Dare Me

by Julie Leto

  On his orders, nothing had been removed from the house and every piece of bric-a-brac had been x-rayed, examined, catalogued and then returned to its original home. Even the precise arrangements of the knick-knacks, chairs, settees and claw-footed tables had been studied for patterns that could lead them to the code.

  But so far, the Arm agents had come up empty. The code, likely a collection of letters, numbers and symbols, could literally be anywhere in the house.

  He followed Macy as she assessed the scope of her mission, stopping when his groin nearly brushed against her backside. He took a moment to close his eyes and inhale the subtle scent of her perfume, a cool aroma tinged with sharp lemon, refreshing mint and soothing chamomile. When he opened his eyes, he realized how close he’d leaned in. His nose was less than an inch from her hair.

  He wanted her beyond reason. At one time, he’d questioned the depth of his need, even railed against the connection that floated only a step below obsession. But now, he accepted how his love simply ran deep and that a man like him could stop at nothing until he won back the woman who owned his heart.

  “I refuse your offer,” she said coolly.

  “You have no alternative.”

  “I could kill you.”

  “Then my men would kill you. Neither the Arm nor T-45 would have the code, all because you don’t want to face what we once had together.”

  “What we once had died the day you betrayed me.” To her credit, her voice remained steady and strong.

  “Maybe. Are you courageous enough to find out for sure?”

  Macy glanced over her shoulder, her eyes narrow slits of blue. “I know for sure, the same way that I know I’ll find the code.”

  She stepped away again and tapped her large stud earring.

  “This is Rush, reporting in.”

  As the agent monitoring her message replied, she brushed past him.

  “Patch me directly to Marshall,” she ordered. “We have a problem.”

  * * *

  The burn of his stare scorched the back of her neck, but Macy refused to turn around. She’d once thought Dante couldn’t be any more arrogant and confident than he had been ten years ago when they’d first met—he the master agent and she the rookie spy. How wrong she’d been. Now, she was one of the most sought-after “finders” in the covert operations business, the next in line to helm T-45, the quintessential elite spy organization envied by everyone from the CIA to MI-5 and Mossad. And yet, all he wanted was her in his bed.

  Well, he could have her goddamned body. It was her heart he truly wanted—and that he’d never possess. Never again.

  “Marshall, here. Do you have the house?”

  “Negative,” Macy answered. “The Arm owns the property. Has for two weeks.”

  “Why didn’t we know?” Marshall asked.

  Macy smirked. “Even the Arm manages to cover their tracks every once in a while.”

  Abe Marshall voiced his annoyance with a series of unintelligible grumblings. None of the agents who worked for Abercrombie Marshall ever admitted to understanding when their boss’s voice lowered to a gruff mumble—likely because no one wanted to know what the man was saying. He was probably firing them all, and if they asked him to speak up, the dismissal would become permanent.

  “How many agents on-site?” he finally asked with clarity.

  “Unknown. Burke is here. He’s doing the bargaining.”

  “The Arm doesn’t negotiate with T-45.”

  Macy pushed aside the sheers blocking the light from the window. Through the low-hanging branches from the century-old oak outside, she spied her fellow T-45 agents. Unfortunately, just a few steps away, disguised quite effectively as a man painting a garden fence and another as a carpenter repairing a broken shutter, were two Arm operatives. A standoff between the two organizations would clearly get them nowhere.

  “Apparently, the Arm will negotiate today. He’s offering me full access to the house. His agents have failed to find anything of use after two weeks of searching.”

  “Maybe there is nothing to find,” Abe offered.

  Macy shook her head, her chest tightening. For as long as she’d been working with Abercrombie Marshall, he’d always shown the utmost confidence in her instincts and her deductive skills. She’d left the Arm—and Dante—because neither the top dogs in the organization nor her lover trusted her as implicitly as Abe. And she’d never proved him wrong. So why, after all this time, did the sharp sting of even a logical question still remain?

  “No,” she insisted, determined to shake the topsy-turvy reaction to having Dante back in her presence, much less her life. “I studied Bogdanov’s journal and letters. I’ve interviewed him myself. The code is here.”

  “Bogdanov is insane, Macy.”

  This much was true. Grigoriy Bogdanov, once the golden boy of Soviet computer science, had been examined by T-45’s elite neurologists from New York, London and Tokyo. They all agreed that the man who had designed and implemented the last computer system to operate the nuclear silos for the Russian government suffered from an extremely aggressive form of dementia. His moments of clarity were few and far between, and no combination of medication or therapy had been able to reverse the damage to his brain cells or coax the healthy pathways of his mind to reveal the information only he possessed.

  But Macy had refused to give up. She’d spent a rigorous week with Bogdanov after T-45 pulled him into protective custody from the bucolic mental institution where his wife had stashed him—the very wife who’d turned up dead just one day after the terrorists transmitted their first threat to the Russian government. Macy knew that further attempts to extract the code from Bogdanov’s memory were impossible, but she also believed the man too intelligent and too meticulous to store the crucial combination only in a vulnerable human brain. She knew the code existed. She’d tracked the likeliest location as the New Orleans house where he’d first retreated after his defection.

  Now, she simply had to work her way through the detritus of an old man’s obsession with antiques in order to find it.

  And to do that, she had to sleep with the man who’d once broken her heart.

  “Insanity seems to be running rampant around here,” she answered.

  Her boss chuckled. Abercrombie Marshall had been with T-45 for as long as anyone in the business could remember. Like her, he was an American ex-patriot spy denied a chance to rise through the ranks of the intelligence community in the United States—he because of his race, she on account of her tarnished reputation, courtesy of Dante Burke.

  “What does he want in exchange for his unexpected cooperation?” Abe asked.

  Macy glanced over her shoulder. Dante remained standing near the threshold to the parlor, his incredible body framed by the archway, his silver eyes locked on her with pure, unadulterated lust.

  “He wants a copy of the counter-code in case our clients don’t use the combination to benefit the United States.”

  Abe paused. Macy turned back toward the window and pressed her eyelids closed, waiting for the question that was sure to come.

  “That’s not all he wants. Damn it, Macy, he wants you, doesn’t he?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “I should order you out of there,” Abe said, his deep voice brimming with anger.

  “Why? There are worse things a woman could do to save the world, right?”

  With a smirk, she disconnected the communication and turned back to Dante, straightening her spine and tilting her chin upward so he knew he hadn’t beaten her. Despite the traitorous thrill that snaked through her bloodstream at the thought of his hands on her flesh again, pleasuring her in ways only he ever had, she knew one thing with perfect clarity—he could have her body, but he’d never, ever, sneak back into her soul.

  Chapter 3

  Exhaustion pressed Macy onto the bed around one o’clock in the morning, her body jostling the secured laptop computer she’d tossed onto the mattress. Even after she closed her ey
es, her vision swam with schematics, code markers and patterns. The key points from the dozens of Arm reports she’d read before daybreak repeated in her brain like mantras to failure, all spoken to her in the melodious baritone voice of Dante Burke. The sensual timbre of his voice so invaded her mind that she didn’t hear him when he actually called her name from the doorway.

  She grunted in response.

  “Have a hard day?” he asked.

  With annoyance giving a shot of spitfire to her spent energy, she turned her head to see him leaning against the threshold to her room. In a white shirt rolled up at the sleeves and expertly tailored slacks in cool slate gray, he was the epitome of casual style. He’d loosened his hair so that his rakish dark locks nearly touched his strong, square shoulders. He’d pulled out all the stops in ensuring that at least physically, he was perfect.

  She, on the other hand, undoubtedly resembled a well-used dishrag. Working through the puzzles that were Bogdanov’s kitchen and parlor from dawn until long after dusk wiped the sparkle off a woman. If he didn’t find her irresistible tonight, so much the better.

  “What do you want?” she asked, knowing full well the range his desires might include. She’d finished her search for the day. The time had come for her to pay the price for his cooperation.

  “Find anything?” he asked.

  “Nothing beyond all the hidden cameras you’ve had installed throughout the house. You were watching me the whole time.”

  He shrugged. “Voyeuristic tendencies are prevalent in our profession.”

  She shifted to lean up on her elbows. Her arms ached, but she spared him a wry smile. “It’s more prevalent in some than in others.”

  “Depends on who is being watched. Some people are innately…impossible to ignore.”

  He stepped into the threshold, but she had her gun drawn and sighted before his foot crossed from the carpet in the hall to the wood in her room.

  “We had an agreement, remember? This room is mine.”

  And hers alone. After assuring her boss that she was prepared to take Dante’s offer in exchange for full access to the Prytania Street house, she’d created a private haven within the walls of this small bedroom just off the hallway to the kitchen. He’d agreed that she could search the tiny maid’s quarters to her heart’s content and Dante would refrain from invading her personal space for the duration of her stay.

  Unlike all the other rooms in the house. Those rooms came with a price.

  When she’d agreed to his challenge last night, she’d never expected the twist he’d introduce to the deal. She should have anticipated he’d up the stakes at some point, but for the briefest instant, she’d actually thought he cared about saving the world from destruction more than he cared about his sex life.

  How wrong she’d been.

  But to gain full access to each room, she’d agreed to his erotic demand. Once she’d searched a room top to bottom—once they knew that the code would not be found there, he would disengage the hidden cameras and she would make love to him there. She had no right of refusal, no voice in how he reintroduced her to the delights of their lovemaking.

  She had to submit entirely to his amorous intentions, no questions asked.

  Since she’d already agreed to his desperate plan to win her back, she didn’t balk at his added terms. Maybe this interplay would be good—for both of them.

  He needed to understand that they were over. She was looking forward to some hot, sweaty, mindless sex. And in the end, Dante would accept that while he might still possess the power to excite her body, he would never again invade her heart.

  He stepped away from her weapon, his eyebrow quirked in amusement.

  “You shouldn’t pull a weapon if you don’t intend to use it,” he warned.

  She slid the 9mm beneath her pillow. “Who said I don’t intend to use it?”

  “You’re not a killer.”

  “You have no idea how I’ve changed,” she insisted, despite the fact that he was essentially right. Macy had the skills and training to take care of herself, but she preferred using her wit to work her way out of danger. “Since I left you, Dante, I’ve been living a very different life. Working for T-45 is light years from employment with the Arm. You have rules. A government to answer to.”

  “And you have Abercrombie Marshall. He’s not exactly a wild-eyed rogue.”

  She nodded. “He’s the most ethical man I’ve met in this world of traitors, liars and thieves.”

  “What does he think of our little deal?”

  Macy rolled to the edge of the bed, sitting upright as she stretched her shoulders to loosen the tightness settling between her joints. “He doesn’t know the particulars. And what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

  She glanced up at Dante. God, how could he look so utterly smug and superior when he’d had to resort to blackmail to get her into his bed again? Did nothing shake this man’s limitless confidence?

  “What he doesn’t know won’t hurt you either, Macy. I hope you’re prepared to enjoy yourself.”

  “I could enjoy myself just fine here alone in my room.”

  “But that’s not our deal. Unless you want to change the terms? Maybe you’d like to be the one who seduces me?”

  She marched to the door. He was attempting to push her buttons, but she preferred to deal straight up rather than expend her energy in some fruitless game of cat and mouse.

  “Stuff it, Dante. You want to screw around, that’s fine. I agreed to your offer. But know this—you’re wasting your time if you think I’ll ever go back to you.”

  She’d come too close. When the tip of his finger skimmed her chin and cheek, igniting a warm sensation before she had a chance to move away, she had no choice but stand firm. She couldn’t show any weakness or he’d use the vulnerability against her.

  He pressed his full palm against her skin, reminding her with a simple touch of the intimacy they’d once shared. Score one for him, except Macy hadn’t needed reminding. In nine long years, she’d never once forgotten the intensity of his sweet caresses, their all-night-long chats about everything and nothing, or the lovemaking that lasted until both their bodies grew numb from sensual overload.

  In fact, the night before he’d betrayed her to her superiors, he’d lured her to a favorite hideaway, a cabin deep in the Virginia forest where they could escape the world of covert operations that had come to rule both their lives. In the seclusion of their private escape, he’d seduced her with all her favorite indulgences from a scalding shower with multiple streams of water beating down on them as they made love against the tiles to a wild game of hide and seek in the woods outside that ended with a session under the stars that had left her satiated for hours.

  Then she’d awoken the next morning alone in bed, laughing innocently as she picked twigs and leaves from various places on her body, never for one minute suspecting that while she languished in the sweet soreness of incredible sex, Dante had returned to headquarters to file a crucial piece of intel that ended up saving several agents from detection and, ultimately, death. Intelligence she’d gathered—and had shared with him.

  Now, she was about to charge headlong into the same brand of hot, mind-altering sex. Only this time, the outcome wouldn’t be nearly the same. He couldn’t break her heart, not after she’d worked so hard to make sure the brittle, delicate pieces never reformed. Not with him. Not with anyone.

  Dante released her, breaking the tentative spell that had lured her into the past. He stepped back and gestured to the hallway. He was ready for his payment and she had no choice but to comply. “You are back with me, Macy, at least in body. For now, I’m willing to work with what I have.”

  “I need a shower,” she snapped.

  “No time. I’ve calculated this evening down to the minute. At some point, you will need sleep, so you’ll have to stick to my schedule.”

  She hated the way he said “schedule” without using the hard k sound. She hated the way he disappeared
into the hallway without looking back, so certain that she’d follow. She hated that she did as he asked and joined him in the kitchen—a room she’d searched all day without finding anything of use.

  The only thing that made the situation bearable was that after picking through every cabinet and examining every plate, cup and saucer in the entire twenty-by-twenty room, she wasn’t as grimy as she expected. Bogdanov’s wife had employed a meticulous housekeeper, one that the Arm had no doubt debriefed and likely had in custody since T-45 had been unable to locate her.

  Macy tried to throw her mind into working out the odds that the woman was worth the effort of finding, but red pepper scents drifted off the stove and stole her attention. Mingling with the incredible aroma of garlic that had been cooked in a slathering of extra virgin olive oil, the combination was heady and irresistible.

  “You cooked?” she asked.

  “You’re hungry, yes?”

  Her stomach growled loudly, effectively answering the question.

  He winked. “I’ve been here two weeks, more than long enough to develop an addiction to Cajun and Creole cuisine.”

  She attempted to fight a grin, then decided that she had to save her energy for more crucial battles.

  “You’ve never cooked for me before,” she commented, walking fully into the kitchen and attempting to leave her wariness at the door. She hadn’t expected this pampering, damn him, but she was pleased nonetheless. When he’d informed her that he wanted their first tryst to take place in the kitchen, she’d imagined they’d recreate a hot and heavy scene from their past—the night she’d attempted her first home-cooked meal and they’d ended up fucking on the butcher-block table surrounded by the stench of charred game hen and overcooked asparagus.

  But this table, a delicate cherrywood covered in lace and set with the fine bone china and sparkling lead crystal she’d examined only a few hours ago, would surely collapse under the weight of two humping bodies.