Undercover Lover

by Tibby Armstrong

  She scowled at him. As soon as the agent—Gray—left she planned to fire the members of her brother’s goon squad, including this newest unwanted addition, and go back to her normal life. In her own flat. Threats and letters be damned. David could just bite her.

  “Email good? Or do you prefer phone?” Günter directed the question to Gray.

  “Email’s fine.”

  “Right, then.” The two shook hands and Günter ushered the agent and his cronies into the hall.

  “Well that was smooth,” Jenny said when Günter strode back into the living room, sliding Gray’s card into his wallet. “I appreciate your getting rid of the cops, but you’re free to go.”

  Ignoring her, he stalked the perimeter of the room examining everything—artwork, ceiling fixtures, walls.

  “Would you mind telling me what you’re doing?” she asked as he grabbed a duffel and took the risers two at a time up the curving staircase leading to her room and the music studio.

  “Re-familiarizing,” he said as he disappeared.

  “What? Is this the Australian outback? Afraid you’re going to get lost?” she called after him. When he didn’t answer she followed.

  “Which room were you in when you rang the car to get you?” he asked when she caught up with him at the studio door. He snapped on the lights, his face grim as he took in the sound-proofed room.

  “I didn’t call anyone,” she lied. “I wasn’t going out…”

  He closed the door and stalked past her. Apparently whatever he sought he didn’t think he’d find in the room full of electronic wizardry. Her bedroom fell under his scrutiny next.

  She raced after him, eager to preserve her privacy. “Hey, do you mind?”

  Of course he went in anyway. He opened her closet and pushed the clothes around as she glared at him. He lifted the dance outfit she’d thrown over a chair in her haste to get changed and cast a sidelong glance at her when he eyed a few flecks of blood. She snatched the garment and shoved it into the laundry. Whirling, she found him rifling through her underwear drawer.

  “Can I help you?” she ground out, truly at the end of her patience.

  He threw his duffel on her bed. Nimble fingers tugged the zipper open with an efficient jerk and Jenny had a hazy memory of a man in a baseball cap unzipping her jacket with deliberate care, his warm hands grazing her flesh, the sound of the zipper hypnotizing her until she swayed toward him in invitation. The garment had hit the floor with a soft whoosh. She shuddered now as she’d shuddered then. She frowned, trying to remember the time and place. Or had it all been a dream?

  Concentration pulling at the corners of his mouth, Günter took two battery-operated radios from his bag.

  “Hold this,” he said, handing her one of the radios before fiddling with the tuning dial on the other.

  That wasn’t exactly the sort of help she’d had in mind—more like the kind that involved assisting him with a swift kick in the ass, but she was too interested in his strange actions to argue the point. “What are you doing?”

  “Turn it on,” he said, motioning to the radio.

  She did as he directed. It was tuned to AM, and a scratchy hiss crackled from the cheap speaker.

  “A little louder,” he said, and she turned up the volume. Several minutes went by as he made painstaking adjustments to the radio he held. When it played the same basketball game her unit played she figured he had tuned it to the same station.

  “Damn,” he muttered and took the radio from her hand to place it on the bureau.

  “What? Are the Knicks losing?”

  “Cute.”

  “That’s me.” She shrugged. “Adorable.”

  He moved about the room, approaching her closet, the bed, the telephone, waving the radio in a slow arc. She watched him work, a keen sense of awareness written in his gaze. It was too bad he was crazy, because even walking around her room like a lunatic looking for aliens he was the hottest thing she’d ever seen. Grabbing her desk chair, he then stood on it and waved the radio closer to the ceiling fixture. As he did so, a high-pitched squeal pierced Jenny’s ears.

  “What the hell was that?” she asked after he’d jumped down and turned off both radios.

  He placed his finger over his lips and motioned her from the room.

  She followed, dumbstruck.

  He leaned in close and whispered, “Grab your things—toiletries, medicines, everything you need for a week—and let’s go.”

  “I don’t—”

  His palm easily encircled her upper arm and she battled the urge to sink against him when his hot breath washed against her ear.

  “It’s no bother to carry you out of here without them. Your choice.”

  Which really left her with no choice at all. Again.

  Chapter Three

  Minutes later, in the elevator, Jenny still felt the aftereffects of Günter’s touch.

  “Where—”

  He placed heated digits full of dark potential to her mouth—man, musk and a measured pressure that had her pouting her lips in a reflexive approximation of a kiss. As if burned, he dropped his hand and stepped back a measure.

  They exited the elevator into the hall four floors down from David’s flat, Günter leading the way. Unlike the penthouse floor, there were two flats rather than one on either side of the foyer—a crystal vase with fresh-cut flowers on an occasional table the only decoration. The door Günter approached had keycard and pin pad access just like David’s.

  As he punched in numbers, she asked, “You live here? In this building?”

  Gold-tipped lashes dipped as he slanted an annoyed look at her. He pushed the door open and she ducked under his arm to step inside. A sensor picked up her movement and, with an automated click, recessed lights illuminated a sleek, high-tech wonderland, which flickered to life before her eyes.

  One reflective wall exhibited nine live shots of the building, interior and exterior, including David’s front door. Looking closer, Jenny also saw the building lobby and the parking garage exit. The window opposite the wall had a coating that muted the city lights. A laptop lay open on a glass dining table, a wireless headset draped over the top of the screen. Above the gas fireplace another reflective surface showcased three news channels playing at once.

  “You asked them for the tapes, yet you had access to all this?” She waved her hand at the evidence of abundant surveillance technology, hoping he’d tell her it tied into the building’s system.

  He went into the open-concept kitchen to pull a bottle of water from the fridge. The crack of the cap sounded loud in the barren space, echoing off the polished steel and black granite. He took a long swallow and she watched his throat work the liquid down. Feeling like a lost sheep, she trailed him back into the living room.

  He checked something on the laptop. “We can talk now.”

  “What do you mean we can talk now?”

  “The flat is,” he glanced at the laptop again, “secured against eavesdropping.”

  “Eavesdropping?” She frowned. Exactly how paranoid was this man?

  “Bugs.” He leaned his hip against the edge of the glass conference table and folded his arms over his chest.

  Throwing her hands above her head, she voiced her frustration to the ceiling. “I know what eavesdropping means. I just want to know why you’d worry about it enough to live like a KGB defector.”

  He slid a chair from the table, muscles rippling against the fabric of his white shirt with the easy motion. “Sit.”

  Arguing with him seemed pointless, so she perched on the edge of the seat.

  “Start from the beginning and tell me the story you told the police.”

  “You answer my question first.” Who employed whom around here anyway?

  He snorted. “I’ll answer your questions if you promise to answer mine. Honestly.”

  “Fine.”

  “All right, then. If they bugged David’s flat, they might’ve bugged anything, even your shoes. And this place,”
he took in the flat, frowning as if he were still assessing for a threat despite the green-lighted readout she could see displayed on his monitor, “is wired for detection methods far more sophisticated than a couple of transistors.”

  “You’re seriously telling me someone bugged David’s flat?” she asked.

  “Yes. I’m seriously telling you someone bugged David’s flat.” He tossed her words back at her.

  Her stomach clenched despite his sarcasm. Visions of David’s disappearance from her life two decades ago played like cutting room clips on the faded screen of childhood memory. He might be a pain in her backside, but she didn’t want to lose the only family she had so soon after she’d regained it.

  “And you could tell that from a regular old radio?” He had to be mistaken.

  Günter turned his attention to his laptop. “It’s an old trick.”

  “Sorry?”

  “The feedback.” He waved one wide hand. “It indicated a listening device in your light.”

  “Huh?”

  She could almost hear his mental sigh.

  “If you tune one radio to AM and the other to FM, and you can tune the FM band into the AM station, you know you have a problem. To find the location of the bug, you use the radio feedback.”

  “Is it the only one?” Why would someone would want to bug her room? Maybe the device had been there since before she’d arrived?

  “Unlikely.” He took a swig of water before answering the thought she’d voiced aloud. “That room was used for storage until you moved in.”

  “You have all of these toys here,” she swept her arm to take in the electronics around the room, “and yet you had to use cheap handheld radios?”

  As long as she kept him answering questions, he couldn’t resume the interrogation Agent Gray had begun.

  “They aren’t my toys.” He cleared his throat. “They’re your brother’s.”

  Jenny looked around the opulent, high-tech room with new eyes. The modernist crystal fixture, the coffered ceiling, the abundance of leather and gleaming chrome—all screamed David. If she’d been thinking about it she would have seen his personality stamped all over the place.

  “He pays you to live here?” she guessed. “Is that where I’ve seen you before? In this building?”

  “Do I live here?” he asked, folding his arms across the span of his chest.

  She stood and looked around again. There were no personal belongings. No photos. No car keys. No plants. She felt Günter’s eyes tracking her as she went into the kitchen. The only items in the fridge were the bottled water and some condiments—nothing that spoiled readily. The sink gleamed as if it had barely been used.

  “Nobody lives here,” she said, coming to stand next to him again. She eyed the comfortable sprawl of his legs and remembered the way his shoulders had relaxed when he’d walked in the door. “But you spend a lot of time here. We must have spoken in the lobby, because I’m sure we’ve met.”

  He tilted back in the chair, muscles in his arms rippling as he laced his hands behind his head. Expression inscrutable, he didn’t bother to deny her guess. A slow blink seemed to bring him out of some private avenue of thought, and the change in his expression startled her with its intensity. To lessen the heat tingling along her skin, Jenny pivoted and renewed her perusal of the space.

  Günter watched Jenny poke around the living room and decided not to call her back when she wandered farther into the flat. She needed to settle her nerves and he needed to compose his thoughts right quick.

  He hadn’t expected her to recognize him. That she had complicated things a great deal. If she found out how much he knew about her and why, both he and Tallis would pay with a tongue-lashing neither of them would soon forget. While he could survive that eventuality, if she remembered the night he’d taken her home in that taxi and tucked her into bed… Well, that could spell disaster for his tenuous hold on self-control where she was concerned.

  Shaking off a sense of foreboding coming at him with the unswerving velocity of a high-speed commuter train, Günter forced himself to look at the laptop. Best to reacquaint himself with what he knew about her. Focus on the facts. Stop staring at her sashaying backside.

  Jenny Ainsley. Twenty-six. Graduate of NYU. B.S. in Finance. Younger sister and only sibling of Jeremy Ainsley who changed his name to David Tallis under witness protection. Separated from brother at age seven when—

  “What are you typing?”

  Günter slanted the laptop cover downward.

  “Notes.”

  “About me?”

  Again, that was a little too observant. Swiveling, he faced her and nearly rocketed back. She was closer than he’d thought. Too close. He nonchalantly rolled the chair backward, putting some distance between them.

  Soft and pink, her fuzzy sweater highlighted racecourse curves that tempted him to play his hands along her inside track. Damn. She revved him in ways he’d never known possible. Biting down on a curse, he stood, using the motion as a pretext for adjusting the seam of his jeans.

  “Sit.” The word came out more forcefully than he’d intended.

  Dark eyes blinked up at him as she darted her tongue along gloss-frosted lips.

  Transforming an unmistakable groan of arousal into a growl, he pointed at the chair behind her. “I said sit.”

  Eyes narrowed, she dropped into the chair.

  Somehow he had to regain the upper hand. His email chimed again and he flipped the laptop lid open to look at a message from Agent Gray containing a transcription of his notes from his interview with Jenny. He found it odd the man would share this depth of intel until he saw Gray’s postscript. Didn’t realize you’d been MI-5. Apologies for the runaround.

  Skimming his eyes over the attachment, he said, “Tell me what happened tonight.”

  A heavy sigh told him Jenny was tired of relating her story, but he didn’t care. Agent Gray and he agreed on one thing according to his report. Jenny was hiding something.

  The surveillance stills he shuffled through were fairly useless—just two shadowed forms struggling against a backdrop of weak exit lights. He tried the infrared cameras next, but found they’d been tampered with. What the hell? Nobody other than Günter and David even knew the cameras existed. How had someone accessed and neutralized them?

  He returned his attention to Jenny. Even if he hadn’t already known it, her body language—the way she splayed her hands, twisting them against one another, the darting of her eyes—told him she concealed something. And if she was anything like her brother, it would be something that could get them all in hotter water than Günter cared to face.

  The very idea that she might be involved in illicit drug deals made him sick with anger and disappointment. If he got the truth out of her now, maybe they could get her life cleaned up before she got into more serious trouble. That still left the question of who’d bugged her bedroom…

  He shook his head. Too many threads leading in too many directions. He had to start with one. Hip braced against the table, he towered over her, arms folded across his chest in a show of power and confidence designed to unsettle her. It was much more difficult to keep track of a lie when flustered, and he intended to fluster her quite a bit before they were through.

  With a toss of her head, she looked up at him. He narrowed his eyes in an effort to resist dipping them to the cleavage peeking above the v-neck of her sweater.

  “I—was getting ready to go to work,” she began.

  In that sweater? In that makeup? He could still see the glitter on her lashes from the eye shadow she’d tried to minimize.

  “Nobody’s there on a Saturday night and I thought I might catch a movie or grab a drink afterward,” she explained, reading his skepticism.

  He pursed his lips in an effort to school his expression. She was too good at intuiting his thoughts.

  “You’d said you weren’t going out. Hadn’t rung up the driver.”

  Face flushed, she stammered, “I—I forgo
t.”

  Bullshit.

  He remained silent, giving her room to dig herself deeper.

  “The doorbell rang and I went to get it.” She took a deep breath and blew it out, telling him this was where the crux of her lie centered. “It was the Wilsons. They were standing in the dark hall, so I let them in.”

  “You opened the door when you couldn’t see who was standing on the other side?”

  She glanced to the left and then back to his face. She was about to lie again. “Yes.”

  If she’d been telling the truth, he’d have chalked her up as too stupid to live and washed his hands of her then and there. As it was, the jury was still out.

  “Did they know you were living in Mr. Tallis’ flat?”

  “I said hello to them when the movers were bringing my things in last week.”

  Movers… “What was the name of the firm you used?”

  “Johnson Brothers?” Her brow furrowed and he resisted the urge to smooth out the lines with word or touch. “I’m not certain. David hired them.”

  “Why did you move in with him? You said you work, right?” He didn’t have to ask the latter question. He already knew the answer—both where and for how long. It was the former that interested him.

  “There have been letters. Threats. One mentioned me. He thought it best that I stay at his place where there’s better security.” She laughed. Bitter.

  For the first time since he’d started observing her for Tallis, he couldn’t detect a sparkle in her eyes. “Go on.”

  “I work for Maley and Markinson as a CPA. I started a few years ago as an intern to get my license, and stayed on.”

  “Did you notice anything odd about the movers? Did they have unsupervised access to Mr. Tallis’ flat or your room?”

  “I wasn’t watching them the entire time.” Another focused frown pulled at her features. “Do you think they planted the bug?”

  “Could be. I’ll run some checks—see how long these blokes have been in business.” He made a note before returning to the topic he needed to pursue. “Now. Back to the Wilsons. Did they tell you what was in the hall or did you look for yourself?”