On the Loose (17 page)

CHAPTER
TWENTY

Morazán Province, El Salvador

Sex was not love.

Honey knew it, and she was pretty darn sure Smith knew it—and yet there they were, tangled up together in the cargo area of the Land Cruiser like two people in love, with him backed up against a gun case, and her draped against a ruck-sack with a corner of her suitcase digging into her butt.

Goodness' sakes, he'd come twice.

But that was sex, not love. Motivated, inspired, dedicated sex, for which she took full, lovely credit—but it was not love.

She'd come twice.

And that was wonderfully, lusciously lovely, and she gave him full credit for all his mad, lovely skills—but it wasn't necessarily love.

He hadn't taken his hands off her, not once. He was molding her with his palm, seeming to memorize her size and shape, his strokes even and smooth, one continuous touch from her shoulder to her thigh, with slow and easy forays over her breasts and belly, down over her hip, and up her back.

Still, no one would ever mistake tender touches for love.

But there was one other thing, a nearly indefinable something that made her want to put her mouth on him just to taste his skin again—and someone might mistake that for love.

She was on the verge of that mistake. She could tell. And it worried the hell out of her, but even with the risk, she didn't have it in her to resist.

Snuggling up closer, she rested her head on his arm, and her cheek on his chest, and breathed him in, the warm, erotic scent of man and sex. God, she'd wanted this for so long, to be with him again. Nothing about longing for him had made sense, and yet she'd longed for him. Thousands of miles away, more than likely, without a clue where he was, or what he was doing, or even if he was still alive, he'd invaded almost her every waking thought.

He smelled so good.

She yawned, and kissed him, and felt more at peace and at home than she had in a long, long time.

“Do you know Darcy Delamere?” Smith asked, completely out of the blue, and about startled her into next week.

Her eyes came open.

Darcy Delamere? Good Lord.

“I think everyone in Washington, D.C., knows Darcy Delamere,” she said, amazingly calmly. “She writes a weekly column in
The Washington Post,
for the society section.” What in the world was he thinking, to be asking her about Darcy Delamere?

She didn't even want to know.

“Yes. I've been reading her for the last few months, since I've been...uh, looking through the weekend society pages. Her column usually runs on the front page.”

Oh, dear, Honey thought, and wondered if she could possibly interest him in another “go” to get his mind off the society pages.

And for the record, Darcy Delamere's column
always
ran on the front page of the society section.

“Well, then you know as much as I do,” she said, and hoped they'd reached the end of the conversation.

No such luck.

“She's funny, but in a very sharp, biting way, very insightful. She skewers everybody, the Right, and the Left. She even goes after the Centrists.”

“Politics is easy satire. Everybody knows that.” At least Darcy Delamere made it look easy. In truth, Honey knew it was a helluva lot of work to be scathing when it was called for, ruthless with the truth, to wrap it all in the fluff of Washington's social whirl, and still make people laugh—and who better to do that than an A-list, Harvard-educated sorority girl?

“People on the Hill credit her with breaking the Lundt-Creasy scandal,” he said, smoothing his hand up her thigh and hip, until he came to rest with his palm on the side of her breast.

She almost purred, his hands were so warm. His whole body was warm, putting out heat like a furnace. She loved it.

“Sex and politics is the easiest satire of all,” she said, scooting even closer. “Everybody looks foolish and culpable, and at least a little perverted, if not out-and-out bent, and it's always there, somewhere.” And those were the bare naked facts. Darcy Delamere's particular genius was in finding the worst of the culprits, the venal ones, the ones peddling their influence for sexual favors, and in the case of the Lundt-Creasy affair, the hypocritical ones pounding political pulpits to hide their own sexual quirks and hijinks. She didn't care what people did in their private lives, unless it threatened to affect everyone else's private life.

“She also exposed the Pittsburgh-Cayman Brac-Potomac connection between government contractors banking offshore and funneling their money through the rust belt.”

So she had. Rather brilliantly, Honey had thought. The whole exposé had come about through an offhand comment overheard in the ladies' room of the upscale District Lounge, a cigar and martini bar on the Hill and a personal favorite of Honey's. There were no secrets in Washington, only items of interest people were too afraid to shout in public. The society pages of
The Washington Post
made a great megaphone.

“Scandal and double-dealing are also very easy to find and blow the whistle on in Washington,” she said around another small yawn, “if you're not afraid of losing your job or stepping on toes that can step back hard.”

“Apparently, she isn't.”

“She's not.” Darcy Delamere wasn't afraid of anything. She didn't need to be. Nobody knew who she was; no one knew her real name. Plenty of people had their suspicions, but too many people in Washington fit Darcy's profile for anyone to nail the pseudonym on her.

Actually, one person did know the truth.

Okay, two: Kurt Miller, Darcy's editor, who had first approached Honey four years ago, and had actually come up with the name Darcy Delamere; and the man who had gotten Honey into El Salvador so fast it had made her head spin, Mr. Cassle, the white-haired gentleman with an office in a little-used corridor far up in the highest reaches of the Department of State. He'd known everything, including Honey's social calendar for the next six months and the last two years, and how she'd become Darcy Delamere.

“She dated an underwear model once,” Smith said.

She slanted him a wary glance.

“How in the world do you know that?”

Honestly. She wanted to know. How in the ever-loving world did he know Darcy Delamere had dated an underwear model?

“She mentioned it once in a column.”

About a thousand years ago, maybe.

“Well.” What could she say? “Underwear models are very popular guys.”

“And she went to Nepal.”

Her eyebrows rose nearly into her hairline.

“How long did you say you've been reading the society pages?”

The Nepal column had run eighteen months ago, but it had been six years since the giant ammonite adventure. No one had made a connection between the two—until now.

“Not very long,” he said. “But I looked through her archives.”

Oh, dear.

“I hope she had as nice a time as I did. The mountains, the Himalayas, are so—”

“Elemental?”

“Yes,” she said, lifting her head and giving him a quizzical look. “Exactly. Profoundly elemental.”

“You use that word a lot in your writing—‘Elemental Female Orgasm: Privilege or Right? A Primer for Men.' ”

A small laugh escaped her. “You read the rest of
Sorority Girl
.”

“The whole thing,” he admitted. “And then I toughed it out through that
Yoke of Political Tyranny
thing you wrote with Dr. Barstow, although I might have slept through a few of those middle chapters, and I noticed you used ‘elemental' a few times in there, too.”

“How amazing.” And how darn near unbelievable. Very few people outside of feminist studies academia had ever gotten through
Women's Sexuality Under the Yoke of Twenty-first Century Political Tyranny,
asleep or awake. She could probably count them on one hand.

“And then I remembered the chapter in
Sorority Girl
titled ‘Postorgasmic Mind State: Getting There Is Half the Fun—Enlightenment through Bliss,' ” he said, turning his head to better see her. He'd flipped the flashlight on to find his shirt to cover her with, and left it propped in a manner to cast a faint glow over the darkened back seat. “You write a lot about orgasm.”

“Well, you know what they say,” she said, leaning down to whisper in his ear.
“Write what you know.”

He laughed, and kissed her, and gathered her close.

And he kissed her again.

Outside the Land Cruiser, the rain was still falling, but in bucketfuls instead of a continuous sheet. The weather was lightening up.

“And then one Sunday, I was reading Darcy Delamere,” he picked up where he'd left off, “and she was drawing blood through the Right and the Left over something she called EBM.”

Oh, crap.

“And I kept wondering, what in the hell is EBM? And I wondered right up until the end of her column, where she spelled it out in big capital letters—ELEMENTAL BELTWAY MIND STATE—and something clicked in my brain. But it wasn't a big click. The lightbulb didn't really go on until a few minutes ago, after you mentioned Nepal earlier. I couldn't get it out of my mind. Nepal. I haven't met many people who have been to Nepal.”

Lying by means of omission was not considered a sin north of the Potomac, so she decided to keep her mouth shut.

He was quiet, too, for a long time, while the rain poured down and the lightning flashed and the wind barely buffeted them at all.

“So,” he finally said. “You've got a job.”

She wasn't admitting anything.

“You're notorious, you know that, right?” he said.

Yes.

“And you know you're right about the EBM.”

Okay, she couldn't resist. She gave her head a small nod.

And he swore.

“
Goddamn
. I knew it. I'm on a top-secret intelligence mission with a damn newspaper reporter.”

Yes, he was.

“
Unfu...unbe
—this is...this is unbelievable.” He was stammering, which simply fascinated her. “Didn't they check you out, before they sent you down here with a damn briefcase belonging to the fricking CIA? I mean,
geezus,
don't you have to have ‘Journalist' tattooed on your passport or something?”

“I write a column for the society page.”

“Bull,” he said. “You are a highly political animal, have been ever since that damn sorority girl book. That thing is pure political feminism, and dammit, I read where Darcy Delamere is the first thing the Secretary of Defense reads on Sunday mornings.”

She couldn't help herself; she smiled and settled in closer to him. She'd
loved
being mentioned by the SECDEF. Miller had given her a raise and grinned like a fool for a week.

“But, dammit, the thing you said about EBM being a blind way to conduct a country's business, putting politics and power ahead of common sense or the truth,” he continued, “and it being dangerous, except to the people doing the conducting, the politicians—that was dead-on. It works out great for them, keeps them in office, gives them the power they want. And you were right when you said the people actually doing the country's business, guys like me, the ones on the ground implementing the government's policies, that we can get burned real badly by the Elemental Beltway Mind State. I've seen it happen more than once, oblivious politicians expecting incredibly daunting missions to be accomplished at the drop of a hat. Too many of them don't have a clue about how the real world works, where men bleed, and men die.” He slid his leg between hers and moved his hand down and wrapped it around her thigh. “
Dammit.
Darcy Delamere.” He let out a soft laugh. “I'll be a sonuvabitch...a damned impressed sonuvabitch.”

Okay. Maybe it was love. Every word he said turned her to mush. But she couldn't take full credit for the column he liked. Her research assistant, Mindy Brighton, came from a military family and had married a Special Forces soldier. She knew about the men on the ground, the guys doing the job, and the risks they were tasked with taking. Honey hadn't spent much time with any “men on the ground,” until one of them had chased her down in San Luis and locked her in a hotel room.

Nothing in her life had been the same since.

She wasn't complaining.

“Are we doing this again, Cougar?” she murmured in his ear, getting comfortable on top of him, loving the feel of him, his broad chest a wall of hard muscle and soft hair, his arms iron-bound, and yet so gentle with her.

“Cougar, hell.” He let out another soft chuckle. “Not yet,
Darcy,
baby. I need to get some sleep, that's all, and I want you close.”

Darcy, baby.
She grinned and kissed his mouth, and then she kissed his jaw. She kissed his cheek, running her fingers back through his hair, and by the time she kissed his temple, he was asleep, out like a light, gone.

She sighed and relaxed into him.

She'd been in love twice, and it had not worked out very well for her. The first time had been during her literary period, between the publication of
Sorority Girl
and the publication of
The Yoke of Tyranny
. The second time had been between Shakespeare in the nude and Calvin Klein underwear models, between not-quite-misspent youth and getting a real job, one that gave her the kind of connections she could have used to keep her out of the cargo area of a Land Cruiser on a back road in El Salvador.

She wasn't sure she was ready for love a third time. It could hurt so badly—but she wouldn't have missed this, not for the world.

The flashlight cast him in harsh shadows, made the angles of his face even more stark, and still he was so beautiful.

She pressed her lips to his shoulder, then reached over and turned the flashlight off, and with his heart beating next to hers, with his breath in her ear and his arm so strong around her, she drifted off to the sound of the rain.