Pawn

by Carla Cassidy

  He took a sip of his coffee and eyed her over the rim of the cup. "Are you sure you're all right? You really do look tense."

  Lynn leaned against the wall and sighed. "I didn't sleep well and then I got up to this computer problem." She couldn't tell him about the FBI. Leo knew nothing about her history and she liked it that way. A clean start, that's what she'd wanted when she'd decided to move to Phoenix.

  "Unfortunately, I can't help you with the computer and as far as not getting enough sleep, my advice would be take a nap." He drained his coffee cup and they left the office and returned to the kitchen where he rinsed his cup in the sink and put it in the drainer to dry.

  "Guess I'll head back over to my place. I just wanted to check in and see what's shaking."

  "Absolutely nothing. If I can get my computer working again I've got tons of work to do."

  "All work and no play make Lynn a boring girl." His blue eyes twinkled.

  She flashed him a quick smile. "All play and no work make Lynn homeless and hungry. Now, get out of here so I can figure out what's wrong with my computer." She walked with him to her front door.

  "Wanna share a pizza tonight?"

  She considered it for a moment. She and Leo often ate together on Saturday nights. "I had pizza last night."

  "What about Chinese?"

  "I don't think so, not tonight. I'm really swamped. I'll probably just nibble on something while I work." Although she did have a lot to do, that wasn't the reason for telling him no.

  She didn't feel much like socializing, especially since what she did feel was the presence of an insidious threat hanging over her head.

  "If you change your mind, let me know," Leo said. "I'm going to be in and out all day, but just leave a message on my machine or call my cell."

  "Okay, but don't count on it."

  She closed the door behind him as he left, then returned to her office and booted up her computer. To her surprise everything came up normal. She had just begun running a diagnostic to see if she could figure out what had caused the earlier anomaly when a knock once again fell on her door.

  Probably Leo again. She rarely had any other visitors.

  "Leo, I told you I'm not going to bed with you," she said as she pulled open the door.

  She stared at the tall, handsome dark-haired man at her door in stunned shock. "Nick." His name fell from her lips in a breathless whisper.

  "Hi, Lynn."

  The familiar deep voice washed over her. "Nick," she repeated and with utter abandon threw herself into his arms. Oh God, he smelled the same, a rich blend of minty soap and earthy cologne and his body against hers felt wonderfully magical.

  It had been so long, so terribly long since she'd seen him and it wasn't until this moment that she realized just how much she had missed him.

  His arms wound around her for one sweet moment, then he disentangled himself and took a step backward. "Can I come in?"

  "Yes, of course. Please, come in. My God, I can't believe you're here." Her head reeled with his presence. Nick. It had been a year since she'd last seen him and the sight of him filled places inside her that had been hollow for so long.

  She led him into the living room, wishing she'd dusted, regretting the fact that she hadn't put on any makeup that morning. She couldn't believe he was here in Phoenix, here in her living room.

  As he sat on her beige sofa, she drank in the vision of him. There were subtle changes in him from the last time she'd seen him. His dark hair was longer and his face was thinner, giving his appearance a dangerous edge that hadn't been there before.

  But, some things remained the same. His white dress shirt tugged across broad shoulders and his dark slacks fit nicely across his slim hips and muscular legs. His eyes were just as dark and gorgeous as she remembered, but at the moment they held no real emotion.

  She sat on a chair opposite the sofa and continued to stare at him as if he were some apparition. She'd dreamed of him often in the past year and what she wanted more than anything at this moment was to be in his arms.

  Did he feel it, too? The sparks that had ignited between them a year ago now simmered once again in the pit of her stomach, on the verge of a full-blown inferno.

  "How have you been? What are you doing here? Are you working here in the Phoenix area? You look wonderful." Giddy happiness swelled inside her and for a moment she felt like the young, innocent woman she had once been.

  "I've been all right." His deep voice resonated inside her. His gaze swept the length of her. "And you look great."

  She ran a hand through her hair, once again wishing she'd put on makeup, taken a little more time with her appearance that morning. "Thanks," she replied.

  "I understand you've been doing well, using your computer skills to make a living."

  "I'm doing okay. Creative Communications is the name of my business and it's been growing by leaps and bounds in the last couple of months." Some of the giddiness she'd experienced only moments before dissipated somewhat as she sensed a distance in him.

  "I'm glad you're doing well, Lynn."

  The last of her giddiness fell away as he didn't quite meet her gaze. Just because she had held thoughts of him close to her heart since their separation didn't mean he'd done the same with memories of her.

  He'd been her first lover and she'd always heard that women remembered their first. She certainly hadn't been his first, so maybe their relationship had never meant as much to him as it had her.

  "Nice place," he said as he looked around the room.

  "Thanks. The rent is reasonable and I like the general area." She leaned forward. "So, you didn't tell me. Are you working in the area?"

  He looked at her then, and in his dark eyes she saw something that caused a faint cold wind to blow through her. "It's a little more complicated than that."

  "What do you mean?" The beat of her heart, which had gone wild at the first sight of him now slowed to a dull thud of wariness.

  For a long moment he didn't answer as he once again broke eye contact with her. Whatever he had to say, it was obvious he was reluctant. He finally looked at her and any happiness she might have managed to hang on to fell away as she saw the unemotional, businesslike look in his eyes.

  "They sent me here, Lynn," he said. "They sent me here from Miami to try to convince you to work for them."

  "Then I guess that makes you a bastard," she exclaimed.

  THE VERY FIRST SIGHT of her had been like a punch in the gut. She was as beautiful—no, more beautiful—than she had been a year before.

  There was a new maturity in her unusual gold-green eyes, a confidence in her carriage that spoke of an inner strength that had been undeveloped when he'd known her before.

  She'd been an innocent, very young twenty-two a year ago. Now she looked like a woman who had taken control of her life and was comfortable with the direction she intended to go.

  He'd seen the happiness that had lit her eyes when she'd first opened the door and looked at him and had fought against a responding burst of joy in himself. She had been a thing of magic for him for ail-too brief a time and in the first second of seeing her he'd once again felt that stir.

  He couldn't get caught up in the memories, in her. Things had changed and there were now powerful people playing significant roles in both their lives. Of course, she wasn't aware of that yet, but within minutes she would understand that it was useless to fight the inevitable, that she could either go along with the program or be destroyed.

  "I guess that does make me a bastard," he agreed. "A bastard who is following orders."

  What little happiness remained in her eyes instantly doused at his words. Her gaze narrowed and her expression went from warm to arctic cool. "So, you're here as a tool for the Feds to use against me."

  She stood and walked over to the living room window, her slender back presented to him like a wall. Her tight jeans hugged the length of her slender legs and cupped the curve of her shapely butt. The blue top she wore had s
paghetti straps, making him realize there was no bra beneath. He definitely couldn't allow his thoughts to go there.

  "Go away, Nick. I already gave them my answer." The flatness of her voice cut through him like a knife.

  The last thing he wanted to do was hurt her, but he was in a box, and whether she knew it or not, she was in one, too. It was a box where somebody else had drawn the boundaries and there was no escape.

  "It's not that simple, Lynn," he replied.

  She whirled around to face him, her eyes more green than gold and radiating with an anger, a strength he'd not have thought possible in her. "What's not simple? I told them no, and I'm telling you no. I'm not working for them and that's that."

  "That's not true," he countered. He wondered what life had taught her in the past year. When they'd first become involved she'd been unusually naive, without the kind of experiences that taught character and strength and purpose. That had started to change when she'd learned of his true purpose in working for her godfather. Now he saw disillusionment shining from her unusual eyes.

  He tamped down his regret. He was here to do a job and he couldn't allow emotion or memories to cloud the issue.

  He stood. "They aren't going to let you go, Lynn. They need you, and what they need you for is in the interest of national security."

  "I don't care why they need me. They can't make me go back to work for them." She swiped a strand of her shiny, reddish-brown hair behind an ear, a gesture he remembered that indicated stress.

  "That's where you're wrong. They can make you. These people who contacted you, they aren't your ordinary Feds. They're hybrids, working for a splinter agency but under the guise of FBI. Trust me, these aren't people to screw around with."

  He took a step toward her, unsurprised when she took a step back, wary suspicion playing in her eyes. He hated them for making him do this, for using him to get to her.

  "How did your computer work this morning?" he asked. "Have any problems?" She stared at him, a pulse beating rapidly in the hollow of her throat. "This morning they gave you just a little taste of what they're capable of. Maybe nothing else will happen today, but maybe tomorrow or the day after, your Web sites will begin to experience difficulties. Mistakes will appear on sites you've already built, errors that make you look careless, that make you look incompetent. And, that's not all they'll do to you."

  Her gaze narrowed and the pulse in her throat beat faster. "You might as well tell me all of it," she finally said.

  "They'll destroy what you've built with your business, screw around with your finances to ruin your credit. And if none of that works, they have enough charges pending against you that they can put you in prison and throw away the key."

  She moved back to the chair opposite the sofa and sat down hard. For a moment she stared at some indefinable point just to the left of where he stood. When she finally met his gaze, her eyes once again blazed with an anger that stunned him.

  "You promised," she said, her voice low and barely audible. "You promised me that if I helped bring down Jonas, then all those charges would be dropped. That was the deal, that my record would be clean. So, you lied to me." Bitterness hardened her voice.

  "No, they lied to me," he said. "At the time I told you that, that's what I was being told. We were both lied to."

  She leaned back in the chair and released a weary sigh. "Why me? Why can't they get somebody else to do whatever it is that needs to be done?"

  "I don't know," he said honestly. "They didn't tell me what they want you to do or why they needed you specifically to do it. They only told me it involved national security. My job was to come here and see that you understand that you have no alternative other than to cooperate with them."

  Her hard gaze held his for a long moment. "How nice, that they could use the emotional baggage of my past to try to bend me to their will."

  Nick drew a deep breath and swiped a hand through his dark hair. He didn't want to remember the passion that had once filled him for her, refused to remember the love he'd once felt for her.

  There was no point in going back there. At the moment his life was more complicated than it had ever been. There was no place in it for memories, for emotional weakness, for Lynn.

  "I didn't want to do this to you," he said. "I didn't want to be a party to screwing up your life, but I had no choice in this, either."

  One of her chestnut eyebrows rose slightly. "And what are they holding over your head, Nick?"

  His chest tightened as he thought of the threats that had been leveled against him, against what was left of his family. "I'm just doing my job."

  "Just like you did a year ago?" Bitterness was once again rife in her voice. "Just like you were doing your job when you seduced the boss's daughter in order to get closer to the boss?"

  Those had been Nick's orders when he'd been working undercover to bring down Jonas White. He'd gotten a job as head of security at the mansion where Jonas lived, but when it looked as though he was as close to the man as he could get, Nick's orders had been to get close through Lynn.

  What had begun as a job had become much more. He'd found himself enchanted by Lynn's innocence, charmed by her humor and stimulated by her intelligence.

  "You know better than that," he now said vehemently. "No matter what has happened since, I didn't pretend anything that I felt for you then. You knew what I felt for you was real, not just some assignment I'd been handed." He held her gaze intently. "You were the one who left, Lynn. You were the one who walked away."

  She stood once again, her posture stiff and chin lifted in defiance. "And you know there were things I needed to figure out, things I had to find out about myself and where I came from."

  "I know," he said softly. "And that was then and this is now and one way or another, they're going to get you. You might as well make it easy on yourself and find out what they want."

  He pulled a business card from his pocket and laid it on the coffee table between them. "There's a number written on this. It will ring directly to Mr. Blake, who is waiting to fill you in. Call him, Lynn."

  She looked at the card as if it were a Gila monster that had crawled up on her coffee table and taken up unwanted residency. When she gazed at him he once again saw a steely core of strength shining from her eyes.

  "Message delivered," she said, then shot a pointed gaze toward the front door.

  There were a million other things he wanted to say to her, a hundred regrets he'd liked to have voiced. He wanted to tell her that thoughts of her had often played in his head, that he'd always hoped he would see her again.

  He wanted to ask her if she'd come to terms with the pain of Jonas's betrayal, if she'd found all the answers she'd been seeking when she'd left him behind. And, he wanted to know who Leo was and had she meant she wouldn't sleep with him today, or she wouldn't sleep with him ever?

  But, what was the point? He wasn't inviting himself back into her life. He had a plane to catch and a shadow life filled with bad guys waiting for him.

  "Despite the circumstances, it was good to see you again," he said as he walked toward the front door. She didn't walk with him, but remained standing by the coffee table.

  He opened the front door then turned back to look at her, waiting to see if she was going to say anything more to him.

  She didn't.

  As Nick stepped out of her apartment and pulled the door closed behind him, he wondered what the agency wanted with her, wondered if he had just handed her a death warrant. Because he knew more than anyone that the men who wanted her played for keeps.

  Chapter 3

  She made the call two hours after Nick walked out her front door. It had taken her that long to process everything he'd said and everything she'd felt at seeing him again.

  She knew he was right. If they wanted her, somehow, someway, they would get her. They could make her life miserable and still sleep well at night.

  At four o'clock that afternoon she got into her car to head to a meet
ing with the enigmatic Mr. Blake. The last thing she wanted to do was give the FBI another minute of her life. But she wasn't stupid enough to think that she could fight them.

  As she drove to the warehouse where they had taken her the night before, she tightened her hands on the steering wheel as she thought of the threat of imprisonment.

  Breaking and entering, theft of artifacts, grand theft—there were a thousand charges they could use to see her in prison until she was a very old woman.

  She'd been promised that the charges would be dropped if she helped get Jonas under arrest. She'd upheld her end of the bargain, but apparently she'd been the only one to do so.

  Big surprise, a government agency had lied to her. Once again she tightened her fingers around the steering wheel as she thought of their broken promises.

  She consciously kept her thoughts away from Nick. What point was there in indulging in what-might-have-beens? He'd been right. She had been the one to walk away and she couldn't harbor bitterness about the fact that their relationship had died due to lack of nourishment and through long distance.

  It pissed her off that he'd been the messenger of doom, that the FBI had guessed that, of all people, Nick would be the only one to convince her to do what they wanted.

  It also upset her that seeing him again had sent all kinds of memories crashing through her head, memories she didn't want to indulge.

  It hadn't been Nick who had convinced her to make the call. It had been the fact that she knew he was telling her the truth, that they would stop at nothing. They would follow through on their threats to destroy her professional life and to take away her personal life. They'd proven that by what they'd managed to do on her computer that morning.

  She had no choice in the matter.

  What she hoped was that she'd meet with Blake, hear the details of whatever they wanted her to do, then somehow talk her way out of it without any further repercussions.

  As she drove through the desert landscape her thoughts momentarily drifted back in time to the lush flowers, bright colors and salt-scented air of Miami.