Overnight Male (7 page)

In an effort to make light of the situation, she smiled and said, “Well, you could
try.
” But the smile felt forced and the comment was in no way funny.

He said nothing for a moment, but when Lila braved a glance back at him, she saw a sad sort of resolution mixed with his disbelief.

“You really think I’m capable of something like that?” he asked.

She sighed and glanced away again. “Look, it’s nothing personal. All you guys are capable of it, and too many of you are prone to it.”

“Meaning you’ve encountered more than your fair share,” he concluded.

“Hey, at least I know how to handle them,” she said evenly, looking at him again. “A lot of women aren’t so lucky.”

He started to say something else, evidently decided against it, and only nodded. Then he grabbed the clipboard, the top sheet of which looked like notes for a chemistry assignment, and dropped it into his lap. Lila relaxed a little more as she watched him flip idly through the pages beneath it, each containing notes of a different kind, all encoded. But somehow she suspected he wasn’t looking at any of them as closely as he should.

“Have a good day at school, Jenny,” he said, emphasizing her name as if needing to remind them both who she was and why they were here. Then, doing a better job of being Ned Collins now, he continued, “I hope you don’t get lost wandering around campus or forget your schedule.”

Meaning, Lila translated, he wanted her to familiarize herself with the campus layout and the schedules of their primary suspects.

“Figure out where the cool kids hang out,” he added, “and try to make some new friends.”

In other words, Lila thought, find out which buildings and establishments were most popular with the type of student they’d pegged as Sorcerer’s most likely contacts and try to put faces to the few names OPUS had managed to cull from the handful of e-mails they’d intercepted.

“Don’t worry about your library books,” he told her, “since they aren’t due until tomorrow.”

Meaning she could wait until tomorrow to check out the computer lab at the library.

He continued, “Get as much studying done as you can over the next few days, because once you start work at the coffee shop later this week, you’re going to have less time for homework.”

Translation, hurry up and get this thing done.

He didn’t need to tell her twice. Lila was finding more reasons every moment to finish this job as soon as she could.

“When you get home tonight, Jenny,” he concluded, “we’ll have lots to talk about. Lots of plans to make.”

Lila nodded. She understood that tonight he’d expect a full report on everything she saw and heard today so they could decide what their next step in the investigation would be. Dealing with Sorcerer, OPUS had learned, was best done in small steps. Too much planning, and the guy slipped through their fingers. One day at a time was the best way to go about dealing with a guy like Sorcerer.

And maybe for other guys, too, Lila was beginning to realize.

“I’ll do my best,” she said as she opened the car door and stepped out. And then, just because it seemed like the sort of thing a young woman having problems with her boyfriend would say in farewell, she told him, “Tonight, Ned, you and I can figure out how we’re supposed to make this thing work.”

Y
OU AND
I
CAN FIGURE
out how we’re supposed to make this thing work.

Lila’s words echoed in Joel’s brain as he watched her cross the parking lot toward the student center. She had some way of walking, he’d grant her that. It wasn’t so much a sexy walk as it was one of supreme confidence. She held her head high, took long strides, moved along at a quick enough clip that her now-dark hair blew away from her face. Her backpack dangled off one shoulder comfortably, as if she carried one every day, and she offered no indication that she was making a thorough survey of her surroundings, even though he was sure she’d be familiar with every brick on campus by day’s end. Had he not known better, he would have thought she was just another college-age kid laughing in the face of both menace and mortality because she was too innocent of the world and too arrogant with youth not to be.

But she wasn’t young. And she wasn’t innocent. He remembered the quickness with which she’d reacted when she thought he was going to hit her and wondered how many men in her past had tried to hurt her. How many had succeeded? How many hands had connected with that beautiful face before she’d learned—or become strong enough—to deflect them? How often had she started to care for someone who had then turned on her? Hell, it was no wonder she threw up as many barriers as she did. No wonder she closed herself off emotionally from the rest of the world.

He sighed as he watched her figure grow smaller, and only when she was completely out of sight did he finally turn the key in the ignition and back out of his parking space. Lila wasn’t the only one with a job to do today. Or, rather, Jenny wasn’t the only one with a job to do today. Joel was having a tough time seeing her as anything other than what he knew her to be, which was obvious by the way he’d fallen so completely out of character while talking to her. Hell, he’d never even been in character.

But then, Lila hadn’t, either, he reflected. He, at least, had an excuse for his lapse—he wasn’t used to working this way. For her, though, there was no other way. Yet she’d crossed the line from professional to personal while they were talking, too. Why?

He immediately pushed the question away. There were millions of reasons. He wasn’t her usual partner, so of course she wouldn’t be as comfortable playing a role as she normally would. They’d just started being Jenny and Ned—maybe it took her time to get into character and stay there. Infiltrating a college campus wasn’t quite as dangerous as infiltrating a foreign government or domestic crime situation, so maybe she didn’t think it was as necessary to maintain a veneer when it was just the two of them seated in a closed-up car.

Whatever.

Whoever he was, Joel had some things to unpack and set up in their apartment, and he wanted to familiarize himself with the area around Vine Street. Not that he’d be out in the field much, since that was Lila’s job, but a guy liked to have at least some idea of what was going on around him.

He expelled a derisive chuckle at the thought. As if any man could know what was going on around him when he was anywhere near Lila Moreau. And now Joel would be living with her. Separate rooms and separate beds, to be sure. Separate jobs and separate timetables. But not separate lives.

It had been a long time since Joel had allowed anyone of the feminine persuasion to get as close to him—emotionally
or
physically—as Lila had in only a few days. Already he’d wrestled with her under covers long enough to appreciate the luscious curves of her body, and already she’d pushed enough of his buttons to get out of him reactions he hadn’t had for a very long time.

He’d sworn almost five years ago that the next time he shared a roof with a woman, it would be because she’d agreed to share her life and herself with him, too. Now he’d be sharing a roof with a woman who went out of her way to keep her life and herself distant from others. And already he was thinking about what it would be like to wrestle with her under covers again. Worse, he was thinking about what it would take to get her to respond to him with the same sort of passion she’d roused in him. Good and bad. Hot and cold. Better and worse.

You and I can figure out how we’re supposed to make this thing work.

Only two days into their assignment, Joel thought, and he was already beginning to fear that both it and he were doomed.

H
ER SECOND DAY ON CAMPUS
,
Lila struck pay dirt. Or, at least, some kind of dirt. And she found it in the Waverly library.

It was newer than the other buildings, made of cement instead of brick, and where libraries generally connoted great works of literature, the Waverly library was filled to capacity with tech journals and textbooks and all kinds of technological wonders. Lila had no trouble finding the computer lab when she went specifically in search of it, because the rest of the library seemed to have been built around it.

According to her information, a computer engineering student named Chuck Miller was supposed to be working his shift in the lab from two until four, meaning he was right in the middle of it when Lila entered the building. He was one of less than a dozen Waverly students OPUS had been able to positively identify as some of Sorcerer’s contacts, and the first on Lila’s list of people to investigate, since he was easiest to find, thanks to his having a job. He was twenty-one years old, had an IQ that made da Vinci look like a drive-through worker, and was scraping by with barely passing grades because he spent most of his free time—and most of his school time and meal time and sleeping time, too—on gaming.

Sure enough, when Lila stumbled into the computer lab—literally, because she was trying to look stupid, since she suspected Chuck was the kind of guy for whom that would be a turn-on—he wasn’t working behind the information desk, but had plugged game controls into one of the school computers and was blowing the heads off virtual zombies. So he wasn’t even noticing that Lila was being stupid to lull him into a false sense of security.

Man, she hated it when that happened.

“Uh, excuse me?” she said.

No response from Mr. Miller.

“Um, hello?”

This time his response was, “Die, you alien zombie scum, die!” But Lila was pretty sure he wasn’t talking to her.

“
Excu-u-u-u-se
me?” She tried again. “Could you help me out? I’m kinda new here.”

Her voice must have finally cut through the video-induced daze, because he turned his head far enough to mutter, “Hang on—lemme finish this level” before going back to his game.

While he was finishing up, Lila took a moment to compare what she saw of him now to what she’d learned in his file. Sandy hair poked out from beneath the backward-turned ball cap embroidered with the words “Ghetto Mafia”—yeah, play that urban hip-hop, white boy. Although he still had his back to her, she knew from his photo that he sported a goatee of a slightly darker shade than his hair, that he had gray eyes and that he wasn’t a bad-looking kid. Although broad shoulders strained at the sleeves of his gray T-shirt, he had a lanky build, standing six-two and weighing only 170 pounds. And he’d just broken up with a steady girlfriend, due to his habit of hooking up with any woman who came on to him in a drunken stupor at parties.

Squeezing info from him ought to be a piece of cake for someone like Lila. Hell, squeezing info from him would be a piece of cake for anything that claimed two marginally human X chromosomes.

Thankfully, Lila did
not
have to maim him to get his attention again, because he finished the level he was trying to complete right when she was cracking her knuckles and looking around for a blunt object. Kind of a shame, too, she thought as he tossed down the game controls and stood to hitch up the baggy black cargo pants that dipped below the waistband of his tie-dyed boxer shorts. She’d never smacked anyone upside the head with a book trolley before. She wouldn’t have minded seeing how effective it was. Could come in handy someday.

Ah, well. Maybe another time.

“Yeah?” Chuck said eloquently as he turned around. Still hitching up the baggy cargo pants that still dipped below the waistband of his tie-dyed boxers.

Miraculously, Lila was able to refrain from saying, “Hey, moron, if you’d buy your pants the right size, you wouldn’t have that problem,” and instead asked—again—“Can you help me out? I’m looking for the computer lab. Could you point me in the right direction?”

She threw him her most vapid smile, then tucked her hands into her extra-low-riding jeans to push them even farther down, thereby revealing an even wider strip of naked torso beneath her cropped black sweater. She didn’t have the exposed underwear problem that Chuck did. Mostly because she wasn’t wearing any underwear, something else she hoped he noticed.

She was fairly certain he did by the way he dropped his gaze to her torso and licked his lips. Honestly. This was going to be way too easy. College guys were no challenge at all. At this rate, Lila would have Sorcerer tucked into her back pocket in no time. Except for the fact that the pockets on these damned extra-low-riding jeans were pretty much nonexistent. Obviously, guys weren’t the only ones who wore pants in moronic sizes.

“Um, hello?” she said when Chuck remained silent and only continued to stare at her midsection. She took a few steps forward and waved a hand in front of his face to get his attention, until he finally pulled his gaze up from her torso. But it halted again at her breasts, the generous tops of which were revealed by the low-cut sweater. Oh, yeah. Chuck wasn’t going to be any problem at all.

“My name’s Chuck. Chuck Miller. Nice to meet you,” he told her breasts.

“You, too,” Lila replied on their behalf. “I’m Jenny Sturgis. And I could really use your help.”

Finally, finally, he drove his gaze up to her face. Then he smiled, clearly liking that part of her, too. Whew. That was
such
a relief. She’d sleep
so
much better tonight, knowing Chuck Miller approved of her physical appearance.

“What can I do for you?” he asked, clearly having heard not a word of what she’d said so far.

“I’m looking for the computer lab,” she said again, donning the most empty-brained expression she had in her arsenal. Though Chuck’s brain was certainly giving her a run for her money on that score. “This is my first semester at Waverly,” she added, “and I’m not all that familiar with the library.”

He grinned, one of those grins guys used when they were vastly amused by something. “You’re standing in the computer lab,” he said.

Lila uttered a single, embarrassed chuckle and rolled her eyes. “Oh, duh,” she said. “I’ve never had to use it before, so I didn’t know.”