by Kay Hooper
“A waste of your vast talents,” he agreed solemnly.
She made a rude noise. “Never mind the editorial comments, just tell me what you want.”
“I need you to do a little shopping for me.”
“Anything interesting?” she inquired hopefully.
“Ladies’ wear.”
Raven laughed. “Get your story ready, pal, because this I’ve got to hear. Sizes and colors, please.”
And Derek, who had a good eye for such things and who had also checked the clothing Shannon had left in the bathroom, recited sizes, suggested colors, and gave her his address. “From the skin out,” he finished, then added hastily before she could comment on that, “It’s possible this building is under surveillance, so act accordingly.”
“Good heavens,” she said, but not as if the prospect of trouble daunted her.
In fact, she sounded rather pleased, and Derek said severely, “You’re not in this, understand? I know that gang of yours loves trouble, but if you all come in on this I’ll have Hagen on my back and that’s the last thing I need.”
Without responding, she said casually, “Where is the maestro of stealth and deceit, by the way? We haven’t heard from him lately.”
“Last I knew, he was foaming at the mouth because some smart lady had ruined one of his plans. I think she snuck out the back door while he was sauntering in the front.”
After a moment, Raven said slowly, “Her name wouldn’t be Sara, would it?”
“I don’t know. Friend of yours?”
“In absentia,” Raven answered in a distracted tone. “I think maybe our Sarah should check on that; if that son of a worm is hounding the poor girl …” Briskly, she said, “I’ll get the clothes, Derek, and be at your place as soon as possible.”
He didn’t ask questions. “Great. And, Raven—thanks.”
But she had already hung up. She was like that, he reflected, cradling his own receiver. She helped automatically because she didn’t know any other way to be.
Lady Luck had gifted him with a number of friends like that.
Shannon knew as soon as she opened her eyes that she had slept a long time: a glance at the clock on the nightstand confirmed the feeling. It was late in the afternoon. It was also not her nightstand.
She sat up, staring around the bedroom that wasn’t hers either. This wasn’t her plain little room with its colorless pseudo-oak furniture, shabby drapes, and bland carpet. This was a larger room with heavy drapes and deep carpet, and the furniture was dark and massive and obviously not pseudo anything.
Frowning, she looked down to see the very large flannel shirt and baggy sweatpants she was wearing. Also not hers. Then, even as she pushed back her tousled hair and swung her legs from the large bed, she remembered.
Civatech. The explosion. An eternally long night of walking, frightened, in pain, alone. And then finding a big, tough, blond man with wonderful dark eyes who had listened to her, fed her, put her to bed, and rubbed her aching hip until the pain went away and she could sleep.
Shannon drew a deep breath and rose to her bare feet, relieved to find that her hip was stiff but not hurting. She went to the closed door, eased it open, and heard the murmur of voices from the den. Biting her lip, she hesitated, then slipped from the room and moved toward the sound.
There were two people in the den. Derek was standing, leaning his hands on the back of a chair while he talked. He was dressed in dark slacks and a gray shirt, and looked more handsome than she remembered. On the couch was a woman, and Shannon instantly became aware of her own disheveled hair, baggy clothing, and bare feet; this woman probably always had that effect on other women. Her long black hair gleamed almost blue and was worn casually in a ponytail high on her head. Her face was striking, not perfect or even particularly beautiful, but somehow lovely and unforgettable. She had wide, merry violet eyes and a warm smile—directed at Derek, at the moment. She was dressed simply in slacks and a silk blouse, a single gold chain at her throat, but she could have worn the same outfit to a diplomatic ball, and no one would have considered her underdressed. Style. The lady had style.
Another swan, Shannon thought miserably.
“Shannon.” Derek came to meet her, and his dark eyes searched her face. “Feeling better?”
She nodded. “Yes, thank you.” Her voice was soft and toneless, without expression.
He frowned fleetingly as he took her arm lightly and guided her to the couch, introducing her to Raven Long. Then, when she sat down, he said, “I’ll get you some coffee,” and briskly left the room.
“It seems you’ve had a rough time,” Raven said, looking at her gravely.
“He—he told you?”
“He told me. We worked together in the past.”
Shannon looked at her, unwilling to acknowledge how relieved she felt because she had just noticed that the other woman wore a gold wedding band. “I see.”
Raven gestured to a stack of boxes on the floor by the couch. “He didn’t want to leave you alone, and since your clothes went up in smoke, he asked me to get a few things for you.” She studied the other woman, ignoring her suddenly flushed face. “The sizes should be about right, I think, and he was on the mark with colors.”
A bit unsteadily, Shannon said, “I don’t know how to thank you. But I’ll pay you back—”
Raven smiled at her warmly. “You don’t worry about that, all right? Time enough later for the unimportant things.” She would have told Shannon to forget the debt entirely, but she was all too aware that this woman would find gifts difficult to accept; she was a hurt person, and hurt people clung to pride. “First, we have to get those creeps off your back—”
“Take yourself out of that we,” Derek said firmly, returning to the room and placing a cup of coffee on the table before Shannon. “I told you, you aren’t involved, Raven.”
She smiled at him.
“I mean it,” he insisted, sinking down in a chair. “Josh would have my head on a platter, and Zach would serve it to him.”
“I told you, they’re busy.” She looked at Shannon, explaining, “My husband and a friend of ours.”
“They wouldn’t be busy long,” Derek said, “if you got involved in this. Not, at least, with a union strike. They’d be busy either taking me apart or else getting hip-deep in the situation themselves. No, Raven.”
She shook her head. “Still an outlaw.”
“I earned the name,” he agreed dryly.
Shannon looked from one to the other, puzzled, and Raven explained after smiling again. “Derek doesn’t like other people’s rules. He’s infamous for his ability to go into tricky situations without backup and come out with his skin intact … and with whatever he went in after. He also—though he’d die rather than admit it—spins some of the most intricate tactical webs it’s ever been my pleasure to see, resulting in whole governments at each other’s throats by the time he waltzes out of their countries.”
“That’s enough,” Derek said mildly.
Raven was still smiling, and her eyes were alight. “Shannon should know what she’s gotten herself into. She should know that you despise guns and don’t know karate from chop suey, which makes the rest of us wonder how on earth you’ve managed to stay alive this long.”
“I throw a mean punch,” Derek murmured.
“He does that,” Raven told Shannon. “He also swims like a fish, has eyes like a cat, and if you dropped him in the middle of a desert he’d find the only oasis within a fifty-mile radius in under an hour. He never gets lost or ruffled, never walks a straight line if he can find a curve or an angle, and never, never gives up.”
“The queue to pay homage forms to the right,” Derek told Shannon dryly.
Raven grinned at him. “Hey, pal, I started that line years ago. I think it was when you saved me from having to say ‘comrade’ whenever I addressed someone.”
“Just because I thought it’d be a shame to hide all that hair underneath a babushka,” he told he
r.
Shannon was staring at Raven. “You mean—?”
Cheerful, Raven said, “If Derek hadn’t had such good instincts, I would have been grabbed by a double agent and taken to the other side as a prize.”
Shannon turned her gaze to Derek. “I don’t think I really believed it until now,” she said wonderingly. “It all seemed so unreal.”
He looked at her for a moment, then said, “Why don’t you go try on the clothes Raven brought? I may have been wrong on the sizes, and we might have to exchange something.”
Obediently, Shannon gathered the boxes and carried them into his bedroom, closing the door softly behind her. Derek lit a cigarette, frowning, while Raven watched him.
Usually, Derek smoked in a lazy, almost careless manner. He would frown critically at smoke ring after smoke ring, searching, he said, for the perfect one. It was not an affectation, but a subtle and deliberate bit of sleight of hand; anyone watching tended to pay attention to what he was doing, which left him free to observe what was going on around him without seeming to look at all.
Lacking Kelsey’s inborn chameleon gifts, Derek had mastered several subtle sleight of hand distractions in body language, and used each so skillfully that only another agent or actor would have noticed.
Raven, a former agent and innate actress, noticed. She also noticed that Derek was smoking now in a quick, hard manner that was not at all deceptive. “Worried, pal?”
He leaned his fair head back against the chair and stared at the ceiling. “You weren’t followed?”
“No. And there wasn’t a hint of anyone watching this place. Combat jitters?”
The phrase was common among agents and referred to something that might have been instinct or intuition; a good agent could often sense the seemingly eternal moment right before everything hit the fan—as Derek had in England years before.
He shrugged a little. “No, not that. I just wonder what it’s all about. What’s so important that they moved that quickly to get Shannon out of the way permanently, simply because she noticed some puzzling phrases in a few letters? Why not give her an unexpected holiday and keep an eye on her, or hire a couple of dumb thugs to grab her and hold her incommunicado for a while?”
“Maybe she knows more than she’s aware of, enough so that they couldn’t take any chances.”
“Then we’re talking about something very big involving some very ruthless people.” He sighed roughly. “Dammit.”
After a moment, Raven gathered her handbag and rose to her feet. “You weren’t wrong on the sizes, so I’ll be leaving. I promised Josh I’d come straight back,” she added absently.
Since he knew Josh Long, Derek grimaced. “That doesn’t sound like him,” he said, putting his cigarette out in an ashtray on a table beside the chair. “Is there something you haven’t told me?”
Raven waved him back when he would have gotten up, then turned toward the door. She didn’t answer until her hand was on the knob, then paused to look back at him. “Nothing at all,” she lied easily, smiling at him. “Call if you need anything, pal. Anything, no matter what. If you need a safe house, Long Enterprises has a warehouse or two in the city, and I’ve a friend in Europe at the moment who offered his loft. Just let me know.” Then she slipped out of the apartment.
Derek stared after her for a moment, then rose and paced restlessly over to the window. He didn’t see Raven leave the building, but he hadn’t expected to; she was too good to make her exit obvious even to him. He studied the street below, then scanned the building across the street. His gaze came to rest finally on the narrow entrance to a dark alley. A good place from which to watch. But, hell, there was always a good place somewhere.
He sighed and turned away from the window. Impossible to predict the turn of every card. Had Shannon lost her pursuer of the night before? Probably. Did the people who were after her know where she was? Unlikely. Not yet, at least. Were there a couple of wild cards in the deal, fate’s giggle at them all? Who knew? Anything was possible.
“Is she gone?”
He had been standing in the center of the den looking at nothing. At the sound of Shannon’s hesitant voice, he focused on her where she stood just inside the room. “Yes. She had to get back.”
Raven’s taste in clothes, he reflected, was right on target. And his suggestion of colors had been perfect as well. Warm colors, he had said, reds and golds and creamy browns: no cool blues or greens. Shannon was wearing ivory-colored slacks belted at her small waist, with a red silk blouse, full-sleeved and tightly cuffed at the wrists.
“She even got shoes,” Shannon said a little breathlessly, looking down at the toes of her cream-colored pumps. Then she looked back at Derek, unable to read his still face and dark eyes. “Everything fits. It’s … it’s too much, though. She got several outfits and sleepwear and—and everything. Even a hairbrush. I don’t know how to thank both of you for helping me like this. I’ll never be able to repay you. I’ll try, though, I’ll—”
“Shannon.”
She bit her lip. “What?”
“You’re beautiful.”
Shannon felt as if someone had kicked the breath out of her, and her heart thudded. He was just standing there, hands in his pockets, looking at her steadily. Simply being nice, of course, he was simply being nice because he had kind eyes, infinitely understanding eyes, the eyes of an old soul. “Thank you,” she whispered, because it was the right thing to say.
He smiled. “You don’t believe me.” It was a curiously gentle, chiding statement.
Her eyes skittered away from his, but her chin lifted. “There are mirrors. I know what I look like.”
Derek shook his head. “No, you don’t. Someone cracked your mirror a long time ago, and now that’s the one you carry with you all the time, the only one you look into.”
She gave him a baffled glance and moved uneasily toward the couch. Why did he keep looking at her like that? And why was he talking about mirrors? She knew all about mirrors. A lifetime of mirrors. “Shouldn’t we be talking about Civatech?” She sat down and sipped her lukewarm coffee.
“I’ve put out a few feelers,” he murmured. “There isn’t much we can do until I get a response.”
Shannon was carefully not looking at him, although she could feel his gaze. “Feelers? You mean you called someone?”
“A couple of friends in the high-tech business. The scientific community likes to gossip as well as the rest of us, and failures are a prime topic.”
“Failures?”
“You said it was a supposedly scrapped design.”
“Oh.” She nodded nervously. “Yes, of course. Then you believe your friends may have heard of the design?”
“It’s a possibility worth checking into. Shannon, are you afraid of me?”
Startled, she looked up at him. “Afraid of you?” There was astonishment in her voice, and it occurred to her only then that he was a man many would be afraid of. Odd. She had felt no fear of him at all, not even in those first tense moments. She trusted him without even thinking about it. “No. I—I’m not afraid of you.”
“Do you trust me?”
“Yes.” She tried to lessen the importance of that instant response by adding defensively, “William does, after all.”
Derek nodded slightly. He was still standing in the middle of the room, hands in his pockets as he watched her intently. “I may have to ask you to trust me unconditionally. Will you be able to do that, Shannon?”
“What do you mean, unconditionally?”
“Just that. No reservations, no hesitations. If I tell you to do something, you have to do it—no matter what. Our lives could depend on it.”
Shannon was afraid now, but not of him. “I don’t understand.”
“We’ll be leaving here in a day or two; it won’t be safe to stay longer.” His voice was calm, steady. “They don’t know you’re with me, but if they know the right people to ask, they’ll find out I’m a possible threat. So we’ll have to keep m
oving. I know a few places, safe at least for a while. But the important thing is that you have to trust me. We may have to move very quickly, with no warning.”
“All right,” she said steadily.
He smiled. “No hesitation?”
“What choice do I have?”
“True.” He stopped smiling.
“I’m sorry.” Suddenly she wanted to cry. “I shouldn’t have said that. You took in a stranger, and you didn’t have to. You didn’t have to be so kind or decide to get involved in this mess—”
“Shannon?”
She put her cup down, wondering why she’d been holding it, then met his gaze. “What?”
“You’re beautiful.”
The two simple words had the same impact on her this time; she couldn’t breathe and her heart thumped heavily. “Stop saying that,” she managed to say.
“Unconditional trust, remember?”
The room was suddenly getting small, very small, until she thought she could reach out and touch the walls, stand up and bump her head on the ceiling. It was small, and full of him, and she couldn’t look away from those dark eyes. Her throat was tense, tight, and her shaking fingers twined together in her lap.
He just stood there, just stood there waiting, as if he was prepared to wait forever if that’s how long it took her to answer. Her hands were cold and there wasn’t any space at all between her and him, he filled it somehow, made it thick with emotions she didn’t understand.
“Stop it,” she whispered, not even sure what she was asking him to stop.
“No.” His voice remained calm, his face still, and he made no move toward her. “This is important, Shannon. You carry a cracked mirror around with you long enough, and everything begins to show a distorted reflection. You have to see what’s there—beginning with your own true reflection.”
“I can’t—”
“I know you can’t. Not yet. That’s why you have to trust me to see for you until you learn how. Do you trust me to do that?”
