Body Contact

Her mouth was dry as she stared into the sea-green eyes of Jack Connors. He was tall, dark and dangerous. And she desperately needed his help.

Wetting her parched lips, she said, “I don't know you well enough to make love with you.”

“Sorry, it's just become part of the job,” Jack said evenly, his gaze leaving her face to travel appraisingly over her body, then come back to her eyes.

His gaze sent a shiver through Maddy that was part fear and part hot anticipation. She'd had wild fantasies about him in the past. “I'm in charge of this mission….”

“If you want me to go with you, you'll go to bed with me first.” He made the statement a challenge, and she'd never backed away from a challenge. But she wanted him to feel something, some emotion.

“We've got to make it look as if we're lovers…” he said in an intimate tone.

Surely he was teasing her, or testing her? “Wh-what do you want me to do?” she said stiffly.

“Sweetheart, I want you to come into the bedroom with me…now.”

Dear Reader,

When I first heard about Harlequin's new Blaze series I was intrigued and excited. Here was a line of sexy books that pushed the envelope in category romance.

My question was: could Blaze incorporate the kind of suspense plot I love to write for Harlequin Intrigue—with a lot more emphasis on the developing sexual relationship between the hero and heroine?

For me, the answer is yes. In
Body Contact,
I've had a wonderful time melding the two genres. I've fashioned a plot where danger and intrigue lurk around every corner, and the only way my hero, Jack Connors, and my heroine, Maddy Guthrie, can save their lives is by cultivating the hot sexual tension simmering between them. But each touch, each caress, each kiss turns up the heat—so that Jack and Maddy can barely focus on their mission through the haze of arousal fogging their brains.

Writing
Body Contact
has been a fun romp for me. I hope you enjoy it. And I hope you visit me at Harlequin Intrigue where I'm pushing the envelope with the relationships between my heroes and heroines. In fact, you'll meet my next Intrigue hero, Alex Shane, right here in
Body Contact.
His story,
From the Shadows,
will be out in June.

Happy reading!

Ruth Glick, writing as Rebecca York

P.S. Don't forget to check out tryblaze.com!

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

M
ADDY
G
UTHRIE'S NIPPLES
were hard, but her mouth was dry as she stared into the sea-green eyes of the man standing a few feet away. He was tall and dark and dangerous. A man she'd admired for his jungle cat reflexes, his steel-trap mind. His tough body, honed to the physical specifications of an Olympic athlete. Only Jack Connors was no athlete. He was an ex-CIA agent she often worked with on special projects. And he was here now because she desperately needed his help.

Wetting her parched lips, she said, “I don't know you well enough to make love with you.”

“Sorry, it's just become part of the job,” Jack Connors answered, his voice even, his piercing green gaze leaving her face to travel appraisingly over her body, then come back to her eyes.

That gaze sent a shiver of reaction over her skin, reaction that was part fear and part hot anticipation, if the truth be told.

Their working relationship hadn't stopped her from conjuring up fantasies about him. Wild, erotic fantasies. But she'd never dared imagine sharing them with anyone—least of all him.

Now she raised her chin. “Wait a minute. I'm the Winston Security Chief. I called you in on this assignment. That means I'm the one giving the orders.”

He gave her a small shrug. “If you want me to go in with you on this mission, you'll go to bed with me first.”

He made the statement a challenge, and she'd never backed away from a challenge, never wavered from a course of action, once she had determined it was the right thing to do.

She knew Jack had the same courage of his convictions. Which was why he must feel duty bound to give her a jolt of reality.

He stood before her, so calm and self-contained. His arms relaxed at his sides, his stance easy. She'd seen that pose before, when he was waiting for the other guy to make the first move. On previous occasions, she'd been standing next to him. Now they were facing each other—opponents instead of allies.

No, she corrected herself. Not opponents. They were still on the same side. Only the stakes had changed dramatically.

She raised her eyes, daring to probe his secrets. Did she detect a hint of emotion below his calm exterior? Something he didn't want her to see?

She
wanted
him to feel something, to let her know that this step was as awkward for him as it was for her.

He didn't give her that reassurance, so she thought about the reason she was here in this plush suite of rooms with him: A seventeen-year-old girl was in terrible trouble, and she, Maddy Guthrie, was the one responsible.

As if Jack were reading her mind, he said, “I told you to stop blaming yourself. Winston's daughter planned her escape carefully. She laced your soft drink with a potent sleeping pill. She'd already bought a bus ticket to New York. She had a suitcase stashed in the garage. From my point of view, it looks like somebody helped her. Someone on the Winston staff.”

“Nobody would do that.”

Jack shrugged. “I think you're wrong.”

Maddy took a steadying breath. If there was someone
that misguided working here, then she had to find out who it was. But not now. Now the important thing was to get Dawn back.

“What matters,” she said aloud, “is that Stan Winston trusted me to guard his daughter, and she slipped away when I was supposed to be on duty.”

To herself, she silently added,
my first screwup in seven years.

She'd worked security at Winston Industries since the summer she was a college senior and her father had asked her to help catch an upper-level manager who was selling crucial documents to a rival. She'd nailed the man photographing a cost analysis and escorted him at gunpoint to her father's office.

From that moment on, her career path had been set. She'd taken courses in criminal investigation, self-defense, covert operations. And she'd risen rapidly through the ranks of the security force. Now she ran the operation. But on this job she needed Jack Connors's help.

Jack had already done what she couldn't. Through some lucky breaks, his network of paid informants, and by calling in every favor that was owed him, he had found out where Dawn was. On Orchid Island in the Caribbean, held captive by Oliver Reynard, a man who had hated Stan Winston for years. As soon as the girl had set foot in Manhattan, she'd been scooped up by some of Reynard's men and whisked off to his island stronghold.

She'd been there for five days, five days during which God knows what might have happened to her. Maddy gave an involuntary shudder and saw Jack's expression change as he caught the slight movement of her shoulders.

Lifting her chin, she looked him square in the eye. When Jack had discovered where Dawn was being held, he'd told Maddy point-blank that the rescue operation was too risky for her to go alone. She'd dug in her heels, sure
of her moral and emotional obligation. She was the one responsible, and she was the one who was going to make this come out right. As soon as she got some things straight.

“Okay, I know invading Orchid Island is dangerous. I know we've got to play carefully scripted parts. But why do we have to…to…go all the way now?” she asked, fighting a surge of panic, thinking she sounded like a teenager being pressured in the back seat of a car on some secluded lover's lane. Still, she couldn't stop herself from adding, “I mean, when we get there, nobody will know what you and your girlfriend are doing or not doing in the privacy of our room.”

His well-shaped lips twisted into a sardonic smile. “I'm afraid you can't count on that. If Reynard is a fanatic about anything, it's security. So there's as likely to be a camera and recording equipment in our room as anywhere else.”

She tried to swallow around the sudden thickness in her throat. “But making tapes of guests in their private rooms is…illegal…and immoral.”

“Exactly. The perfect description of Orchid Island. If you add, treacherous, perilous and insidious, you get the whole picture. Once you go to a place like that, you surrender all semblance of privacy—and safety.”

She conceded he knew what he was talking about. After leaving the CIA, he'd started his own security business. He had access to all kinds of covert information about the island that Reynard ruled like a medieval tyrant. Enough information for them to rescue Stan Winston's daughter, she hoped.

Jack was speaking again, his voice hard as glass. “The men who come to Orchid Island as Reynard's guests are there for two reasons. They want to do business with him. Or they want to relax in a no-holds-barred environment.
When they bring their women, they like to show them off to the rest of the guys. Dress them up for his cocktail parties in barely-there silks and expensive jewels. Outfit them in designer tops and shorts for daytime. Parade them around like expensive trophies. And we've got to fit the pattern Reynard is expecting. If he finds out we're on his turf to rescue Dawn, he'll have us killed as easily as he'd swat an insect.”

The words chilled Maddy. Intellectually she'd understood the dangers. But until a few moments ago, she hadn't realized exactly how far Jack Connors was proposing to take their charade.

His eyes narrowed as he cut into her thoughts. “You called me in to help you get onto the island, and I can do it. But once we're there, your life will depend on following my lead. Or adhering to my explicit directions without question. So you'd better show me you can do that—under the most difficult circumstances you can imagine. Because if you can't, I'm going to have to find another partner who can.”

Follow his directions. Under the most difficult circumstances she could imagine.

Did that mean he was really going to insist on the ultimate intimacy between them as a condition of getting her onto Reynard's turf? Or was he just testing her—seeing how far she was willing to go? Yes, maybe that was it. He was going to push her to the limit, then let her off the hook at the last minute. Because he couldn't be planning to take her to bed. Not with the cold calculation he brought to his job.

Well, if testing the limits was his game, she would play it.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked, thinking that there was still time to bail out.

“I want you to come into the bedroom.”

He turned and walked through the door at his back as if there were no question in his mind that she would follow him. Pretending that her insides hadn't turned to jelly, she did as she was told, and found herself in a room that might have been transported from one of New York City's most opulent hotels. The Pierre or the Park Lane—places where she'd accompanied the Winston family. But this wasn't a hotel. It was a guest suite Stan Winston maintained on the top floor of the Winston Building in midtown Manhattan. She'd been here before, doing security checks. But never had she dreamed of using one of these bedrooms for her own intimate purposes.

The room was furnished with antique chests, Chippendale-style wingback chairs, a muted Oriental rug lying on the polished wood floor. But it was the king-sized four-poster bed that caught her eye as she followed Jack into the chamber and came to an abrupt halt five feet inside the door.

He moved in back of her, and she forced herself not to flinch when she heard him lock the door behind them.

He crossed to the high Victorian mantel, turning to face her, studying her with that unnerving green-eyed stare that was like a laser beam cutting all the way to her bones.

It was all she could do to keep herself from babbling then—from asking if he'd thought about who might have helped Dawn sneak away from the estate. If he knew how soon they could leave for Orchid Island. How they were going to get away once they found Dawn and freed her.

But she managed to keep all those questions locked in her throat. Maybe because she knew that if she tried, her voice would come out thick and shaky. Maybe because her training and her pride wouldn't allow her to show him her raw nerves.

So she stood there with her lips slightly parted and her hands at her sides.

He made her wait long, agonizing seconds before he murmured, “I think we'll start with a striptease. Take off your skirt and blouse and panty hose. Take them off for my pleasure; then fold them neatly, and lay them on the chair over there.”

She knew this man. Had worked with him. Joked with him. Felt a deep connection between the two of them. But there was a line neither one of them had crossed—because both of them were sticklers for rules. And rule number one was—no dating the people you worked with. Involvement like that could confuse your objectivity, distract you from cool calculations. Make you take chances that could cost you your life.

She'd told herself he'd wanted to break that ironclad rule with her. She had certainly wanted to. And suddenly here they were together in this room, breaking every rule of morality and self-preservation she'd ever set for herself.

When she had dreamed of being with him, the scene in her mind had always started with an intimate candlelit dinner—at his apartment or hers. After dinner there would be good brandy. Mood music. They might dance slowly, intimately. Finally he would gather her to him and lower his mouth to hers for a kiss. She hadn't expected the kiss to be tender. But she'd expected passion. She had pictured him as a bold and skillful lover. A man who would give his partner pleasure as well as take it.

Now she wanted the reassurance of that kiss. Well, more than the kiss, actually. She wanted the traditional preludes to intimacy that she had imagined.

“Are you going to back out?” he asked, his tone mocking her.

That was enough to firm her jaw, to firm her resolve. If he thought she couldn't carry off this performance, he was dead wrong.

“No.” Still, she fixed her gaze on the Renoir painting
over the mantelpiece—thinking it had to be a real Renoir, since Stan Winston would have insisted on the genuine article.

And she was the genuine article, too, she told herself as she reached for the buttons at the front of her blouse. She was a trained security operative who knew every nuance of her profession. She'd played roles before. Been in tight spots. And she'd always come out the winner.

Still, her fingers felt wrapped in layers of gauze as she slid the buttons open, thankful in some corner of her mind that she'd worn her peach-colored bra and panties, the ones that went so well with her blond hair and warm skin tones.

It seemed to take centuries to remove the blouse. Finally she had it off. Because she needed to clutch on to something, she crumpled the fine material in her hands, then turned and started toward the chair in the corner of the room.

“I told you to fold it neatly,” he said, his voice hard, demanding obedience.

She blinked, looked at the tangled mess of fabric in her hands, then did as he asked, smoothing the soft silk with her fingertips, watching him from the corner of her eye, knowing he was following every tiny movement she made.

The skirt was easier. Only one button and a zipper. When she reached for the fastening, another sharp command stopped her hands.

“Turn around and face me. I don't want to look at your tush—although it's nice enough in its own way. I want to see your breasts jutting toward me when you reach in back of you to pull the zipper.”

Her face heated as she turned, his vivid description echoing in her mind. He was right, groping behind her for
the zipper thrust her breasts toward him as though she were begging for his touch.

She tried not to think about how she looked, tried to keep her mind blank, as she folded the skirt on top of the blouse, then kicked off her sling-back pumps and bent to roll down her panty hose. Keeping her eyes cast downward, she laid the stockings neatly on top of the other clothing.

Then, before he could give another harsh command, she turned back to face him. Still, in her lacy bra and panties, she felt too vulnerable and exposed to look him in the eye. She didn't need to see his gaze on her, taking in details. She felt it scorching her. And the tight points of her nipples were as embarrassing as her state of undress. God, this was turning her on. And she couldn't hide it from him.