Overnight Male

CHAPTER THREE

“HOW CAN YOU KNOW THAT?” Faraday asked. “And why wasn’t it in your report?”

Lila tugged meaningfully on the handcuff that still connected her to his headboard. In a fantasy, she might have found the idea of being handcuffed to the bed of a sexy stranger profoundly arousing. In reality, it was damned annoying. Probably because Joel wasn’t a stranger to her anymore. She was getting to know him pretty well. What was weird—and unwelcome—was that she still found him sexy. Where getting to know him should have made her dislike him, she instead found herself feeling curious about him. Even worse, the stuff she was curious about had nothing to do with the job they both had facing them.

“Uncuff me,” she told him, “and I’ll reveal everything.”

He arched a dark eyebrow at that.

“Everything I know,” she clarified with an exasperated sound.

The eyebrow dropped back down again, and for a minute he almost looked disappointed. Interestingly, though, his expression registered no fear at the prospect of releasing her, and that, Lila had to admit, was pretty admirable. Stupid, but admirable. Most guys wouldn’t have had the gall to cuff her in the first place. Men who’d tried to restrain her in the past had generally ended up horizontal, usually unconscious and always bloody. And even if one of them had managed to capture her—yeah, right—no way would he have been brave enough to release her while he was still anywhere in the same ZIP code.

Of course, Joel Faraday wasn’t exactly hurrying to carry out her instructions, was he? So maybe he hid his fear well. Which, to Lila, was even more admirable.

“Promise me you won’t kick my ass to Abu Dhabi and back again,” he finally said.

Okay. She’d just kick his ass to Aberdeen and back again. “I promise I won’t kick your ass to Abu Dhabi,” she vowed.

“Or back again.”

“Whatever.”

But he still didn’t move. “Promise me you won’t even kick it as far as Arlington.”

She sighed heavily. Fine. She’d just kick his ass to Foggy Bottom. “I promise I won’t kick your ass as far as Arlington,” she repeated dutifully.

“Promise me you’ll leave my ass the hell alone.”

Well, now, she didn’t want to be hasty. She’d already noticed that, even in baggy pajama bottoms, his ass was kind of nice. She might have plans for it later. After she’d kicked it around for a little while. “Look, I promise I won’t kick your ass tonight, all right?”

“Ever,” he insisted.

She bit back a growl. “All right. I won’t kick your ass ever. Or any of your other body parts, either,” she added when he opened his mouth to say more.

“Promise?”

This time she growled quite distinctly. “You want me to sign something in blood?”

He actually seemed to consider it for a moment.

“All right.” She finally ground out the words. “I promise.”

He must have believed her, because he made his way cautiously to the nightstand where he’d placed the key. And watching him move, all fluid and stealth and leisure, Lila realized she had no desire to kick his ass anyway. It really was a nice ass. And it was attached to a very nice torso. Which had extremely nice shoulders. Fastened to lusciously nice arms. In fact, she decided as she watched him palm the small key and turn toward her, it would be a shame if anything happened to any of Joel Faraday’s body parts. Unless, of course, his body parts happened to be naked at the time, and Lila happened to be the one doing anything—and everything—to them.

Yeah, it was definitely going to be an interesting assignment.

He hesitated a moment at the side of the bed, still just beyond her reach. Then, even more cautious than he’d been before, he extended his empty hand outward, palm up, presumably in a silent request for her to give him her hand that was uncuffed. Not sure why he would want it, Lila nevertheless started to do so without hesitation. Then, for some reason, her hand stopped when her fingertips were just shy of his. She glanced up to find him gazing at her face, a silent question in his eyes. But he didn’t move his hand forward to take hers, only waited without speaking for her to touch him first.

Still not sure why he didn’t just unlock her, and never once removing her gaze from his, she gingerly pushed her hand the remaining distance necessary to meet his. But the moment their fingers finally connected, she instinctively wanted to pull back.

It was the strangest thing. Lila never retreated from anyone without a damned good reason. As in, without a life-threatening reason. Joel Faraday was in no way a threat to her life. He wasn’t even a threat to her wrist at this point. But there was something about the way her bare palm skimmed over his—a perfectly innocent touch—that made her want to jerk back again.

She fought the sensation by dropping her gaze and focusing it on the fingers that folded gently over her hand. But for some reason, that only compounded her confusion. Because not only did Joel’s fingers nearly swallow her hand whole, he touched her in a way that made goose bumps pebble her flesh. His hand was warm, the skin duskier than hers, dusted with black hair that made it appear darker still. His fingers were long and blunt compared to her small, slender ones, unadorned save the heavy Georgetown University ring he wore on his ring finger. His was a no-nonsense hand. A working hand. A manly hand. But it held hers so gently.

Maybe that was what put her off-kilter. She’d never thought of a man’s hands in terms of gentleness before. On the contrary, men’s hands were not to be trusted.

Joel continued to hold her free hand as he bent forward to reach for her cuffed one. He had to lean over her body to get to it, and when he did, the V-neck of his T-shirt fell away from his body at eye level. That gave Lila a view of a long, muscular torso and trim waist, all of it naked, and all of it dusted by dark hair. She sucked in an involuntary breath at the sight of such masculine beauty, filling her nose with the scent of him, a scintillating mix of Dial soap, expensive cognac and raw, unmitigated male. Her heartbeat quickened in response, and in an effort to slow it, she turned her gaze to her left hand, which had pulled taut the short chain imprisoning it to the bed. But seeing Joel insert the key into the lock and give it an uneasy twitch only made her pulse skyrocket again.

Looking away once more, she found herself gazing at his throat, mere inches from her face. And she saw that she wasn’t the only one suffering from a fast, irregular pulse. Joel’s was hammering hard near his collarbone, and she could hear his breathing now, too, coming in short, ragged bursts. Heat pooled in her belly and spread, filling her breasts to bursting and making her damp between her legs.

My God, she thought, closing her eyes. It was as if they were indulging in some kind of incredibly erotic foreplay. Yet neither had said or done anything to generate this kind of heat. Just the simple act of touching hands and being in close proximity was turning both of them on. What the hell was going on?

After loosing the cuffs from Lila’s hand and the bedpost, Joel straightened and dropped both cuffs and key back on the nightstand, then retreated to the far side of the room. And if he seemed to make the trip in record time, Lila wasn’t going to mention it. She was just happy to be able to breathe normally again. If one could consider quick, shallow, dizzying gasps to be normal.

She dropped her recently freed wrist into her other hand and rubbed idly, not so much because she needed to soothe it as she simply needed something to do with her hands that didn’t involve reaching for Joel. But when she looked at him again, he seemed to be watching what she was doing with an inordinate amount of interest. For a second time, something exploded in her belly and seeped into parts of her that were better left alone.

She did her best to ignore the sensation and return to the topic of their assignment. “Okay, here’s what I know,” she began. But her voice sounded husky and aroused, so she cleared her throat and tried again. “With that bogus attempted-murder charge floating around, I had to stay on the lam for five fuh—uh…for five freaking months,” she quickly amended.

Her language had appalled her sister, Marnie, that single evening the two of them had spent together getting caught up after being separated for virtually their entire lives. Only then had Lila realized just how rough her vocabulary was, compared to that of polite—i.e., non-OPUS—society. But she’d spent her childhood in a trailer park among neighbors who were, at best, bikers and, at worst, junkies, her adolescence on the streets of Las Vegas and her adult life in the company of spies and thugs. Language was a weapon in such environments, and Lila had simply adopted the behavior she saw practiced around her. Once she’d realized how uncomfortable it made Marnie, however, she’d done her best to gentle her vocabulary and deepsix the profanity. Even outside Marnie’s presence, Lila still tried to watch what she said and how brazenly she said it. Such was the good influence her sister had already brought to her life.

“During the five months I was lying low,” she began again, “I learned a lot of stuff about Sorcerer on my own. Stuff that I couldn’t report back to OPUS, because they’d forced me into hiding. And whattaya know, in that five months Sorcerer dropped off the face of the earth. He went into hiding, too, because he couldn’t know what OPUS was doing or where they’d be next, since I hadn’t given them any intel to go on. Without me sending in reports, his contact couldn’t send them back out again. He couldn’t know where he stood with us, so he disappeared.”

Joel studied her hard in silence for a moment, then said, “That sounds like speculation on your part.”

“It was at first,” she admitted. “So I started to dig a little deeper where I could at my end. And I had my partner do a little discreet checking around at OPUS. Between the two of us, we found evidence that there could definitely be a leak somewhere within the ranks of the organization.”

“Could be a leak,” Joel repeated. “Not that there definitely is a leak.”

“Which is why it’s not in my report,” Lila told him. “Neither of us has proof yet, but my gut tells me there’s someone inside who’s helping Sorcerer. Who’s been helping him for a long time now.”

“You think it’s someone who knew him when he was still working for OPUS? Or someone who’s come to work for us since? Is it possible it could even be someone he placed himself? Hell, how do you know it’s not me?”

“I don’t know that,” she replied honestly. “But I don’t have any reason to suspect you. Yet,” she added pointedly because…Well, just because. “I’ve thought a lot about all the possibilities, and at this point I just don’t know. It would make more sense if the leak were someone Sorcerer worked with years ago, but it could be someone he recruited, too. The guy is a charmer,” Lila said frankly. “Very charismatic. Very attractive. Very sexy.”

“Why, Miss Moreau,” Joel said in an affected, golly-geewhiz kind of voice, “you sound like you’re the president of the Adrian Padgett aka Sorcerer Fan Club.”

“No,” she immediately denied. She hesitated before saying the rest, then figured, what the hell. Even if Joel was only her temporary partner, he was still her partner. And she was reasonably sure he wasn’t the leak in the organization, since he wasn’t a part of the information-gathering arm. Anyway, what she was about to tell him wasn’t anything Sorcerer didn’t already know. So she added, “But I’d be lying if I said I’m immune to him. There’s something about him that is undeniably seductive.”

Her remark seemed to surprise Joel, though whether it was what she’d admitted or the fact that she’d admitted it that caused the reaction, Lila couldn’t have said. Frankly, she’d surprised herself when she’d had a one-night stand with Sorcerer shortly after being assigned to the undercover team looking for him. But she’d found herself in a position where she could get close enough to him physically to potentially bring him down. She supposed she’d just taken a page from Adrian’s own notebook and overstepped the usual parameters of the job. Not that that had been the first time she’d stepped over the line. But to get as close to him as she could, she had done something she’d never done on an assignment before—or done since. She’d had a sexual liaison with the suspect.

At the time, she honestly hadn’t thought much about it. Mostly because it hadn’t been any hardship to have sex with Adrian Padgett. He was a gorgeous, sexy guy, and as such, Lila had been powerfully attracted to him on a physical level. At that time, too, she’d been going through some things in her personal life that had allowed her to disengage herself from her feelings, even more so than usual. He’d turned her on, and he’d wanted her. She’d taken advantage of both facts. Unfortunately, he’d figured out she was part of the OPUS machine before she could make use of her new position in his life.

“And were you seduced?” Faraday asked her point-blank.

“No,” she replied honestly. “When I had sex with Sorcerer, I was an active and willing participant.”

His mouth flattened into a tight line at that, and a muscle twitched in his jaw. “So you really did sleep with him?”

“I won’t apologize for what I did that night,” she told him. “It wasn’t exactly protocol, but neither was it against the rules. Plenty of agents before me—male and female—have used sex to garner information from someone they were investigating.”

“And did you?” Joel asked. “Garner information from Sorcerer?”

“Some. I could have gotten more if I’d had an opportunity to extend our…liaison. As it was, he figured out who I worked for before I had the chance.”

“And was the desire for information the only reason you slept with him?” Joel asked.

Honesty, she reminded herself. She had to be honest. So she told him, “No. It was the desire for something else. And I found Adrian Padgett to be genuinely attractive.”

“Even knowing what he is?”

“I didn’t think about what he is,” she said. “I thought about how he made me feel. How he made my body feel,” she corrected herself. Since that was the only place she’d felt anything while she was with him.

“And would you have slept with him knowing what he is if you hadn’t needed information?” Joel asked.

Why he was belaboring this she couldn’t begin to imagine. It wasn’t as if he had a stake in it. Again, being honest, she replied, “No. Not knowing he was Sorcerer. Had he just been some guy I met, yeah. I might have. But I don’t sleep with the enemy just because the enemy turns me on. The enemy needs to have something else I want more than physical gratification.”

“Information.”

She nodded. “Information.”

Her encounter with Adrian Padgett had come at a time when Lila wasn’t much concerned with moral or ethical repercussions. Hell, that was one of the reasons OPUS had recruited her in the first place. She was the perfect candidate for the job they wanted her to do. Estranged from what little family she had—not even knowing about half of it when they recruited her—and coming from a background that had prevented her from forming emotional attachments to other people, she was a vessel waiting to be filled by OPUS policy and procedure. The fact that she wasn’t bad to look at and was used to being kicked around hadn’t hurt, either. Nor did the fact that she was accustomed to hard work. Add it all up, and OPUS found in Lila Moreau the quintessential femme fatale. And boy, did they exploit it. And her. Why shouldn’t she exploit herself, too? At least she was the one in control then.

“I won’t apologize for what I did,” she said again. “Because circumstances being what they were at the time, I wasn’t out of line to do it. And it did lull Sorcerer into a false security that allowed us to extend the life of the investigation in Indianapolis long enough that we almost caught him.”

“But you didn’t catch him,” Joel reminded her.

“No,” she agreed. “Unfortunately, we didn’t.” She met his gaze levelly. “But this time, I promise you, I’m taking that son of a bitch down.” She hesitated for a moment, then added, “And I’m going to do it in less than two weeks.”

Faraday arched his dark eyebrows again. “We don’t even know exactly where he is. How can you set a timetable at this point?”

She grinned, mostly because she couldn’t help herself. Lila always grinned when she thought of what would be happening in two weeks. “’Cause I have someplace I need to be in two weeks, that’s why.”

Now he narrowed his eyes at her. “I haven’t heard anything about another assignment for you. In fact, they made clear to me that this is the only thing on your agenda right now and to take all the time we needed.”

Lila studied her manicure. “Yeah, well, just shows how much they know.”

Faraday straightened and hooked his hands on his hips. “Where do you have to be in two weeks?” he demanded.

She sat back on her haunches and mimicked his challenging posture, settling her hands on her hips, too. “That’s none of your damned business.”

Up went the eyebrows again. “Excuse me?”

Enunciating more carefully, she repeated, “It’s. None. Of. Your. Damned. Business.”

His gaze never once leaving hers, he glared at her harder, shifted his weight to one foot, crossed his arms over his chest, expelled a soft sound and said quietly, “Don’t push me, Lila.”

It spoke volumes about his effect on her that she actually found herself relenting. Then again, it wasn’t as if her whereabouts in two weeks would be top secret. “Fine,” she muttered, relaxing her stance. “If you must know, I have a wedding to go to in two weeks.”

His mouth dropped open a fraction, and he eyed her blandly. “A wedding.”

She nodded. “Yeah, a wedding. I’m gonna be the best man. So I need to wrap this thing up before then. I need to bring down the son of a bitch one way or another before the Saturday after next.”

Faraday didn’t reply right away, only looked at Lila in a way she found a little disconcerting. It kind of made her feel the way a bug must feel when it was pinned under a microscope, while some guy in a white lab coat loomed over it holding a big ol’ pair of tweezers in one hand and a specimen slide in the other.

Finally he said, “We.”

Confused, Lila asked, “What?”

“We,” he said again. “We are going to bring the son of a bitch down.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “What are you talking about?”

“You and I,” he clarified. “We’ll be bringing in Sorcerer together.”

She shook her head. Oh, she didn’t think so. Aloud, she told him, “No, we won’t. I’ll be going to Cincinnati, and you’ll be staying here with all your gizmos and files. The wonders of technology and all that. Even hundreds of miles away, I can report in daily. That’s the way it always works. Me in the field sending intelligence where I find it, my partner manning home base collecting and dissecting that information. Yeah, we’re usually no more than a few miles apart at most, but it shouldn’t be a problem, you staying here in D.C.”

Now Faraday smiled in a way that Lila found really disconcerting. Like maybe the guy in the lab coat just lit the flame on a Bunsen burner. He pointed behind himself at the overflowing desk, where, at the bottom of a pile of papers, sat a laptop, now folded closed. “The wonders of technology,” he echoed. “As long as I have a wireless connection, I can be hundreds of miles away from all my gizmos and files and still have everything I need at my fingertips. Meaning I’ll never have to be more than a few miles at most away from my partner.”

Oh, no, Lila thought. No, no, no, no, no. He was not saying what he seemed to be saying.

He continued, “See, Lila, you may officially be back to tabula rasa with the big guys, but they’re not quite ready to cut you loose to your own devices again.”

She studied him morosely, a nervous knot forming in her stomach, and wondered why she hadn’t seen this coming from a hundred miles away. Man, she really had been out of the game too long. She’d forgotten the most rudimentary rule of OPUS. They didn’t trust anyone anytime anywhere anyhow anyway.

“I’m going to have to be on a leash for a while,” she guessed.

Faraday nodded.

“And you’re going to be the one holding it.”

He nodded again.

She sighed, much more softly than before. Even though it wasn’t necessary for him to spell it out any further, he did. Probably just his little way of showing Lila who was going to be in charge.

“I’ll be going to Cincinnati with you,” he told her. “And you’ll be reporting to me pretty much every day. If you don’t, I’ll be obliged to tell your superiors that you’ve gone missing again, something I doubt either of us would like to see happen. In other words, Lila, I’ll be the one running this operation. And you’ll be the one doing whatever I tell you to do. And maybe, maybe, if you’re a very good girl, and do exactly as you’re told, we’ll get you to your wedding on time.”

CHAPTER FOUR

A LITTLE MORE than twenty-four hours after leaving Joel Faraday’s Georgetown town house, Lila was back again—this time arriving at his front door, and with more than just the clothes on her back. This time she had some clothes packed in a carry-on bag, as well. Along with some assorted toiletries. And some official files. And some lethal weaponry. And a good book to read on the plane. Normally, carrying weaponry, lethal or otherwise, onto a plane, even with a good book, might pose a bit of a problem. But not when one was flying chartered. Government charter. Top secret government charter at that. In fact, Lila wasn’t sure, but she and Joel Faraday might just be flying to Cincinnati in Wonder Woman’s invisible jet. Which she had to admit, even to her jaded self, might be very cool.

When she’d left his house yesterday, the sun had just been staining the eastern sky with the pinks and oranges of early dawn. Now the sun had fully crested the horizon, but the western sky was still a bit smudged with remnants of blue and purple left over from the fleeing night. Lila wished she could retreat with it and stay in the darkness, where she felt infinitely more comfortable.