Express Male (18 page)

Oh. Okay. So much for winning possession of the kiss. Or anything else. Funny, though, how he didn’t mind relinquishing control at all….

Driven by instinct now, he moved his hands up over her back, reveling in the feel of the warm, naked flesh beneath his fingers. Up and down, around and back again his hands explored, over the subtle swells of her shoulder blades, down the slender column of her spine, along each delicate rib. When the ties of her top became a hindrance, he deftly freed each and pushed the garment away. Then he moved a hand between their bodies, upward, over the lower curve of her bare breast. She gasped when he did that, too. So he captured her mouth with his own and took command of the embrace again, pushing his fingers up over her breast and holding her completely in his hand.

She was so soft, so warm, so incredibly, unbearably sexy. She smelled of red wine, rare spices, rich blossoms. She was curved where he was angled, soft where he was hard, smooth where he was rough. And it had been so long, too long, since Noah had touched a woman this way. He’d forgotten how easily—and how thoroughly—he could lose himself to sex. Had forgotten how hypnotic and narcotic and erotic it could be. And he wanted to remember. All of it. He wanted to remember all night.

For long moments, he only kissed her and cradled her breast in one hand, palming her warm flesh, raking his thumb over the ripened peak, loving the way she arched her entire body into his with every stroke of his fingers. He felt her hands on him, too, frantically pulling his shirttail from his trousers, opening over his bare skin, running up and down his arms, molding his shoulders, cupping his jaw, tangling in his hair. He felt other things, too, inside—heat and need and want and desire unlike anything he had felt before. And when he moved the hand on her back lower, tugging the zipper of her skirt down, down, down, something began to hum in his belly like a wild, tempestuous thing.

Then he realized the vibration in his belly wasn’t the result of a tempest, but technology. His pager, set on vibrate, was going off, and it was just enough to jerk him back to the reality he realized now he never should have left. Gently but firmly he pushed Marnie away and stood, turning his back on her in an effort to collect his frantic thoughts and quell his ragged breathing.

“That…” he began. But the word got stuck in his throat, so he cleared it and tried again. “That, uh, shouldn’t have happened,” he finally got out.

But his words belied his feelings when he turned to look at Marnie, lying on her sofa with her top held carelessly to her torso, revealing the lower and side swells of her breasts. Because not only was he thinking that it should, too, have happened, but also what the hell was the matter with him, stopping it now? She did nothing to cover herself or straighten her clothing; nor did she utter a word, either of censure or of solicitation. She only lay there watching him, her eyes never leaving his, her silky hair fanning out around her face, her lips parted and swollen and wet. One arm was thrown above her head while the other pressed her top in place and her chest rose and fell with her own rapid respiration.

Before Noah could stop himself, he was on the sofa beside her again. He hooked an arm over her body and anchored his hand above her head beside her own, then began to lean over her again. His mouth hovered a breath above hers, but just as he was about to close the distance, his cell phone began to vibrate, too.

“Dammit,” he snapped, pushing himself up again.

This time he made himself move into the dining room, where he wouldn’t be able to see, smell, hear, touch or taste Marnie. He plucked his cell phone from the clip at his back and flipped it open. “What?” he barked into it.

Silence greeted him from the other side, and he wanted to kill whoever had had the temerity to dial a wrong number at a time like this. Then a woman’s voice said tentatively, “Sinatra? That you?”

Noah closed his eyes. Oh, yeah. He was working with other people on this assignment, wasn’t he? People with whom he was supposed to check in regularly. Like, for instance…He glanced at his watch. Dammit. Fifteen minutes ago. Just how long had he and Marnie been doing the horizontal rumba?

“Holland,” he replied, using the other agent’s code name. “Yeah, what is it?”

She hesitated. “Well, sir, when none of us heard anything from you at the check-in time, we started to get a little concerned. And then when you didn’t answer your pager right away, we—”

“Everything is fine,” he interrupted. “I just, um…I didn’t realize what time it was.”

There was another pregnant pause on the other end of the line. Probably because senior OPUS supervisors never said things like “I didn’t realize what time it was.” That was tantamount to saying “I’m an idiot.” Even the greenest agents out of training knew what the hell time it was at any given time. But then, considering what Noah had been doing to make him lose track of time, he supposed he was lucky he was even able to string two sentences together.

“How are things out there?” he asked Holland, steering the topic away from his own stupidity.

“Quiet,” she said. “This neighborhood makes the one where Beaver Cleaver lived look like Party Town. Even the dogs are too polite to bark. If Sorcerer’s around, he’s been bored to death by now.”

Noah sighed, a mixture of fatigue and frustration and dread churning in his stomach. “Just try to keep your eyes open until morning, all right?”

“Yes, sir.”

But he could tell from her tone of voice that she didn’t relish the idea of spending the rest of the night in Marnie’s neck. Ah, in Marnie’s neck of the woods, he meant. He snapped his phone shut, stuck it back in the holder at his waist and berated himself most brutally.

What the hell had happened? He hadn’t just crossed a line in there with Marnie. He’d damned well erased it. What he’d done was inexcusable. Reprehensible. Unfathomable.

So why were his instincts screaming at him to go back in there and start doing it again? Only this time, finish what he started.

As he tucked his shirt back into his trousers, he noticed it was unbuttoned down to the middle of his torso. But he couldn’t remember if Marnie had done it or he had. Never in his life had Noah lost control like that with a woman. Or anything else. He didn’t lose control. Ever. Even when lives were at stake and the balance of world power was threatened, he could always hold on to his emotions, his thoughts, his actions. With Marnie, though…

He inhaled another deep breath and released it slowly, then dragged his fingers through his hair to tame it. With Marnie, he had no control, he realized. And he couldn’t figure out why.

By the time he returned to her living room, she had risen from the sofa and put herself back together as well as she could manage. She still looked sexy as hell, her hair a riot of manhandled silk, her lips red and swollen, her breasts thrusting against the fabric of her top, her hips round and ripe beneath the leather skirt. Noah forced himself to look past her, at the semi-opaque lace curtains behind her that could very well have been insufficient for hiding what was going on in her house.
Dammit.

“That shouldn’t have happened,” he told her again.

“So you said,” she replied softly. “Just before you were about to let it happen again.”

He closed his eyes. “I made a mistake.”

Man, what a night. First Noah had told an agent he lost track of the time, then he admitted making a mistake. Worse, he
had
lost track of the time and made a mistake. Next thing he knew, he’d be revealing the top-secret OPUS chili recipe, and then the world would
really
go to hell in a handbasket.

When he opened his eyes again, Marnie was still looking at him with an unflinching expression, so similar to one he’d seen often from Lila. From Marnie, though, the look affected him even more profoundly. Because somehow, there was more at stake with her than there had ever been with Lila.

He told himself that was because Marnie was a civilian, and he naturally felt a greater responsibility for her. Lila knew the job was dangerous when she took it. She’d been carefully trained to do the job well. She had weapons at her disposal, the most dangerous of which was Lila herself. Marnie had no idea what she’d gotten herself into with Sorcerer and was in no way prepared. It was only natural that Noah would have deeper feelings of…something…for her. He just wished he knew what the hell those feelings were.

“It won’t happen again,” he said. Though whether he was trying to convince Marnie or himself, he honestly didn’t know.

She said nothing for a moment, only continued to stare at him in silence, her dark-blond eyebrows knitted downward. “Why did it happen just now?” she finally asked.

Good question, he thought. Too bad he didn’t have a good answer to go with. “The two of us are involved in a strange situation, one where emotions are a bit strained and tension is running high.”

Oh, good going, Noah,
he derided himself.
Reduce it to a cliché. That’ll definitely make her feel better.
Ah, what the hell. He might as well admit the truth. To both of them.

“Look, Marnie, I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “I think you’re very attractive.” Okay, so that wasn’t entirely honest, since he actually considered her to be unbelievably sexy. No need to reveal that much. He added, “And it’s been a long time since I…Well. It’s been a long time for me, that’s all. Put it all together, and I guess I’m just a little…not myself,” he finally finished lamely. “What I did was inexcusable, and I apologize.”

“You weren’t the only one who did something,” she said. “And there’s no need to apologize. Unless you’re sorry it happened.”

To attempt a response to that would be certain death. So Noah only repeated, “It won’t happen again.”

For a moment, he thought she was going to press the matter. She opened her mouth—that ripe, sexy, luscious mouth—to say something, then closed it again. Finally, slowly, she nodded. Once. Enough to let him know she agreed with his assurance. Not enough to convince him she believed what he’d said any more than he did.

“It would probably be best if we called it a night,” he said, in spite of what he’d just told Holland. “If Sorcerer was going to show up, he would have by now. A safe house really would be the best bet, at least for now.”

“Will you be at the safe house, too?” she asked.

And, God, he wished he knew why.

He shook his head. “No. But there will be two other agents there to keep an eye on things.”

She said nothing for a moment, only continued to look at him as if she were weighing her options. Yet when she spoke again, he was in no way prepared for what she had to say.

“I want to accept your offer of a job,” she told him.

Certain he’d misunderstood, Noah said, “What?”

“I want to accept your offer of a job,” she repeated, more forcefully this time. “The sooner I help you nail this bastard, Noah, the sooner I’ll get my life back. I want the job,” she reiterated. “When do I start?”

A
WEEK AFTER TELLING
Daniel the truth about her assignment, Ellie was ready to kick her own ass for ever telling Daniel the truth about her assignment. Because ever since their conversation in the coffee shop, he’d been convinced he was James Frigging Bond, and that Buzz Truman was the treacherous Dr. No. He’d even started making notes of all the reasons he was sure Truman was the leak, and Ellie was beginning to fear Daniel had even started poking around in the guy’s business at work.

Barely a week into her first assignment, and she’d already violated rule number one of spy school, which was “Don’t tell nobody nothin’, dumbass.” And also rule number two, which was “Don’t let a suspect know he’s a suspect, dumbass.” And okay, also number three, which was “And whatever you do, don’t let a suspect tag along on your assignment. Dumbass.”

But Daniel had pretty much blackmailed her into doing just that. That night in the coffee shop, he’d told Ellie that if she didn’t include him in the OPUS operation at ChemiTech, he’d go straight to the CEO and blab, stopping only long enough to tell Dr. Sebastian Baird to watch his back ’cause the feds had a file on him.

Which was something else that had ticked off Ellie. Somehow, over the course of the week, Daniel had correctly identified all five of the people on her list of suspects, simply by watching them all in action and forming opinions on their potential to be evildoers. And the four besides Truman, all of whose innocence he was supremely confident, like Sebastian and himself, he wanted to be cleared right away. It was Truman, he’d assured Ellie over and over again. It had to be. And who was better positioned to help her prove that than he himself, who’d worked at the company for years and had personal poop on all of the suspects, poop it would take OPUS months, maybe years, to learn by themselves.

Like she needed or wanted Daniel Beck’s help with her training assignment. Dumbass…ah, she meant
kick-ass…
spies weren’t supposed to
need
help. Especially not from civilians. Oh, sure, when she was finished with her training and was an officially recognized agent, she’d be partnered with another agent with whom she would complete all of her assignments. That was how OPUS worked. Agents were paired into teams where one of them went into the field to gather intel and feed it to the other, who then assessed and analyzed the information before passing it to the higher-ups.

But the whole point to this training assignment was to see where Ellie’s expertise lay, whether she would be more valuable to OPUS as the member of the team out in the field gathering information, or the member who took the information and evaluated it. The former needed skills like stealth, deception and a complete flouting of personal safety, while the latter needed talents like intelligence, perception and an ability to recognize patterns and find connections in the data collected. Ellie already knew she was better suited to the field. But she still had to prove that. And there wasn’t much proof in having been caught with her hand in the cookie file right out of the gate. There was even less proof in accepting the assistance of one of her suspects.

But every time she turned around, Daniel was trying to take charge of her assignment. He’d even won legitimate entrée into Truman’s home via a Saturday afternoon housewarming party that Truman and his wife were hosting for all of Truman’s co-workers, a little more than a week after Ellie and Daniel embarked on their—or rather
her
—assignment.

Originally, Daniel had told Ellie, he’d intended to return the RSVP with his own version of the abbreviation: Really Shan’t, Vituperous Prick—honestly, sometimes his big brain wasn’t all that sexy—but he’d never gotten around to it, so he called in a last-minute acceptance of the invitation, and asked if it would be all right for him to bring a date.

A
date,
she echoed derisively to herself as she got ready for the party. Not only was she no longer in charge of her own assignment, but she hadn’t even been cast in the role of sidekick. She was just a prop that Daniel Beck, agent Double-Oh-
Fine
was using to further investigate his own suspicions.

But even
that
wasn’t what was bothering Ellie the most at this point. What bothered her most was that she was finally going on a date with Daniel Beck, and it was nothing but a sham.

She blew out an exasperated breath as she awaited his arrival Saturday afternoon, steamed at herself for having her priorities so mixed up. She had a job to do, dammit. And she’d better start doing it quick.

She did her best to pretend their date was genuine, however—for the sake of the investigation, naturally—dressing for the party in a short denim skirt and a red, scoop-neck top that fell modestly off one shoulder, with flat black skimmers on her feet. Emma Peel aside, kick-ass spies rarely wore high heels, just in case they had to, you know, kick someone’s ass. High heels could only poke someone’s ass. And that just pissed off the bad guys even more. But since Ellie had been wearing her hair loose most days in her auditing-accountant attire—and since that would still be her cover at Truman’s party—she left it loose today, letting it cascade past her shoulders, to nearly the middle of her back.

She was relieved when she opened the front door to Daniel’s knock to see that he’d dressed a little more formally than usual, too. He still had on baggy cargo pants, these the color of a Hershey bar, but his usual T-shirt had been replaced by a creamy pin-striped button-down—though he hadn’t bothered to tuck it in. He opened his mouth to speak, but it was his eyes that did the moving, traveling down Ellie’s body and back up again in a way that made the strings of her heart do some serious zinging.

“I’m sorry, but I just can’t get used to you with legs,” he said by way of a greeting.

There was something in his voice that wasn’t normally there when he was talking to her, and the warm humor in his eyes seemed to have heightened to something hotter and less frivolous than usual. Ellie told herself she was just imagining it, that wearing a short skirt wasn’t enough to rouse such a reaction in him, since he’d seen women wearing a lot less than that, on a lot of other occasions. So she only muttered a soft thank-you and grabbed her purse to head out.

Daniel drove them in Ellie’s car to the party, since short skirts didn’t mix well with motorcycle seats, and, inescapably, his preferred topic of conversation was the assignment. No matter how many times she tried to change the subject—though
not
because she wanted to pretend this was a real date, since, of course, it wasn’t, and she was just tired of talking about the assignment all the time and shouldn’t be talking about it to him anyway—he managed to turn it back where he wanted. It wasn’t until they pulled to a stop in front of Truman’s house that he finally shut up. But then, Ellie wasn’t sure what to say, either, when she got an eyeful of the place.

Except maybe “Holy cow.”

She wouldn’t exactly call the house a mansion, but neither was it a modest abode. The neighborhood was one of Cleveland’s pricier ones, full of big, rambling old homes, lovingly refurbished, with enormous trees and crooked sidewalks. It was where the rich people used to live before the cow pasture McMansion explosion, and where the old money had stayed when the new money moved to the more ostentatious ’burbs. The Truman home was a three-story brick Victorian, complete with wraparound porch and widow’s walk, with lush landscaping and a cobbled walk and not a single thing that needed home improvement.

“Jeez, how much money does Truman make at ChemiTech, anyway?” Ellie asked.

“He can’t possibly make enough to afford that,” Daniel told her. “I mean, yeah, he’s got seniority on me, so I’m sure he takes home more than I do, but not that much more.”

“His wife must make a lot of money,” Ellie ventured.

“I wonder what she does for a living?”

“Or maybe the money comes from somewhere else,” Daniel said ominously. “Like maybe from a group of terrorists overseas.”

Ellie dropped her hand to the door release. “Only one way to find out,” she said as she pushed the door open.

Daniel emerged from the driver’s side and circled the front of the car to where Ellie was waiting for him, then surprised her by taking her hand in his and weaving their fingers together the way boyfriends and girlfriends had a tendency to do.

Her reaction must have shown in her face, because when she glanced up in confusion, Daniel smiled and said, “You’re my date, remember? And I kinda have a rep at work that I need to maintain.”

“What kind of rep?” she asked.

He lifted one shoulder and let it drop. “Let’s just say I date well, all right?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Is that supposed to be a compliment for me or for you?”

His smile broadened. “Yes.”

“So I have to spend the afternoon pretending to be besotted by you?” she asked. Not that it would be such a stretch for her to manage that, she had to admit.

“What do you mean pretend?” he asked. He feigned shock. “What? Are you saying you’re
not
besotted with me?”

She toddled her head back and forth a few times. “Besotted, befuddled, bewildered…they’re all pretty much the same thing, when you get right down to it.”

“So then you
are
besotted with me,” he concluded. But his voice was laced with something she could only liken to confusion, as if he wasn’t quite sure whether or not she was kidding, and he didn’t know where he stood with her, and he really wished he did.

Good, Ellie thought. If he was confused, then that made two of them. She wasn’t sure lately where she stood with Daniel, either. Something had changed since the night he’d caught her in the records room. No, even before that. The first day she’d shown up for work at ChemiTech, when she’d turned around to find him ogling her. Daniel had never ogled her before. Not once. But he’d done it several times since that morning—looked at her in a way that made her think he was seeing someone else. Or maybe he was looking for someone else. Hoping for someone else?

Ellie just didn’t know. But there was something there between them now that hadn’t been there before, and for the life of her, she couldn’t tell if it was good or bad.

Pushing her troubling thoughts to the back of her mind for now, she smiled at Daniel, deliberately didn’t answer his question and turned to make her way up to the front door.

The game was afoot, she thought as Daniel lifted his fist to rap on the Trumans’front door. Ellie just wished she could figure out what game, exactly, they were playing, and who was making the rules.

T
HE MORE
D
ANIEL SAW
of Buzz Truman’s house, the more convinced he became that Buzz was the one selling information to the bad guys. Not only had the place been restored to period perfection—work that had been done
before
Truman bought the house, Daniel had learned, so the place must have cost a small fortune—but it was chock-full of antiques and artwork that were probably worth even more than the house. And a short chat with Truman’s wife Nicole revealed that she worked as a pre-school teacher, an occupation that had shown up on the “Most Lucrative Jobs in America” list a total of, um, never times.

Still, he supposed there could be some legitimate explanation for the flow of cash. Savvy investing, perhaps. Successful gambling. A bequest from a wealthy relative. Lottery win. It wasn’t exactly unheard-of for people to suddenly come into large sums of money. But Truman, to Daniel’s way of thinking, wasn’t the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, so he couldn’t see the guy being some investment whiz or cardsharp. And a person was less likely to win the lottery than they were to be struck by lightning. On a sunny day in July. When it was snowing. Atomic dust. And, face it, the guy was too big a prick for
any
relative to want to leave him money. Daniel would have bequeathed his estate to Neo-Nazi Pedophiles for Satan before he’d let someone like Truman get his grubby hands on it.

An hour after his and Ellie’s arrival, the party was in full swing, with easily fifty people milling about inside and out. Nicole had hosted a few tours around the place at the beginning of the afternoon, and had made clear that anyone who wanted to look around anywhere was welcome to do so. Daniel figured you didn’t get an actual invitation to pillage and plunder a suspect’s house every day of the week, so he figured he and Ellie ought to take advantage of it. The minute the coast was clear—which was pretty much the minute Nicole Truman announced that food had been laid out in the kitchen—he wrapped his hand around Ellie’s wrist and tugged her in the direction opposite the kitchen, where she was clearly headed.

“Hey!” she cried, pulling on her arm to free it. “What are—”

“Shh,” Daniel hushed her in mid-objection. “We don’t have much time.”

“For what?” she asked.

He pointed at the ceiling overhead. “We need to get upstairs and check out Truman’s home computer.”

“What?” she exclaimed.

“Sshhh,”
he hissed more adamantly. “Will you please keep it down? I’m trying to do a little spying here.”

“But Nicole just put out the food. And I’m starving.”

“You can eat later. There will be a line, anyway.”