Body Double (18 page)

A team comprising intelligence forces, OSI agents, Kate (representing the S.A.S.S.) and one of Reynolds’s special assistants heard Joan give a full accounting of each of the thirty doubles she’d worked on at the Texas compound. As well as information she had on a second compound, this one actually in the Middle East. A similar second team debriefed Simon, Harry and Brent, and Jeremy met with a child psychologist, who specialized in hostage and war trauma.

By 5:00 a.m., the separate briefings were over and everyone came together in the conference room to compare notes. Finally, at 5:30 a.m., Colonel Gray arranged protective lodging for Simon, Joan and Jeremy and for Harry and Brent, and everyone called it a night.

Shortly thereafter, Colonel Drake dismissed Amanda and Mark. “Be back here at 10:00 a.m. for an update briefing and further instructions,” she told them. “By then, Kate will have a CAA Report prepared and we’ll know what we’ve got and what we need.”

“CAA Report?” Mark asked, unfamiliar with the S.A.S.S. acronym.

“Compilation, Assimilation and Assessment Report,” Amanda said. “She’ll pull updates and status reports from everyone remotely connected to the GRID case, digest it all and give us a fix on the big picture.”

“Great.”

Dead on her feet, Amanda didn’t have to be told twice that she could leave. She caught Mark by the arm and led him to the door. “Let’s get out of here before we get recruited to do anything else tonight—today—whatever it is.”

Smiling, Mark walked beside her outside to the Hummer, which had been impounded when they’d gone missing from the jail.

“It’s nearly 6:00 a.m., but it’s still dark.” Mark opened the door, and when she slid onto the seat, he added, “Let’s keep it easy and call it a night.”

“I’m all for easy.” Amanda clicked her safety belt into place.

They drove to Mark’s subdivision. At the security gate, the guard waved them through and Mark drove on around, and finally pulled into his garage. He stopped the Hummer and just sat there, staring straight ahead at the wall through the dust-smudged windshield.

“Something wrong?” she asked.

He chewed at the inside of his lip, pondering his words carefully. “Maybe.” A few silent beats passed. “I’d say after that conversation on the plane earlier we’ve gone beyond being partners and friends.” He put the gearshift in Park, turned off the ignition then looked over at her, his expression as sober as she’d ever seen it. “It is personal, Amanda.”

Definitely personal. He was driving the point home because this mattered so much to him. Looking at him proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was personal. Everything
about him rammed her hormones and her emotions into over-drive.

She reached for the door handle. “So it’s personal.” Could that actually have been her voice, sounding so ambivalent? What did he want from her? “Okay, Cross. Are you looking for declarations of undying love, promises of some sort, or what? Last I knew, we were waiting for the doors to blow open.”

He leveled her with an uncompromising gaze, signaling this was a make-or-break point with him and not negotiable. “I’m making sure you understand that I don’t sleep around and I’m damn particular with whom I share my body.”

Fair enough. It was the second time he’d told her this. Great news actually, but not at all surprising. He had that monogamous look. The kind that when women saw him on the street, they did a double take because envy shot right through them. That sexy kind of monogamous look every woman craves having someone say they see in her man. “Point taken.” Her palm grew so clammy she lost her hold on the door handle.

He draped an arm over the steering wheel and another on the gearshift. “I think the odds are high we’re going to end up in bed together and I don’t do one-night stands.”

“No, you do six-date stands. And you haven’t yet explained that.” She settled back against the seat, listened to the engine ticking. “I think that was part of the bargain.”

“It’s the job. Just like it is for you.” He dragged an impatient hand through his hair. “It’s being asked too many questions I can’t answer. Having no choice but to tell lies to cover up the truth. It’s apologizing over and over for too many unexplained absences. Catching hell for missing birthdays and special events and holidays. You know exactly what it is, and what I mean. It’s easier to just cut it off after six dates—before anyone can start to think of you as a couple.”

“Does that include the woman?”

“Especially the woman.”

Amanda did know what he meant, and she agreed with him. It was easier to be alone than to be asked to explain that which couldn’t be explained without violating oaths, breaching security and jeopardizing missions and lives. “Any other allergies besides peanuts?”

“No.”

She unsnapped her safety belt, turned toward him in her seat and propped her arm on the seat’s back and tilted her head to it. “Hmm, that explanation might do.”

He paused, then slid her a look torn between accusation and elation. “You get to me, Amanda.”

Her stomach hollowed and her chest swelled. For some reason she couldn’t begin to sort out, that pleased her immensely. “Well, there is a bright side to this, Cross.” She scooted over the gearshift and wedged herself between him and the steering wheel. Wrapping her arms around his neck, she whispered against his mouth, “Together, we don’t have those pesky job-related dating problems, now, do we?” They both knew not to ask questions that couldn’t be answered.

“No, I guess we don’t.” His breath warmed her face.

She slid her hand along the straight of his shoulder, around its curve and down his arm, then across his chest, following ridges of honed muscle. Rubbing their noses, she looked into his eyes. “Does this mean you’re ditching your six-date rule?”

He caught her head in his hands and whispered against her lips, “Absolutely abolishing it. Effective immediately.”

She pulled back and smiled, not quite satisfied with that response. “Women everywhere will rejoice and thank me.”

“Apparently, I wasn’t clear.” He drew her back to him, and the look in his eyes stole her breath. “You’re the woman in my life, and I’m abolishing the rule for you.”

She smiled. “You do know how to charm a woman.”

“Shut up and kiss me, Amanda. I’m dying here.”

They kissed hungrily, greedily, tugging at buttons and sleeves and barriers keeping them from touching skin to skin.

Breathless, limbs heavy, and bodies in need, they initiated, inspired, indulged, consuming, not exploring so much as laying claim. Amanda separated their mouths, her blouse and his shirt hung open and loose, her bra bunched on one side, exposing an aching breast. Her voice ragged and rigid and rushed, she shuddered. “Inside, Cross. Hurry.”

Mark opened the driver’s door, pulled her out of the car and lifted her higher. Breasts to chest, she tightened her legs around his hips and her arms around his shoulders. “I’ll get the alarm. You keep doing what you’re doing to my neck. I think I love that.”

Mark moved close to the panel and she punched in the code, then snagged the doorknob. He shoved the door open with her backside—their lips locked, their hands greedy—kicked the door shut behind them, and then made his way through the den to the hallway.

“Damn it, Amanda,” he gritted out between clenched teeth. “If you touch me like that again, I won’t guarantee we’ll make it to the bedroom.”

She snuggled closer, feeling his erection through her clothes at her stomach, and stroked him again. Harder. “Who cares?”

His shirt hit the floor.

Her blouse followed.

They cornered the hall into his bedroom—a huge suite as masculine as he, decorated in deep burgundy and navy and gold and full of gleaming dark woods and rich, robust fabrics, and his musky smell that she was drawn to. She didn’t have to ask. She knew that she was the first woman he’d brought into his private domain, and the knowing unleashed a powerful prowess in her, a seductive magic that swept every
thing from her mind but this man. This gorgeous, surprising, amazing man.

He set her on the bed. In a heated rush, they stripped, came together, and lost themselves in blinding passion that seared and soothed, stoked and simmered, stole and saved. The intensity of their coupling surprised Amanda, and Mark obviously hadn’t expected it, either. When they had satisfied their bodies and lay spent, Amanda still shook inside from the sheer force of it.

“That was…” Mark’s thready voice trailed.

“Intense?” she suggested, too liquid-boned to actually move. Lost in a sensual fog, she couldn’t grasp a more explicit descriptor.
Intense
didn’t begin to describe what had happened between them, but nothing else did, either.

He turned on the pillow, stroked her hair, her face. “I was thinking
explosive,
but
intense
will do.”

“For me, too.” She snuggled closer to him, eyed her gun on the nightstand. “Do you think the adrenaline push of the escape had anything to do with it?”

“What escape?” he said, telling her succinctly it hadn’t mattered a whit. “I wish I could say it did, but I’d have to lie, and I swear I’ll never lie to you, Amanda.”

“I didn’t think so, either, but I’m a little fogged. Thought I’d better check with someone in their right mind.”

“Don’t look this way, honey. Not yet.”

She smiled against his chest. “You know I’m crazy about you.”

“Are you really?” He curled an arm around her, held her close.

“Yeah.” She rocked back and looked up at him. “But break my heart and I’ll cripple you.”

Mark smiled. “You really know how to capture a man’s devotion.”

“Okay, so I’m a rookie at sweet talk. I haven’t had much
practice.” She pecked a kiss to his chin, then to each of his eyelids. “But I could have said I’d kill you, and I didn’t.”

“Cripple, kill.” He laughed. “Yeah, I see the distinction.”

She walloped him on the shoulder. “Well, damn it. Don’t you have something to say to me?”

His eyes twinkled, but he didn’t smile. “You cripple me and I’ll kill you.”

“Now, there’s a real sweet-talking pro.” She feigned a sigh. “Cross, you leave me breathless.”

“Not yet—” he rolled over and caressed her “—but I intend to.”

Amanda laughed and dived under the covers.

The Office of Special Investigations hummed with activity.

Colonel Drake sat at a desk in the center of the wide room, issuing orders to Kate and talking on two phone lines at once. Amanda knew that one was a secure-link teleconference with several Middle Eastern ambassadors. Amanda surmised the colonel was looking for or receiving information on potential GRID-compound locations.

Colonel Gray, Mark’s commander, had taken up a station at the desk by the only window in the room—prime real estate, windows—and was relaying information from Joan to a Special Operations officer, apparently in the field in Texas. The commander had put the thrust of the raid on hold for Intel coordination, and the joint forces pounded the dusty dirt in wait mode, anticipating further orders any moment. From the chatter, it was going to be a while.

Mark sat in his cubicle on the far side of the operations center. He, too, was on the phone, trying to get the two men in his unit charged with murder cleared. General Shaw had agreed that Sloan could be released from jail and the charges against him dropped. And while M. C. Harding had partici
pated in Mark and Amanda’s abduction at the jail, his actions had been under extreme duress. Since M.C. was dead, General Shaw had agreed, and Secretary Reynolds had concurred, that Harding’s daughter be told that her father had not killed her mother, that they had found the man guilty of the murder, and though his name couldn’t yet be released, she could rest assured that he would be tried and convicted for the murder. It was a compassionate act on Secretary Reynolds’s and General Shaw’s part.

Kunz would be convicted of those murders. Amanda took immense satisfaction in knowing and believing that.

“Amanda,” Kate called out from her desk. “You need to take this call. He says he’s Paul Reese.”

Her skin crawled and her stomach tightened. She walked to the nearest desk, which happened to be the one next to Mark’s, and reached for the phone. Before lifting the receiver, she looked over at Kate. “Trace it. See if we can pinpoint his location.”

“All of the calls are being traced,” Mark reminded her. “We have a leak in the office, remember?”

She did remember, and picked up the phone, doing her best to keep her voice steady. “Captain West.”

“I’m impressed, Captain. I would have bet against you on escaping.”

Kunz.
Her heart rate doubled. She flagged Mark, mouthed that it was Thomas Kunz on the phone. “You knew I’d try, Thomas. You even said you did.”

“Try, yes. Succeed, no.” He let out a little laugh. “But just how successful have you been? Do you know? How many doubles have been inserted? Where? And for what purposes? Ah, you don’t have any idea, do you?”

“It’s easy enough to figure out the ultimate purpose,” she said. “You want what you’ve always wanted—to destroy America. It’s not a big mystery, Thomas.”

“They’ll tell you that you’ve won. I’ll let them all believe it for a time, until other matters occupy their minds and their focus shifts. But I want you to know that you haven’t won, Amanda. I have. You can’t stop me anymore. None of you can stop me anymore.”

“Everyone can be stopped,” she insisted, “including you.”

He laughed, deep and rich and so full that she knew he was genuinely amused. In his mind, he couldn’t be stopped, and he planned to prove it and to make a fool of her for trying to stop him.

“I wanted to share that with you,” he said. “So you never have a false sense of security about where we stand.” He dropped his voice, hot and sultry. “I own you, Amanda. I’ll always own you.”

The hell he did. The hell he would. She fought to keep revulsion out of her voice. He’d just feed on it. “Thanks so much. I can’t tell you—”

“I’m not done yet,” he cut her off, his voice flat and cold. “I wanted to share something else with you, too.”