by Rachel Lee
“Maybe, when I was little. When I got older I was something of a hell-raiser.” He stroked her soft cheek with a fingertip. “I managed to avoid any real trouble, though. I always wanted to be one of the good guys.”
When she decided it was time to get out of the tub, he insisted on toweling her dry himself, and he took unabashed pleasure in the task, lingering in ways that made her feel desirable and prized. The pajama top he gave her to wear was simple blue cotton, but it was soft with many washings, and it smelled like him. By the time he settled her on the bed and tucked the covers around her legs, she was feeling totally pampered.
Propped against pillows, she smiled up at him. “You sure know how to take care of a lady.”
He perched on the bed beside her and leaned toward her to give her a warm, caressing kiss on the lips. “I’m glad you think so.”
She reached up and cupped his face in her hands, reveling in the scratchy sensation of his beard. “What brought all this on, Arlen? Did something happen?”
The habit of secrecy was deeply ingrained in him from his better than sixteen years with the Bureau. The FBI released information from current investigations only when there was some advantage in doing so. As Special Agent in Charge, he had for years been making the decision about what could be usefully revealed, and he was usually inclined to reveal nothing. Even now, looking into Jessie’s worried brown eyes, he leaned toward silence. He didn’t see how it could possibly help the Bureau or her for her to know about Carl Stratton, or the connection between Dobrocek and Barron. Or that Barron had been murdered. Not even when he needed to persuade her to be careful of her safety had he told her that a murder had been committed.
Jessica’s gaze skipped over his features, taking in every nuance of his expression. “You don’t have to tell me anything,” she said quietly. “I realize you can’t talk about your cases. I shouldn’t have asked.”
But the questions were there in her eyes, and he could read them clearly. He sighed when she leaned forward and touched a light kiss to his rough chin.
“I need a shave,” he said. He could see the redness his beard had left on her cheeks and neck. “I need a shower.”
She smiled. “Go ahead. I’ll bet there’s plenty of hot water.”
He started to smile as she settled back against the pillow. She’s a treasure, he thought. An honest-to-God treasure. And then his smile faded completely.
“Jessie,” he said. “Jessie, I know it’s hard to sustain a high level of caution for a long period. I know that it’s been wearing you to a nub and that you’re getting past the point of fear. I can see it.”
Her bright brown eyes regarded him steadily, but he saw the leap of the pulse in her throat, a sign he was scaring her. Damn it, he had to keep her scared to keep her safe. “Jessie, don’t trust anyone. Please. This case has gone beyond the usual limits. There’s a very real danger.”
Her own expression grew serious as she waited for him to explain. When he didn’t speak, she felt a certainty settle like lead in her stomach. It was something she had suspected all along.
“Dave Barron didn’t kill himself, did he?”
His silence would have been answer enough, but he was never one to take the easy way. Nor would he lie. “No, he didn’t kill himself.”
Jessica drew a sharp, shaky breath. “I wondered. I couldn’t really believe that he had.”
He took her hand and held it between both of his own. Rubbing it gently while his mind raced, he tried yet again to find a way to remove her from all of this. He kept expecting her to turn from him—he’d gotten her deeper into this, after all—but she never took her somber gaze from his face.
“That’s why you asked me to be careful,” she said presently, her voice little more than a murmur. “You found out he’d been murdered.”
He didn’t bother to answer that one. It was self-evident. Instead, he did the only thing he could think of. He leaned forward until he lay against her, his face in the curve between her neck and shoulder. Her arms closed around his shoulders immediately, and in their strength he felt her tension and fear. Damn, he thought, at some point she was bound to conclude that he had wanted only to use her as bait. It wasn’t true, but there was no way he could prove that. And when she reached that conclusion, she would never, ever forgive him.
“I’m not going to leave you alone for a minute, Jessie,” he told her, pressing a kiss on the warm, soft skin of her neck. “Not a minute. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
She made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a sniffle. “And here I was hoping you were spending all this time with me because you like being with me.” As soon as the words were out, she wanted to snatch them back. She couldn’t believe she had revealed so much of her hopes, so much of her fears. He didn’t want her to care for him. He didn’t want to be responsible for her caring or hurting. Funny, he could be so quick to protect her, to take responsibility for her physical safety, but he didn’t want any responsibility for her emotional safety. Of course, he didn’t want to feel anything himself. No involvement. No emotional risk.
It occurred to him that he had been a fool in more ways than one. If he had any excuse, it was that this was his first affair, too. After all, Lucy had been the only woman he’d dated, and that had been a chaste relationship until their wedding night. Still, he wondered now how he had ever thought that Jessica wouldn’t demand a declaration of some feeling other than lust from him. Of course she wanted to know that she meant something to him. Hell, he wanted to know the same from her. He just didn’t want to mean too much.
“Of course I like being with you,” he said gruffly. He could say that with perfect truth.
Her arms tightened on him, and her hands began to caress his upper back. She asked nothing more. Instead, with her touches, she let him know she felt the same way.
At length she sighed. “I suppose we have to get back.”
“Not until morning.” He was taking a risk, but he felt it was a necessary one. Let the watchers wonder where they’d gone, but Jessica would have this time to escape and regroup. “I figure we can get up a little early and go home to dress for work.”
“Sounds good to me.” Did he, she wondered, realize he had referred to her house as home, as if it were his? Her heart accelerated a little with hope, and Arlen suddenly raised his head to smile into her eyes.
“What did you just think about?” he asked huskily. “Your heart went into overdrive.”
Her cheeks heated and she shook her head, too embarrassed to answer. He must never know how much she wanted from him. If he ever guessed how much she cared for him, he would retreat in short order.
“My heart speeds up anytime I think about you,” she answered finally, feeling terribly, painfully shy. “All I have to do is think about you kissing me or touching me…”
Now that was something he felt he could handle, so he did. Willingly, readily, tenderly. Damn, but she made him feel tender.
In fact, she just plain made him feel.
Chapter 11
Jessica arrived more than a half hour early for work in the morning, but when she stepped into the section and closed the door behind her, she saw Frank Winkowski coming down the hall with a sheaf of papers in his hands.
“Morning, Frank. Getting a head start on the week?’
Frank was usually a cheerful, pleasant man, but this morning he looked disgruntled. “Well, I’d like to,” he said almost peevishly.
“What’s wrong?”
“The damn cleaning crew,” he said irritably. “I’ve left notes for them before, and they usually listen for a while, but this time it’s worse than I’ve ever seen it.”
“Notes about what? What did they do?’
“They rearranged things on my desk! But this time…! I tell you, Jessica, I won’t stand for it any longer. This time they were in my desk. And I can’t imagine what they must have been doing in here over the weekend, but one of Bob’s reports was in my desk drawer—” he wave
d the offending papers beneath her nose “—and one of my folders is missing. I hope it’s in Bob’s desk! All I know is, I’m going down to maintenance right now to complain about this!”
“Wait a minute, Frank.” Jessica’s heart skipped a beat and then slipped into high gear. “Let’s go to my office and talk about this first.”
Frank, his face flushed with annoyance, paused in the process of opening his mouth to continue his tirade. “Why?” he asked instead.
“Just come with me and I’ll explain.” Butterflies fluttered wildly in her stomach as she led the way to her office. How much should she tell him, if anything? And what would Arlen think if she betrayed to the wrong person the fact that the FBI was involved?
She closed her door behind them. Frank took the one extra chair and sat back, papers on his lap.
“What gives?” he demanded. “You can’t do anything about the janitors, so why do you want to discuss this?”
“What if it wasn’t the janitors, Frank?” she asked baldly. She didn’t have any other idea about how to begin this discussion, so she jumped right in.
“Not the janitors?” He repeated the words almost blankly, then abruptly leaned forward as they penetrated. “What are you suggesting? That somebody was looking for something in my office?”
Jessica was thinking as rapidly as she ever had in her life. Arlen, she reminded herself, didn’t want anybody to know their relationship was anything but personal. He also didn’t want anybody to know that the FBI was investigating her missing document.
And, she recalled with a sudden thud of her heart, Dave Barron had been murdered, possibly because he had found out something. She was being a complete and utter fool if she allowed anyone to guess that she had more than a passing interest in odd happenings around MTI.
Taking a breath to steady herself, she decided she had better be careful. Trouble was, she hadn’t gotten much sleep last night, and her mind was a little fuzzy. Frank, however, was still leaning forward, looking at her with a strange intensity. She had said enough to either make him think she was losing her marbles or make him suspicious that something was going on. Stupid, Jess, she told herself. Stupid, stupid. Let the pros handle this stuff.
“Uh, no,” she said. “I’m not really suggesting anything, Frank. I guess I’m still nervous about that document I mislaid. Maybe a little paranoid.”
Frank’s lips thinned. “I can understand that. I’m getting a little paranoid about my desk. Damn it, Jessica, you’d think these cleaning people would understand that you don’t fiddle around with somebody’s desk. Considering the kind of work we do here, I don’t think nosy janitors ought to be tolerated.”
She nodded agreement. “But we don’t keep anything classified on our desks.”
“No, of course not, but you know as well as I do that there’s plenty of important stuff that isn’t classified. Things that would be useful to our competitors as well as to other nations. I’m going downstairs, and I’m going to lodge a written complaint.”
“What folder of yours is missing?” she thought to ask as he stood up to leave.
“The design you wrote for the Sure Eye project.”
Jessica’s heart slammed. She had thought from the outset that the design ought to be classified. The classification guidance provided by the Department of Defense, however, had not permitted it, so she and Bob Harrow had decided to mark it Company Confidential. Theoretically, that designation meant it wouldn’t be shown to anyone outside the company and would be treated as a trade secret.
It remained true that, regardless of classification, it delineated the software for the project in a way that would make it possible for someone else to duplicate the project if they had access to the necessary database of technical information about countermeasures—some of which information was contained in the document that had been taken from her safe.
Troubled, she watched Frank leave, evidently fixed in his determination to complain to maintenance, her own mind still worrying at the problems. A Company Confidential document was relatively easy to steal. People could, and did, carry them off the premises in the course of business. A kind of accountability was kept, a record of everyone who had a copy, but it wasn’t difficult for someone else to obtain one or gain access to the information.
The person who was stealing and copying documents could well be someone who didn’t recognize the difference between a classified document and a Company Confidential document. Or it could be someone with the technical know-how to realize how the project design fitted into the whole. Well, it had to be the cleaning crew, because everyone in the section already had a copy of her design report. The cleaning crew or security—either one had access over the weekends. And that was something Arlen needed to know.
Picking up her phone, she hesitated. She really should go off-site to call. But then, Frank had left the section, and there wasn’t a soul here to overhear her. She dialed.
“FBI.”
“This is Jessica Kilmer. May I speak to Special Agent Coulter?”
“Ma’am, I’m sorry, but Agent Coulter is in court this morning. Can someone else help you?”
Jessica glanced at her watch and saw that it wasn’t yet eight. Wasn’t that too early for court? Something else must be going on. “Will he be back before noon?”
“Yes, ma’am, he’s expected around eleven.”
Arlen didn’t want her to discuss anything to do with the spying on the telephone, so she was left with no alternative. “Please tell him that it’s important he meet me for lunch today. I’ll be at the Corner Pub a little after twelve. If there’s a problem with that, he can call me at work.”
The woman who answered the phone repeated the message, and Jessica hung up.
Nearly four more hours. She had the feeling that time was going to crawl.
A movement in the corner of her eye startled her and she spun around, but no one was there. Of course no one was there, she reassured herself, willing her hammering heart to slow down. Frank was the only person in the section who was already at work, and he had gone downstairs to castigate the maintenance people.
“Paranoid, Jess,” she told herself aloud, needing the sound in the suddenly uncomfortable silence of the empty office. “Your imagination is running away with you again.”
The morning crawled even more slowly for Arlen than it did for Jessica. He was used to the time involved in any kind of legal action, but even ingrained patience couldn’t make the waiting go any faster.
Maddy Kazin had dumped the required information for the wiretaps on his desk sometime last evening, and it had been the first thing he looked at this morning. A quick reading told him that Kazin had done her job; this should be enough to get the court order. He had learned a long time ago, however, that attorneys often had a different perspective on such things, particularly U.S. Attorneys. Scooping up the file, he headed upstairs to Carolyn Granger’s office, knowing he would probably have to defend his request before she would take it to the judge.
“Intuitively,” Carolyn Granger said a half hour later, “I see why you think the tap is necessary. The evidence is slim, though, and mostly circumstantial. As far as I know, it’s still not a crime for a U.S. citizen to be acquainted with a Czech, or even with a KGB agent, for that matter. You’re acquainted with more than a few yourself.”
“Yep,” he agreed calmly, maintaining the control that had gotten him through plenty of tense situations in his career. No one would ever have guessed how tired he was of all this legal maneuvering. Of course, a long time ago he had accepted the difference between an FBI agent and a lawyer. He was an agent because he was a man of action. A man of action was bound to get impatient with all the dotting of i’s and crossing of t’s.
She smiled faintly at him. “No argument?”
“What’s the point?” He flashed a quick smile in return. “If there’s any way possible, you’ll get me what I want, Caro. You usually do.”
She shook her head, her smile growing br
oader. “You take all the fun out of it. I’m supposed to drive you crazy with my nitpicking. You’re supposed to do anything short of going down on your knees to get what you want.”
“I’ll kneel right now if it’ll speed things up.”
Carolyn shook her head once again. “It would be a mistake to rush, and you know it. It could blow our case out of the water if a defense attorney can argue that the tap was illegal and therefore inadmissible.”
“You’re talking like a lawyer again,” Arlen remarked wryly.
Which was how he came to be standing at the window at the end of the hall outside Carolyn Granger’s office while she wove together the necessary threads.
He rocked back onto his heels and shoved his hands into his trouser pockets. Looking up at the blue, blue sky of a sunny Texas morning, he found himself thinking of the velvet darkness of the night just past. The satisfaction he felt this morning went far beyond anything as simple as satisfied passion, though. Yesterday he had been useful to another person on a purely emotional level that had fulfilled a startling need of his own.
It was a need he hadn’t really been aware of until now. He had thought—foolishly, it now appeared—that he’d closed a chapter in his life and hereafter would be content with his work, his grandchildren and his other interests. A man who had been the hub of the family for half his life, a man who was accustomed to taking care of others, should have known better. Last night had reminded him that he needed to be needed.
For better than three years now he had closed up on himself and convinced himself that he no longer needed what he no longer had. The folly of that delusion had become eminently obvious to him last night and this morning. And damned if he wanted to sacrifice this morning’s utter contentment for some stupid notion that he was too old to be entitled to it. But Jessica was too young for him, too biologically young. That youth was going to take her away from him, because she would want children and…
Children. Another problem. He had missed out on Melanie’s early infancy, but he had been around for Andrew’s birth and first few months. He could still remember the warm wonder and awe he had felt when he held his son. The small, soft head in the crook of his arm, the fingers and toes so tiny it was impossible to believe they were so perfectly formed. Yeah, he remembered it all vividly. He remembered feeling vaguely embarrassed by the rush of tenderness he had felt for those tiny little children, embarrassed by the soft, warm, utterly unmacho feelings they’d evoked in him. He’d never mentioned those feelings to anyone, but they had tempered his every action ever since.
