Seduced by the Operative

by Merline Lovelace

  “Can you describe them for me?”

  “There were people. Lots of people dressed in kind of weird clothes.”

  “Weird how?”

  “Old-fashioned, I guess you could call it. And real plain, like they were farmers or something. Some of the women had kerchiefs on their heads. At first they were just standing there, staring at me. Then they…Then they…”

  She twisted the strand of hair into a tight spiral. Her breathing sped up. Carefully, Claire watched these visible signs of distress.

  “They started crowding closer and closer,” Stacy said in a small, scared voice, “until I was surrounded.”

  She swallowed. Her eyes took on a haunted look that accented the dark shadows under them.

  “Then their faces start falling off,” she whispered, pushing out each ragged syllable. “The flesh melted away, until they were just skulls with empty eyes. All of them. Just skeletons. Surrounding me. Reaching for me. Like…Like I was going to die and they wanted to drag me into the grave with them!”

  She ended on a note of rising panic. Claire anchored her with a calm observation.

  “Skeletons quite often appear in dreams, but they don’t necessarily symbolize physical death.”

  Hope replaced the burgeoning fear in the girl’s eyes. “They don’t?”

  “No. In fact, some analysts think they represent life, not death. It could be your subconscious telling you to stop, take a breath, focus on the positive things around you, instead of the negative. Which must be kind of hard to do when you’re living in a fishbowl,” Claire added shrewdly, “and you see your father’s critics on the evening news. It must hurt to hear them question his leadership.”

  “It does! I hate it when people criticize him. They did it back home, too, when he was governor, but they’re so much meaner here.”

  Claire didn’t doubt that. Andrews was playing in the big league now.

  “Did you have dreams like this back home?”

  “No, never!”

  “Tell me what books you’ve been reading lately. What Web sites you go to, the movies you watch.”

  With her bright red jacket, jeans and Mary Janes, Stacy Andrews didn’t give the appearance of being into Goth or horror, but Claire knew appearances could be very deceptive. Nothing the girl related seemed likely to have implanted the hideous images she’d described, however.

  “How about caffeine?” She tapped the frosted glass. “Do you usually have a soft drink before bed?”

  “No. Dad says they’re not good for me and wants me to limit myself to one or two during the day.” Her eyes pleaded with Claire for another explanation. “The dreams really freaked me out, Dr. Cantwell. What else could have caused them?”

  “Well, it could have been the stress of the trip, although threatening dreams such as the ones you’ve described can result from any number of causes.” Lifting a hand, she ticked off a quick list. “Anxiety, illness, loss of a loved one, excessive alcohol consumption, reaction to a drug, sleeping disorders, or even an inherited tendency toward nightmares.”

  “Dad never mentioned having horrible dreams like this, and he’s got a lot more stress than I do.”

  “How about your mom?” Claire asked gently. “You went through a rough time when you lost her. Do you still miss her?”

  “Every day. But…” She worried her lower lip with her teeth for a moment. “It scares me, Dr. Cantwell. Sometimes I have to think real hard to remember what she looked like.”

  “That’s a natural part of healing.”

  As Claire knew all too well.

  “We may not keep their faces or the sound of their voices in our heads, but we keep them here.” She laid a palm over her heart, reminded vividly of her own torturous journey. “You don’t need to feel guilty for going on with your life, Stacy.”

  “I don’t. At least, I don’t think I do.”

  They talked for a little while longer, and Claire heard nothing that suggested a troubled or deeply disturbed teen.

  “Tell you what,” she said when they finished. “I’ll do some research and get back to you. In the meantime, try to go to bed the same time each night—even on weekends—to reset your sleep cycle. A warm, relaxing bath before you hit the sheets might also help. Also a good thirty-minute workout, if you exercise at least four to five hours before bedtime.”

  “I can do that.”

  “I can’t promise you won’t have these dreams again,” Claire cautioned. “If you do, call me and I’ll come over. Or you can come to my office. We’ll talk you through them and try to understand what they’re telling you.”

  “Thanks, Dr. Cantwell. I’m…I’m not so scared now.”

  “Good girl. Do you want me to speak to your father about our discussion? I won’t, if you’d rather not.”

  “Sure, you can tell Dad. I’ll talk to him, too, and tell him what you said.”

  Stacy’s Secret Service detail remained on duty in the hall while a staff member escorted Claire to the West Wing.

  She departed the White House a half hour later, leaving behind a somewhat reassured teenager and a still very worried father. Another staff member drove her back to her office on K Street. Since her very efficient office manager had cleared her schedule after Lightning’s call, Claire decided to beat the traffic out of the city and dictate notes of her session with Stacy Andrews at home.

  As she drove across the 14th Street Bridge and headed for Alexandria, her thoughts swung between the frightened teenager she’d spent the afternoon with, and the enticing, demanding, occasionally exasperating but always intriguing man she would spend the evening with.

  Luis could fill in more details concerning Stacy Andrews’s activities while in Cartoza. With a shiver of sensual anticipation, Claire decided he could also make up for the long hours she’d put in at work while he was gone.

  She loved her profession. Helping someone through pain or confusion or despair gave her a deep sense of giving back to the world. Her client list kept her extremely busy between the missions she worked for OMEGA. Very often, Claire brought casework home with her, as she had tonight.

  She had a large number of friends and acquaintances, as well. Socializing with them and with her tight circle of fellow agents required skilled juggling. Luis had added another dimension to the life Claire had carved out for herself.

  And of all the demands on her time and energy, she acknowledged with another ripple of anticipation, Colonel Luis Esteban required the most personal attention.

  Chapter 2

  Thinking of the evening ahead, Claire turned onto a tree-shaded street in Old Town, Alexandria. After her husband’s death, she’d sold their colonial-style home in the suburbs and purchased a three-story townhome. Not only was it closer to her downtown D.C. office, but renovating the town house helped blunt some of her soul-searing grief.

  Her home was one of four carved out of an eighteenth-century brick warehouse that had once stored huge barrels of tobacco awaiting shipment from the New World to the Old. Claire had sanded the oak plank floors herself and roamed antique stores on weekends for just the right doorknob and lamp. She’d chosen light, neutral fabrics for the furniture, with jewel-toned throw pillows for the occasional splash of color. Plantation shutters graced the windows throughout the house instead of drapes. In her considered opinion, the result was a perfect blend of new and old, of sunlight and space.

  The tranquility of her home welcomed her as she took the stairs from the ground-floor garage to an entry hall lined with oak plank flooring. Once inside, she decided to change before dictating her notes. When working with clients, she wore suits or pantsuits in cool, soothing colors that, theoretically at least, put them at ease. At home she preferred hip-hugging sweats and comfortable T-shirts.

  Unless Luis was coming for dinner. Or sex. Or both.

  With those tantalizing possibilities ahead, she deposited her briefcase on the foyer table and detoured to the den to click on the built-in stereo system. Humming along with E
tta James’s smoky rendition of “At Last,” she went upstairs.

  As always, when she entered her bedroom her glance went first to the crystal-framed photo on the bedside table. It was one of her favorites, snapped during her honeymoon in Hawaii. She and Dave were laughing and splashing through the surf. He looked like he was about to lose his baggy bathing trunks to the undertow. Claire waved to the camera, hoping her new husband didn’t moon the woman who’d obligingly offered to take the picture.

  “Hard to believe we were ever that young,” she murmured with a smile.

  Stifling a familiar pang of regret for the years she and Dave had lost, she exchanged her suit for loose-fitting linen slacks with a drawstring waist. She topped those with a colorfully embroidered, off-the-shoulder top she’d picked up during a visit to Cartoza with Luis. He’d taken such delight in showing her his country, she in meeting his friends and family. His parents were dead, but he remained close to his brother, a clutch of sisters, a lively brood of nieces and nephews, and the rather intimidating matriarch of the Esteban clan—a blunt-spoken nonagenarian they all called Tia Maria.

  Smiling at the memory of Tia Maria’s observation that it was about time Luis chose a woman for her sense instead of her chest size, Claire slid her feet into thong sandals and descended to the kitchen on the main floor of the town house. Cooking for Luis always challenged her admittedly limited culinary skills. Dave had been pretty much a meat-and-potatoes man. Claire’s tastes were somewhat more eclectic, but nowhere near Luis’s sophisticated palate. Since he’d burst into her life, he’d introduced her to exotic delicacies she would never have tried on her own.

  Thank goodness she had two swordfish steaks in the freezer. While they defrosted in the microwave, she prepared a marinade of lemon juice and white wine. After dousing the steaks, she stuck them back in the fridge. Sprinkled with slivered almonds and arranged on a bed of crushed tomatoes, they would broil in minutes. She assembled a fresh spinach salad and put that into the fridge, too. With crusty French bread and a side of wild rice, the meal should satisfy even Luis’s discerning tastes.

  Dinner taken care of, Claire went down the hall to the room she’d had custom-fitted as a combination library, office and retreat. Bookshelves lined three walls, high-tech electronic gear the fourth. Her favorite novels and biographies vied for space in one section of shelves. Psychology journals and reference books filled the rest.

  She went first to check her faxes. She found one from the White House—a confidentiality agreement she needed to sign and return before they would release Stacy Andrews’s medical information, including the results of her most recent blood test. Claire read the agreement carefully. Satisfied it conformed to her own professional standards concerning client privacy, she signed and dated it. Once she’d faxed it back, she powered up her computer and switched on voice recognition mode.

  “Notes from session with Stacy Andrews, fourteen-year-old female, who’s experienced two vivid nightmares with debilitating sleep interruption.”

  She noted the date, time and place of the consultation and described in detail her observations and discussion with the president’s daughter. When she finished the dictation, she switched to a powerful search engine that gave her access to a host of databases. Those included the Clinical Psychology Network, with its more than five thousand links, and the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The link she was most interested in at the moment took her to the National Sleep Foundation.

  Claire knew Freud believed dreams expressed unconscious desires, but modern research had tied them to the REM cycle. REM sleep began with a signal from the pons at the base of the brain. The signal was relayed to the cortex, which controlled learning, thinking and organizing information. Although scientists had yet to definitively determine what actually caused dreams, one theory held that the cortex received fragmented signals from the pons and tried to sequence them into thoughts or scenes.

  Everyone dreamed. Not everyone remembered their dreams when they woke up. But if the REM cycle was suddenly interrupted or the dreams were vivid or frightening, the sleeper might jerk wake. In that case, they could retain detailed images, as had happened with Stacy Andrews.

  Chewing on her lower lip, Claire slid a pad toward her and began making copious notes on the symptoms and treatment for nightmares. That led her to the rare but very dangerous condition known as REM Sleep Behavior Disorder, when individuals got out of bed and began physically acting out their dreams while asleep.

  She was still hard at work when the door chimes rang. Startled, she glanced at her watch. Good thing she’d prepared the swordfish before getting lost in her research.

  When she opened the door, Luis had to fight to keep his smile lazy. Madre de Dios! Did the woman have any idea how seductive she looked?

  The last slanting rays of the sun deepened the gold in her pale blond hair and gave her skin a creamy tint. His pulse quickening, Luis followed the clean line of her throat to the slope of her shoulders so enticingly displayed by her blouse.

  She excited him in her usual attire of severely tailored suits and pumps. Cool and serene, she stirred fantasies of slowly stripping away her outer clothing piece by piece until he roused the passion he knew lay underneath.

  Like this, though, with her hair falling in a soft cloud to her shoulders and those drawstring pants riding low on her hips, she shoved all thoughts of slow out of his head. His groin tightened, and his greeting took on a husky note.

  “Buenas tardes, mi corazón.”

  “Buenas tardes, Luis.”

  Her reluctance to use pet names or endearments amused him as much as it had begun to irritate him. He was no overeager young stud. He’d loved passionately once, long ago. Since then, he’d enjoyed mutually satisfying liaisons with a fair number of women. Sophisticated women for the most part, who knew how the game was played and enjoyed playing it. Luis had worked hard to give them as much pleasure as they’d given him. He’d also made sure he parted with each on amicable terms.

  But this one, this reserved, self-contained beauty, challenged his masculinity in a way no other woman had. Even in their most intimate moments, she held back a part of herself. Luis hadn’t minded at first. He understood and respected her need for privacy in some corners of her life. He was a man with many secrets himself.

  Yet what had begun as a familiar, sexual dance had gradually become a test of his will. And hers. One day, he vowed, he’d break through the wall she’d built around her heart since her husband’s brutal murder.

  “Dinner will be ready shortly,” she said as the door closed behind him. “I just have to broil the…”

  He snagged her arm, tugged her around.

  “First things first.”

  Depositing the wine he’d brought on the hall table, he thrust his free hand into her hair. The strands threaded between his fingers like air-spun silk.

  “I missed you while I was in Cartoza, preparing for President Andrews’s visit.”

  “I missed you, too.”

  She came into his arms readily and her mouth opened under his. That should have been enough. That, and the way she hooked her arms around his neck and rose up on tiptoe to return the kiss.

  Despite her ready kiss—or perhaps because of it—Luis wanted more. Perhaps it was his still-simmering frustration over the president’s canceled trip. Perhaps it was the insult from that ass, Fogarty. Whatever it was spurring him sharpened his desire for this woman to a deep, driving need.

  He angled his head, found her tongue with his. His hands roamed her back, slid down to cup her bottom and press her against him. He was already hard and aching for her, which made her draw back a little.

  “Before dinner?” she asked, with a smile in her eyes.

  “Before, during and after,” he growled, scooping her into his arms.

  His heels rang on the hardwood stairs as he carried her up to the master bedroom. The decor was all Claire—oyster-colored walls,
framed Impressionist prints, an inch-thick Turkish carpet in muted jewel tones. Nothing harsh, nothing jarring, everything perfect and in place.

  Including the photo in a crystal frame on her bedside table.

  Luis wasn’t jealous of the husband Claire had loved and lost. On the contrary, that soul-shattering experience had moulded her into the woman she was today. Strong. Self-reliant. Incredibly skilled, both in her profession and the dangerous undercover ops she worked for OMEGA.

  Too strong at times. Too self-contained. What ate at him was the knowledge she’d entered this relationship for the same reasons he’d entered it. For friendship and intellectual stimulation, as much as sexual satisfaction. The problem was, she seemed content with that.

  The atavistic urge to disrupt the tranquil harmony of both the room and the woman in his arms gripped him. A little roughly, he deposited her on the bed and stood over her while he unbuckled his belt and shed his clothing.

  Her gaze swept down his chest and flat belly to linger on the erection jutting from the nest of dark hair at his groin. “You have missed me,” she said with a teasing smile.

  Luis was in no mood for teasing. He wanted her wet and hot, as hungry for him as he was for her. At some deeper, primal level, he also wanted her to acknowledge him as a mate as worthy of her as the husband she’d lost.

  He took time only to unstrap the ankle holster that was as much a part of him as his suspicious nature and various scars. Naked, he came down beside her. Stretching her arms above her head, he captured her wrists with one hand and yanked at the ties of her slacks with the other.

  Her eyes widened, but she obligingly kicked off her sandals and raised her hips. In one swift move, Luis rid her of both slacks and lacy briefs. He tugged up the hem of her blouse, well aware of the fact that she rarely wore a bra at home.

  She didn’t need one. Her breasts were small and firm and tipped with pink nipples that rose to stiff peaks when he suckled them. Mounding the creamy flesh with his free hand, he bent his head.