“What do you want from me, Alex?” she asked raggedly.
Everything, he thought. Every damned thing.
With a groan, he pulled himself off her, because he simply couldn’t stand being this close to her anymore without having her. Lying on his back on the mattress beside her, he shook his head, wanting her and thinking it was going to be a cold day in hell before he had her, before they had anything together.
So what did he want? What could he hope to get?
“Tell me you want me,” he said. “Give me this, at least. Tell me this part of it was real.”
“Sorry to break it to you, but I’m not going to let myself be attracted to some homicidal scientist gone mad.”
“I am not a madman,” he said. “I’m not a killer, and I’m not a traitor. I’m just a man—one who liked having you in his bed. And I can’t accept that none of that was teal.”
“I can’t help what you believe. Or the lies you choose to tell yourself,” she said.
“And I can’t quite keep my hands off you. Or my mouth,” he said, still painfully aroused. “You want to go for round two in this little bondage extravaganza of ours?”
“Only if you’re the one who’s shackled to the bed this time,” she replied.
“Hey, let’s do it,” he said. “I’m easy.”
“No.” She glared at him. “There’s nothing about you that’s easy or simple.”
They lay there staring at each other for a long moment, his gaze taking in her swollen lips, the rapid rise and fall of her chest. He was more than ready for round two of this little war between them. He could keep her just like this, he thought, cuffed to the bed, so she couldn’t get away. He could keep pushing until she couldn’t lie to him or to herself anymore, and before he was through, he’d find her warm and wet and willing. He knew it.
“Alex—don’t look at me that way,” she begged. “What are you trying to prove, here? What do you want?”
“You, dammit. I want you. The woman from the cabin. Without all the lies.”
“You want me to admit that I want you, too? Would that be enough?”
“No, but it would be a damned good start.”
“Okay, I want you. I hate myself for it. I think it’s got to be one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done, that my body has turned traitor on me, and every bit of common sense and training I ever had has deserted me. But I want you. Satisfied, now?”
“Gee, when you put it like that...” he said sarcastically. “You want me, and I’m your worst nightmare?”
“I don’t know what else I can give you, Alex. Not now.”
He waited, lying by her side on the bed. She was still breathing hard and she wouldn’t look at him. “I never lied to you,” he said. “There’s a lot I never told you. But that man you got to know at the cabin, that was me. As real as it gets. And I think deep down you know that.”
“Alex—”
“Think about this. About me. Us. Think with your heart instead of that hard head of yours, Geri. I think, in your heart, you know I’m not a murderer. Or a traitor. I don’t think you could feel the way you do in my arms and believe that about me. I don’t think you’re the kind of woman who’s that good at separating what’s going on with your body from what’s going on in your head. I don’t think you’re nearly as cold-blooded as you’d have me think.”
“Alex—”
“You know something isn’t right about this. You know it.”
“That doesn’t mean—”
“Think about that communications unit. That’s got to tell you something, Geri.”
“I don’t know what,” she said.
“If that piece doesn’t fit, you know there are going to be others. There’s got to be something you could do to check out what I’ve told you. Something to make you believe me. I told you what happened. Exactly what happened.”
“I don’t—” She broke off, thinking. “Okay. I’ll talk about it, dammit. Just don’t touch me, okay?”
“If you insist.”
“I insist.” She sighed heavily. “I didn’t see anything in any reports about traces of drugs found in the safe house. We had units on the scene in twelve minutes flat. There was nobody else in that lab. There were no fingerprints.”
“Except your own people’s?”
“Yes.”
“Twelve minutes is more than enough time for what I used to wear off and for whoever was there to clear out. I needed it to act fast, remember? You sacrifice the time it remains in somebody’s system when you need to knock them out quickly.”
“Alex, really—”
“Ask somebody. There’s got to be somebody you trust. Ask them if they found traces of that tranquillizer in the lab that night.”
“But the reports—”
“Would you put that in a written report coming out of your own agency if you could help it? If it explained how I got out? If it was a little piece that didn’t fit? Say you wanted everybody to think I offed the guard and walked out of there on my own?”
Geri took another minute. He was making progress. He could feel it. Finally, someone was going to believe him. He wasn’t going to be in this all alone anymore.
“You thought of something else, didn’t you? Something that didn’t fit.”
She shook her head, looking overwhelmed and sad and still mad as hell at him. “The timing—”
“What about it?”
“Just...something. Something off in the timing.”
“Tell me,” he said urgently. “Dammit, just tell me.”
“You tell me,” she retorted. “Tell me who helped you get out of there.”
“Nobody helped me do anything.”
“I mean it, Alex. There’s a part of me that wants to listen—a foolish part, I’m sure—but I want to hear what you have to say. And if you want me to have any hope of trusting you, you have to tell me the truth now.”
“Nobody helped me. Why do you think somebody did?”
“God, I knew it was hopeless. I knew it was foolish to even think about trusting you.”
“Why do you think somebody helped me? And what does that have to do with the timing of the shooting? Tell me, dammit. Just tell me.”
Furious, she asked, “How many people were guarding you that night, Alex?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“How many!”
“Three, I think. I’m not sure. I had a lot of different people guarding me, a lot of different setups. Why?”
“Three,” she said. “One inside that building, two outside. What happened to the guards outside?”
“I don’t know. They just weren’t there. Why? Why is this so important to you?”
“Did you ever even wonder where they went? Or what happened to them?”
“Frankly, I was a little too worried about staying alive at that point. And I’ve been having trouble accepting the fact that I’m wanted for murder, that I’ve been branded a traitor, and that there is no one I can turn to for help!” he yelled.
She glared at him. He had this oddly surreal premonition of doom. There’d always been something potently irrational about her reaction to him. Not sexually. Emotionally. The anger. The hatred.
He didn’t want to know, Alex decided. But, damn, he really had to know. He swore softly and whispered, “Why?”
Looking stricken and emotionally spent, she said, “Because I was one of them. The bullet wound on my shoulder? That’s my little souvenir of my time spent trying to save your sorry ass.”
Alex backed up a step and stared down at her. She was breathing rapidly, her chest rising and falling. He felt dizzy and sick inside, and he knew. Ah, damn. Now he knew one more undeniable piece of the complex puzzle that was her.
“This is why you hate me,” he said.
She shook her head and looked away.
“You do.” He finally believed it. “You hate me.”
“Not so much for me,” she told him. “I’ve been shot before, worse than this. But Dan..
. Dan is my partner. Was my partner. He took a bullet that shattered one of his vertebrae. The last time I saw him, he was in a wheelchair, and I’m not sure if he’s ever going to get out, and that—that—is just one of the reasons I despise you, and I wish you’d just leave me alone and let me despise you, Alex. It’s about the only thing that’s kept me going the past few months, and if I lose that, I don’t know what would be left of me.”
A few minutes later Geri lay back on the bed, cursing herself, trying to not even breathe while he leaned over her, working on the lock on the handcuffs. She didn’t have the key, hadn’t planned on having to worry about getting the cuffs open. She’d planned to leave him in this room, chained to the wall, and wait outside until somebody came to pick him up.
She didn’t want to be anywhere near him now, but he was trying to pick the lock on the handcuffs—again—to set her free this time.
They hadn’t said a word since Geri’s emotional outburst a moment ago, and she couldn’t even look at him. She didn’t want to think about the way she’d lost control, about all she’d told him, all she’d shown him. Her reaction to him was, as it always had been, purely emotional, and edgy and out of control—nothing like that of the cool, impersonal professional she was supposed to be. And she hated him for that, too. One more thing to add to the list of reasons.
She heard a click. He worked over her hands for another minute, and the cuffs came loose. Carefully, she lowered her arms, which were stiff and sore from even the brief time they’d been held above her head.
He looked like he was thinking of rubbing some of the soreness out of them, but she shot him a killing glance.
“Sorry,” he said softly, watching her with an expression she didn’t care to decipher. “We need to get out of here.”
“I know.”
“Leave everything behind? Except the laptop?”
She nodded. Someone was tracking her, she believed, and she had no idea how. Bugs could be infinitesimal these days. She could be carrying it on nearly anything—her clothes, her shoes—and not even know it.
“We’ll need clothes,” she said, finally managing to think. “Shoes. Wallets. Some kind of bag. Toothbrushes. Toothpaste. The whole bit. We don’t take anything out of this room that we had with us in the cabin.”
He nodded, keeping his distance. “Does your head still hurt?”
“Yes,” she admitted.
“It shouldn’t last much longer,” he said, almost regretfully. “An hour, max.”
“I’ll live,” she said.
Alex frowned. “Geri, I—”
“Don’t,” she interrupted wearily, thinking he was going to apologize about every damned thing, thinking he might be sincere. “Just don’t.”
He nodded, not saying another word.
They moved quickly from there. Buying what they considered the essentials from an all-night convenience store nearby, outfitting themselves for colder weather, grabbing some burgers and coffee, changing at the motel. Alex bundled up everything they’d brought with them and threw it under the tarp covering a fancy speedboat being towed by a half-ton pickup parked in the parking lot, thinking that maybe it would buy them a little time.
They were ready to get on the road when Geri spied a pay phone by the side of the road. “I need to make a phone call,” she said. “It’s probably not the smartest thing to do, but we’re leaving anyway.”
“Do whatever you have to do,” Alex said.
She ought to be calling Tanner, too. Checking in. All hell would be breaking loose now that she’d gone so long without calling in and the cabin had blown up with two bodies in it. She was risking her career, she realized. And for what? A gut feeling? A dangerously stupid attraction to an infuriatingly smug, handsome, self-assured genius accused of murder? She’d never been stupid until she met him.
Geri looked down at the comm unit in her hand. She’d taken the time to study it now. It was definitely one of Division One’s, which meant she had to accept the possibility that someone at her office had betrayed her. She remembered the look on the faces of the intruders at the cabin. They’d had no intention of letting her leave there alive. Geri was a long way from believing that her boss, Martin Tanner, was involved in a plot to frame Alex Hathaway and steal his nifty little explosives. Tanner was a man who’d devoted his life to serving his country, and she couldn’t see him suddenly betraying her or the organization or his country this way, even if Alex had described Tanner to a T earlier.
No, Geri wasn’t ready to believe that Tanner was a traitor, but...could she afford to rule it out altogether? Thinking of the comm unit, Geri didn’t see how she could. Still, she needed to know what was going on at headquarters. Instinct told her something had broken loose on the case, something that would help her. She needed to know.
Of course by calling someone now, she’d likely be putting her life into that person’s hands. So she needed someone she trusted implicitly.
Geri picked up the phone and dialed a hospital in Virginia. The switchboard operator told her Dan Reese was no longer a patient there.
“Where else would he be?” Alex looked concerned. “If he was hurt that badly... You don’t think he...”
“No,” she said. “It was touch and go for a while after the shooting, but he’s been off the critical list for months. He was in a rehab hospital the last time I talked to him.”
Alex looked grim. “He meant a lot to you. I’m sorry.”
Geri ignored that. She didn’t want sympathy from Alex. She didn’t care if he was sorry. She didn’t want to think he was human.
She tried Dan’s apartment and got nothing. She’d never heard him talk about anyone special in his life, except right after the shooting.... Jamie Douglass, she thought. Another agent, one caught up in this whole mess, as well. Could something be going on between Dan and Jamie? Jamie had investigated the shooting at the warehouse. She’d written the official report of the agency’s findings on how and why it had happened, and had come to all the wrong conclusions, Geri thought. And she and Jamie had fought about it—about what had actually happened and who was at fault. But Geri had thought that was her own guilt talking. She certainly hadn’t entertained any suspicions about her boss having betrayed them all.
“What’s it going to be, Geri?” Alex asked.
She thought about it. She’d missed the time she was supposed to check in with headquarters by more than twelve hours. They would know what had happened at the cabin by now. They would have found the bodies. She would be putting Jamie in an awkward position by contacting her and asking her to stay quiet about their conversation. But Geri had to know.
She picked up the phone and dialed. A groggy male voice said, “Hello.”
“Dan?” she said.
“Yes. Geri?”
“Yes.”
She could hear a sleepy female murmur something, could hear Dan telling her not to worry, to go back to sleep, heard him speaking in a warm, sexy tone she’d never have believed could come from him.
Geri smiled. Her partner was a dynamic-looking man, and he could be charming, when he worked hard at it. Most of the time, he didn’t. She’d never heard him like this. She would have sworn he’d never talk to a woman in quite that way. Interesting, she thought. Dan and Jamie.
Dan cleared his throat. “I know you didn’t call just to chat, not at this hour,” he said. “And how did you know I was here?”
“Just a hunch,” she replied.
He swore. “I’m that transparent.”
“A hunch. Really. I need to know something. From Jamie. About the night of the shooting.” She looked right at Alex as she said, “Ask her if anyone found any traces of a tranquillizer called LH-7 in the lab.”
“Almonds,” Alex told her. “It would have smelled like almonds.”
Geri relayed the message.
“What’s going on?” Dan asked.
“Would you believe I’m just wondering?”
“No.”
“Ask Jamie
.”
He did, then came back to the phone. “She doesn’t remember anything like that. But she wasn’t on the scene until more than twenty-four hours later. Tanner was the first one on the scene that night. He was coordinating things from there for the first twelve hours or so. Why? What did you find out?”
She thought about Tanner—a guy who spent his life behind a desk—coordinating action on the scene. She didn’t think he’d done that since he’d become a section leader. Of course, Division One had never lost an agent in the field, either, and this had happened about fifteen minutes from Division One headquarters. It wasn’t so unusual, Tanner being in charge of the scene, when she thought about it that way.
“Geri?” Dan prompted.
“I’m not sure what’s going on,” she said.
“Where are you?”
“I shouldn’t say. Not on an unsecured line.”
“I don’t like the sound of this. Who’s with you? Who’s covering your back?”
“Nobody.”
“I don’t like that at all. And we need to talk. Some things have happened you should know about. Things about the shooting.”
“Oh,” she said, more curious than ever. “Look, I can’t stay here. I’ve been here too long already, and somebody’s tailing me. Let me call you somewhere. Twelve hours,” she said. “Remember where we used to call that kid who worked on the Brazilian ambassador’s staff? The one helping us with—”
“Yeah. I’ll be there. Watch your back.”
“You, too,” she said, then turned to Alex. “Let’s go.”
They climbed back onto the bike. It was pitch-black and they’d traveled far enough to the north the day before so it was cold now, and she was once again hanging on to the back of a man she alternately despised and desired. She couldn’t figure out if she was stupid or just tired or naive, and until she knew, she was stuck with him. She couldn’t let him out of her sight.
Spies, Lies and Lovers Page 15
