An Act of Persuasion

by Stephanie Doyle

  None of this Mark would share with Anna, of course. No, this was just a little game between former spies. Still, he wondered…how well did she know Ben? She had been with him for six years, after all.

  “He’ll come for you, you know. Probably tonight after I leave,” she said matter-of-factly.

  Yeah, his Anna was no fool. “Yep, he will. Worried he might sway me and I’ll fire you?”

  “You would fire a poor pregnant woman who needs a salary so she can raise a child on her own?”

  “In a heartbeat. Didn’t Ben tell you? I’m ruthless as well as dangerous.”

  She smiled, knowing he was teasing and he was glad to see it. Glad that he’d made it happen. Anna was a good woman. He’d known it the first time he met her. She was grounded and level-headed and would be cool in a high-pressure situation. There was a steadiness about her that probably should have been washed away by the years she’d spent in uncertain situations as a child. It hadn’t been. She was rock solid and would have made a good operative or soldier. For his sake and Ben’s, Mark was glad she was neither.

  No, he imagined it wouldn’t be hard at all to spend a lifetime trying to make her smile. But, as was his pattern, Ben had gotten there first. This was Mark’s bad luck.

  “So what are you going to do?” he asked.

  “Uh…I was thinking of working for the rest of the day with periodic time-outs to eat saltines and drink ginger ale.”

  “I meant about Ben. He proposed, remember?”

  “And I said no. Actually I said hell no. He was pissed but he’ll get over it. When he calms down we can discuss our situation like rational people. Marriage isn’t the answer.”

  If Mark’s gut was right, he didn’t think that rational discussion would happen. Not because Ben wasn’t rational, but because he’d broken his number-one rule and slept with his employee. For a man like him that was like a tectonic shift in his principles. And he would be immovable until he got the results he wanted. In this case, Mark suspected the results were marriage.

  And that came back to Mark’s original assessment. Something about Anna was different for Ben. Given how sad she looked when she came into the office after having been proposed to, it didn’t take a professional observer to know how she felt about Ben in return.

  Mark shrugged. None of it should be his concern. He’d hired Anna simply to piss off Ben, but he’d quickly grown to like her. Now, because of that, it seemed terribly important to him how all this worked out. Which, he realized, was nothing more than a stall tactic on his part from having to make the most important decision of his life.

  Yes, Ben had beaten him to the punch in a lot of different areas in his life. But the one thing Mark had done first was father a child.

  *

  BEN WATCHED as Anna drove out of the parking garage into downtown Philadelphia traffic. He waited until she’d turned right at the first corner and was out of sight before he exited his car.

  He entered the building he’d been in earlier that day gathering information. He stopped at the security desk briefly and flashed the badge he’d spent the afternoon forging before making his way to the elevators. He hit the button for the appropriate floor and felt a surge in his stomach as the sleek elevator climbed the distance so fast he could actually feel pressure against his eardrums.

  Leave it to Mark to pick a flashy office. By contrast, Ben and his staff used a small, serviceable office in the Northern Liberties section of the city. Results were what mattered, not a slick image.

  Once the elevator stopped, he made his way down the hall and wasn’t surprised to see Mark lounging in the doorway that opened to his office. So casually as if to suggest he could predict Ben’s actions and knew he would be arriving.

  “Sharpe,” Ben said, acknowledging him.

  “Tyler,” Mark replied, sporting his legendary smile.

  Women went crazy for that smile. Hardened female foreign agents revealed secret information because of that smile. All Ben ever wanted to do was punch it.

  Mark stepped back and allowed Ben to enter. He passed Anna’s desk—had to be hers because there was a small potted plant on the corner of it. She hated planting and hated having to remember to water them even more, yet held firmly to the belief that an office needed real life in it. Not plastic decorations.

  He made his way past the glass partition to the larger space and sat in one of the two guest chairs available and waited for Mark to take his seat behind the desk. He would like the position of authority it gave him, Ben knew.

  Mark sat in his high-back leather chair, knotted his fingers together and waited. It was a power play, keeping silent so Ben would speak first and state his purpose for showing up. Silence was better than asking a question that could potentially deliver an answer you weren’t prepared for. He couldn’t necessarily blame the man for the ploy. After all they both knew why he was here. And this was Ben’s move.

  “You’re going to let her go.”

  “Let her go?” Mark affected a confused expression. “If you mean as my employee, then, no, I’m not. If you mean it in another way…”

  Ben knew Mark was toying with him. Using the one advantage he’d always had over him—his ability to seduce women. The interesting thing was Mark was hardly a Casanova. He was much too focused on his work to ever devote a lot of time to seducing women.

  But when he did want a woman he made that a priority. The fact that he always seemed to want the women Ben showed interest in was no coincidence.

  This situation, however, was different. Ben was confident Mark’s attention to Anna wasn’t sexual. Or if it was, there hadn’t been time for him to act on it. Not with all Anna had going on recently with Ben’s weeks of quarantine, finding another job and coming to terms with being pregnant.

  At least he hoped so.

  “Bullshit.”

  Mark shrugged and obviously wasn’t willing to lie beyond what he’d already alluded to.

  “What the hell are you doing here anyway?” Ben asked. “Shouldn’t you be the new section chief in Afghanistan?”

  Initially he’d been annoyed he hadn’t been aware of Mark’s presence in the city—it wasn’t until Anna had announced who she was working for that Ben had known. A former agent, moving into his territory. It should have shown up somewhere on his radar. No allowances for the fact that he’d been quarantined in a sterile room at the hospital while Mark set up shop.

  “I quit. Just like you did.”

  Ben had left the agency when the politics started to matter more than the results. There were days he’d felt the entire agency was a tool being used solely for the administration’s end game. Instead of uncovering information, they were manufacturing it—something he was not willing to be a part of. Unfortunately, the higher up in the ranks he was promoted, the closer he got to the bullshit that was D.C. It was either leave or have his career stall at the same level, watching less talented but more politically savvy agents advance ahead of him.

  “Like I did?” He thought Mark would have been one of those more politically savvy agents.

  “Stevens got promoted to section chief.”

  Then again, obviously not. Stevens’s quality of work left a lot to be desired—a fact overlooked by the key decision-makers he networked with. “You were better than him.”

  “Yes, I was. But you know that doesn’t always matter.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “After you left the fun of trying to one-up you was gone and my ambition seemed to tank with it. I couldn’t deal with the politics any more than you could. Watching men and women who cared more about furthering their careers than getting the job done was driving me mad. I discovered I wasn’t willing to play and so I got skipped over. Then some other things in my life changed and that was a sign that it was time to get out of the game. The fact that I made the transition so easily tells me I already had one foot out the door.”

  “Really, you’re finding the…transition…easy?” Ben hadn’t. It had take
n him nearly a full year to stop looking over his shoulder every other second. Now, he did it only every other minute. So far in the six years he’d been out no one had ever been behind him.

  “I’m…adjusting.”

  “Why here? Why Philadelphia?”

  “I have my reasons,” Mark said. His attention seemed to wander momentarily before he refocused on Ben. “They weren’t all about you.”

  Ben believed him. In a strange way, as much as Mark had always annoyed him with his antics, it felt right to be sitting here with someone who had lived the same life he had, who had seen the same things and knew the same information. Like he was finally connected to someone again.

  He hadn’t felt like this since…Anna.

  The reason he was here.

  “She’s pregnant with my child.”

  Mark didn’t flinch from the sudden shift in the conversation. “I know. She told me when I interviewed her. You want to talk about how you let that happen with an employee?”

  “You knew she was pregnant and you still hired her?” Ben asked, ignoring the other comment.

  “I’ll take that as a no, you don’t want to talk about how it happened. Okay, fine. Why did I hire her? Ben, you know it would be discrimination if I held her pregnancy against her. Besides, she could have come to me and said she had two months to live and I still would have hired her. She was your trusted assistant for six years. Which means she’s completely and utterly capable. You wouldn’t have kept her around for so long if she wasn’t.”

  “What do you have her doing?”

  “Right now setting up the office. Placing ads in appropriate print media and online, setting up a computer system for billing and a fair amount of researching on the cases I currently have.”

  “She said you specialize in cold cases.”

  “I do. I have no intention of spending my days photographing cheating spouses. I’m fortunate enough to have saved quite a bit of money during my years abroad so I can select only the cases I want. Which means criminal cases most likely. And I like challenges, so the older the case, the bigger the challenge.”

  “You said right now. What are your plans for her in the future, if she chooses to stay with you?”

  “You mean, if she doesn’t return to work for you? Do you really see that as a possibility?”

  No, Ben didn’t. Regardless of what happened regarding her job here, he doubted she would ever agree to work for him again. They were beyond that now. Trying to blend their relationship as both parents and coworkers would be too complicated. In one area they had to be equals, in the other area they wouldn’t be.

  Besides, that’s not what he wanted. His thoughts on having sex with his employees hadn’t changed. His thoughts on having sex with Anna had. He wanted her. So he had to let her go professionally. If she had to leave his company and work for someone else, he could think of worse things than it being someone he knew and ultimately trusted. As long as he knew what her responsibilities would be.

  “What are your plans going forward for her?” Ben asked, again refusing to answer Mark’s question.

  “She has aspirations to be an investigator. I’m going to train her, help her get her license and give her cases to work.”

  Ben crossed his right leg over his left and smoothed out the material of his pants. “The hell you are.”

  “She’s got a knack for research.”

  “She will not be investigating criminal cases. Cold or hot.”

  Mark smiled. That blasted smile that had Ben’s knuckles itching to remove it from his face. “You really don’t have any say over that, do you?”

  “Maybe not, but I can make sure she knows the type of man she’s working for. A man who doesn’t see a problem putting other people at risk for his own ends.”

  “You’re never going to get over that, are you? No one forced you out of that helicopter. That was your choice.”

  There had been an assault on a suspected al Qaeda leader’s home. Mark had done most of the work gathering the intel and wanted to be with the SEAL team when they raided the property despite Ben’s protestations. The agency’s job was to collect the information, pass it over and let the military do the work. However, in this instance, the team hadn’t been opposed to having Mark with them in the helicopter to provide specific detail about the small complex before they attacked. Ben had accompanied them to oversee his operative.

  A good thing he had, too, because not a minute after the team deployed, Mark broke protocol and followed the SEALs onto the ground.

  “It wasn’t a choice. You were being fired upon.”

  “Yeah, good old Ben to the rescue. Because there was no chance I would have made it out of the situation on my own like I had countless times before.”

  As far as Ben was concerned, he wouldn’t have. “I’m not here to rehash the past. I’m here to tell you how it’s going to be with Anna. Beyond any history you and I have, she’s carrying my child. I will not let you put her in harm’s way.”

  “I’m putting her in harm’s way? You knocked her up. You didn’t even know about it until a few days ago. Tell me, Ben, which one of us is the bigger jerk in this scenario.”

  The accusation hit Ben directly in the gut. What was worse, he couldn’t refute it. “My relationship with Anna is none of your concern.”

  “And my relationship with her and her future career here is none of your concern. I can tell you this, she’s one stubborn girl. That’s easy enough to see. Push her to quit this job and you’ll only be playing into my hands.”

  Ben waited a beat until the rush of anger he felt subsided. “You’ve known her eight weeks. I’ve known her six years.”

  “But you know I’m right.”

  He did. He also knew that Mark Sharpe was a risk taker and, as he said, the bigger the challenge the bigger the high for him. She would be taking on cases that involved potentially dangerous people and the idea of her out there alone, unprotected by Ben, sent a chill through him he wasn’t totally willing to acknowledge.

  “We’re done with this conversation. Stay out of my way.”

  It was an old command. One he’d used with many operators working under him when he was on a particular mission. He didn’t want their help, he didn’t want their input, he wanted them out of his way so he could do what he did best.

  Before that meant hunting down known terrorists.

  Today it meant hunting down Anna.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ANNA LEANED AGAINST the passenger door of Ben’s car waiting for him to exit the building. Not much past six o’clock and the afternoon rush was nearly finished in the city. Everybody was already heading home to the burbs in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Only a few cars passed by occasionally and Anna had no doubt Ben would see her immediately upon leaving the building.

  She was right. He was looking at his phone, then stopped in his tracks. Glancing around, he spotted her quickly. The yellow sundress helped. She lifted her hand and waved, happier than she would admit at having gotten the better of him.

  He jogged across the street in a blatant act of jaywalking.

  “I guess I didn’t fool anybody,” he said, frowning.

  She knew he hated when he was predictable. She imagined when he’d been working for the government nothing about him had ever been predictable. But being in the states, starting his own business and settling into a normal life, he’d grown completely banal. She thought it suited him. She hadn’t known him in his old life, but she imagined there would have been an intensity about him, a barrier that no one could penetrate. Given he’d never married or never mentioned any other significant relationship he’d had back then, she suspected she was right.

  “What are you doing here, Ben?”

  “Sharpe and I were getting reacquainted.”

  “I’ll bet. Look, I knew you would pull this move. Mark told me enough about your past together for me to know you wouldn’t be happy with me working for him. I get that it sucks for you. But it’s a good job. I
like it. And I’m not leaving. So can we get that out of the way and move on.”

  “I’m supposed to be okay with the idea that you might be in danger?”

  She had to struggle not to roll her eyes. “The only thing I’m in danger of right now is getting carpel tunnel syndrome. Am I stupid?”

  “No.”

  “Do I look like someone who would take unnecessary risks, especially in my condition?”

  “No.”

  “No,” she repeated. “For the next six months, and probably well after that, the closest I’m going to get to any of Mark’s cases is via my computer. I’m going to be a single mom. I respect the responsibility of that.”

  He ducked his head and she could see she’d made her point. She could also see she’d annoyed him.

  “He used to take extreme risks. Unnecessary ones. I worried about you being in that environment.”

  “But you’re conceding I can make my own decisions in this.”

  It took a moment, but eventually he nodded.

  “And you won’t give Mark any more trouble?”

  “As long as he stays out of my way…no.”

  Since Anna couldn’t imagine a scenario where Mark would need to get in Ben’s way, she figured that provisional agreement had to be good enough.

  “Okay. Then that’s settled.” She pushed her bottom against the car, using the momentum to set her in motion. She was stopped by his hand circling her wrist. “So close to a clean getaway.”

  “Not really. I tagged your car. I knew you had returned and parked in the building. I was hoping we could talk.”

  “Ben.” She sighed.

  “Back left bumper. You can remove it, but please give it back. It’s a rather expensive one.”

  “Fine. Are we finished?”

  “Not even remotely. Come have dinner with me.”

  The invitation took her by surprise. It almost sounded like a date request, but she knew it wasn’t. Instead her meal would include a side lecture on the merits of marriage and the benefits a child had being raised in a two-parent home. By now he would no doubt have statistics and hard-core facts at his fingertips.