Spies, Lies and Lovers
Page 1
The bar fell silent.
Letter to Reader
Title Page
Books by Say Tyler Hayes
About the Author
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Copyright
The bar fell silent.
In the darkest corner of the room, the man keeping to himself felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. Straightening, he looked over his shoulder to see what was wrong.
In the doorway he saw impossible high heels, delicate-looking ankles, trim thighs that seemed to go on forever beneath a sinfully brief excuse for a skirt. The woman’s whole midsection was exposed, the skirt barely covering her belly button, the top more or less covering her breasts. He saw honey-colored skin, imagined it must be smooth as silk, covering a body toned like an athlete’s.
Or a spy’s?
The man who called himself Alex Connor nearly groaned aloud. This was the dirtiest trick yet. If someone was sending a woman like her after him, he just might get caught.
Dear Reader,
It’s summertime. The mercury’s rising, and so is the excitement level here at Silhouette Intimate Moments. Whatever you’re looking for—a family story, suspense and intrigue, or love with a ranchin’ man—we’ve got it for you in our lineup this month.
Beverly Barton starts things off with another installment in her fabulous miniseries THE PROJECTORS. Keeping Annie Safe will not cool you off, I’m afraid! Merline Lovelace is back with A Man of His Word, part of her MEN OF THE BAR H miniseries, while award winner Ingrid Weaver checks in with What the Baby Knew. If it’s edge-of-your-seat suspense you’re looking for, pick up the latest from Sally Tyler Hayes, Spies, Lies and Lovers. The Rancher’s Surrender is the latest from fresh new talent Jill Shalvis, while Shelley Cooper makes her second appearance with Guardian Groom.
You won’t want to miss a single one of these fabulous novels, or any of the books we’ll be bringing you in months to come. For guaranteed great reading, come to Silhouette Intimate Moments, where passion and excitement go hand in hand.
Enjoy!
Yours,
Leslie J. Wainger
Executive Senior Editor
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SPIES, LIES AND LOVERS
SALLY TYLER HAYES
Books by Say Tyler Hayes
Silhouette Intimate Moments
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Second Father #753
Wife, Mother...Lover? #818
Dangerous To Love #903
Spies, Lies and Lovers #940
SALLY TYLER HAYES
lives in South Carolina with her husband, son and daughter. A former journalist for a South Carolina newspaper, she fondly remembers that her decision to write and explore the frontiers of romance came at about the same time she discovered, in junior high, that she’d never be able to join the crew of the starship Enterprise.
Happy and proud to be a stay-home mom, she is thrilled to be living her lifelong dream of writing romances.
With gratitude to Michael, on La Femme Nikita, whom I did find wonderfully inspiring.
Prologue
The cursor blinked annoyingly amid a mass of letters and symbols that would be nothing but gibberish to the masses. But Alex Hathaway understood them all, just as he understood that something was desperately wrong.
He tore off his headphones, silencing the hard, fast strumming of the guitar that kept him company hour after hour in the lab. Eyes scanning the room, he found it empty, everything just as he’d left it two hours ago when he’d gone to brief the brass on his progress.
Pulling his watch from a pocket in his faded jeans, he saw that he’d been working almost continuously for fourteen hours. Maybe he simply couldn’t see straight anymore. That made more sense than what his eyes were telling him.
At a nearby sink, Alex cupped his hands under a steady stream of cold water, letting it pool in his palms. He drenched his face in the water again and again before reaching for a towel and returning to the computer.
“Come on, sweetheart,” he coaxed, tapping lightly on the keyboard. “It’s Alex. Don’t scare me like this.”
The screen filled once again with an incredibly complex chemical formula. But Alex knew the symbols and numbers like the back of his own hand, and they simply weren’t right. He’d booby-trapped the thing. If anyone but him tried to access it, the computer automatically scrambled the formula, and he was definitely looking at a scrambled one now.
Alex mumbled a few choice phrases, all of them profane, and shut off the computer so quickly it howled in protest. Long, angry strides took him to the front of the windowless lab, to reinforced steel doors that he flung open.
Two fully armed military guards snapped to attention. Alex looked up one side and down the other of the corridor separating him from the outside world, finding it empty, as it should be.
Nose-to-nose with the biggest, beefiest guard, he announced, “Someone’s been in my lab. In my computer.”
The young man blanched, but met Alex’s stare dead-on and said nothing. Alex could tell the guard couldn’t have been more surprised if Alex had just announced he was Papa Bear, and Goldilocks was sleeping in his bed. It made as much sense as someone prowling through his computer—something Alex had been assured couldn’t happen here.
“No one’s gotten past you?” Alex demanded. “No one’s gone in there?”
“No, sir.”
Alex had given up trying to explain to them that he didn’t need to be addressed as “sir.” Raking a hand through his hair, he started issuing orders.
“Call your commander. Tell him I’m leaving. Tonight.”
It was less than two full days later when the hit came. Alex was alone in a new, supposedly safe place. It was very, very early, and his two assistants were asleep, when he sensed more than heard someone else’s presence in the lab.
He closed the file he’d been working on, shut off his notebook computer and slipped it into a small leather duffel bag he’d taken to keeping within arm’s reach. He had money, a few clothes, a bit of a disguise, and he could hotwire a car with the best of them. All he had to do was get out.
He could bypass the security system on the front door—not easily, but he could do it. He’d made sure of that. There was an armed guard at the door, two more outside. At least there had been two hours ago when he’d last checked in with them. If someone had gotten past the guards...
Damn.
Alex pulled a small vial of liquid from his pocket, took a breath and held it. He emptied the vial onto the counter next to the desktop computer, thinking it would be the first place anyone looked. Then he crept around the corner and hunched down close to the floor, covering his mouth and his nose with a chemically treated mask. It would buy him a few extra minutes.
It wasn’t long before he heard someone moving in the lab, heard him fall heavily to the floor. The urge to go back and see who had done th
is to him was strong, but so was the chemical that was buying his way out. When he got to the door, it was open and the guard was slumped over on the floor, bleeding heavily. Alex stopped to check for a pulse and, finding none, paused for a moment of regret over the havoc wrought so far by this thing he’d created.
He would trust no one now. He was truly alone.
Shortly before midnight, Geri Sinclair walked into a staid, utterly respectable-looking four-story brick office building in Georgetown where she reported for work when she wasn’t away on assignment. Passing through a series of checkpoints, she finally found herself face-to-face with a deceptively sweet-looking gentleman who’d once been a Navy SEAL. He tipped his hat to her and smiled as he punched in a code that opened the final reinforced-steel door.
“How’s the arm, ma’am?” he asked politely.
After three months of physical therapy, Geri suspected her arm and shoulder were as good as they were going to get. To the security guard, she simply said, “Better, thanks, Harry. What’s up?”
“No idea, ma’am.”
She’d glanced at the TV as she dressed. There’d been no special news bulletins, either. Sometimes those held a clue to where she was headed.
Geri was the last agent to arrive at the briefing room. She took her seat and nodded to her boss, Martin Tanner, a former CIA operative who’d gotten his start in the military, as Geri and many of the other agents had.
Tanner stood at the head of the table, dimmed the lights and flicked on the slide projector. The smiling face of a boyishly handsome man filled the screen. He had dark eyes and light brown hair that he wore cropped close to his head. In his arms, he held a little girl of three, maybe four. She looked up at him as if she were simply dazzled by him and delighted to have him so close.
Hostage rescue, Geri thought absently, feeling a little queasy at the thought that they might be heading after the little girl, as well.
Then something had her studying the man once again. She’d seen his face before in a profoundly different situation. Methodically, she stripped away the details—the beautiful little girl, the sunshine—his open, honest look and even his smile, reconfiguring his features as she went.
The first real sense of excitement she’d felt since the shooting slammed through her.
It was him.
She’d never seen him in person—just a very serious-looking likeness of him at a hasty briefing much like this one, three months ago. She’d seen the same grainy photograph again when he’d made it to the top of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. He’d been inside the fortress-like safe house the entire time that she and her partner, Dan Reese, were on duty that disastrous night, and had been in the agency’s custody for less than sixteen hours before he’d disappeared. His fingerprints had been found on the weapon that killed Doc—a man she’d known and worked with for years—and Geri blamed him nearly as much as she blamed herself for her partner’s injuries and her own.
Despite her security clearance, up to this point she’d known little about the man. His existence had been veiled in the kind of secrecy Geri had seldom seen in her time with the agency and her previous experience in military intelligence. Right now, a joint task force of the FBI and the CIA were after him—for killing a federal agent. But that was merely the tip of the iceberg, the only crime the government was willing to publicly admit had taken place. Judging by the anxiety level in Washington, D.C., something much bigger was at stake. Geri wanted in on the hunt, but the agency had been yanked off the case by the president himself, as punishment for having lost the man in the first place.
But now, it looked as if they were back in the game.
Geri smiled for the first time in months.
Tanner quickly ran through the man’s background—a near genius-level IQ, degrees in engineering and computer science, as well as a Ph.D. in chemistry. The little girl was one of his nieces.
Tanner tapped his pointer against the boyishly handsome face. “I’m sure you all recognize Dr. Alexander Hathaway. I don’t have to tell you how badly I want to bring him down.”
Geri gazed up at the man’s face again. He was laughing, damn him. Smiling. Happy. And Doc was dead. Dan was still in a wheelchair. Geri, herself, was a mess. All because of this one man—a man she hated.
“Dr. Hathaway worked for a government contractor doing research in security systems, particularly in their abilities to detect plastic explosives. He was trying to develop the next level of surveillance equipment to be installed in the nation’s airports when he stumbled upon an interesting anomaly. He found a chemical compound that, when added to plastic explosives in use today, rendered them virtually undetectable to the security systems now in use.
“You can imagine,” Tanner continued, “the kind of people interested in acquiring Dr. Hathaway’s formula and what they’d be willing to pay for it.”
Oh, yes. Geri could imagine all too easily.
“This man is a traitor, willing to betray his country for money,” Tanner said. “We believe he slipped away from the government’s protection to sell his formula on the black market. I hold him responsible for the death of one of my agents, the loss of the services of another. The FBI and the CIA have been looking for him for three months without any luck, but he’s ours now.”
Ours? No, Geri decided, sweet anticipation running through her veins. He was hers.
Chapter 1
The bar fell silent, except for a peculiar creaking, crackling sound.
In the darkest corner of the room, the man hunched over the only freestanding video game within forty-five miles felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. Straightening, he gave up all pretense of playing the game and looked over his shoulder to see what was wrong.
In the doorway, he saw impossibly high heels, delicate-looking ankles, trim thighs that seemed to go on forever beneath a sinfully brief excuse for a skirt. The woman’s whole midsection was bare, the skirt barely covering her belly button, the top more or less covering her breasts. He saw honey-colored skin, imagined it must be as smooth as silk, covering a body toned like an athlete’s.
Or a spy’s?
The man who called himself “Alex Connor” nearly groaned aloud. This was the dirtiest trick yet. If someone was sending a woman like her after him, he just might be caught. Whoever she was, she was trouble. Young, goodlooking, scantily dressed women didn’t show up alone in seedy bars in the Texas panhandle without causing trouble.
She took three steps into the interior of the bar. Red leather strained and creaked with every step she took. He had a feeling the sound would come to haunt his nights, if the sight of her didn’t kill him right away. Alex didn’t think he’d ever had a fantasy about a woman in red leather, but he was an open-minded kind of guy. And he hadn’t been near a woman in months—something he now could see might prove to be a fatal flaw in his plan.
The woman paused at the edge of the room, as if she were on the end of a runway in Atlantic City, flashbulbs popping all around her, the Miss America song blaring from the sound system. Either she didn’t have the brains God gave a goose or she was here for a reason. For him.
The bartender’s look said he knew she’d be trouble. The other six reprobates in the room might as well have had their tongues hanging out of their mouths, panting and stumbling over themselves like overeager puppies with no manners at all. They were going to pounce on her any minute.
Oblivious to the danger, the woman strolled into the room, selected one of the stools at the bar and sat, the motion hitching the miniskirt up even higher on her thighs.
From the right came a sound that might have been one of the men keeling over onto the floor. Eventually, stunned silence gave way to catcalls and whistles.
“What’ll you have?” Buck, the bartender, drawled.
“A shot of tequila and a tall glass of ice water.”
She picked up a cocktail napkin, using it to slowly dab at the sweat on her forehead, her cheeks, her neck. Alex started to sweat, too. As
her hand dipped lower, to the hollow between her breasts, a decrepit-looking man to her right drawled out a curse, its pronunciation unlike any Alex had ever heard until he’d come to Texas. Silence reigned once again in the bar, until a drunken cowhand named Willie sat down beside the woman.
“You lost?” he asked.
“Car broke down,” she purred. “About a mile from here. I was hoping someone at the garage could fix it. But I needed a drink first. It was so hot out there.”
Hot? Alex swore softly. How dared she utter that word?
“Sal’s is closed,” the bartender told her. “Won’t be open till Monday morning.”
She pouted prettily. “Surely there’s someone around here besides Sal who can fix a car.”
Alex winced, because there wasn’t. There was next to nothing to this town, which he thought made it a damned good place to disappear. Now, he wasn’t so sure.
As he sat there on the stool in front of the video game, a weakness of his that he indulged from time to time in this seedy little bar, Alex wondered who had found him, how they’d found him, and how many more of them were waiting for him outside, or at his cabin. Then he heard another curse and turned back around.
The woman had her drinks—tequila in a shot glass, ice water beside it. She picked up the glass of ice water, condensation rolling down its sides, pressed it to her forehead and sighed. Alex watched her breasts rise and fall, straining against that sorry excuse for a top with every breath she took. Then she held the cool, wet glass to the side of her cheek and practically purred with satisfaction.
Alex considered begging her to stop right then. He could turn himself in, let her put the handcuffs on him. Maybe she would sit beside him in the back seat of the car and put on another little show like this one for him as they took him away. He’d be caught, but what a way to go.