Bait

by Karen Robards

  The too-sweet smile faded. “How to put this? Not your business.”

  She had let the door fall open a little wider as they’d talked, and he was able to see past her into most of the bathroom now. His gaze swept the room. It was a typical bathroom, smallish, with a tub/shower combo, toilet, and vanity sink. A big mirror covered the wall behind the sink. Lots of white tile, trimmed in a kind of sea green. Clean. Empty except for her.

  There was a cell phone on the vanity. Light dawned.

  “You were talking on the phone.”

  Her lips compressed as she followed his gaze.

  “What, are you my keeper now? So I was talking on the phone. Big deal.” Her eyes met his again. They were less than friendly. “Why are you still here, anyway? You’ve done your thing. Not wanting to be rude or anything, but it’s probably time you toddled off on your way now.”

  His eyes narrowed. “What happened to don’t leave me?”

  “I got over the shock,” she snapped.

  He almost smiled. There was that hostility of hers again in spades. He wasn’t sure if it was directed at him personally, if she just didn’t like men in general, or if there was something else going on here that he hadn’t quite tumbled to yet. Not that he minded it particularly. It was kind of cute, kind of different. The thing was, though, right at the moment it was damned inconvenient. Then another odd thing hit him. The mirror. It was clear as a summer’s day. Not steamed up a bit. The water she’d been running since before he’d entered her apartment had not been hot.

  Either she was into cold showers—and she didn’t seem like the type—or a shower had not been on her agenda when she’d turned the water on. Which meant she’d been running the water for some other reason. To cover up a sound. Of using the toilet? Maybe, especially if she was shy. But the water had been running a long time. To cover up the sound of her voice as she talked on the cell phone?

  Bingo.

  “Mind telling me who you were talking to?”

  “My boyfriend, okay?” Her eyes flashed at him. “What’s it to you?”

  Good question.

  Maybe somewhere deep in his subconscious, he’d suspected she was talking to a boyfriend all along. Maybe that was what was bugging him.

  Because something was. He was definitely getting one of those little niggles of his again. Hell, maybe it was just knowing that she was naked under that towel that was throwing his thought processes off. The thing was, he was so damned tired that he couldn’t think straight enough to reason out the whys and wherefores of this feeling he had that something here was not quite right.

  “If you really want to know, I was calling my insurance company about my car,” Maddie said, her tone a little friendlier now. “And the reason I’m not in the shower yet was that I can’t quite figure out how to do this without getting my shoulder wet, too.”

  O-kay. That made sense. Kind of.

  “Plastic bag,” Gardner said from her position on the couch, and Maddie looked past McCabe to where the other two were, clearly, taking in every word.

  Since Maddie had appeared in the towel, Sam realized with some chagrin that he had completely forgotten that they were even in the room.

  “You got trash bags?” Wynne asked her. When Maddie nodded, he heaved himself to his feet. “I’ll get you one. Where are they?”

  “In the kitchen under the sink.” Maddie looked at Sam again. “Is there anything else you want to know?”

  “Since I’m going to be leaving in a minute”—he watched her face brighten—“we need to talk about a few things.”

  “Such as?”

  “What you can and can’t do. The kinds of precautions you need to take. Wynne and I are going to be taking off for a few hours, but Gardner’s going to be here with you. We probably won’t have outside backup until tonight. That means you ...”

  Maddie’s brows snapped together again. “Whoa. Hold on just a minute. What?”

  Wynne came up behind them and held a white plastic trash bag out to Maddie. “Just poke a couple of holes in it for your arm and your head, then scootch it up everywhere you don’t need protection. It should keep the water off that wound.”

  Momentarily distracted, she took it, giving Wynne a quick smile and a thanks. Then, as Wynne retreated, her eyes immediately refocused on Sam. And the frown returned.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “One of us is going to be with you twenty-four hours a day until this guy is caught. Gardner’s on for the next few hours, and it would probably be best if you stayed inside your apartment. I don’t really expect anything to ...”

  She was shaking her head. “Wait. Stop. Uh-uh. No way. I already told you, I don’t want to be kept under surveillance. I appreciate the offer, but no. What part of ‘I refuse my permission’ did you not understand?”

  Sam could feel another one of those killer headaches coming on, but he held on to his patience with some effort. “I was hoping that since we saved your life out there, you might have rethought that.”

  A beat passed.

  “You did not save my life.”

  Sam’s brows twitched together. “You’re alive, aren’t you?”

  “Whoever fired that shot missed. That’s what saved my life.”

  Sam took a deep breath. “The point is, you’re alive. And we mean to keep you that way. It would help if you would cooperate. By that, I mean you want to stay inside as much as possible. You want to take care to keep your curtains closed at night. If you have to go out, you want to get into and out of buildings as fast as you can. One of us will be with you. ...”

  “No,” Maddie said. “I’m not going to do this. I refuse.”

  Sam’s head throbbed. His patience, never his strong suit, wobbled dangerously. “You can’t refuse.”

  “Oh, yes, I can.”

  “Mind telling me why you have a problem with this?”

  “Because I have a company to run, and right now things are kicking into high gear for us. I have clients to see, advertising campaigns to work on, PR to do. Having an FBI agent dogging my every step is probably not going to make anybody real eager to do business with me, in case you haven’t figured that out. In fact, just the opposite. Anyway, the police said the shooting was probably random, and I agree with the police. So I appreciate the offer, but no. Thank you. If it makes you feel better to know this, I’ll be extra careful. But I don’t want you.”

  Sam looked at her for a moment without saying anything at all. Her eyes glinted militantly at him. Her jaw looked mulish.

  He sighed. “Look, I’m not going to argue about this. I’m dead on my feet here. We all are, you probably included. So here’s the deal: Either you cooperate, or I’ll take you into protective custody and whisk you off to a safe house so fast you won’t know what hit you, and let you try running your company from there. At least that’s one way to keep you from getting killed while we try to figure this thing out.”

  Her eyes flashed. “Is that another threat, Mr. Special Agent? Well, guess what? This time I’m not buying it. You can’t just take somebody into custody because you feel like it.”

  Sam’s patience crashed and burned.

  “Can’t I?” He smiled, and from the way he was feeling, it was not a nice smile. “Try me.”

  Their eyes clashed, and Sam was reminded forcibly of the old saying about irresistible forces and immovable objects.

  In this case, the immovable object—that would be him—won. Which, under the circumstances, wasn’t surprising, since he’d meant every word he’d said, and she must have been able to read that in his eyes.

  Because for a long moment all he got was a sizzling look. Then...

  “Fine,” she snapped, and slammed the door in his face. Seconds later, from the other side, he distinctly heard her mutter, “Jackass.”

  Glad his nose hadn’t been any closer to the solid wood panel when it connected with the jamb, he turned away from the closed door to find Wynne and Gardner looking at him.


  “Way to be persuasive,” Wynne said, giving him a thumbs-up, and Gardner looked at Wynne and laughed.

  UNBELIEVABLE, Maddie thought hours later.

  There was an FBI agent making himself at home on her couch, and there didn’t seem to be a thing in the world she could do about it. He had what was left of the pizza they’d had for dinner on the table by his side, his stockinged feet were on her coffee table, and her remote control was in his hand. The sounds emanating from the TV jumped spastically from cartoon voices to a feverish play-by-play for some ball game to eerie mood music to a talking head waxing eloquent about the falling economy as he, apparently, flipped channels indiscriminately.

  From where she lay—flopped on her stomach in the middle of her queen-size bed in her shadowy bedroom—she couldn’t see the TV. She couldn’t even see him. But that was the position he’d been in when she’d last exited the bathroom at a little past midnight—it was now shortly before one a.m.—and if her ears were any judge, nothing had changed.

  For the last hour she’d been trying to sleep, without success. It was possible that the exhausted nap she’d succumbed to in the middle of the afternoon had something to do with that. Or maybe sleep was elusive because her shoulder throbbed, or her thoughts raced, or she kept having flashbacks to the moment she’d gotten shot every time she closed her eyes.

  Or maybe because there was an FBI agent in her living room.

  McCabe, to be precise.

  Or any combination of the above.

  “I’m trying to sleep here,” she finally yelled in frustration through the door he had insisted she keep partially open. “Think you could turn it down?”

  If he replied, she missed it, but the volume lessened.

  Maddie rolled onto her good side and pulled her knees up under her chin. Her movements were gingerly, because her shoulder ached like she’d been shot—oh, wait, she had been—and the pain pill she’d taken around nine didn’t seem to be touching it. If she had been alone, she would have gotten up to watch TV, but her babysitter was already doing that and, since she had only the one set, that meant TV was pretty much out.

  Unless she wanted to watch TV with him.

  Definitely out.

  Closing her eyes, snuggling under the smooth top sheet that was the only covering she could stand, given the sweaty realities of third-floor apartments, inefficient air-conditioning, and tropical heat, she breathed in the faint sea-breeze scent of the fabric softener sheets she habitually used in the dryer and tried to put herself to sleep by counting her blessings.

  She was alive. She was home, with her life still intact. And they’d gotten the Brehmer account.

  All good. All, unfortunately, also subject to change at any moment.

  Before she could stop herself, her mind went over to the dark side.

  Number one, there was an FBI agent on her couch.

  Number two, she’d spent the entire day cooped up in her apartment with a woman who looked like Rambo Barbie. On a really bad hair day.

  Number three, she hadn’t gotten any of her usual Saturday errands done. Her dry cleaning was still at the cleaners, she was out of bread and cereal, the milk in her refrigerator expired two days ago, and she had three rented DVDs that were racking up late charges even as she lay there.

  Number four, her car was pretty much undrivable until they came to replace the glass, which she’d been told would happen sometime Monday.

  And number five—this was the biggie—someone was trying to kill her.

  Although her friend Bob, whom she’d been talking to in the bathroom that morning when McCabe had come banging on the door, had sworn it wasn’t true. If there had been a contract out on her—which he had no knowledge of whatsoever—it had been withdrawn after their previous conversation. If a shot had been fired at her that morning—which again he had no knowledge of whatsoever—it was an accident, and had nothing to do with them at all. Or—ahem—an easily rectified mistake.

  They had no reason to kill her, he assured her, as long as she kept her end of the deal and stayed away from the feds.

  As far as Maddie was concerned, however, there were two problems with Bob’s assurances: First, someone had taken a shot at her; and, second, even as her buddy Bob had warned her to stay away from the feds, one had been banging on her bathroom door.

  And he was still here.

  Since getting rid of McCabe and Co. clearly wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, all she could do was try her best to maneuver around him. The only thing her protests had done so far was make him start to wonder why she wasn’t just jumping up and down with joy at the prospect of taking advantage of his offer of government-funded bodyguards; she’d seen it in his eyes. So she had given in—possibly with something less than good grace, but, hey, as far as she was concerned, losing well was overrated—and now she was stuck.

  Performing the highwire act that her life had turned into.

  As long as Bob and his friends kept their word and didn’t find out about her new babysitters, she was good. And as long as McCabe and Co. didn’t know about her past, she was equally good. But if any of them found out about the rest of them, the situation was going to go to hell in a handbasket.

  Worrying about just such a mischance was probably the primary reason she couldn’t fall asleep. That, and the fear that one of her patented nightmares hovered waiting in the wings. Tonight of all nights, when the scary truth that she had to once more be afraid for her life was really starting to sink in, being transported back seven years in her sleep would be more than she thought she could bear.

  And, oh, yeah, there was the little fact that someone had tried to kill her. Twice now. Wasn’t there some saying about third time being the charm?

  Even the thought made her shiver.

  After another fifteen minutes or so of wriggling—she couldn’t toss and turn because of her injured shoulder—Maddie was still wide awake, and forced to admit that she had a new problem: She had to go to the bathroom.

  And given the fact that her apartment was just old-fashioned and inexpensive enough so that it only had one bathroom, which wasn’t connected to her bedroom but opened off the living room, that meant that she was going to have to walk past McCabe.

  She felt funny about the whole thing. She felt funny about walking past him knowing that she had on her little shortie nightgown, even if she was going to pull her big terry-cloth bathrobe on over it. She felt funny about him knowing she had to wee. She felt funny about having him in her apartment, period.

  But whether she felt funny or not, she decided a few minutes later, she had no choice: She really, really had to go.

  Sliding out of bed, pulling her robe on—carefully, because of her shoulder—and tying it around her waist, she hesitated, looking at the partly open door that glowed blue from the TV, then took a deep breath, headed toward it, and paused in the opening to glare his way.

  Just as she had suspected, McCabe was still parked on her couch. As far as she could tell, he hadn’t switched positions in a couple hours. Except, maybe, to change the channel and stuff his mouth. The TV provided the only illumination in the apartment, and by its flickering light he was little more than a big, solid, dark presence that dominated the small room. Much as she hated to face it, though, she didn’t need light to know just exactly what he looked like. His black hair and coffee-brown eyes and mobile mouth and chiseled chin—to say nothing of his muscular bod—seemed to have implanted themselves in her consciousness, whether she liked it or not. When he had arrived at about eleven p.m. to take over from Wynne, who had taken over from Rambo Barbie at four, McCabe had been looking good. In fact, in a clean navy polo shirt and jeans, freshly shaven and with his hair combed, he had been looking handsome. Actually, way handsome.

  And way sexy.

  To her chagrin, she had realized that the serious attraction she’d felt toward him earlier was definitely not a figment of her imagination. FBI agent or not.

  Not that this had in any way endeared him
to her, then or now. In fact, just the opposite. A complication of that sort she absolutely did not need.

  So quit looking at him, she told herself, and, taking her own advice, averted her gaze and marched toward the bathroom.

  Caught in the act of taking a swig out of a can of Diet Coke, McCabe choked and swung his feet to the floor as her sudden appearance apparently caught him by surprise.

  “Something the matter?” he asked when he had recovered from his coughing fit. She was already halfway across the living room by that time.

  “Not a thing in the world,” she said, glancing over her shoulder. Their eyes met, and she realized he’d been tracking her across the room.

  If he was as flustered by her presence as she was by his, he did a darn good job of hiding it.

  “Oh. Good.” With that, his attention returned to the TV, and he relaxed into the couch again.

  Having reached the bathroom by that time, Maddie turned on the light, shut the door and locked it with a decided click, then paused to eye her surroundings. A thought occurred, and she turned on the faucet in the sink. The idea that he might be able to hear her using the facilities even over the TV was embarrassing, of course. But the idea that she might be able to allay any suspicions she had aroused in him that morning when he had caught her running the shower to cover her phone conversation was a consideration, too. If she was lucky, he might just hear the shower and think that she always used running water to cover bathroom sounds.

  Play the hand out.

  That’s what her father would have told her, and that’s just what she was going to do.

  Emerging from the bathroom a few minutes later, Maddie padded back across the smooth, cool hardwood floor toward her bedroom. Beyond casting a single glance her way when the door opened, McCabe ignored her, for which she was grateful. The easiest way to deal with having him in her apartment was to simply pretend he wasn’t there.

  But, even when she had crawled back into bed and pulled the sheet up around her neck and closed her eyes, she couldn’t get the thought that he was approximately twenty feet away out of her head.