closer to capturing him. Six months ago he’d turned up in New York, misrepresenting himself online to lure a lonely young woman into helping him further his plans. Unfortunately, although the young woman, Avery Nesbitt, had done her best to help OPUS catch him, Sorcerer had managed to evade them yet again.

“If what you theorize is true,” Joel said, deliberately emphasizing that word to piss Lila off—hey, two could play her power game—“then Sorcerer can’t do it alone. As smart as he is, he doesn’t have that specific kind of know-how. He knows computers, sure. But not sophisticated programming like that. That’s why he approached Avery Nesbitt. Because he knew she did. But she’s out of the picture now,” he pointed out.

“Yeah, but there are other people like her in the world,” Lila countered. “People who are whizzes with all things programming-related, including viruses. Hell, especially viruses. Some of those people are just kids. And a lot of them, regardless of their ages, are socially backward enough that they could easily be manipulated. Especially by someone like Sorcerer.”

“He’s looking for another patsy to help him do his dirty work,” Joel said. “Maybe more than one patsy. Avery Nesbitt wasn’t the only person he contacted when he was trawling the Net for virus builders, though she was without question his prime target. Understandable, considering her history. But when we had him under surveillance in New York, Sorcerer seemed to be shopping around a lot, contacting a number of people, as if he were trying to put together a geek squad of sorts.”

“So is he still looking?” Lila asked. “Or has he found the people he needs?”

“Well, that’s the big question, isn’t it?” Joel replied. “He’s been off our radar for a while now. What we have working in our favor is that guys like Sorcerer tend to be creatures of habit, no matter how much they might think otherwise. The fact that they’re convinced their behavior is untraceable, not to mention the fact that they have staggering great egos, only helps us out, because people like that aren’t always thorough in covering their tracks. At least, not as well as they should.”

“How close have you gotten to finding him?”

Joel set down his cognac and rose from his chair to bend over the mahogany rolltop desk that had belonged to his great grandmother. It was overflowing with untidy heaps of files, notebooks, maps, sketches and other paper paraphernalia, but he knew exactly where to locate what he wanted. Picking carefully through the mess, he withdrew a diagram he’d sketched himself of precisely the geographic region he was talking about. Moving to the foot of the bed, he unrolled it so that it was facing upside down from himself and toward Lila.

“I’ve narrowed it to an area of roughly three hundred square miles,” he told her as he ran his hands briskly over the paper to smooth it out. When the edges began to turn up again, he retrieved his iPod and cell phone from the desk, placing one on each side of the drawing to anchor it down again. By then, Lila had repositioned herself on one hand and both knees, her handcuffed arm extended behind her, to inspect the map.

“Three hundred square miles isn’t what I’d call narrowed down,” she said.

“It’s not as big an area as it sounds like,” he told her. “It’s pretty much relegated to one city and its immediate environs. And within that area, there are two smaller ones that I think will produce Sorcerer for us.”

“You know for a fact he’s here?”

“Not for a fact, no,” Joel admitted. “No one’s registered a physical sighting of him since your sister’s house.”

Five months after disappearing from New York, Sorcerer had turned up again, this time in Cleveland, Ohio, because he’d mistaken Lila’s twin sister, Marnie Lundy, who lived and worked there, for Lila herself. And although Marnie, too, had aided in the investigation, even posing briefly as Lila because Lila had been keeping a low profile at the time, Sorcerer had again slipped through their fingers. His disappearance then had just made Joel that much more determined to locate him now.

“Taking into account Sorcerer’s past actions and appearances, his personal history and his proclivities,” he said, “I’m reasonably certain he’ll turn up in one of two places within this city. All you have to do is go into those places and flush him out.”

“So what city are we talking about?” she asked, looking up at him. And Joel had to give himself a good mental shake to keep from falling into the fathomless depths of her blue, blue eyes. “You haven’t labeled any streets or landmarks here.”

“Haven’t gotten around to it yet. But don’t worry.” He pointed to his temple. “I’ve got them all stored up here.”

“Feel like sharing any of them?” she asked. Sounding impatient. Glaring at him impatiently. Giving her handcuffed wrist an impatient jerk.

Just like that, Joel felt the upper hand slip firmly back into his grip. This time he was the one to grin. And he hoped he didn’t look too smug when he did.

Oh, who was he kidding? He went out of his way to look as smug as possible.

He told her, “It’s a city known for showbiz mayors, tasteless pornography and dubious art exhibits.”

“Oh, great,” Lila groaned, looking down at the map again. “I have to go back to Vegas?”

He shook his head. “Not Las Vegas. Cincinnati.”

“Cincinnati?” she echoed incredulously, sitting back on her heels. “Just how much have you had to drink tonight, guy? Cincinnati is the heartland of America. It’s Ohio, for God’s sake. Have you ever been to Ohio? Me, I just left Ohio a couple of weeks ago. Walt Disney would gag on its sweetness. How does all that stuff relate to Cincinnati?”

Joel lifted a hand and counted them off. “Jerry Springer,” he said in response to item number one, extending his index finger. “Larry Flynt,” he added, thrusting up another—rather significant, at that—finger. “And the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit,” he concluded, adding a third finger to the mix. “Trust me. Cincinnati has a dark side you can’t begin to imagine.”

She burst out laughing at that. “Dark side. Cincinnati. Right.”

“Yeah, okay, maybe that’s pushing it,” he conceded, dropping both hands to his hips. “It’s still the place where we’re going to find Sorcerer. Mark my words.”

“How do you figure?”

“Like I said, he was in contact with several people when he was reeling in Avery Nesbitt. An inordinate number of them were located in the Cincinnati area. Also located in the Cincinnati area is a very small, very exclusive private college. Waverly College. Ever heard of it?”

“Yeah, it’s like a small-scale MIT.”

Joel nodded. “Except a degree from Waverly is more prestigious, and it’s a harder school to get into. What you end up with is a streamlined student body full of big brains that are light-years ahead of the intellectual norm, all of them tech majors, the vast majority in the field of computers. The place is thick with hackers. In fact, a few years ago, a small group of underclassmen was arrested, tried and convicted on charges of treason after hacking into top secret CIA files and selling them to terrorists to pay for their pornography and gaming habits.”

“I remember that,” she said with a nod that nudged a stray lock of pale blond hair over one eye. She immediately shoved it back behind one ear, but not before Joel’s fingers curved instinctively in preparation to do that himself.

Terrific, he thought. Barely an hour after meeting Lila, he was responding to her in a way that he really couldn’t afford to be responding. Wanting to touch her, however innocently. Hell, wanting to touch her in ways that weren’t innocent at all. Being mesmerized by the incredible blue eyes to the point of momentarily forgetting what he’d intended to say. Battling a very uncharacteristic—never mind completely politically incorrect—wave of arousal every time he looked up and saw her handcuffed to his bed. It had been months, maybe years, since he’d experienced such an immediate attraction to a woman. And Lila was the last woman he should be experiencing it for.

She added, “So you think Sorcerer stopped by Waverly on the way home from work to pick up a dozen eggheads with his usual gallon of milk?”

He nodded. “I think it’s extremely possible. And very likely.”

She thought about that for a minute. “Makes sense. Especially when you consider his recent appearance in Cleveland. It’s only a few hours’ drive from Cincinnati.”

“Also interesting, and significant,” Joel continued, “is the fact that there have been a rash of online scams and crimes committed in recent months that have been traced back to a user or users in this part of the country.” He pointed at the map again. “They started off as petty mischief, like worms and viruses and hoaxes, exactly the sort of thing college students enjoy most. But whoever’s been creating them and sending them out has covered his or her—or their—tracks well. We’ve only been able to pinpoint the city, not an actual address. Over the past several weeks, however, the crimes have escalated into some pretty major—and pretty ballsy—thefts and cons that are starting to rake in some significant money.”

“You don’t know who’s perpetrating them?” Lila asked.

He shook his head again. “Only that it’s someone in the Cincinnati area. Most likely someone at Waverly. But the activity shows signs of having started off with amateurs, becoming more sophisticated just recently.”

“Like maybe someone or a handful of people who were once only in it for the fun are now also in it for the profit.”

“Exactly like that.”

“Like maybe someone suddenly joined up with this person or persons and injected them with a little more ambition and organization.”

“Yep.”

“Like maybe Sorcerer has indeed found his band of merry hackers.”

“Which means he’s now stronger and smarter than he’s ever been before,” Joel concluded.

He traced his finger on the map in a circular motion around an area near the Ohio River. “Dormitory housing is pretty sparse at Waverly, so a good number of the students live in the city proper. And there’s an area downtown around Vine Street that especially caters to students. Lots of student-type apartments, coffee shops, clubs, student-friendly retail establishments, that kind of thing. I think that’s probably the best place to start looking. There and on Waverly’s campus. If my calculations are correct—and it goes without saying that they are,” he added, since Lila was right about modesty being overrated when it wasn’t warranted, “you’ll find Sorcerer in one place or another. Along with his accomplices. It’s just a matter of being in the right place at the right time.”

“And being uncharacteristically lucky,” she added.

He smiled. “So all that good karma you’ve been scoring over the years will come in handy now.”

She laughed at that, a deep, full-bodied, throaty laugh that made something inside Joel shimmy like mirage heat on a strip of desert highway. Only, instead of being way off in the distance like mirage heat usually was, it surrounded him and closed down hard. Once again he reminded himself that he was in no position to be feeling such things. Even under the best of circumstances, he did not need a sexual attraction to a woman whose emotions—at least the positive ones—ran about as deep as a fingerprint.

Note to self, Faraday: You’re not into meaningless sex anymore. Remember?

Well, evidently not…

“Do you have a list of the people in the area Sorcerer contacted and may or may not have followed up on?” Lila asked.

Joel shook off his wayward thoughts—again—and focused on the matter at hand. Which happened to be the woman he was trying not to think about. Damn. “We do,” he said. “It will be in a dossier with other information I have for you. But remember, there are almost certainly others we don’t know about.”

“Do you know if Sorcerer established any contact with any of the people you did identify?”

“You’ll receive a detailed account, but yes, we intercepted a number of e-mails between him and several students at Waverly. They were mostly exchanges of inconsequential information, though. Getting-to-know-you type stuff, the same thing he initially sent to Avery Nesbitt. Sorcerer assumed several different identities, each tailored to be most attractive to whomever he was in touch with. Most often, he was a young student at another university close enough to arrange for a physical meeting, should it come to that. With women, he invariably went the romantic route. With the men, he posed as another gamer and attempted to strike up a friendship through those avenues. Online gaming is huge at places like Waverly.”

“And did any such physical meetings take place?” Lila asked.

“A couple of times either Sorcerer or his mark would extend an invitation to meet up somewhere, but to the best of our knowledge, no such physical meetings ever took place.”

“To the best of your knowledge,” she repeated. “That means it’s entirely possible that he has made physical contact. With any number of those people.”

She was right, as much as Joel hated to admit it. Intelligence and surveillance could go only so far. And Sorcerer certainly knew how to keep himself from being tailed. He’d built a career on it. Not to mention, according to Sorcerer’s past habits—which, lately, Joel had been building his own career on—Sorcerer would delight in putting one over on OPUS by completing such a meeting just for the hell of it. He’d be careful, as he’d been in New York when he lured Avery Nesbitt into such a meeting, but he’d carry through. Unfortunately, Joel had an even bigger reason to agree with Lila.

“It’s more than possible,” he admitted. “It’s probable. Except for those few appearances in Cleveland, Sorcerer’s been off our radar for a while now. That’s given him ample opportunity to operate with total freedom. And there were plenty of gaps in our surveillance even when we did have him in our sights. Not that he can be sure he hasn’t been under constant surveillance, so there’s still some small chance he’s gone into hiding and stayed there, but—”

“Oh, he’s been sure he wasn’t under surveillance,” Lila told him with what sounded like absolute certainty. “He’s known about every gap and failure. You can count on it.”

“Well, I don’t know if I’d count on it,” Joel said, “but somehow the guy always does seem to know what OPUS is doing. Sometimes it even seems like he knows it before we do.”

“There’s no somehow to it,” Lila said. “And no seems, either.”

Joel looked up from the diagram where his gaze had fallen to find Lila staring at him with a very troubling expression. As if she knew something he didn’t. Which, if Sorcerer was involved, wasn’t good. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“I mean the reason he manages to stay one step ahead of OPUS is because he does know what we’re doing. Every step of the way. And he knows it, sometimes, before the field agent even gets handed the assignment.”

Joel narrowed his eyes at her. “That’s impossible. The only way he could know that would be if—”

He halted before finishing, not wanting to put voice to the thought that flashed into his head.

So Lila finished his statement for him. “Someone inside the organization has been helping him all along.”




CHAPTER THREE


“HOW CAN YOU KNOW THAT?” Faraday asked. “And why wasn’t it in your report?”

Lila tugged meaningfully on the handcuff that still connected her to his headboard. In a fantasy, she might have found the idea of being handcuffed to the bed of a sexy stranger profoundly arousing. In reality, it was damned annoying. Probably because Joel wasn’t a stranger to her anymore. She was getting to know him pretty well. What was weird—and unwelcome—was that she still found him sexy. Where getting to know him should have made her dislike him, she instead found herself feeling curious about him. Even worse, the stuff she was curious about had nothing to do with the job they both had facing them.

“Uncuff me,” she told him, “and I’ll reveal everything.”

He arched a dark eyebrow at that.

“Everything I know,” she clarified with an exasperated sound.

The eyebrow dropped back down again, and for a minute he almost looked disappointed. Interestingly, though, his expression registered no fear at the prospect of releasing her, and that, Lila had to admit, was pretty admirable. Stupid, but admirable. Most guys wouldn’t have had the gall to cuff her in the first place. Men who’d tried to restrain her in the past had generally ended up horizontal, usually unconscious and always bloody. And even if one of them had managed to capture her—yeah, right—no way would he have been brave enough to release her while he was still anywhere in the same ZIP code.

Of course, Joel Faraday wasn’t exactly hurrying to carry out her instructions, was he? So maybe he hid his fear well. Which, to Lila, was even more admirable.

“Promise me you won’t kick my ass to Abu Dhabi and back again,” he finally said.

Okay. She’d just kick his ass to Aberdeen and back again. “I promise I won’t kick your ass to Abu Dhabi,” she vowed.

“Or back again.”

“Whatever.”

But he still didn’t move. “Promise me you won’t even kick it as far as Arlington.”

She sighed heavily. Fine. She’d just kick his ass to Foggy Bottom. “I promise I won’t kick your ass as far as Arlington,” she repeated dutifully.

“Promise me you’ll leave my ass the hell alone.”

Well, now, she didn’t want to be hasty. She’d already noticed that, even in baggy pajama bottoms, his ass was kind of nice. She might have plans for it later. After she’d kicked it around for a little while. “Look, I promise I won’t kick your ass tonight, all right?”

“Ever,” he insisted.

She bit back a growl. “All right. I won’t kick your ass ever. Or any of your other body parts, either,” she added when he opened his mouth to say more.

“Promise?”

This time she growled quite distinctly. “You want me to sign something in blood?”

He actually seemed to consider it for a moment.

“All right.” She finally ground out the words. “I promise.”

He must have believed her, because he made his way cautiously to the nightstand where he’d placed the key. And watching him move, all fluid and stealth and leisure, Lila realized she had no desire to kick his ass anyway. It really was a nice ass. And it was attached to a very nice torso. Which had extremely nice shoulders. Fastened to lusciously nice arms. In fact, she decided as she watched him palm the small key and turn toward her, it would be a shame if anything happened to any of Joel Faraday’s body parts. Unless, of course, his body parts happened to be naked at the time, and Lila happened to be the one doing anything—and everything—to them.

Yeah, it was definitely going to be an interesting assignment.

He hesitated a moment at the side of the bed, still just beyond her reach. Then, even more cautious than he’d been before, he extended his empty hand outward, palm up, presumably in a silent request for her to give him her hand that was uncuffed. Not sure why he would want it, Lila nevertheless started to do so without hesitation. Then, for some reason, her hand stopped when her fingertips were just shy of his. She glanced up to find him gazing at her face, a silent question in his eyes. But he didn’t move his hand forward to take hers, only waited without speaking for her to touch him first.

Still not sure why he didn’t just unlock her, and never once removing her gaze from his, she gingerly pushed her hand the remaining distance necessary to meet his. But the moment their fingers finally connected, she instinctively wanted to pull back.

It was the strangest thing. Lila never retreated from anyone without a damned good reason. As in, without a life-threatening reason. Joel Faraday was in no way a threat to her life. He wasn’t even a threat to her wrist at this point. But there was something about the way her bare palm skimmed over his—a perfectly innocent touch—that made her want to jerk back again.

She fought the sensation by dropping her gaze and focusing it on the fingers that folded gently over her hand. But for some reason, that only compounded her confusion. Because not only did Joel’s fingers nearly swallow her hand whole, he touched her in a way that made goose bumps pebble her flesh. His hand was warm, the skin duskier than hers, dusted with black hair that made it appear darker still. His fingers were long and blunt compared to her small, slender ones, unadorned save the heavy Georgetown University ring he wore on his ring finger. His was a no-nonsense hand. A working hand. A manly hand. But it held hers so gently.

Maybe that was what put her off-kilter. She’d never thought of a man’s hands in terms of gentleness before. On the contrary, men’s hands were not to be trusted.

Joel continued to hold her free hand as he bent forward to reach for her cuffed one. He had to lean over her body to get to it, and when he did, the V-neck of his T-shirt fell away from his body at eye level. That gave Lila a view of a long, muscular torso and trim waist, all of it naked, and all of it dusted by dark hair. She sucked in an involuntary breath at the sight of such masculine beauty, filling her nose with the scent of him, a scintillating mix of Dial soap, expensive cognac and raw, unmitigated male. Her heartbeat quickened in response, and in an effort to slow it, she turned her gaze to her left hand, which had pulled taut the short chain imprisoning it to the bed. But seeing Joel insert the key into the lock and give it an uneasy twitch only made her pulse skyrocket again.

Looking away once more, she found herself gazing at his throat, mere inches from her face. And she saw that she wasn’t the only one suffering from a fast, irregular pulse. Joel’s was hammering hard near his collarbone, and she could hear his breathing now, too, coming in short, ragged bursts. Heat pooled in her belly and spread, filling her breasts to bursting and making her damp between her legs.

My God, she thought, closing her eyes. It was as if they were indulging in some kind of incredibly erotic foreplay. Yet neither had said or done anything to generate this kind of heat. Just the simple act of touching hands and being in close proximity was turning both of them on. What the hell was going on?

After loosing the cuffs from Lila’s hand and the bedpost, Joel straightened and dropped both cuffs and key back on the nightstand, then retreated to the far side of the room. And if he seemed to make the trip in record time, Lila wasn’t going to mention it. She was just happy to be able to breathe normally again. If one could consider quick, shallow, dizzying gasps to be normal.

She dropped her recently freed wrist into her other hand and rubbed idly, not so much because she needed to soothe it as she simply needed something to do with her hands that didn’t involve reaching for Joel. But when she looked at him again, he seemed to be watching what she was doing with an inordinate amount of interest. For a second time, something exploded in her belly and seeped into parts of her that were better left alone.

She did her best to ignore the sensation and return to the topic of their assignment. “Okay, here’s what I know,” she began. But her voice sounded husky and aroused, so she cleared her throat and tried again. “With that bogus attempted-murder charge floating around, I had to stay on the lam for five fuh—uh…for five freaking months,” she quickly amended.

Her language had appalled her sister, Marnie, that single evening the two of them had spent together getting caught up after being separated for virtually their entire lives. Only then had Lila realized just how rough her vocabulary was, compared to that of polite—i.e., non-OPUS—society. But she’d spent her childhood in a trailer park among neighbors who were, at best, bikers and, at worst, junkies, her adolescence on the streets of Las Vegas and her adult life in the company of spies and thugs. Language was a weapon in such environments, and Lila had simply adopted the behavior she saw practiced around her. Once she’d realized how uncomfortable it made Marnie, however, she’d done her best to gentle her vocabulary and deepsix the profanity. Even outside Marnie’s presence, Lila still tried to watch what she said and how brazenly she said it. Such was the good influence her sister had already brought to her life.

“During the five months I was lying low,” she began again, “I learned a lot of stuff about Sorcerer on my own. Stuff that I couldn’t report back to OPUS, because they’d forced me into hiding. And whattaya know, in that five months Sorcerer dropped off the face of the earth. He went into hiding, too, because he couldn’t know what OPUS was doing or where they’d be next, since I hadn’t given them any intel to go on. Without me sending in reports, his contact couldn’t send them back out again. He couldn’t know where he stood with us, so he disappeared.”

Joel studied her hard in silence for a moment, then said, “That sounds like speculation on your part.”

“It was at first,” she admitted. “So I started to dig a little deeper where I could at my end. And I had my partner do a little discreet checking around at OPUS. Between the two of us, we found evidence that there could definitely be a leak somewhere within the ranks of the organization.”

“Could be a leak,” Joel repeated. “Not that there definitely is a leak.”

“Which is why it’s not in my report,” Lila told him. “Neither of us has proof yet, but my gut tells me there’s someone inside who’s helping Sorcerer. Who’s been helping him for a long time now.”

“You think it’s someone who knew him when he was still working for OPUS? Or someone who’s come to work for us since? Is it possible it could even be someone he placed himself? Hell, how do you know it’s not me?”

“I don’t know that,” she replied honestly. “But I don’t have any reason to suspect you. Yet,” she added pointedly because…Well, just because. “I’ve thought a lot about all the possibilities, and at this point I just don’t know. It would make more sense if the leak were someone Sorcerer worked with years ago, but it could be someone he recruited, too. The guy is a charmer,” Lila said frankly. “Very charismatic. Very attractive. Very sexy.”

“Why, Miss Moreau,” Joel said in an affected, golly-geewhiz kind of voice, “you sound like you’re the president of the Adrian Padgett aka Sorcerer Fan Club.”

“No,” she immediately denied. She hesitated before saying the rest, then figured, what the hell. Even if Joel was only her temporary partner, he was still her partner. And she was reasonably sure he wasn’t the leak in the organization, since he wasn’t a part of the information-gathering arm. Anyway, what she was about to tell him wasn’t anything Sorcerer didn’t already know. So she added, “But I’d be lying if I said I’m immune to him. There’s something about him that is undeniably seductive.”

Her remark seemed to surprise Joel, though whether it was what she’d admitted or the fact that she’d admitted it that caused the reaction, Lila couldn’t have said. Frankly, she’d surprised herself when she’d had a one-night stand with Sorcerer shortly after being assigned to the undercover team looking for him. But she’d found herself in a position where she could get close enough to him physically to potentially bring him down. She supposed she’d just taken a page from Adrian’s own notebook and overstepped the usual parameters of the job. Not that that had been the first time she’d stepped over the line. But to get as close to him as she could, she had done something she’d never done on an assignment before—or done since. She’d had a sexual liaison with the suspect.

At the time, she honestly hadn’t thought much about it. Mostly because it hadn’t been any hardship to have sex with Adrian Padgett. He was a gorgeous, sexy guy, and as such, Lila had been powerfully attracted to him on a physical level. At that time, too, she’d been going through some things in her personal life that had allowed her to disengage herself from her feelings, even more so than usual. He’d turned her on, and he’d wanted her. She’d taken advantage of both facts. Unfortunately, he’d figured out she was part of the OPUS machine before she could make use of her new position in his life.

“And were you seduced?” Faraday asked her point-blank.

“No,” she replied honestly. “When I had sex with Sorcerer, I was an active and willing participant.”

His mouth flattened into a tight line at that, and a muscle twitched in his jaw. “So you really did sleep with him?”

“I won’t apologize for what I did that night,” she told him. “It wasn’t exactly protocol, but neither was it against the rules. Plenty of agents before me—male and female—have used sex to garner information from someone they were investigating.”

“And did you?” Joel asked. “Garner information from Sorcerer?”

“Some. I could have gotten more if I’d had an opportunity to extend our…liaison. As it was, he figured out who I worked for before I had the chance.”

“And was the desire for information the only reason you slept with him?” Joel asked.

Honesty, she reminded herself. She had to be honest. So she told him, “No. It was the desire for something else. And I found Adrian Padgett to be genuinely attractive.”

“Even knowing what he is?”

“I didn’t think about what he is,” she said. “I thought about how he made me feel. How he made my body feel,” she corrected herself. Since that was the only place she’d felt anything while she was with him.

“And would you have slept with him knowing what he is if you hadn’t needed information?” Joel asked.

Why he was belaboring this she couldn’t begin to imagine. It wasn’t as if he had a stake in it. Again, being honest, she replied, “No. Not knowing he was Sorcerer. Had he just been some guy I met, yeah. I might have. But I don’t sleep with the enemy just because the enemy turns me on. The enemy needs to have something else I want more than physical gratification.”

“Information.”

She nodded. “Information.”

Her encounter with Adrian Padgett had come at a time when Lila wasn’t much concerned with moral or ethical repercussions. Hell, that was one of the reasons OPUS had recruited her in the first place. She was the perfect candidate for the job they wanted her to do. Estranged from what little family she had—not even knowing about half of it when they recruited her—and coming from a background that had prevented her from forming emotional attachments to other people, she was a vessel waiting to be filled by OPUS policy and procedure. The fact that she wasn’t bad to look at and was used to being kicked around hadn’t hurt, either. Nor did the fact that she was accustomed to hard work. Add it all up, and OPUS found in Lila Moreau the quintessential femme fatale. And boy, did they exploit it. And her. Why shouldn’t she exploit herself, too? At least she was the one in control then.

“I won’t apologize for what I did,” she said again. “Because circumstances being what they were at the time, I wasn’t out of line to do it. And it did lull Sorcerer into a false security that allowed us to extend the life of the investigation in Indianapolis long enough that we almost caught him.”

“But you didn’t catch him,” Joel reminded her.

“No,” she agreed. “Unfortunately, we didn’t.” She met his gaze levelly. “But this time, I promise you, I’m taking that son of a bitch down.” She hesitated for a moment, then added, “And I’m going to do it in less than two weeks.”

Faraday arched his dark eyebrows again. “We don’t even know exactly where he is. How can you set a timetable at this point?”

She grinned, mostly because she couldn’t help herself. Lila always grinned when she thought of what would be happening in two weeks. “’Cause I have someplace I need to be in two weeks, that’s why.”

Now he narrowed his eyes at her. “I haven’t heard anything about another assignment for you. In fact, they made clear to me that this is the only thing on your agenda right now and to take all the time we needed.”

Lila studied her manicure. “Yeah, well, just shows how much they know.”

Faraday straightened and hooked his hands on his hips. “Where do you have to be in two weeks?” he demanded.

She sat back on her haunches and mimicked his challenging posture, settling her hands on her hips, too. “That’s none of your damned business.”

Up went the eyebrows again. “Excuse me?”

Enunciating more carefully, she repeated, “It’s. None. Of. Your. Damned. Business.”

His gaze never once leaving hers, he glared at her harder, shifted his weight to one foot, crossed his arms over his chest, expelled a soft sound and said quietly, “Don’t push me, Lila.”

It spoke volumes about his effect on her that she actually found herself relenting. Then again, it wasn’t as if her whereabouts in two weeks would be top secret. “Fine,” she muttered, relaxing her stance. “If you must know, I have a wedding to go to in two weeks.”

His mouth dropped open a fraction, and he eyed her blandly. “A wedding.”

She nodded. “Yeah, a wedding. I’m gonna be the best man. So I need to wrap this thing up before then. I need to bring down the son of a bitch one way or another before the Saturday after next.”

Faraday didn’t reply right away, only looked at Lila in a way she found a little disconcerting. It kind of made her feel the way a bug must feel when it was pinned under a microscope, while some guy in a white lab coat loomed over it holding a big ol’ pair of tweezers in one hand and a specimen slide in the other.

Finally he said, “We.”

Confused, Lila asked, “What?”

“We,” he said again. “We are going to bring the son of a bitch down.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “What are you talking about?”

“You and I,” he clarified. “We’ll be bringing in Sorcerer together.”

She shook her head. Oh, she didn’t think so. Aloud, she told him, “No, we won’t. I’ll be going to Cincinnati, and you’ll be staying here with all your gizmos and files. The wonders of technology and all that. Even hundreds of miles away, I can report in daily. That’s the way it always works. Me in the field sending intelligence where I find it, my partner manning home base collecting and dissecting that information. Yeah, we’re usually no more than a few miles apart at most, but it shouldn’t be a problem, you staying here in D.C.”

Now Faraday smiled in a way that Lila found really disconcerting. Like maybe the guy in the lab coat just lit the flame on a Bunsen burner. He pointed behind himself at the overflowing desk, where, at the bottom of a pile of papers, sat a laptop, now folded closed. “The wonders of technology,” he echoed. “As long as I have a wireless connection, I can be hundreds of miles away from all my gizmos and files and still have everything I need at my fingertips. Meaning I’ll never have to be more than a few miles at most away from my partner.”

Oh, no, Lila thought. No, no, no, no, no. He was not saying what he seemed to be saying.

He continued, “See, Lila, you may officially be back to tabula rasa with the big guys, but they’re not quite ready to cut you loose to your own devices again.”

She studied him morosely, a nervous knot forming in her stomach, and wondered why she hadn’t seen this coming from a hundred miles away. Man, she really had been out of the game too long. She’d forgotten the most rudimentary rule of OPUS. They didn’t trust anyone anytime anywhere anyhow anyway.

“I’m going to have to be on a leash for a while,” she guessed.

Faraday nodded.

“And you’re going to be the one holding it.”

He nodded again.

She sighed, much more softly than before. Even though it wasn’t necessary for him to spell it out any further, he did. Probably just his little way of showing Lila who was going to be in charge.

“I’ll be going to Cincinnati with you,” he told her. “And you’ll be reporting to me pretty much every day. If you don’t, I’ll be obliged to tell your superiors that you’ve gone missing again, something I doubt either of us would like to see happen. In other words, Lila, I’ll be the one running this operation. And you’ll be the one doing whatever I tell you to do. And maybe, maybe, if you’re a very good girl, and do exactly as you’re told, we’ll get you to your wedding on time.”




CHAPTER FOUR


A LITTLE MORE than twenty-four hours after leaving Joel Faraday’s Georgetown town house, Lila was back again—this time arriving at his front door, and with more than just the clothes on her back. This time she had some clothes packed in a carry-on bag, as well. Along with some assorted toiletries. And some official files. And some lethal weaponry. And a good book to read on the plane. Normally, carrying weaponry, lethal or otherwise, onto a plane, even with a good book, might pose a bit of a problem. But not when one was flying chartered. Government charter. Top secret government charter at that. In fact, Lila wasn’t sure, but she and Joel Faraday might just be flying to Cincinnati in Wonder Woman’s invisible jet. Which she had to admit, even to her jaded self, might be very cool.

When she’d left his house yesterday, the sun had just been staining the eastern sky with the pinks and oranges of early dawn. Now the sun had fully crested the horizon, but the western sky was still a bit smudged with remnants of blue and purple left over from the fleeing night. Lila wished she could retreat with it and stay in the darkness, where she felt infinitely more comfortable.

There was something about the light of day that made everything scarier. More threatening. Less comforting. At least in the dark she knew where she stood. Daytime exposed too much ugliness, revealed too many sights to consume and digest and make sense of, released too many people who assumed too many roles. At night, everything was pretty cut-and-dried. People who populated the nighttime never worried much about making a good impression or keeping up an appearance. At night, not many people bothered with artifice. Daytime dwellers often had people to impress. Schedules to keep. Jobs to protect. So they often had much to hide. It was harder to trust those people.

Joel Faraday was just such a daytime dweller. But that wasn’t why Lila had trouble trusting him. It wasn’t even because she couldn’t be positive he wasn’t the leak. No, with him, it was the same as it was with everyone else. She didn’t trust him because…Well. Because he was human. And, she supposed, because she was human, too.

Before moving her hand to the doorbell, she first ran it briskly over the front of her white linen shirt and beige linen trousers—and immediately chided herself for taking even that small effort with her appearance. Flat beige skimmers completed the outfit. She’d pinned her hair atop her head when she showered and hadn’t bothered to take it down once she was dressed, nor had she bothered with jewelry or cosmetics. Not her typical attire or appearance by a long shot, but she liked to dress for comfort when she traveled. She’d slip into character once they arrived in Cincinnati. For now, she didn’t have to be She-Wolf. For now, she could still be Lila Moreau if she wanted. So for now, she would dress and act and talk however she wanted.

She adjusted her carry-on over her shoulder, pressed her finger to the doorbell and waited for Joel to answer. And waited. And waited. And waited. She was bent over with her bag open and was wrapping the fingers of one hand around her lock pick and the fingers of the other around her .32 when he finally opened the door. Her gaze lit first on his bare feet, then moved up long legs clad in faded jeans, then up more, over a pin-striped white oxford button-down in the decidedly unbuttoned—and untucked—position. Again she was assailed by the elegance and power of that half-naked torso dusted with dark hair, and again she was hit by the splash of heat in her belly that immediately spread outward. It only burned more fiercely when her gaze finally landed on his face and she was reminded yet again what a beautiful, beautiful man he was.

The adjective should have diminished his masculinity. Using it twice should have doubly diminished it. But the potency of the man’s virility was nearly overwhelming. His features were too ruggedly carved, his dark eyes too turbulent, his muscles too finely sculpted for anyone to ignore the sheer maleness of him. At the same time, the way he was put together was nothing short of a work of art.

What was strange was that Lila’s regular partner, Oliver Sheridan—at whose wedding she would appear as best man, by God, she vowed again—was also a very attractive man. His fiancÉe, Avery Nesbitt, obviously agreed, because even when Oliver, using the name Dixon at the time, had dragged her kicking and screaming—literally—out of her safe life and into a potentially dangerous undercover role with OPUS, she’d fallen head over heels in love with the guy. Of course, that had been due to more than his looks, but still. He was a great-looking guy. Yet not once, not even for a second, had Lila ever felt even a flicker of sexual attraction toward—or even a sexual awareness of—him. So why such an immediate captivation with Joel? Hell, she and Oliver even got along well, whereas a definite spark of tension had sputtered between her and Joel from the very beginning. There was no reason she should be reacting this way to him. But she was. Really badly, too.

And, dammit, since when had she started thinking about him as Joel?

“Hi,” he greeted her now in a voice that was more than a little brusque.

A strand of wet hair fell over his forehead, indicating he’d been in the shower when she rang the bell. This in spite of the fact that they were scheduled to be leaving for the airfield in—she glanced down at her watch—less than fifteen minutes. And they still had a few things to go over before their car arrived, things they couldn’t discuss in the presence of anyone else, even a driver or pilot for OPUS.

“Oversleep?” she said by way of a greeting as she zipped shut her bag and stood to face him.

“A little,” he confessed with clear embarrassment.

She nodded. “You sure you’re up for a field assignment?” she asked. Not just because it was a good question, but also because she knew it would bug the hell out of him.

Okay, okay. So maybe part of that spark of tension was her fault, she admitted. She couldn’t help herself when she was around Joel. Something about him begged to be bugged. She’d provide the same service for anyone who had usurped her power. It was the least she could do.

“I’m sorry I overslept,” he said with barely a trace of apology. “It won’t happen again.” He took a step backward and pulled the door open in a silent invitation for her to enter. As she did, he continued, “Look, I just need to shave and finish dressing. And, okay, maybe pack a few more things. Help me with that last, and I can be ready to leave in ten minutes. Fifteen max.”

“Good,” she said. “Because the car will be here in twelve. And we still have a couple of things to go over.”

“Come upstairs,” he said as he closed the door behind her. “We can talk while I shave and finish dressing.”

They did both in ten minutes, Lila leaning in the doorway of first Joel’s bathroom, then his bedroom as he completed his morning ritual. She’d never done that before—watched a man go about his morning routine—and something about sharing the experience with Joel now, even though she didn’t know him well, made her feel as if the two of them were sharing some strange kind of intimacy. She especially enjoyed watching him shave, and not just because he removed his shirt to do it to keep from messing it up.

Still, the way the muscles in his left arm bunched and relaxed with every stroke of the razor across his face was rather intriguing, she had to admit. And the spicy scent of the sandalwood shaving soap he used was more than a little sexy. But it was the act of standing there talking business in such a personal setting that really seeped into her awareness. In all the times she’d opened her eyes in the morning after a sexual encounter, she’d never hung around any longer than it took to get dressed and bolt. There had been times—rather a lot of them, actually—when she hadn’t even woken her partner to say goodbye. Sex and intimacy had nothing to do with each other as far as Lila was concerned. But she hadn’t realized that something as simple and nonsexual as this could be intimate, either.

When Joel finally emerged from the bathroom capping his toothbrush holder, Lila was tossing the last of his things into his bag and getting ready to close it. She paused long enough for him to toss the toothbrush into the bag, then finished with a soft zzzzip that punctuated their race for time quite nicely. They both seemed to realize it, chuckling as one at the sound.

“Nicely done,” she told him.

“Couldn’t have managed it without you,” he conceded.

She didn’t say what should have been the obvious next remark. So Joel took it upon himself to say it.

“We make a good team.”

Lila said nothing in response to that, either. The team thing remained to be seen. So she drove her gaze around the room, looking for something that might change the subject. Ultimately, her gaze fell on the collection of childishly executed artwork. There were primitive sketches of stick people and stick animals, a few more progressive ones of houses and trees and suns, and a handful of portraits that actually weren’t half-bad. Provided they’d been drawn by someone under the age of fifteen. Which, judging by the rest of the exhibit, they most likely had been.

“Who drew all the pictures?” she asked, jutting her chin up toward the one nearest them.

Joel’s features softened at the question in a way that made his entire face seem as if it was smiling. That should have diminished his masculinity, too, she thought. But somehow it just made him even more potent.

“My sister’s kids,” he said. “She sends me a lot of their work. Since she became a mom, she thinks everyone needs the influence of children in their lives. Makes them more human, she says. The grown-ups, I mean,” he hastily qualified. “Kids, any kids, she thinks are already pretty much perfect.”

“Well, except for the part about them being odious little miscreants,” Lila said.

He laughed at that, as if she’d made a joke. Funny thing was, she hadn’t been. She didn’t much care for children. She supposed they had their purposes—mostly to serve as warnings to always use birth control—but she didn’t want any in her own life. She studied Joel more closely, trying to discern if he was being sarcastic or maudlin when he talked about the alleged perfection of his nieces and/or nephews. Neither, she finally decided. Weird as it seemed, he was just being matter-of-fact. He actually agreed with his sister.

Huh. How about that.

She asked, “So are you one of those people who doesn’t think life can be complete without the Dutch Colonial in the suburbs, the two-point-five kids and the dog named Sparky?”

He smiled in that should-have-diminished-his-potency-but-didn’t way again. “Well, the house could be a Tudor and the dog could be named Pal and life would still be complete, but…” He left the sentence unfinished, but the gist of his feelings came through just fine.

Lila was surprised by the little stab of disappointment that jabbed her chest when she heard him voice the sentiment. So what if Joel Faraday had bought into that suburban myth of home, hearth and riding mower? she asked herself. So what if he was the settling-down kind? So what if he wanted a traditional life with a traditional partner in a traditional community? What did she care? If that was the sort of thing he wanted, it just hammered home how ill suited the two of them were. Because that kind of life would strangle her.

And why the hell was she even thinking in terms of the two of them suiting each other in the first place? That was beyond nuts. Nobody suited Lila. And she sure as hell wasn’t looking to suit anyone herself.

He started to speak again, even got as far as saying, “But the thing is—” when the doorbell chimed, heralding the arrival of their driver. By the time they were seated in the back of the big black Town Car, however, Joel must have forgotten what he’d intended to tell her, because he never revisited the topic. Instead, he started a new one.

“So since you and I are going to be working together so closely for this assignment—”

“You mean living together?” Lila interjected, already knowing that the plan OPUS had outlined would involve their sharing living space. She’d read the entire dossier through last night and knew all the particulars of their undercover operation—at least, the particulars to which OPUS had decided she would be privy for now. There was no telling what Joel knew that she didn’t. He was, after all, the one in charge.

Talk about your odious little miscreants.

“Yeah, that,” he said. And if she hadn’t known better, she would almost have sworn he sounded a little flustered about the prospect of shacking up, even as a job requirement. “So maybe we should know a little more about each other’s habits ahead of time.”

“Like what?” she asked.

He looked at her in a way that indicated he didn’t like her asking him the question he’d intended her to answer first. But he replied anyway, “Like the fact that I’m the early-to-bed and early-to-rise type, but I suspect you’re not.”

“Oh, really?” she asked. “So what happened to Mr. Early-to-Rise this morning?”

Joel expelled an exasperated sound. “Okay, so today Mr. Early-to-Rise overslept a little.”

“Actually, he overslept quite a bit.”

“He hasn’t been getting as much sleep as usual,” Joel continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “People keep breaking in to his house in the middle of the night and trying to cuff him.”

Lila smiled. “Some people are so rude.”

“Aren’t they, though?”

“If I were you, I’d want a piece of someone’s hide.”

He arched his eyebrows at her suggestively, opened his mouth to say something in retort, then seemed to think better of it. Which was a shame, because Lila found herself looking forward to that retort. Among other things.

Ultimately, he only said, “I think I’ll just settle for alerting the authorities.”

“Oh, good idea,” she said. “The authorities always know the right thing to do.”

“Anyway,” he said, circling back to the original topic, “as I said, something tells me you’re not the early-to-rise type.”

She grinned. “Wow, you’re really good at this fieldwork. I can see why they gave you this assignment. That was a brilliant deduction.”

“Hey, I work for an information-gathering arm of the U.S. government,” he told her with clearly affected self-importance. “It’s my job to make brilliant deductions.”

She waved off his concern quite literally. “Don’t worry about it. I’m highly adaptable. I can match my hours of operation to yours with no problem.”

He eyed her thoughtfully. “Something about the way you said that indicates you’d rather not.”

This time Lila shrugged off his concern literally. “I prefer to work at night—big surprise—but when the assignment calls for daytime activity, I don’t have a problem with it.”

“You’re just not as happy working during the day.”

“Happiness isn’t a word that appears in my job description,” she told him.

“But you’d still be happier if this was one of those nighttime infiltration things, wouldn’t you?”

There was no reason to deny it, so Lila relented. “Yeah. I’d be happier if it were. But—”

“Why?” he interrupted before she could finish.

She hesitated before replying, just long enough to let him know she resented his interruption. Finally, though, she said, “Because I work better at night.”

“I beg to differ,” he contradicted.

Lila gaped at him. She wasn’t used to people contradicting her, especially as immediately and absolutely as Joel just had.

He obviously understood the reason for her silence, because he told her, “I’ve studied the particulars of every assignment you’ve carried out for OPUS, Lila, and statistically speaking, you’re always very effective regardless of what you’re doing or when you’re doing it.”

A thrill of something warm and fluid purled through her when he addressed her by her first name. She told herself she should be offended at the familiarity and his lack of protocol. Then again, she’d only a short time ago been giving herself permission to drop protocol until they arrived in Cincinnati, and she herself had been thinking of him not as Virtuoso, but as Joel. Besides, she kind of liked the way her name sounded when it was spoken in that deep, velvety baritone.

Then the essence of what he’d told her finally gelled. “You’ve read over every one of my assignments?” she asked incredulously. She hadn’t kept track, but considering the years she’d put in with OPUS, the total number must be staggering. And God knew how many pages were devoted to each.

“Once I knew we’d be working together, I needed to familiarize myself with you,” he said. Immediately he corrected himself, “I mean…with your methods. How else was I going to do that if not by reading about your standard M.O. when you work?”

“You could have learned about my standard M.O. by looking at a handful of my most high-profile assignments. Then you could have looked at my personnel file for anything else you wanted to know.”

He schooled his features into what Lila supposed was meant to be a bland expression. But it was in no way convincing. Her sarcasm of a moment ago had been warranted—he really wasn’t equipped to be working out in the field. What the hell was OPUS thinking, letting him tag along?

“Your personnel file,” he said, “is off-limits to everyone except a few people who are a hell of a lot higher up the ladder than me.”

Lila couldn’t help the derisive chuckle that escaped her at that. “Right. And God knows they never leak any information about me to anyone else in the organization. I mean that whole rumor about me having tried to murder the Big Guy must have started with the lunchroom ladies in the OPUS cafeteria.” She sighed and lifted a hand to rub her forehead in an effort to relieve a fast-approaching headache. “Look, um, Virtuoso, don’t talk to me like I’m an idiot.”

“I’m not doing—”

“Virtuoso,” she said again.

“Joel,” he corrected her. “Please call me Joel. I know it’s not protocol, but we’re not in Cincinnati yet, and I feel like an idiot whenever someone uses my code name. It just seems like such a Hollywood affectation.”

“Is that why you don’t call me by my code name?” she asked, trying to change the subject. And also wanting to know why he called her Lila when, professionally speaking, he shouldn’t.

He grinned. “Don’t try to change the subject.”

Although she noticed he didn’t answer her question, she let it go. “Then don’t talk to me like I’m an idiot,” she repeated.

“I’m not.”

She met his gaze levelly. “Don’t pretend you didn’t read over my personnel file, too. It makes perfect sense that they would give it to you. Even if they didn’t give me yours.”

She told herself she did not sound petulant when she uttered that last comment. The reason she hadn’t been given any more information about Joel than the essentials of name, rank and serial number—at least, technically speaking—was that she already knew the most important thing about him: That he’d never been out in the field. And also because—dammit—he was the one who would be in charge of the operation, feeding her whatever information she needed as she needed to know it. Clearly, anything personal about him was nothing she needed to know. At least, the higher-ups at OPUS didn’t think so. Nor did Joel, evidently, because he certainly wasn’t talking.

And why that bothered her so much, Lila would just as soon not ask herself.

She continued, “I’m sure you know every intimate detail of my background and personal life. At least, the parts that OPUS knows.” Which, granted, was pretty much everything, she had to concede. But there was no reason Joel couldn’t think she had one or two secrets she was keeping to herself.

He studied her in silence for a moment longer, as if he were going to continue the charade. Finally, though, he admitted, “Okay, I know everything OPUS knows about you. But you don’t strike me as the sort of woman who would worry about other people discovering all the skeletons in her closet.”

She chuckled at that, too, though with genuine good humor this time. “Ah, no,” she admitted freely. “The skeletons in my closet got tired of the crowded conditions and made their break a long time ago. There’s not much left in there to discover.” Quickly, before he had a chance to comment on that, she added, “Still, you get to know everything about me, and I know almost nothing about you. So much for our partnership.”

She emphasized the first half of the word deliberately, hoping to goad him. Goading people had always helped Lila keep them at a distance, which, she told herself, was the only reason she was trying to goad Joel. To drive the wedge between them a little deeper. It wasn’t because she was hoping it would present a challenge that made him offer up some snippets about himself, too.

He eyed her in silence for a moment, long enough to let her know he understood exactly what she was doing. Then he asked, “What do you want to know about me?”

She arched her eyebrows in genuine surprise. If OPUS hadn’t given her information about Joel, then she wasn’t supposed to have it. Anything he might tell her about himself that she wasn’t already privy to would be in violation of the organization’s rules. Not a huge violation, especially if he only told her things like how he’d come in third in the fifthgrade spelling bee or how his favorite food was Mallomars. It was still a violation. And it surprised Lila that he would overstep the rules by even that much. Maybe archivists played by their own rules, but their rules weren’t generally in violation of OPUS’s. Joel especially seemed like the type of guy who would abide by regulation.

In spite of that, she said, “Where did you grow up?”

“Falls Church, Virginia,” he told her readily.

“You’ve lived your whole life in the D.C. area?”

He nodded. “My father was a Virginia senator until he retired a few years ago.”

Lila’s mouth dropped open at that, but she said nothing.

“He still does a little advising for the current administration,” Joel continued matter-of-factly, “but mostly he and my mother enjoy their respective retirements, usually on another continent.”

“Respective retirements?” Lila echoed. “What did your mother do for a living?”

“She edited the Washington Sentinel. Her family owns it. Among other things. They’re big in the publishing world.” Before Lila had time to digest that, Joel was adding, “My grandparents lived in D.C., too. My grandfather worked for Eisenhower, and then Kennedy. The house I live in now belonged to him and my grandmother. She left it to me when she died, since my sister and her husband already had a place in Tysons Corner and she knew I wanted to stay close to home after I graduated from Georgetown.”

Lila’s head was spinning by now, thanks to the rarefied atmosphere she’d just entered. Senators, presidents and newspaper families were the sorts of creatures she never had much chance to meet, but to Joel, they were a part of everyday life. Falls Church, Georgetown and Tysons Corner were all very refined, very affluent areas. Certainly Lila was no stranger to the lifestyles of the rich and powerful. But she’d been a part of them only as an outsider looking in. And only when she was working on assignment. Never in her life had she been a part of that environment for social reasons. To Joel, there was no other life.

“You come from money, then,” she said, stating the obvious.

“I do,” he admitted. Again without hesitation, but also without apology or vanity. It had been Lila’s experience that rich people usually copped to their wealth in either one way or the other. To Joel, however, it seemed to be a part of his makeup, the same way his lungs were.

“Must be nice,” she couldn’t quite keep herself from saying.

“It was,” he told her. But once more, he spoke without any kind of inflection. “Still is.”

“And you have a sister. Anyone else?”

He shook his head.

“She’s older?”

He nodded.

Well, goodness, this conversation was offering Lila all kinds of insights into Joel’s background and character. If this kept up, she might even find out what his favorite color was, and that would really violate regulation.

She grinned. “If you could be any vegetable in the world, what would you be and why?”

That, finally, got a reaction out of him that wasn’t matter-of-fact. Not a big reaction. Mostly just the squinching up of his eyes so that he was looking at her as if the sun had gone into total eclipse and thrown the planet into complete darkness, but hey, it was something.

Even so, his voice remained unchanged from its usual straightforward delivery when he replied, “One of those bags of salad that’s already washed and ready to serve.”

Lila’s smile broadened. “Really?”

“Yeah.”

“But that’s not actually a vegetable, is it?”

“Of course it is,” he insisted. “And it’s a damned interesting one, too.”

“Okay, so why would you be that?”

He gazed at her blankly. “Are you kidding? Salad already washed and ready to serve? That’s like a party just waiting to happen.”

After that, the remainder of the ride to their jet passed in a surprisingly swift and tension-free manner, with Lila learning all kinds of things about Joel. Like, for instance, if he could be any fruit in the world, it would be a coconut, because they never took themselves too seriously. Any animal, he would be a jellyfish, because, hey, no pressure there. Any musical instrument? An electric guitar, because it was so soulful. Supermarket product? A TV dinner, because they were bad for you but, oh, so good. Mode of transportation? A bullet train. Because, well, for obvious reasons.

Of course, she thought when he uttered that last. What guy wouldn’t be a bullet train for obvious reasons? Still, it did make her wonder. About a lot of things. Things that had nothing to do with transportation. Well, not conventional transportation, anyway. A guy who was a bullet train could doubtless transport a woman to a lot of places. Hence the wondering about a lot of things. Until the wondering became visualizing and started threatening to make Lila lose track of what her and Joel’s actual goal was, which was…

Well, hell. She’d known a little while ago. Before Joel became so charming and approachable and bullet-trainy and made her start wondering about and visualizing things she had no business wondering about and visualizing when she should instead be focused on…

An assignment, she finally recalled. An assignment to capture a man who was a threat to national—even international—security. A man who had eluded OPUS—who had eluded her—for years. A man whose presence roaming free in the world was a smack in the face to Lila’s skill and determination as an agent. A man she was tired of chasing.

It was time to catch Adrian Padgett, she told herself, refocusing her attention on the man it really needed to be on. Past time. She would catch him this time. And she would see him tossed into the most fail-safe prison in the country, if she had to slam the door shut and lock it behind him herself. Then maybe she could get on with other more pleasant pursuits. Like, oh…she didn’t know. Her life, maybe.

For some reason, her gaze fell on Joel as that last thought formed in her head. Even though she told herself he was not going to be one of her pursuits, never mind have anything to do with her life. He wasn’t her type, he wasn’t her goal, he wasn’t her match. Hell, he wasn’t even her partner, not really. Providing Oliver survived his upcoming wedding to Avery Nesbitt, he and Lila would return to being a team. She hoped.

Joel Faraday would just be a blip on the time line of Lila’s life. One man of many, and by no means the most important. That man was hiding somewhere in Cincinnati. And she was this close to bringing him down. For good.




CHAPTER FIVE


LOUNGING WITH A SNIFTER of an exceedingly good Armagnac in the living area of his exceedingly luxurious suite at the Four Seasons Cincinnati, Adrian Padgett was exceedingly bored. But then, that was hardly anything new, was it? He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been intrigued/fascinated/captivated/even remotely preoccupied by anything intriguing/fascinating/captivating/even remotely worthy of preoccupation. Life could be so boring when one was corrupt. Where was the challenge in anything? Where was the mischief? Where was the sneaky underhandedness? When a man was amoral to begin with, there were no lines to cross, no rules to break, no crosses to double. If one had no allegiances to begin with, one couldn’t exactly betray them, could one?

Truly, dammit, where was the fun? Taking the entire planet hostage wasn’t turning out to be nearly as diverting as Adrian had thought it would be.

Of course, he thought as he contemplated his companions, it would have helped if he’d been able to amass some proper henchmen instead of the ragtag group of college students he’d collected over the past few months. The three young men draped over the furniture in his suite weren’t exactly Adolf Hitler and Genghis Khan when it came to villainy. More like Boris and Natasha. Only, without the elegant wardrobe and charming accents.

Oh, sure, they said they wanted to take over the world with Adrian. And if they’d put forth half the effort to take over this world as they had taking over the worlds in their godforsaken video games, Adrian would be master of time, space and dimension by now. But that was just it. Unless something was a graphic on a game screen, they didn’t view it as a challenge. And it wasn’t as if Adrian hadn’t given them plenty of incentive. He’d promised them that once they had the world in their possession, the boys could have Daytona Beach, all incarnations of MTV, the Playboy mansion, Nintendo and Jessica Alba to divvy up however they wanted.

He blew out an exasperated breath. Where were tomorrow’s despots supposed to come from, if not from today’s universities? Where were the future Slobodan Milosevics and Saddam Husseins? It was criminal how college campuses weren’t producing tyrants anymore. Well, except for the Young Republicans. But even they were more interested these days in making sound business investments than they were in global domination. At this rate, by the time today’s youth grew to maturity, the world wasn’t going to be worth taking over. Which was all the more reason why Adrian had to do it now.

Unfortunately, the timetable wasn’t up to him, since it wasn’t he who knew the secret code that would finally put the world in his grasp. No, that was up to Moe, Larry and Curly over there. The ones currently focused on the bigscreen television, playing a game that seemed to involve a hedgehog who was dressed in large red sneakers and big white gloves, having evidently eschewed any other clothing.

Typical cartoon character, Adrian thought. All accessories. No pants.

“I wanna be Sonic now,” Chuck Miller said suddenly, tossing down the game controls he’d held in both hands and seizing—without asking permission—the controls from his companion to the left.

Neither of his playmates took offense, however, since they were all old pals. In fact, Adrian knew the trio’s friendship went all the way back to their freshman year in college, three whole years ago. Donny Grawemeyer, who was seated on Chuck’s left, only swatted Chuck’s hat and sent it flying, and Hobie Jurgens, on the right, only laughed and called him Buttwad.

It warmed the cockles of Adrian’s heart to see the boys getting along so well. And such charming, articulate creatures they were, too.

The three young men went to great pains to make clear their nonconformity from the campus cattle who did their academic grazing en masse, but each was dressed in some kind of iconic costume of his generation that indicated a desperation on his part to belong somewhere. Chuck was the typical suburban faux gangsta in his ropey gold chains and oversize pants and T-shirts—today’s color scheme was blue on brown. Donny was the self-proclaimed metalhead, his wavy red hair streaming past his shoulders over a black System of a Down T-shirt—whoever the hell they were—and blue jeans. And Hobie, with his cropped blond locks and baggy Jams and red Billabong T-shirt—whatever the hell that was—was the surfer dude. This despite the fact that the only surf one might find on the Ohio River occurred when a passing coal barge increased its speed to more than one knot.

Adrian supposed that, to the three students, he was something of an icon, too—albeit from their parents’ generation. To them, he was The Suit. A suit who went by the name of Nick Darian, since there was no way on God’s green earth he would ever give any of them his real name.

Now that his work day had ended, however—though his work day these days didn’t much involve any work—he had shed his espresso-colored jacket and tie and unfastened the buttons of his mustard-colored dress shirt at his throat and cuffs, rolling the latter back to his elbows. Adrian clung to his Fortune 500 wardrobe selections, even though his job these days consisted of little more than watching his back and trying to figure out where to strike next with his band of half-assed men. And also making sure that his half-assed men didn’t stray from the path of world domination any further than obtaining the next level in Fire Emblem. Whatever the hell that was.

Adrian identified with none of the boys. He admired none of them. He respected none of them. He liked none of them. He did, in fact, resent all of them, since they were all essential to a plan he couldn’t execute without them. Because they knew things about computers and code and other such things that Adrian simply could not grasp himself. Unfortunately, the little bastards couldn’t focus their brains on anything besides gaming for longer than fifteen minutes at a stretch.

When they did focus, though…Good God, they were magic. There was potential for them as a group that Adrian had barely tapped, and if they would just think about something besides half-naked hedgehogs, it would be they, not he, who ruled the planet.

“Dude, you’re always Sonic,” Donny said now, his carrot-colored hair falling forward as he reached for the controls Chuck had taken from him. “Gimme back the controls.”

But Chuck only nudged with his foot the controls he’d abandoned, scooting them closer to Donny. “You can be Tails,” he said. “Live a little.”

“Tails sucks, man,” Donny said. “He don’t do jack.” But instead of reaching for the controls that Chuck held firm, he leaned over his friend and snatched the controls Hobie held.

“Hey!” Hobie objected eloquently.

“I’m Knuckles now,” Donny announced. He tossed the controls formerly known as Chuck’s to Hobie. “You be Tails.”

“Tails sucks, man,” Hobie said. “He don’t do Jack.”

Adrian closed his eyes in a silent plea for patience. Oh, what he wouldn’t give for a good, solid two-by-four at the moment. How could people who claimed the IQs of NASA engineers have the maturity of eggplants?

“Boys, don’t make me separate you,” he said as he pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “You know how much you hate being put in time-out.”

They, of course, ignored him. Worse than ignored him, actually. They didn’t even hear him. And if there was one thing Adrian hated more than anything in the world, it was going unnoticed.

He opened his mouth to say something that would, he hoped, wrest their attention from the colorful graphics zipping by on the TV screen for even a moment, when the door to the hotel suite beeped at the use of a key card, then opened to reveal the final member of the group. She, too, barely acknowledged Adrian as she strode by him, tossing a halfhearted “Hey, Nick” over her shoulder at him as she approached the boys instead.

Ah, Iris, he thought as he watched her take a seat on the sofa, thrusting one long leg over the arm to swing her foot anxiously above the floor. She was always doing something anxiously. The antithesis to the boys, who could sit idly for hours in front of their games, Iris Daugherty could never be still for more than a few minutes at a time. She was an icon of her generation, too, though she took greater pains to establish her own identity of Goth Girl. She was dressed today as she always was, completely in black, from the cropped T-shirt to the baggy, zipper-ridden cargo pants to the studded belt and high-top sneakers. Her ears were pierced probably a dozen times, as was her eyebrow, her nose and her navel. Scores of black rubber bracelets encircled one wrist, and a black studded wristwatch was wrapped around the other. She carried with her, as she always did, an enormous black bag, chunky with its contents, slung diagonally over her shoulder and torso. As he always did, Adrian wondered what she could possibly have it filled with, as it was indeed always completely stuffed. She dyed her straight, chin-length hair and eyebrows black to match her clothes, even painted her bittendown nails black. Heavy black liner encircled pale blue eyes, and black lipstick stained her mouth.

Whenever Adrian saw her, he couldn’t help wondering what she’d looked like before the transformation. Especially since she was an aging Goth Girl who couldn’t hang on to this persona much longer without looking ridiculous. At twenty-six, she was older than the boys by half a dozen years, having started college a bit later than the others and taking her time to complete her degree. Adrian didn’t know a lot about her, but from what he’d heard and observed of her, he’d formed an impression of a rich kid who was even more bored by life than he was. He’d been around wealth often enough as an adult that he was reasonably adept at recognizing those who were born to it. Perhaps because his own background was so completely opposite to theirs.

Although Iris was certainly as comfortable around computers as the boys were, Adrian had come to the conclusion that the main reason she hung out with them was that she was a geek groupie. He’d overheard enough conversations between the young men when she wasn’t around to know that she’d slept with all three of them at some point—and more than once with all of them at the same time, something that intrigued Adrian rather a lot.

Ah, well then, he thought as the realization formed. He stood corrected. There was something—or rather, someone—he found intriguing after all. In fact, he found Iris rather fascinating. Rather captivating. And more than worthy of his preoccupation.

“Hello, Iris,” he greeted her as she slumped back on the sofa and watched the boys play.

She had the courtesy to turn around then and reply, “What’s up, Nick?” But she promptly returned her attention to the game and gamers, indicating she hadn’t expected a reply to the question. And when she realized what the boys were still arguing over, she uttered a loud sound of obvious disgust. “You’re playing Sonic again?” she said disdainfully. “What are you, a bunch of fifth graders? I thought we were going to break out the new Resident Evil this afternoon.”

“We men,” Chuck said manfully, emphasizing his gender, “are playing Sonic. You do what you want, Iris.”

What Iris did was roll her eyes dramatically and leap up from the sofa to make her way to the minibar, from which she withdrew, without asking permission, a soft drink. Not that Adrian minded. Much. It wasn’t as if he’d be drinking it himself. The beverage was, to his way of thinking, about as appealing as a big glass of bile. Not to mention that any expenses racked up during his stay here in the suite were more than covered by the money the group had appropriated over the past few months. Mostly by raiding other people’s computers and appropriating their financial information—and then their finances themselves. And Iris was no slouch herself when it came to hacking and designing viruses. Plus, there was the small matter of, when it came time to check out of the suite, Adrian would be gone before the bill was tucked under the door, leaving behind absolutely no traceable evidence of himself or the others.

He was currently on week three at the Four Seasons. One more, and he’d be moving to the Omni, just up the road. Although he alone stayed at the suite around the clock, he’d given the others key cards and indicated they were welcome whenever they wanted to drop by. That, of course, wasn’t true—Adrian didn’t welcome them at all, ever—but he needed them to think he was one of them, or at the very least striving to be one of them. They were valuable tools, the way he saw it. And he wanted to have them close by for whenever he might need them.

Like tonight.

He watched Iris as she screwed the top off the soda and enjoyed a healthy swallow before lowering it again. And for some reason he found the sight of her black-stained mouth covering the rim of the bottle to be more than a little arousing. He hadn’t really thought about giving Iris a go himself, since the last time he’d mixed business with pleasure, he’d regretted it. What he’d thought was simply an alluring sex kitten named Tiffannee, someone who didn’t have the brains of a sponge mop, had turned out to be one of the most dangerous—and cunning—women in the world. And she’d come this close to returning Adrian to the not-so-loving bosom of OPUS, who would have then locked him up and thrown away the key.

He would not make the same mistake twice. His information pipeline at OPUS might not be running quite as freely and quickly as it once had, but he’d been able to learn enough about each of the boys to be reasonably certain they were precisely who they claimed to be. Iris remained a big question mark, but since she wasn’t really a player in their game, Adrian wasn’t too concerned about her background anyway.

What mattered was that bits and pieces of information had begun to flow from his source again, and a background check of each of his, ah, colleagues was at the top of his list of needs. It shouldn’t be long before he knew more about them than they knew themselves. In the meantime, they’d more than proved their worth by breaking every law he’d asked them to, without question or compunction. There was almost no chance any of them were working for anyone other than him. Would that they just worked a little better. Then Adrian would be a very happy man.

“So what’s on the agenda tonight?” Iris asked.

The question dispelled his troubled thoughts and replaced them with much nicer ideas. He was rather looking forward to this evening. He had his eye on a certain Swiss bank account he was hoping the boys could bleed dry.

Iris moved to the desk in the corner where Adrian’s laptop was folded closed and opened it. Again without asking permission. Again without Adrian minding. Much.

“It’s been a while since we did anything fun,” she added as she seated herself and tapped the mouse pad with her middle finger to bring the computer out of sleep mode.

As she began to type, Adrian set his snifter on a side table and strode across the room to stand behind her. Looking over her shoulder, he saw that she’d gone to the iTunes music store and pulled up information on a band he’d never heard of before. He had to remind himself he was only forty-six and in no way ready for the retirement home. But having spent the past few months with this group, he’d been forced to accept the fact that pop culture no longer catered to his generation. Actors, singers, dissidents, serial killers—they were all younger than Adrian these days. College students were making millions selling Web sites they designed on a lark, and the teenage offspring of bestselling novelists were hitting the lists even higher than some of their parents. Society was now geared to those who were younger, hipper, faster. The ones who required less sleep and more distraction, thereby ensuring that the entertainment industries made money around the clock.

Maybe he wasn’t old, Adrian thought, but he was older. And he was no longer a part of that demographic that everyone wanted to attract. All the more reason to take as much as he could as quickly as he could. So that he could disappear on his own terms, instead of on theirs.

“We haven’t had fun for a while, have we?” he told Iris over the din of the still-arguing boys on the other side of the room.

He completed another step, an action that placed him immediately behind her, close enough that he could have settled both hands on her shoulders had he wanted to. Funnily, he realized he did want to. But he didn’t. Yet. Instead, he only gazed down at the crown of her head, scrutinizing the part in her hair that zigzagged across her scalp. He smiled when he found what he was looking for. There, very faint, he saw that her roots were blond. Very blond. Nearly white-blond. His grin broadened. He’d always had a predilection for blondes.

“You’re right—we should do something fun this evening,” he agreed as Iris began to download music from that band Adrian had never heard of onto his laptop. Without asking his permission. Not that he minded. Much. And although he himself had one or two additional ideas as to what that “fun” might involve, he decided to focus instead on his original plan.

For now.

IRIS DAUGHERTY WAS MORE than a little aware of Nick Darian’s nearness as he stood behind her and watched every move she made on his computer. Good. ‘Bout damned time he started noticing every move she made, since she’d been watching his every move since the day Chuck had introduced the two of them. Even if he did have probably twenty years on her and dressed like a corporate drone. And even if he was interested in any of them only because they knew ‘puters and didn’t mind overstepping the law. Kind of hard not to watch a guy who looked as good as Nick did, with that thick auburn hair and those amber eyes and those cheekbones sharp enough to slice tomatoes. And those shoulders that were broad enough to strain the seams of his shirt. And that waist just narrow enough for a woman to wrap her arms around. And a chest just perfect for that same woman to settle her head against.

Not that Iris had done any of those things to Nick. Not that she was likely to in the near future. But a girl could dream, couldn’t she? Hell, yeah.





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