by Fiona Quinn
Spyder raised an eyebrow.
“I’m serious, Spyder. I have to tell Striker. I can’t keep something like this from him.”
“Lexicon, you have been involved in many cases, many with me and many with Striker. Are you ever apprised of the danger? Or is it held back as need-to-know, and it is very rare that you need to know?”
“Held back. But in a case like this –”
“You have been in danger’s way. You might have been safer knowing the information. Did Striker give it to you, or did he simply believe that you should trust your team to handle it?”
My mind went to a particular night at the Halston Ball when I played the role of Babcock’s date, all dressed up like an Italian woman named Gabriella Ricci. My sixth-sense warning system went off, and I had a “knowing” that said “Hydra Marionette.” I had waited, fuming, through the entire car ride to the mansion where Babcock would pick me up. Striker told me nothing. Just before I popped my door open, I specifically asked if he had anything he needed to tell me, and Striker looked confused. No. In fact, Striker never ever ever shared even a droplet of information that I absolutely didn’t need to know. He wanted me to trust the team to keep me safe.
I flopped back in the chair completely deflated. I felt like a traitor. I knew I wasn’t going to tell Striker anything about his sister. “This is another relationship test, isn’t it? I will have to split my loyalties and prioritize them, right? Striker is my priority, and I truly believe I am his. Loyalty to my code of ethics, loyalty to my job and country, they have to stand first when it comes time to make decisions that belong in a work box.” I flexed my neck to the left and right and listened to the vertebrae pop.
Boxes make life simpler. My life was anything but simple. This conversation seemed so familiar. I remembered back to the night I went to the Halston Ball to put the listening device in Babcock’s pocket. Angry, ready for a fight, I walked into Striker’s apartment, and there he was, his warm eyes drinking me in. I loved him so much, and I was trying so hard to understand him and who we were to each other. Boxes. He wanted two of me: Lexi for his Lexi box - a girl to date and enjoy. And Lynx for his Lynx box - a colleague that got the job done. So naïve. So incredibly naïve. I didn’t understand all of the angles and complexities. Could we do this? Could we marry and make a life together? Even with all the secrets?
“What’s the plan?” I asked. My throat was dry and raspy.
“I’ll fly to Miami tonight. I should be home in the morning. And you? Do you have a direction you wish to explore?”
“Yes. There is an artist named Dyozo Tsukamoto. There were three people in all of the United States who owned his works. All of them live in the DC area. One is Babcock. One is Iniquus. And one is unknown. It’s made me curious.”
Thirteen
The front door shut, and Striker entered and trekked to the fridge. The sighing hiss of a cap twisting off a cold bottle of beer told me today had probably been as frustrating for him as mine had been for me.
I lay on the floor with my hips tucked up against the wall, legs and feet stretched straight up toward the ceiling in a yoga pose. My Kitchen Grandmother from Punjab, Biji, told me to do this viparita karani when I needed to think clearly. Right now, I could really use a bit of clarity.
Striker sauntered over and pushed his back against the wall that I had staked claim to. He smiled down at me. “Comfortable?” He took a swig.
“Very.” I swung my legs down and slowly sat up.
Striker turned his head back and forth to loosen his shoulders and neck, then slid down the wall so we were eye to eye. He brushed my hair out of my face and smiled. “I’m glad you’re a blonde again. You were beautiful last night, but this is how I like you best.”
“You recognized me? Hmm. Maybe I need to work on my disguise abilities.”
“Your disguise was fine. I would recognize you anywhere.”
“Really? Anywhere?”
“Yes. By your aura, your walk, your gestures.” He leaned in and kissed my neck. “You smell nice. I like that perfume.”
“Aura?” I laughed. “Are you taking psychic lessons from Miriam that I don’t know about?”
“That’s Gater’s gig. Mine is to observe, and I don’t mean aura like glowing rainbows.” He tilted his head. His eyes were soft and warm like moss in sunlight. “I mean it more like that Byron poem. She walks in beauty like the night, of cloudless climes and starry skies. Like a lady — graceful, and pure of heart.”
“Awww.” I reached out to squeeze his hand. “That was a sweet thing to say. And poetry to boot. What turned on your romantic switch?” I released his hand to rub my thumb over the stress lines between his eyes where normally he had none, trying to ease the headache I could see beating there.
“Stream of consciousness.” He pulled his legs in and rested his elbows on his knees. “So, are you going to tell me why you were at the arts ball?”
“I wonder what you would tell me if I asked you the same?”
“Classified,” he said.
“Yup. Me too. And if you think I went to spy on you and Vine, I was surprised that you were there. Once I saw you, I tried to stay out of your way.”
“But you did see us.” He tipped his head back for a longer drink, then used the back of his hand to catch the droplets on his lips. “This part I have been cleared to go over with you – Vine and I are working undercover as husband and wife. I was playing the role of her husband, so we had physical contact.”
“Yes, I saw that. And what I witnessed was that even before you could have known I was there, it was Vine who instigated the kisses and canoodling. I understood. I was cool with it,” I said. “I’ve had to kiss our team members from time to time to sell a scheme, myself.”
“Members?” Striker stood and reached for my hand, pulling me up beside him.
Standing toe to toe, I tilted my head up so I could watch his eyes. Striker had mastered the art of stoicism. If I was going to find any body language “tells,” it would be in his eyes. “I told you Deep kissed me the day of the bank robbery to hide our faces from the V.P., and we had to be convincing and make the guy uncomfortable, so Deep also glad-handed me a bit.”
Striker scrunched his brows together. “Glad-handed you?”
“Yeah, you know, he was glad his hand was rubbing over my fanny.”
“Hmm. So the plural was Deep and me?”
“And Gater.”
Striker’s chin inched up a centimeter, the tiniest show of pugnaciousness. “When did you have to kiss Gater to ‘sell a scheme’?”
“Remember when I passed out in your kitchen and the team had to take me to the hospital? Gater was the pretend boyfriend. When he came in the room and found me awake, he did what every concerned boyfriend would do—he gave me a loud smacking kiss for the benefit of the nurse.”
“Alright,” he said. “Same kind of thing, I guess.” He reached for my hand, and we walked toward the living room. “I liken this sort of things to actors who perform on stage during their work day, and then go home to their wives and children. Just part of the job.” He sat down on the couch and pulled me down beside him.
“And some days the job is more pleasant than others.” I laughed.
“So you enjoyed kissing Deep and Gater?”
“Did you enjoy kissing Vine?”
“Point taken.”
“Here’s another point.” I swiveled around on the cushion, until I was sitting sideways, facing Striker. “If your acting job went beyond a PG-13 rating, I would not be alright with it.” I paused for emphasis. “When you say you’re a husband and wife team, does that involve travelling out of town? That would mean you’d have to sleep in the same bed with her.”
“Same room. I wouldn’t sleep in the same bed as Vine. I’d sleep on the floor or in the tub.”
“Seems an uncomfortable choice.”
“I think I’d probably be more uncomfortable in bed with her.”
Huh. Interesting. “When you w
ere protecting me in the safe house, and I was frightened, I slept with you, and you didn’t make any moves on me.”
“Right, but you were married and I was on the job, so neither one of us would allow anything to happen. We were both committed to being platonic.”
“What you’re saying is that Vine might make a play for you?” I sat with that thought for a moment, then nodded. “I can see that. I could also see how being partnered with her might be incredibly uncomfortable. You dated her. You cut it off when you realized that you and Vine had different feelings and relationship goals. You thought you had ended it. Now here she has a free pass to make a pass at you. And you have to put up with it.”
Striker nodded, I could see a little wariness in his eyes.
“Why didn’t you ask Mr. Spencer to give this file to one of our other team members?”
“I did, actually. Vine offered the contract, the contingency being that I work as her partner. And I told you how desperate things are getting at Iniquus. Spencer knew what he was doing when he signed the contract. He trusted that you and I could work through any problems. Iniquus needs to succeed here for its reputation’s sake, and Iniquus needs the money.” He took a drink from his bottle. “If this mission is successful, you’ll be pleased with the data we’re producing.”
“Shoot, now I want to ask why I’ll be pleased.” I scratched frustrated fingers through my hair. I understood need-to-know, intellectually. Didn’t mean I enjoyed it. “I won’t pester you. But I am going to go back to this whole Scarlet Vine thing. I want you to know that I love you. I trust you. And I also believe in evolution and science.”
Striker’s lips quirked up into a lopsided smile, his “this is going to be good” expression. “I’m not following you, Chica.”
“Your ancestors were once cavemen, and though you’ve evolved into a less hairy—thank goodness—specimen with better posture, you still owe much of your survival to the biology of your distant forefathers.”
“I think I’m going to need another beer for this one.” He looked at his empty bottle, tucked it behind the sofa leg, then slunk down into the comfort of the cushions with his knees wide and his arms crossed over his chest.
For just a moment, I pictured him sitting like that in a Fred Flintstone-designed getup, and I giggled. That got me a raised eyebrow.
“Okay, seriously,” I said, to correct my course. “We can both agree that the main forces in a human are the need to stay alive and to protect the human DNA chain. In order to protect the human DNA chain, we have to make babies. In order to make babies, we have to copulate.”
Striker smiled. “We have to copulate? I’m beginning to like this conversation.”
I ignored him. “Imagine, if you will, an ancient cave of people getting ready for the men to go on a hunt. All these guys had in the way of weaponry were the spears in their hands, and yet they must find enough meat and animal parts to keep the cave healthy. As the men were preparing their travel gear, their bodies were preparing, too, by secreting survival hormones. What are those hormones? Cortisol, testosterone, and adrenaline.”
I pushed farther back on the couch and hugged one of my knees to my chest. “Now, the caveman brain says, ‘Heeeeey, I’m about to go fight a saber toothed tiger with a stick in my hand. It’s very likely this isn’t gonna go well for me. I very well might die and never come back to this cave, so it would probably be a great idea if I left some semen behind with some willing woman, so that way, my DNA can continue even if I don’t.’”
The light in Striker’s eyes was dancing; he tried to tamp down his smile by rubbing a hand back and forth over his mouth.
“Now here’s the thing. What if the caveman didn’t have a mate? What if he did have a mate but she wasn’t handy at that particular moment? Do you know what the caveman’s hormones would insist he do?”
“Find a willing fertile ground to plant his seeds?”
“Exactly. Survival hormones give us an incredible sexual drive. There was a war correspondent who wrote articles from different countries about people in combat zones. He described a ‘frenetic lust’ that permeated the conditions. He said that even normally very conservative people were out there desperately screwing around. ‘Frenetic lust,’ Striker, those are the words he used. And there’s more.”
“Of course,” he deadpanned.
“It’s not just survival of the fittest; it’s also survival by community. In ancient days, one of the worst punishments available was ostracizing someone from the group. There was little chance of survival on one’s own. So imagine a life or death situation. It’s imperative that the cavemen and women came to each other’s rescue and find solutions in community. We wouldn’t be here today had the cavepeople believed in every caveperson for himself and had they not received a huge charge of dopamine hormones, making it pleasurable to help each other.”
“This is more about fun with human chemistry?” Striker’s chest vibrated with his attempt to compress his laughter.
“Yes. Hush.” I held up a hand, and sighed out some of my mounting frustration. “I don’t want you just listening to me right now. I need you to hear me. This is serious.”
Striker affected his best combat face, but he couldn’t mask the twinkle in his eye.
“So anyway, they’ve done these psychological tests to see if this is true, if people, who already find each other attractive, are in a situation where they could replicate a sudden secretion of these specific survival hormones, would the people increase the attraction and the likelihood of them becoming a couple?”
“And they did this how?” Striker asked.
“The psychologists sent the subjects out over a visibly swaying pedestrian suspension bridge, which crossed over a two-hundred-thirty foot drop to the base of the river canyon, and asked them to hang out in the middle.”
“That could do it.” He nodded.
“Could and did. The experiment showed that secreting these hormones make people horny and mate-able.”
“Mate-able?”
“You know what I mean. Wanting to form a pair bond, become a couple. . .”
Laughter bubbled out between his words as he said, “And you’re telling me this because you think that if I’m in the field with Vine, that someone might shoot at me, and I’ll lose control and have wild monkey sex with her right there and then, and afterwards we’d dance off into the sunset hand in hand?”
“When you say it like that, it sounds ridiculous.” I frowned. “This isn’t ridiculous, Striker, it’s science.” And honestly, not all about Scarlet Vine or any other female operative whom he might be in a close contact situations with. This all kind of blended and mixed with my own personal insecurities about why Striker was with me. Might as well lay it out on the table. This wasn’t going to fix itself. “To tell the truth, sometimes when I think about us, it even makes me wonder. . .” I stopped, pressed my lips together, and shook my head.
Striker’s eyes crinkled at the corner as he gave me that slow simmering smile that makes me melt inside. “Are you afraid I love you because I secreted adrenaline around you?”
I pointed a stern finger. “Don’t make me sound like that.”
He pushed himself over closer to me, and touched his nose to mine. “Like what?” he grinned.
“I don’t know. . .irrational, I guess.”
Striker pulled me into his lap and full-body hugged me. “The very last thing anyone could ever accuse you of being is irrational. But let me remind you. I felt attracted to you when I met you in the hospital. No adrenaline. No cortisol.” He grasped my chin between his fingers and tipped my head back so we could see each other’s face. “My feelings for you were wrong because you and Angel were married. So of course, I tried to hide them from you.” He kissed the tip of my nose. “When we were sitting at the table in the safehouse the very first night we were there to protect you from your stalker, Travis Wilson, and my guys said they hadn’t found the flash drive at one of our target’s houses, you told them
they should have looked for it in the bottom of her tampon box. That little blush at saying tampon in front of a bunch of guys, and the triumph in your eyes, knowing you were right, made me want to grab you and kiss you right then and there.”
“Kiss me how?” I asked, wrapping my arms around his neck.
“Something like this.” He leaned me back to take full advantage of my lips and tongue. His lips were cool, and he tasted sweet and yeasty from his beer.
He ended the kiss and lifted me back upright, though I still wanted more. “I promise you, what I was feeling in that moment didn’t include adrenaline, or cortisol. Just testosterone. And lots of it. As a matter of fact, there were only three times before I told you I was in love with you that I felt adrenaline.” He took my hand and counted these off on my fingers. “When you saved my sister Lynda and my niece Cammy’s lives from the gang members. When you got word that your husband died. And when Travis Wilson attacked you in the park.” He moved to hold my head so we were looking into each other’s eyes. “Not for one millisecond in any of those scenarios did I have the tiniest thought about sex. All I could think was: I need to keep her safe.”
I heard the words, but I also saw the little thought that looked like it wanted to hide. “But?” I asked.
“But to be perfectly honest, I claimed you from the beginning. I guess it’s the most psychic thing I’ve ever experienced in my life. From the moment I pushed open the door of your hospital room, I knew you were mine, to have and to hold, for better and for worse. I also knew you were already married and deeply in love with Angel, so the ‘to have and to hold’ part was going to be as a friend.” He stared straight into my eyes, straight into my soul. “Chica, I want you to understand how committed I am to my one and only psychic knowing. I will hold only you in my heart, always. And I would never hurt you purposely or break faith with you. Can you understand what I’m saying?”
I nodded and curled myself into his lap. “Your heart is beating faster than normal,” I said with my ear pressed against his chest.
