by Lucy Monroe
“You only see your friends at work.”
“I’m seeing you now and we aren’t at work.”
“It’s during work hours. Same thing.”
“If you say so. I do not need a sex life to have a good one.”
“You can say that after the way you were humping Mr. Tall, Dark, Dangerous, and Just a Little Bit Scary?”
Lana could feel the blush she’d finally gotten rid of returning. “He’s not scary.”
“If you say so.” Casey took a sip of his coffee and an expression of bliss suffused his face. “What is he doing here anyway? I don’t see Ms. Gray needing reinforcements.”
“Our secondary crop enzymes have come to the attention of the Vega Cartel. Apparently they have targeted Elle Gray because of their interest in the enzymes.”
Casey’s eyes rounded. “You mean the Queen of Badass is in danger?”
“Don’t call her that.”
“It’s what everyone calls her.”
“It’s disrespectful.”
“I doubt she’d mind. In fact, I bet she knows about it and likes it.”
“She has a perfectly good name. Use it.”
“Yes, mother.” Casey cocked his head to one side, clearly thinking. Then he asked, “Why Ms. Gray?”
“She’s in the way of them getting the enzymes maybe? Security was good before she came.”
“But not good enough. Now it’s phenomenal.”
“Exactly.”
“You think they plan to kidnap her and torture her until she tells them how to circumvent the security measures she put in place?”
For the second time that morning, memories threatened to overwhelm Lana. It took all she had to shove the images back into the dark closet of her mind she’d relegated them to. “I hope not.”
“She can handle herself if they do.”
“You think so? She’s amazing at her job, but she’s not impervious to hurt. No one is.”
“The same could be said of you.”
“What?” Did he know about her past? She trusted Casey, but she’d never told him about what had happened to her.
“No one, not even brilliant lady scientists with amazingly brilliant assistants, is impervious to sexual desire. It’ll bring you to your knees if you don’t watch out. Which technically isn’t such a bad thing, if you like giving oral sex, that is.”
“Dr. Billings!”
“What?”
“You have less of a filter than I do. Which most would say is impossible. And don’t think I didn’t notice how you called me merely brilliant while you are supposedly amazingly brilliant.”
The redhead grinned, his white teeth gleaming in the coffee shop’s warm lighting. “So, do you?”
“Do I what? Or should I even ask?”
“Like giving oral sex.”
“You think this is an appropriate discussion between two scientific colleagues?”
“It’s your own fault. I’m your best friend, not just your colleague. If you had developed more friends outside work, you wouldn’t be stuck with me as your confidant.”
“And I’m yours. What does that say about your social life?”
“That it’s pathetic? So? Spill.”
She didn’t make him repeat the question. “I never have in the past.”
“You think that could change with Myk?”
“I think that I’m considering reevaluating my stance on the whole sex issue and once again trying to find out what all the fuss is about.” And wasn’t that a shocker? She hadn’t wanted anything but her hand and her BOB for a very long time.
“Makes sense. You are a scientist, after all, and empirical research is in the job description.”
“That argument might hold more water if I was a psychologist or anthropologist, or even a sex therapist—don’t you think?”
“I think you’d make the world’s worst sex therapist and that you should go for it with the guy you can’t seem to keep your lips off of.”
“Thanks a lot. You want to know what I think?”
“What?”
“You should worry about your own sex life.”
“Or lack thereof,” Casey said glumly.
“Get dumped again?”
“Nah. I did the dumping this time.”
“Why?”
“She was seeing other guys.”
“Did she promise exclusivity?”
Casey sighed. “Not per se.”
“If not per se, then how?”
“She kissed me.”
“Ahh…” That explained some of Casey’s reaction that morning.
“A kiss is an intimate act,” Casey said with vehemence he usually reserved for his work. “If it didn’t mean anything to her, she should have said something.”
“Casey, hon, I think a lot of women today kiss without putting significant social or relational meaning behind it.”
“Maybe I should have been born in a different time.”
“And live without a computer? I don’t think so.”
Casey laughed, like she’d meant him to, but Lana felt bad for him. His problem wasn’t that he’d been born to live out his life in the twenty-first century. It was that he was a geek. A nerd. Amazingly brilliant, just like he’d said. But sadly lacking savvy in interpersonal relationships. He was more naïve than she’d been before her first serious boyfriend had sold her out to Kurdish rebels who wanted their own stockpile of chemical weapons.
“Have you tried dating someone from work?”
“No.”
“Have you thought about it?”
“Do I have to answer that?”
“You have! Who?”
He remained stubbornly mute.
“Come on, Casey. You owe me a secret for digging into mine. Spill.”
“I think Nisha is incredible, but she’d never be interested in someone like me.”
Nisha Garjana was eight years Casey’s senior, but didn’t look it. Like many women of her genetic predisposition, she would maintain her youthful, exotic beauty for decades to come.
“Have you asked her out?”
“No!” Casey look scandalized. “I couldn’t.”
“You could. In fact, I think you should. She’s not seeing anyone right now. She finds intelligence highly attractive, and I think she’s lonely.”
“She told you that?”
Lana just looked at her assistant until he nodded, looking a little sheepish. “I get it. It’s just more of the information your brain catalogs about the people who populate your environment.”
“So, you know it’s true.”
“But what if she thinks I’m a baby?”
“The trend for older women to date younger men is growing.”
“Really?”
“Would I lie to you?”
“No more than you would lie to yourself.”
“Your point?”
“If it wasn’t crass, I’d make you a five-hundred-dollar bet that you and Myk are going to end up doing the nasty before the double Chernichenko wedding.”
“Elle, Beau, Chantal, and Mat are getting married next Saturday,” she said with shock. She wasn’t surprised Casey thought she and Mykola were going to have sex, but that he thought it would happen so soon. And that he was so certain, he’d be willing to make such a large bet on it.
Although, she’d known Myk less than an hour when he kissed her the first time, a kiss was a far cry from penetrative sex. Or, at least, that had always been her experience. With Myk? She’d been on the verge of climaxing and she’d never even gotten her pants off.
Still, she wasn’t jumping into bed with a man she barely knew. “You’re on.”
Casey grinned, so smug it made her teeth hurt. “It looks like I’ll be getting that new game system before I planned.”
She shook her head before he pulled her into a discussion of everything that had happened in the lab before he arrived that morning.
When Casey had pulled every detail about the Vega Cartel situation
out of her, he drained his espresso cup with one final grim pull on the dark brown liquid. “Man, that is heavy.”
“You sound like a sixties beatnik.”
“I told you I should have been born in a different era.”
“I’m glad you were born in this one.”
“Thanks, boss.”
“Though maybe you should stop watching movies made in the 1960s.”
“I’ve been on a kick lately.”
“I noticed. It’s better than when you were in your John Wayne phase.”
“I don’t do a good impression of the Duke, do I?”
“It never really worked for me, no.”
“I found a library in Orange County that has a collection of the first-ever talkies.”
“Maybe I should buy you the Star Wars series.”
“No, thanks. That whole doughnuts on the sides of Princess Leia’s head makes me laugh out loud and I can’t take the movies seriously.”
“You are a strange man for a geek, you know that don’t you?”
“No stranger than my belly dancing boss.”
“You’ve got a point.”
She reached across the table and grabbed his hand. “I’m not convinced the situation is as dire as Mykola intimates, but I want you to be careful. Okay?”
“You think they’ll try to get me?”
“You know as much about the enzymes as I do.”
“That’s an overstatement, but I could see how the uninformed might assume it to be the case.”
“So, you’ll watch out for yourself? Maybe stop visiting the clubs for a while.”
Casey gave her the look. “It sounds to me like you want me to take the advice you’re fighting to ignore.”
Lana pulled her hand away and looked down, guiltily breaking eye contact. “It’s different for me.”
“Why? Because you’ve got some training in Middle Eastern hand-to-hand defensive combat?”
“It helps.” Though she wasn’t so naïve she believed she could save herself from truly determined kidnappers. She just had a fighting chance now, not like before when she’d been clueless how to fight back. “Besides, if you are going to ask Nisha out, you aren’t going to need to be going to the clubs.”
“I’ll make a deal with you. If she says yes, I’ll stop clubbing, but if she says no, you go clubbing with me. You can protect both of us.”
Casey’s uninformed attitude that they were safe bothered Lana, but she liked it better than unadulterated fear. “You’ve got a deal.”
Steaming, Lana slammed her front door shut before spinning to lock it.
She wasn’t sure what irritated her the most. The security officer who arrived in her lab and informed her it was time to go home, or the knowledge that Mykola had arranged it. She’d argued that she wasn’t done working, but the security guard had remained obdurate, not budging from his hovering position until she had shut down her computer, packed a satchel of work to take home with her, and agreed to leave the building.
Then? The man had had the effrontery to follow her home.
He’d saluted her from his car when she’d unlocked the front door of her secured building. She’d been so irritated, she hadn’t even had her usual smile for the female security guard at the front desk.
Tina was four months pregnant and tended to take things personally. Lana sighed. She would have to make sure she stopped to say hi at the desk the next time the other woman was on duty.
The phone rang as Lana spread her work out on the coffee table in front of the television, watching a rerun of Buffy with the volume set on low. It was probably Mykola calling to tell her what other plans he had to ensure her safety and future need for counseling on anger management. Ready to yell, she grabbed the phone only to almost swallow her tongue when a familiar if infrequently heard voice came across the line.
“Mr. Smith?”
“Hello, Dr. Ericson. How are you?”
“Frustrated.”
“With Agent Chernichenko?”
She didn’t bother to ask how he could guess. Presumably Mr. Smith knew a little something about Elle’s brother. “Yes.”
“You know he wants only to keep you safe?”
“I would say that was a secondary consideration to keeping Elle from trouble, sir.”
“I get the impression that Agent Chernichenko takes all his considerations seriously, secondary or otherwise.”
“No doubt.”
“Have you given further thought to his desire for you to give up teaching belly dance for the time being?”
“No.”
A bark of laughter sounded over the phone line.
She sighed. “There’s no use dissembling, sir. I’m not going back into prison.”
“I believe, my dear Dr. Ericson, that is exactly what the agent is hoping to avoid.”
“There is more than one kind of prison, sir.”
“I am aware.”
Silence reigned for a full minute.
Finally, Lana sighed. “I’m scared to give up the freedom I’ve fought so hard to attain.”
“You will not go back to living that half-life I enticed you away from.” He might as well have said rescued from, but that was Mr. Smith, giving the people he believed in the benefit of the doubt.
“You sound so sure.”
“That is because I am.”
“Then you have more confidence in me than I have in myself.”
“I have complete confidence in you.”
“I’ll think about it. Giving up the class for the time being.”
“That is all I can ask.”
It wasn’t. He could order her to do it. He had to know she’d submit out of loyalty and respect. But that wasn’t Mr. Smith’s way.
Myk stood in the men’s room cubicle and fought the urge to retch. He refused to let his sister see him like this. Or anyone else for that matter.
But damn it to hell and back. The Vega Cartel bastards had tried to kill his little sister this morning. The fact that they had not succeeded in no way mitigated Myk’s fury, or his fear.
His sister had been marked by a cartel jefe for death.
She was supposed to get married in less than a week. And he couldn’t be sure he would be able to keep her alive long enough to make it to her honeymoon. Not with her refusing to go to a safe house. He’d expected her denial when he made the suggestion, but the reality was too fricken hard to deal with.
He’d thought he could handle this case with an objective view. No way in hell.
Some part of him had to have been banking on the fact the cartel had been interested in taking Elle, not taking her out. Kidnapping an agent as well trained and deadly as his sister would have been a whole lot harder, but a well-aimed sniper’s bullet could kill the best agent in the world in a matter of seconds.
The Vega Cartel wanted Elle dead. The only reason she wasn’t was because her assassin had tried to make it look like an accident. Next time, they might not be so lucky.
And that made Myk angry enough to kill on his own. He slammed his fist against the wall of the bathroom stall.
It didn’t leave a dent, but damn, his hand hurt. He cursed.
“The stalls are made with titanium walls.”
Myk let his forehead drop against the wall in front of him at the sound of Beau Ruston’s voice. What was he supposed to say to the man who was supposed to become his brother by marriage in a matter of days?
He put his game face on and exited the stall. “Titanium walls?”
“Yep.” Beau was leaning against the bank of sinks.
“You worried about graffiti?”
“We’re a company made up of scientists. They take notes anywhere. You should have seen the stall walls before Elle insisted on their replacement.”
Myk washed his hands. He might have been in the stall for reasons other than its usual usage, but the place was still a bathroom. “Definite security hazard.”
“Yes, and your sister was smart enough to see that.�
� Beau turned his body slightly so he faced Myk.
“Her intelligence isn’t going to keep her alive against a sniper rifle.”
Eyes a shade lighter brown than his own but every bit as unreadable gazed back at Myk. “I agree.”
“So, talk her into a safe house.”
“You got any suggestions on how to do that?”
“The future husband love-guilt card didn’t work?”
“No more than the concerned older brother love-guilt card did.”
“She’s stubborn.”
“Pertinacious headed toward cantankerous. I’ve decided she gets that from your grandmother.”
“Baba would refuse the safe house, too.”
“Probably. Life wasn’t always safe in her little corner of the Ukraine before she came to the States. She survived.”
“You think Elle can will away an assassin’s bullet?”
“I think that as long as the cartel thinks Elle’s unaware of the danger, they’ll stick with the arranged accident scenario.”
“That will make it harder to succeed.”
“Yes.” Beau’s jaw went taut. “But not impossible. Elle believes that if she disappears, it will tip the cartel off that she’s on to them. She thinks it will make it harder to bring them down before they get their hands on Lana.”
“No one is getting their hands on Lana. Or Elle.”
“I want to believe you.” For one short moment, the terror living inside Beau for the woman he loved showed clearly on his face.
“Then believe me. You think we can get Elle to disappear if she’s convinced it won’t compromise the case?”
“I think we’d have a fighting chance.”
“Then, I guess we’ll have to get that fighting chance.”
“You have any ideas how?”
“One. I need to make a couple of calls to set it up.”
Beau nodded. Then he took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Thank you.”
“You don’t have to thank me. She’s my sister.”
“I’m leaning toward the belief that you’re a hell of a brother to have.”
“Here’s hoping.”
They shook hands and Beau left.
Myk made his calls.
On his way back to Elle’s office, Myk considered how best to present his plan to Elle. His phone calls had borne fruit. Now he just had to get his sister’s buy-in. He couldn’t even pretend to himself he looked forward to that conversation. He had a secret weapon, though, and wasn’t afraid to use it.
