Diamonds Are Truly Forever: An Agent Ex Novel

by Gina Robinson

  His lips met hers. He kissed her gently, exceptionally tenderly, yet probingly. Very much like the first time.

  She was too stunned to stop him. Or even remember to break away. She may have even kissed him back!

  A second later, he broke the kiss and cleared his throat, looking her in the eye with his inscrutable spy face in place. “See, that’s what I’m talking about,” he said in the same tone a coach uses with his team during halftime of a big game. “I knew you could do it.”

  She gaped at him before remembering to put her game face on and try to be as unreadable as he was. No way would she let him see how much he’d rattled her.

  He didn’t wait for her to speak. He jumped up, grabbed the phone, and held it out to her. “I think you’re ready for prime time. Call your mom.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Drew stared into the master bathroom mirror as he got ready for bed, mentally running over the security measures he had in place around the condo. He couldn’t find a single lapse or hole in his logic.

  Staci should survive the night.

  Even so, he felt apprehensive about her staying in the room next to his. He hoped she didn’t get any smart ideas about sneaking out. He’d already warned her he’d armed the security system. And although he didn’t have disintegrator stairs, he had his share of toys. She wouldn’t get far, nor would an intruder penetrate the condo without his knowing. But she could disrupt his sleep. In truth, she already had. And he hadn’t even been to bed yet.

  He shook his head at the bemused reflection of himself in the mirror. You’ve done it now, buddy.

  He shouldn’t have kissed Staci. He knew it before he leaned forward into her lips, but somehow the knowledge hadn’t stopped him. He’d like to claim he was just going with the performance, carrying it out to its logical extreme. But in reality, he knew the truth—he’d wanted to kiss his wife, though his reasons were unclear, even to him.

  What had he hoped to find out? Whether she still loved him? Whether the chemistry had disappeared?

  Apparently not. His reaction to kissing her was about the same as throwing water on sodium—kaboom! Which only strengthened his determination. He had to complete this mission and get out of Seattle. For good.

  He cursed Emmett beneath his breath and remembered the way his boss had meddled with his fellow spy Ty’s marriage during their last mission together in Hawaii. Ty got his wife back and was now a happily married spy. Emmett hated ex-spouses, claiming they were security risks waiting to happen.

  The odds of Emmett manipulating a reconciliation here were the equivalent to those of RIOT giving up its plans for world domination—nonexistent. If Emmett thought he was solving another security problem by playing marriage counselor again, he was about to lose his perfect record. Master manipulator that Emmett was, he wasn’t God.

  At least NCS didn’t have the same no-ex policy RIOT did—extermination.

  Drew was no good for Staci. And Staci was definitely not good for him. They were each other’s worst liability. From now on, he intended to keep his distance. He squeezed a dab of toothpaste onto his toothbrush and began scrubbing his teeth with way more force than the American Dental Association recommended for good gum health.

  * * *

  The guest bathroom in Drew’s condo was well lit and clean, obviously unused since the leasing company had cleaned it and Drew had moved in.

  Staci scowled at her sentimental reflection in the mirror.

  Why had she let Drew kiss her?

  The girl reflected in the mirror looked as if she was going to revert to longing for what was, rather than doing the smart thing and moving on.

  Fortunately, that dumb mirror-image girl also looked so chaste and buttoned up and surrounded by layers of cotton, she appeared ready for the convent. It would take a more imaginative man than Drew to find anything sensual about her. The fluffy pink robe Drew hated, topped off with the ugly monkey slippers, would have sent him running, had he seen her.

  Beneath the robe, she wore her most comfy, totally unsexy and prim pajamas, the gag gift Mandy had given her when she separated from Drew. Mandy had said a girl deserved a few good nights of sleep in the comfy stuff before going on the prowl and having to give it up in favor of colder, more revealing lingerie.

  Staci set her cosmetic bag on the counter just as a flash of movement in the corner by the door caught her eye. She turned around to get a closer look and screamed.

  * * *

  Drew had just stripped down to his boxers and pulled back the covers, ready to slip into bed, when Staci’s ear-piercing scream broke the silence, followed by two thuds in rapid succession.

  Shit!

  He grabbed his gun from the nightstand and charged into the guest room with his arms cocked in the ready to fire clear the room position. The window was closed, the room empty. The adjoining bathroom door stood ajar, light streaming out. But no Staci in sight, not even reflected in the bathroom mirror.

  His wife had turned into a vampire. Nothing remained of her reflection, just the sound of her screams echoing off the bathroom walls and another thump as something hit the wall.

  He charged in, scanning the area for enemy assassins, bullet holes, hand grenades, or signs of fire, ready to kill Staci’s attacker.

  Instead he found Staci cowering in the corner of the tub, screaming. She balanced on the edges as if the tub beneath contained nitroglycerin as she brandished a toilet brush in the air like a weapon.

  “What’s wrong? What’s the matter? What is it?” He fired the questions at her without waiting for an answer to any of them, expecting to see a maimed terrorist somewhere on the bathroom floor or in the tub.

  “There! Behind the door.” She pointed to the corner behind him.

  Drew spun around, ready to shoot whoever hid there. Instead, he saw his guest shampoo bottle cracked with the cap off, bleeding out its pale yellow contents, a bottle of conditioner, and a bruised bar of soap. “You’ve been attacked by body care products? Are you trying to call Mr. Clean with that toilet brush to ward them off?”

  Staci screamed again. “No! There, there, there!”

  Drew moved in closer, gun still cocked in front of him, trying to still his racing heart. A monster brown house spider cowered stock-still in the spreading shampoo slick between the conditioner and the soap.

  “Calm down, Staci. Stop screaming. You’re scaring the poor spider to death. What were you trying to do? Give it a killer shampoo?” He let out a sigh of relief.

  “Good! I want to scare it to death. Death to spiders,” she screamed back. “Get it! Shoot it!”

  “I’m not putting a hole in the wall just to take out a spider. The Agency has a thousand-dollar deposit on this place.” He shook his head and set the safety on his gun. “This little guy won’t hurt you. He’s not even a black widow.”

  “Don’t give me any ideas.” Staci sounded as if she remembered full well that black widows ate their mates. “Just kill it.”

  He reached for a tissue to grab the spider with. Staci stopped screaming. Just as he knelt and lunged for the little beast, it took off toward the tub and scampered up the shower curtain.

  Seeing it rush toward her, Staci let out another bloodcurdling scream. The spider froze halfway up the curtain.

  “On second thought, keep screaming. It seems to calm the savage beast.” Drew reached for the shower curtain just as Staci smacked at it with the toilet brush in an apparent spider-killing frenzy.

  The blow glanced off Drew’s shoulder. A second blow hit him square atop his head. He covered his head with his hands and took a step back. Right into the puddle of shampoo. Where he promptly lost his footing and took another step back. Into more slippery shampoo.

  He grabbed for the shower curtain to keep his balance. And pulled down the compression shower rod and the curtain with it. He was still stumbling and fumbling, unable to see a thing with the shower curtain on his head. He banged his knee on the toilet and started cursing.

  “I�
�ll save you!” Staci jumped on his back, pummeling him with the toilet brush as he stumbled and slid toward the door and safe, nonslippery carpeting.

  He reached the bedroom and dumped Staci onto the bed. He’d just gotten her off and shrugged the shower curtain onto the floor when Staci screamed again.

  “It’s on your foot!”

  Sure enough. He froze and the damn thing ran up his leg, disappearing beneath his boxers, tickling as it went.

  Spiders were one thing. Spiders up his boxer shorts and into his family jewels was pure torture.

  He screamed, dancing around, trying to pull his shorts off before the thing bit him in his manhood. He didn’t relish the thought of showing a bite like that to a doctor.

  Staci bounced up off the bed to help him, still waving her weapon of choice. “Hold still! I’ll get it.”

  “Not with that toilet brush, you won’t. You’ve already clobbered me with it twice.” He backed away and banged into a dresser, cursing some more.

  “Why not? It’s clean. I’m sure it’s never been used.”

  “Now’s not the time to get kinky.” He twirled away from her and screamed, doing a dance as he felt the spider in his crotch.

  Staci tossed the brush away, ran up behind him, reached around him, nestled up against his back, and stuck her hands down his boxers, groping around for the spider.

  He’d been way too long without sex. Even with a spider making a pass at him, his wife dressed in the thickest layer of cotton he’d even seen and ugly monkey slippers on her feet, at her touch he grew embarrassingly long and hard.

  “Hey, I said, Hold still!” She hitched up her sleeve. “I’m having trouble maneuvering in this fluffy robe.”

  He tried to spin away again. Staci got hold of his shorts and pulled them to his knees.

  “There it is! I see it!” She reached between his legs and flicked at the creepy-crawly thing as he waddled around with his flagpole at attention.

  The spider flew across the room, heading toward the baseboards, and disappeared into a crack beneath them.

  Drew kicked his shorts off. “Jump on!”

  He hiked Staci onto his back and ran for the door, slamming it behind them when they were safely in the hall. Staci leaped off, shrugged off her robe, took a long look at his towering Roman pillar of manhood, and tossed him the robe.

  “Here, cover yourself. I’ll be right back.” She dashed into his bedroom.

  Chivalry is not dead, he thought as he put on the one-size-fits-all pink monstrosity.

  He turned to follow her in just as she reappeared with a blanket. She knelt and stuffed the blanket up against the door. “That should hold him.”

  As Drew tied the belt of the robe around his waist, he thought that brief touch couldn’t hold him at all. Flushed with excitement, exercise, and adrenaline, even wearing modest men’s-style pajamas, she made him hot.

  “I can’t stay there.” She pointed to the guest room door.

  “No, absolutely not.” He stuffed his gun into the robe pocket. “We’ll get that arachnid in the morning. And all his little friends, too.

  “I’ll call the exterminator and ask him to gas that guy with the full power of his strongest spider spray.” Drew cleared his throat. “You can stay with me. We’ll share the bed. Just promise to stay on your side.”

  “Deal.” She looked at Drew and started to laugh.

  “What?”

  “You look so fluffy in that thing. Like pink cotton candy.”

  “Shut up.”

  She cocked her head, and her lips twitched as if she was trying not to laugh. “Drew, baby, I didn’t know you were afraid of spiders. You screamed like a girl in there.”

  “I was trying to keep the spider calm. Shrill screaming seemed to frighten him into submission.”

  “Liar.” But when she looked at him, her eyes were shining with admiration, not derision. “You should have seen yourself. The way you were dancing around.” She laughed.

  Her laugh was contagious. In retrospect, it was funny. Before he knew it, he was laughing so hard he couldn’t stop.

  They both laughed until their sides hurt. Finally, Staci wiped the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand and went suddenly serious. “Attacked by mad snipers hired by who knows whom and lecherous spiders. It’s been some day, hasn’t it?”

  He nodded.

  “Drew?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks for coming to my rescue. Twice.”

  He nodded. “No problem.” He paused. “Stace?”

  She looked at him.

  “Emmett told me about the spiders in Paraguay. Everything considered, you were brave in there, going after that spider with the toilet brush and reaching into my shorts after it.”

  She continued wiping her eyes. “Yeah, it takes a brave woman to reach into her estranged husband’s shorts.”

  He grinned. “All the same, thanks for coming to my rescue.”

  “No problem.”

  He led her into his bedroom, regretting, not for the first time, that his new bedroom hadn’t been big enough to accommodate a king-size bed. A guy could lose his wife in a king-size. His queen-size was a little too close for comfort. It was going to be hell sleeping next to her without touching her after all they’d been through together in the last fourteen hours. And the way she’d touched him looking for that spider.

  She climbed into bed on her usual side. Drew walked around to his and tossed off the fluffy pink robe.

  “You’re not planning to come to bed without taking a shower, are you?” She looked aghast.

  “What?”

  “I can’t sleep with a man who’s been on intimate terms with a spider.” She shivered. “And besides, you have shampoo on your feet. The least you could do is condition them, too.” She smiled and ducked under the covers before he could hit her with a pillow.

  * * *

  Drew’s alarm woke Staci from a sound sleep. She couldn’t believe she’d drifted off so easily. After surviving being shot at by a hired killer, being practically held against her will by Drew, taunted by a common house spider, trashing a bathroom, and having to share a bed with Drew, sleep didn’t seem like it was going to be easy coming. Even if she was exhausted.

  Staci hated to admit it, but she felt safe with Drew. Even if he was afraid of spiders. It was nice to know the man feared something.

  Drew slapped his alarm, rolled out of bed, and stumbled off to take his second shower in eight hours, his hair standing on end. She watched him until he closed the bathroom door. A few seconds later, the shower came on, bringing with it the cozy, reassuring white noise she loved and found so calming.

  And she needed calm. She had to face her mom today with the big lie. The mere thought raised her blood pressure, even in the midst of the calming white noise.

  She rehearsed various scenarios in her mind. All too soon the water shut off and Drew emerged from the shower looking flushed, freshly scrubbed, and yummy.

  Yummy really wasn’t the way a nearly ex-wife should think of her nearly ex-husband. But Staci had always loved Drew fresh out of the shower. As he put on his work clothes—a buttondown shirt and slacks—he looked like the man she’d fallen in love with and married. The regular guy, before she knew he was a spy.

  She supposed she was an anomaly. Most women probably preferred Superman to Clark Kent. But not her. She wanted Mr. Everyday. Mr. Calm and Normal. Mr. Nine to Five. James Bond and his reckless, devil-may-care sense of adventure scared her. And so did Drew.

  He could play whatever roles he pleased, taking on cover persona after cover persona. She wondered why he couldn’t just put on the persona she fell in love with and run with it. Permanently. What, after all, was so bad about leading an ordinary life?

  No more sniper attacks. Having children and not worrying someone would try to kidnap or hurt them. No more lies, at least not the big kind. It all sounded like heaven to her.

  Drew buttoned his shirt and turned to her. “They’re delive
ring your car at nine. Remember the plan and stick to it. Directly to the Red Café, lunch with Linda, home.”

  He gave her a description of the guys who’d be delivering the car and how to get her keys. Then he delivered a lecture on security, awareness, and how to arm the security system.

  “You remember what I taught you about how to spot a tail?” he asked.

  She rolled her eyes. “Yes.”

  “And how to lose one?”

  She nodded.

  He reached into a dresser drawer, pulled something out, and tossed it to her.

  “What’s this?”

  “Your very own Kubotan. Put it on your key ring. If someone grabs you, stab them where it hurts—the neck, the thigh, the ribs, anywhere you can get them. I’m confident you’ll be at least as competent as Mandy is.”

  * * *

  As Drew pulled into a parking spot at Hook House, his cell rang. He shut off the engine and checked the incoming encrypted text. It was from Emmett.

  The sniper who took a shot at Staci is dead. We recovered his body. We believe SMASH got him. Keep an extremely close eye on Staci. If RIOT is involved, they won’t stop until she’s dead.

  Drew swore beneath his breath. SMASH was RIOT’s death squad. They had a perfect kill record. The name SMASH was RIOT head Archibald Random’s play on SMERSH, the old Soviet death squad. SMERSH was a Russian acronym for “death to spies.” SMERSH took out anyone they suspected of being a double agent, a traitor, or a defector, not to mention anyone who screwed up or just grew tired of playing the game. No one left the Soviet machine alive.

  SMASH operated much the same way. Smashing anyone who screwed up, anyone Random ordered eliminated. So it wasn’t surprising SMASH had taken out the sniper who’d missed. But Drew felt the chill all the way to his soul. Why was RIOT after Staci?

  Drew glanced at his watch. There was still time to call Staci and tell her to beg off her lunch date with her mom.

  He frowned. Staci would never go for that, and he didn’t want to scare her. RIOT would have to be desperate to strike in public. She should be safe. As long as she stuck to the plan.