Kiss Me While I sleep (24 page)

She hadn’t felt passion in so long that it took her by surprise, both his and her own. She hadn’t realized how starved she was, how much she’d wanted someone to hold her. Needing more, she opened her mouth for him and wrapped her arms around his neck.

He made love the same way he drove, fast and with great enthusiasm. He barely paused at second base, then drove for third, slipping his hand between her legs and gently massaging. In sheer reflex she grabbed his wrist, but she couldn’t make herself push his hand away. He set the heel of his palm against the center seam of her pants and rocked it back and forth, and Lily went boneless.

Only the fact that they were in the car saved her. Her bent leg began cramping under her and with a gasp she pulled away from his mouth, clumsily trying to twist so she could straighten out her leg, hampered by the seat belt and his arms. She gave one hoarse cry of pain, then ground her teeth together.

“What’s wrong?” he asked sharply as he tried to right her in the seat They flailed around, elbows banging steering wheel, console, and dashboard, getting in each other’s way and generally looking like idiots. Finally Lily managed to fight her way back into her seat and with a groan of relief stretched out her aching leg as far as she could. It wasn’t far enough; she released the seat latch and pushed the seat back as far as it would go.

Panting, she tried to catch her breath as she massaged her thigh. “Cramp,” she muttered in explanation. Her knotted muscles began to relax and the pain receded. “I’m too old to be making out in a sports car,” she said, heaving a sigh. Leaning her head back against the seat, she gave a tired laugh. “I hope no one videotaped that little comedy.”

He was still turned toward her, the streetlights illuminating his face. He was smiling, his expression strangely tender. “You think we could be blackmailed with it?”

“Oh, yeah. Think how our reputations would suffer. What brought that on, anyway?”

His smile turned wry. “Have I mentioned that I get turned on when you laugh?”

“No, I don’t believe you have. I’m sure I’d have remembered.” He was wrong; she had definitely needed her weapon. She should have shot him before letting him kiss her like that, because now she wasn’t sure she could get through a day without having more of his kisses.

She returned her seat to its original position and smoothed her hair. “If you try, do you think you can manage the rest of the trip without scaring any more pedestrians half to death, almost killing us, or making another detour to attack me? I’d like to get home before midnight.”

“You liked being attacked. Admit it.” He reached for her left hand and took it, lacing her fingers with his. “If it hadn’t been for that cramp in your leg, you’d have liked it a lot more.”

“We’ll never know now, will we?” she asked.

“Wanna bet?”

“No matter how much I liked it, I’m not sleeping with someone I met just a few days ago. Period. So don’t get your hopes up, or anything else for that matter.”

“Too late, on both accounts.”

She swallowed a laugh, sucking hard on the insides of her cheeks. He gently squeezed her hand, then released it and restarted the engine. A U-turn put them back on the main boulevard.

Montmartre used to be thick on the ground with artists of all descriptions, but a lot of the area had deteriorated since its salad days. There were narrow, twisting one-lane streets with a groove down the middle for water to run off, buildings crowded close on each side, and a lot of tourists in search of nightlife. Lily guided him through the maze and finally said, “There, the blue door. That’s my apartment building.”

He pulled up outside the door. There was no place to park the car without blocking the street, so there was no question of him coming upstairs with her. She leaned over and pressed a quick kiss to his cheek, then his mouth. “Thank you for today. It’s been fun.”

“It was my pleasure. Tomorrow?”

She hesitated, then said, “Call me. We’ll see.” Perhaps his friend would come through with the information they needed about the lab’s security. Swain was just as likely to come up with yet another impractical invitation that would for some reason appeal to her, though she thought they’d be safer if she drove instead of him-and
her
driving skills were sadly rusty.

He watched until she was inside the building, then lightly tapped the horn before driving away. Lily climbed the stairs, taking them slower than she once would have, pleased that she was only a little out of breath when she reached her little apartment on the third floor. She let herself in and locked the door behind her, then heaved a big sigh.

Damn him. He was getting inside her defenses and they both knew it.

As soon as Swain picked his way out of the maze that was Montmartre and could pay attention to something other than where he was, he turned on his cell phone to check for messages. There weren’t any, so he called Langley as he drove, and asked for Director Vinay’s office; maybe his assistant was still at her desk, though the time there was pushing five o’clock. When he recognized her voice, he was relieved. “This is Lucas Swain. Can you tell me the director’s condition?” Then he held his breath, praying that Frank was still alive.

“He’s still in critical condition,” she said. She sounded shaken. “He doesn’t have any immediate family, just two nieces and a nephew who live in Oregon. I contacted them, but I don’t know if any of them will be able to come.”

“Do you know the prognosis?”

“The doctors are saying that if he makes it through twenty-four hours, his odds get better.”

“Will you mind if I call you again for an update?”

“Of course not. I don’t have to tell you that this is being kept very quiet, do I?”

“No, ma’am.”

He thanked her and hung up, then breathed a combined thank-you and prayer. He had succeeded in distracting both himself and Lily today, but the knowledge that Frank could die had stayed in the back of his mind, gnawing at him. He didn’t know what he might have done, if it hadn’t been for Lily. Just being with her, devoting himself to making her laugh, had given him something to focus on other than his worries.

It broke his heart to think of her as an eighteen-year-old, just the age his son Sam was now, being recruited to kill someone in cold blood. God, whoever had done that should be taken out and shot. That man had robbed her of a normal life when she was still too young to realize how high the cost would be to herself. He could see how she would have been the perfect weapon, young and fresh and largely innocent, but that didn’t make it right. If he ever got the man’s name from her-assuming she’d been given his correct name and not an alias-he’d make it a point to hunt the bastard down.

His cell phone rang. He frowned, the bottom dropping out of his stomach. Surely to God, Frank’s assistant wasn’t calling him to say that Frank had just died-

He grabbed the phone and glanced at the number showing in the window. It was a French number, and he wondered who in hell could be calling, because it wasn’t Lily-she’d have used her own cell phone-and no one else here had his number.

He flipped it open and cradled it between his jaw and shoulder as he pushed in the clutch and downshifted for a turn. “Yeah.”

A man said in a quiet, even tone, “There is a mole in your CIA headquarters feeding information to Rodrigo Nervi. I thought you should know.”

“Who is this?” Swain asked, stunned, but there was no answer. The call had been disconnected.

Swearing, he closed the phone and slipped it back into his pocket. A mole? Shit! He couldn’t doubt it, though, because otherwise how had the Frenchman gotten this number? And the caller had definitely been a Frenchman; he’d spoken in English, but the accent was French. Not Parisian, though; Swain’d picked up on the Parisian accent within a day.

A chill ran down his spine. Had everything he’d requested been fed straight to Rodrigo Nervi? If so, any action he and Lily took could be taking them straight into a trap.

Swain paced back and forth in his hotel room, his usual good-humored expression replaced by one that was cold and hard. No matter how he looked at it, he was literally on his own. The mole at Langley could be anyone: Frank’s assistant; Patrick Washington, whom Swain had liked so much that one time he’d talked to him; any of the analysts; the case officers-hell, even the DDO, Garvin Reed. The only person there Swain totally trusted was Frank Vinay, who was in critical condition and might not live. With this revelation from his mysterious caller, Swain had to consider that Frank’s automobile accident might not have been accidental, after all.

But if he had thought of that, then probably several thousand others at Langley had thought the same thing. What if the mole was conveniently placed to divert suspicion from the accident?

The thing was, though, auto accidents were tricky, definitely not the most reliable method of eliminating someone; people had been known to walk away from accidents that totaled their cars. On the other hand, if you killed someone and didn’t want anyone to know it was deliberate, you staged events to make it
look
like an accident. How well it was staged depended on the reliability of the parties involved, and the amount of money behind it.

But how could anyone stage an auto accident that would take out the DO? Logically, predicting where someone would be at any given moment in the D.C. traffic was impossible, what with the fender benders, mechanical troubles, and flat tires all over the city that delayed and diverted traffic to other routes. Add in the human factor, such as oversleeping, stopping for a latte-he didn’t see how it could be done, how anyone could time things so perfectly.

At any rate, surely to God, Frank’s driver hadn’t taken the same route to work every day. That was basic. Frank wouldn’t have allowed it

So-logically, the accident had to be just what it seemed: an accident.

The result was the same. Whether or not Frank lived, he was out of commission, unreachable. Swain had been a field officer for a long time, but he’d been
in
the field, working with various insurgents and military groups in South America; he hadn’t actually spent much time in CIA headquarters. He didn’t know very many people there, and they didn’t know him. He’d always considered it a bonus that he was seldom at headquarters, but now that put him in a bind, because he had no one he knew well enough to trust.

So there would be no more help from Langley, no more requests for information. He tried to work the angles on what this meant to his particular situation. The way he saw it, he had two options: he could pull the plug on Lily right now and complete his stated mission, then hope to God that Frank lived so he could root out this damned mole-or he could stay here, work with Lily in cracking the Nervis’ security, and try to find out from this end who the mole was. Of the two, he preferred staying here. For one thing, he was already here, and no matter how good the security was at the Nervi complex, it wouldn’t be anything compared to the security at Langley.

Then there was Lily. She touched him and amused him and turned him on way more than he’d expected. Yeah, he’d found her attractive from the get-go, but the more time he spent with her, the better he knew her, the more intense the attraction became. He was getting in deeper with her than he’d ever planned, but it still wasn’t deep enough. He wanted more.

So he’d stay here and do the best he could to work things from this end, totally on his own. He’d been playing along with Lily’s scheme to break into the lab complex out of his own curiosity-that, and a strong desire to get into her pants-but now he needed to get serious about it. And he wasn’t totally alone; he had Lily, who was no novice, and he also had his unknown caller. Whoever he was, the man was well-placed enough to know what was going on, and by warning Swain he’d placed himself on the side of the angels.

Thanks to the handy-dandy little cell-phone feature that listed incoming calls, Swain had the guy’s number, both literally and figuratively. A person almost couldn’t make a move today without leaving an electronic or paper footprint somewhere. Sometimes that was a blessing, sometimes a curse, depending on whether you were searching or hiding.

It was possible the guy even knew the name of the mole, but Swain doubted it. Otherwise, why give him a generic heads-up? If it had mattered enough for him to warn Swain, then he’d have given the name if he’d had it

But you never knew how much information anyone had that they didn’t know they had, bits and pieces they simply hadn’t put together yet into a cohesive whole. The only way to find out was by asking.

He didn’t want to call his unknown informant back using his cell phone, on the off chance that the guy didn’t want to talk to him and wouldn’t answer after seeing his phone number listed as incoming. Likewise, he didn’t want this guy to know he was staying at the Bristol; just seemed safer that way. He’d bought a telephone card the day he’d arrived in France, figuring he’d never use it but wanting to have it just in case his cell phone batteries died unexpectedly or something. Leaving the hotel, he walked down Faubourg-Saint-Honore, bypassing the first public phone for one farther down the street.

He was smiling as he dialed the number, but this smile was totally lacking in humor. It was more like the smile of a shark as it closed in on lunch. He glanced at his wristwatch as he listened to the phone ringing: 1:43 am. Good. He was probably getting the guy out of bed, which is what he deserved for hanging up the way he had.