Hastily she hit the button for the next page. She was supposed to be working tonight, digging up information on Annie's research and on whoever might be trying to get their hands on it, not passing notes with the cute boy in study hall. Where the heck were her priorities?
"In my pants."
Sam jolted in her chair. "What?"
"That's where Abby had hidden the hamster Mom said she wasn't allowed to have. In the pocket of the pants I kept in my bedroom closet," Noah explained, sounding almost as if he admired his sister's creativity. "Let me tell you, there's nothing quite as peculiar as putting on an old suit and feeling it move around you. I almost fainted, like a gothic heroine."
Laughing weakly, Sam determined to focus as least half her attention on the task at hand. She could flirt with Noah on Saturday night. For now, she had work to do.
"… worst trouble you ever got into?"
How should she know, considering the answer might change within the next week?
"I was a perfect angel." She settled for obvious sarcasm.
Noah laughed. "Now why do I have a hard time picturing that?"
"I have no idea. It's the truth. I—" Sam's gaze scanned down the role of search results and locked on number 47. She felt her heartbeat stumble, and the flip her stomach gave this time did not count as anything close to fun. "I have to go."
"What? Why?" Noah sounded confused.
Realizing how abrupt she had sounded, she tried to force a teasing note back into her voice. "I just looked at the clock, Noah. It's almost midnight, and we both have to work in the morning. We can talk more then. Bye."
She hung up without letting him get another word in, her hands almost trembling. She didn't think she should plan on a second career on Broadway. She couldn't act worth a shit.
Helplessly she felt her gaze drawn back to the words on her computer screen. She really, really hoped they didn't mean what she thought they meant.
The search engine had turned up an academic reference, a citation in some scientific journal from three or four years ago. The title read: "The Theory Behind the Manipulation of the Structure and Function of the STN4 Gene's Effect on Muscle Strength: Can Science Create the Supersoldier?" The author was listed as the National Task Force on Strategy and Medical Research.
Cursing with words she hadn't even realized she knew, Sam picked up her phone again and dialed Annie at the lab; she didn't even bother trying her apartment first.
Three rings, then Annie's voice mail clicked on. "Hi, you've reached Annie's machine. Leave me a message, and I'll call you back. Bye."
Sam swore again and was about to hang up when the recording continued.
"Oh, if this is Sam, do me a favor and check your e-mail. Thanks."
She had her mailbox pulled up before the beep could sound. Lowering the receiver, she hit the send/ receive button and waited impatiently for her new messages to download. Three were spam; one was a coupon to her favorite catalog; the fifth was from Annie.
Sam double-clicked.
hey, sam, you must have tried me at home, which is a good thing, don't call the lab right now, 'cause i can't talk here anyway, i know i agreed to one week, but i need just a couple more days, i swear we'll talk on monday, with the alpha, too, I've booked some time on thursday and friday at a lab run by a friend of mine at MIT, so I'll be gone til the weekend, i'm not taking my cell, you can yell at me on Sunday, love you, a.
Sam finished the note and said something she wasn't even sure she understood. It ended with the relatively benign "that little twit!"
No wonder Annie hadn't answered her phone. She knew perfectly well that Sam would have stopped her if she'd known about this plan ahead of time. Not only was it breaking the agreement they'd made to tell the Alpha everything on Friday, but it also left Sam in a position where she couldn't even tell Graham herself. She didn't understand Annie's research; if she tried to explain what was going on, she'd sound like an idiot and she'd never be able to convey the seriousness of the situation. She might be able to make Graham understand she was worried, but unless he got the why of it, he'd just pat her on the head and tell her to let him know when something happened. The explanation would have to wait until Annie returned.
Samantha swore again and slammed her fist down on her desk, not even wincing when the wood cracked under the stress. Annie Cryer had played her. Like a five-cent jukebox.
Noah hung up the phone and scowled at it hard enough to melt the plastic. What the hell had happened? One minute he'd been talking to the woman he hoped to see naked in the very near future—and getting a pretty good button-loosening vibe going—and the next she was brushing him off like dandruff. What the fuck?
He searched his brain for something he might have said to set her off but came up blank. Sure, she'd sounded a little distracted there at the end, but he'd figured she was getting tired, and he could live with tired. He could live with ending the call, but it pissed him off to know she'd used "tired" as an excuse just to get him off the phone. He knew she had another reason for hanging up on him, and damned if he'd let her get away without telling him.
On the plus side, she couldn't hide from him. Avoiding someone who worked in the same office—in the same room—as you did required a kind of talent he felt pretty confident Sam didn't possess. Werewolves might have some pretty impressive skills, but the list didn't include invisibility. He'd see her downstairs tomorrow and impress upon her his dislike for being brushed off. He just hoped he'd calmed down some by then, or the impressing might wind up taking the form of a few stiff smacks to her backside.
When his phone rang, he reached out to snatch it up again, only to find dead air. There was no call on the other line, just a dial tone.
Cursing, Noah replaced the receiver and sprinted to the closet. Pulling his firm-bottomed duffle down from the top shelf, he pried up one corner of the floor of the bag and extracted a small black box. Two seconds later, he was tugging the line out of the base of the phone and reconnecting it with the box between the phone and the wall jack. When the phone rang again, he just stared at it. After the second ring, it went dead for another ten seconds.
The third time it rang, he picked up the receiver. "This is one."
"I've been waiting for an update."
"I got the cell. The contact said it was secure. I'll call when I have news."
"It is. So is this. I had hoped you'd have news now."
"I'm collecting information. I've had to space out the interviews with the contacts I'm most interested in to keep the Others from noticing the pattern. They're not stupid."
"That's all well and good, but we need results. We can't wait on this forever. Things move fast in this field."
"I move fast, too," Noah gritted out, "but I don't rush. I can either do this right, or I can do it quick. Quick and right would require an entirely different kind of operation."
"Should I be reevaluating your role in this assignment, Major?"
Reevaluate your fat ass, Noah thought, his jaw clenching. "No, sir. I'm just letting you know how I see things."
"I may reevaluate anyway, unless you can show me some progress."
Noah hesitated, but he didn't want the general to start seriously considering Plan B. Noah didn't know what it was, but he would guess it involved a heavy hand and some consequences for the Others that he'd rather avoid.
"I have a name. A woman," he continued before the voice could ask who it was. "The brightest of the kids I've been talking to look at her as some kind of genius. Albert Einstein and Marie Curie and Gregor Mendel all rolled into one. She'd got at least two PhDs, one of which is in molecular biology."
There was a pause on the other end of the line. "Have you checked her out?"
"Not yet. I just got the name today, and she's apparently not a social butterfly. I've been trying to figure out a way to meet her, but I don't think it will be an easy thing to orchestrate."
"If you can't make it happen, find another way to get the information," the voi
ce ordered brusquely. "You've got until Monday. After that, I'm going to have to reevaluate the strategy."
The line clicked dead in Noah's ear.
"Bastard."
Unhooking the encryption box, Noah stowed it back in its hiding place and settled himself in to brood. He hadn't lied to the man. Noah's first good lead of this whole nightmare pointed at a female Silverback by the name of Annie Louise Cryer. She made every one of the science geeks he'd been interviewing sigh with envy, and she apparently took her work so seriously that she never left her lab or attended any but the absolutely mandatory pack functions. Few of the kids who knew about her knew her very well. They treated her more like a legend than a pack mate, and not a single one had been able to tell him where he could arrange to bump into her. Somehow, he didn't think wandering nonchalantly into a reportedly secure lab at the university where she worked was going to cut it. She might be able to guess he had ulterior motives.
He ran a hand roughly over his close-cropped hair. Damn it, between the conversation with Sam and the conversation about his assignment, he felt ready to chew nails. The thing he wanted to do—namely, Sam—refused to get done, and the thing he wanted no part of, this goddamned lie he was telling to people he'd started to consider friends, seemed to be pulling him in faster than quicksand.
His gut had told him not to take the assignment, and he should have listened to it. He had plenty of leave saved up; he should have taken it and stayed the hell out of this mess. He had never felt comfortable with the idea of using lies to get information out of the Others. They'd been remarkably cooperative all through this Unveiling thing, always wanting to find ways to work with the human establishment for the benefit of both sides. So why did the Pentagon feel it had to get its information on their scientific research through covert operations? None of the answers Noah could think of made him the least bit happy. The main one was that whatever the military wanted to do with that research was something the Others wouldn't agree to, and that made his back itch, right in the center where he couldn't reach to scratch it. It was a sign for Noah that somehow he'd ended up standing downwind just as the shit was about to hit the fan.
The other reason was that the information the Pentagon needed was something it didn't want anyone else to know it had. That idea didn't make him any happier. People didn't usually hide things unless they expected to eventually use them to get the upper hand on someone else.
On top of that were the lies. Every damned minute they got harder to keep up. He liked the Others he knew, and more than that, he respected them. He hadn't had quite as many prejudices to overcome against the Others, not after serving with some of them for years before the Unveiling that announced their presence to the world. He'd liked the folks his sister had introduced him to right away, and the Alpha of the Silverback Clan was no exception.
Neither was his personal assistant, who happened to be the other reason that Noah's deception had begun to make him so goddamned uncomfortable. The attraction between him and Sam had flared from the beginning, but over the last week he'd started to think it might be something more than just chemistry. It might be something worth pursuing, worth keeping hold of for more than a few weeks. Might be the beginning of a relationship.
Frustrated, he took to pacing the confines of his suite at the club. One of the good things about staying in a club for true night owls was not having to worry about disturbing anyone in the wee hours. Below him, he knew the club would be hopping. No one would notice his restless footsteps.
How the hell could anyone ever build a relationship surrounded by so many lies? It wouldn't be founded on those lies, since the attraction between them was very real and he'd never told her anything about his past or his family or his character that wasn't true. But the lies were still there, eating away at the framework he was laying like acid etching steel.
For all his combat experience and advanced tactical training, he couldn't for the life of him see a way out of the trench he'd already dug. In fact, the only thing he could see was a way to dig it deeper. As much as he hated what he was doing, he hated the idea of anyone else doing it even more. At least Noah respected the Others, and he would go out of his way to make sure that he accomplished his mission with the highest possible level of respect for them and their culture. Whoever else the general sent might not be so considerate, or even considerate at all, which meant that Noah had to make sure he got the job done.
With a sick sort of fury, he realized that the best way to get the information he needed on Annie Cryer would be to see what Sam could tell him. As a friend to the Luna and assistant to the pack Alpha, she had to know most of the pack, at least by reputation. She would have to know something about Cryer. So Noah just had to think of a way to get Sam to share it with him without raising her suspicion. He had to pump her for information when what he really wanted was to pin her against a wall and demand that she tell him what the hell was bothering her so he could fix it and get on with his real goal of pinning her to a mattress. Which he was pretty sure she wouldn't want him to do if his strategy of using her to complete his secret assignment succeeded and she found out about it.
Noah already had too many secrets to keep, but now he added one more to the list. And hoped that the dangerous game he played wouldn't cost him anything harder to replace than his job.
Like his heart.
* * *
CHAPTER EIGHT
Noah discovered on Thursday that for a werewolf, Samantha Carstairs could prove as slippery as a greased piglet.
He made a point of heading downstairs to her office early, since he'd noticed that she rarely arrived less than fifteen minutes ahead of schedule herself, but this morning her desk sat empty. Even after Graham arrived on the dot of nine, it stayed that way. Finally, at nine thirty she raced in like a whirlwind and dropped her backpack in the middle of her desk. Noah rose from the seat he'd taken while he waited, intending to go over to her and ease at least part of his frustration by forcing her to tell him what was bothering her. But Sam didn't even spare him a glance, just grabbed a pad and pen and hurried into Graham's office, closing the door behind her. Cursing to himself, he sat down to wait. And wait.
And wait.
In the end, Sam spent all morning closeted away with the Alpha. Noah pretended to work and to carry out his business, but even during his one interview of the morning he kept one eye on the clock and felt his frustration grow with every single tick.
She would pay for this one.
When twelve thirty rolled around and she still hadn't returned to her desk, he tried an experiment. Snagging his uniform jacket, he shrugged into it, calmly fastened the buttons, and exited the office as if he had no more devious a goal in mind than lunch. As soon as he pulled the hallway door shut behind him, he turned and pressed his ear to the wood. Just as he'd expected, it took less than five minutes before he heard the interior office door open and Sam's voice thanking Graham for helping her get caught up. She sounded nervous and guilty when she added that if he needed her, she'd be having lunch at her desk today and in the afternoon would be in Richards's office going over the semi-annual employee reviews. She expected to be tied up until quitting time, when Noah supposed she planned to sneak out before he laid eyes on her again.
Not on his watch.
Moving quickly, he spun the door open and shot toward her desk. Considering he was human and Sam Lupine, he couldn't move fast enough to make a grab for her, but the office setup worked in his favor. Instead of trying to reach her, which she would assume he'd do as soon as she saw him, he countered speed with strategy, entering the room and immediately cutting off her primary means of escape. Her desk occupied the corner to the right of the door and formed a sort of alcove with a large wardrobe used for supplies butting up against one end of the L-shaped desk. At the other, shorter end of the L, there was a three-foot gap between the end of the desk and the wall of Graham's office that was the only way behind or out from behind the large piece of furniture. Noah plac
ed himself in the middle of that opening and waited.
Cornered behind her desk, Sam met his intense gaze with a glare and folded her arms across her chest. He felt a surge of triumph, not because he'd blocked the path between her and the rest of the room, but because if she had really wanted to get away from him, there were at least a couple dozen ways she could have done it. One of those ways would have been to go right through him. He had no illusions about the fact that even though he was strong and fit, stood at least six inches taller than her, and outweighed her by more than fifty pounds, she still could have kicked his ass. She would always be stronger and faster and fitter; it was a genetic fact. But the fact that she chose not to use her superior physical abilities to get away from him told him she might be half as caught up in him as he was in her.
"What do you want, Noah? I have work to do."
"You just told Graham you were going to lunch."
"I just told Graham I was having lunch. At my desk. While I work. Alone."
Noah shook his head. "Very bad for the digestion. Come eat with me. We should talk."
"No."
"No to eating? Or no to talking?"
"Take your pick."
"You can't avoid me forever," he told her, taking a careful step closer. "Sooner or later, you're going to run out of work or excuses or other places you have to be, and then you'll have to talk to me whether you like it or not. Why not now? Over lunch."
She scowled at him. "Because I don't want to. So go mind your own business."
"I'd rather mind you." He took a second step, still cautious. "I want to know why you brushed me off so fast last night. You seemed to be enjoying our conversation, and I think it was pretty clear that I was. Right up until that last minute. What happened?"
"I don't want to talk about it."
"I do."
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