Harlequin Intrigue November 2013 - Bundle 2 of 2

by Carla Cassidy

  His pulse quickened at the sight of her.

  She glanced both ways and slipped into the store. The minutes ticked by on Beau’s watch, each one passing slower than the previous one. He slurped the last of his cold coffee and chucked the magazine onto the table.

  Several more minutes passed, and then Deb emerged from the store, her sunglasses on top of her head. She must’ve asked the taxi to wait because the same one barreled down the street as Deb stepped onto the curb.

  Beau scraped his chair back, tossed his coffee cup and sandwich paper into the trash and dropped the magazine back in the rack just inside the coffee place.

  He decided to walk back to the hotel, welcoming the cold air that needled his face. Now that Deb had her ticket to tonight’s festivities, he had to beg, borrow or steal his own. He had no intention of leaving her in that lion’s den by herself.

  If Zendaris wanted a murder, he’d get a murder.

  He used his key card to enter the room, but Deb had chained the door. Her instincts seemed to be returning to her after the shock of losing her son.

  “It’s me.”

  She shut the door and slid the chain. She greeted him holding a laminated rectangle in front of her.

  Before studying the ticket, his gaze locked on her eyes, now brown instead of green. Her emerald eyes had given her face a bright, open aspect. This stranger hid secrets behind her dark eyes.

  “Nice disguise.”

  She waved the ticket back and forth. “I thought I might be able to slip outside and give this to you once I was in, but it has a UPN code. Some attendant at the door will most likely scan the ticket so that it can’t be used again.”

  “That UPN makes it hard to duplicate, too.” He pinched the plastic between his fingers and turned the ticket over. “Looks like I’m just going to have to steal one.”

  “Do you think you can do that?”

  He rolled his eyes and handed the ticket back to her. “You’re the one fond of calling me Loki.”

  “I didn’t realize Loki was a thief along with all his other talents.”

  “Some of Loki’s exploits are exaggerated—” he flicked a finger at the small camera he’d taken from his pocket “—and some aren’t.”

  “Is that a camera?”

  “Yes, Madam Spy. I don’t leave home without it.”

  “Do you think you caught Zendaris’s associate?”

  “Associate? That’s a nice name for him.” He claimed his laptop from the closet, placed it on the table by the window and booted it up. “Tell me if you recognize any of these people. Maybe the guy who dropped the phone in your pocket on that street corner.”

  Deb paced the room while he fiddled with the USB connection between his mini camera and the laptop. Soon the images loaded. “They’re up.”

  Deb leaned over him, her black ponytail sliding over her shoulder and tickling his arm. Her scent, a mingling of flowers and musk and citrus, made his head swim. Or maybe it was her close proximity and the way her warm breath caressed his cheek that made him dizzy.

  He tapped the keyboard to scroll through each image. “Any of these people look familiar?”

  At the third picture, Deb jabbed the screen. “This guy.”

  Beau zeroed in on his face and blew up the image. The man in the picture also had on sunglasses that hid a portion of his face and a hat pulled low on his forehead. Was everyone in Boston sporting some kind of disguise?

  “No.” She wiggled her fingers at the screen. “Zoom out again. It’s not his face. It’s his body. The guy who bumped into me on the street in Beacon Hill had a large build, a puffy jacket like this guy and broad shoulders, a thick neck—or at least his jacket made it seem thick.”

  Beau hit the arrow key several times until the man’s body filled the frame. “He’s big, wide through the torso, neck as big as one of my thighs. Do you think it’s the same guy?”

  “Could be. Was he one of the first ones you caught at the bookstore?”

  “Yep. He’s my third suspect. Look through the rest before you settle on him.” He clicked through the slideshow for her, and she halted at only one more—another big guy in a leather jacket.

  “The first one had the right kind of jacket on. It could be him. His face isn’t very distinctive, is it?”

  “All heads and faces have distinct shapes and forms. I’m sending this one to my guy to see what comes back.”

  She stepped back and curled her fingers around the back of his chair. “You have a guy?”

  “You have Prospero. I have a support team, too.”

  “Do they know what you’re working on?”

  “Never.”

  She puckered her lips and blew out a long breath. “Haven’t you had to check in with Prospero yet? Aren’t they demanding some kind of progress report from you?”

  “I’m Loki, not a second-grader.” He cropped and saved the photo and then sent it along to one of the computer banks that matched faces with a huge database of known and suspected terrorists, thugs and wannabes. “This could take a while, but then we have a party to attend.”

  “Three hours to go. How are you going to get that ticket?”

  “I’m a skilled pickpocket.” He flexed and then cracked his knuckles. “You don’t think swiping one of these tickets from some distracted scientist isn’t going to be child’s play for Loki?”

  She laughed and some of the lines that had been plaguing her face disappeared. “Not every scientist is forgetful and distracted.”

  “I’ll find one who is.” Crossing his arms behind his head, he stretched out his legs. “I had a sandwich for lunch. Do you want to eat something before the party?”

  “I can’t eat.” Deb folded her hands across her stomach. “Too nervous. We still haven’t discussed the plan for this evening. How are we going to pull off a fake murder?”

  “We’ll have to assess the situation first. Maybe I can get close to Dr. Herndon and make a proposal.”

  “He’s not going to listen to some deranged stranger and agree to play possum.”

  “Who said Dr. Herndon and I are strangers?”

  “You know Dr. Herndon?” Her newly dark eyes popped open.

  “You could say that.”

  She huffed out a breath and her nostrils flared. “Why don’t you just say it?”

  “We all have our secrets, Deb.”

  Her cheeks flushed and she turned away.

  He planned to help her rescue her son, but that didn’t mean he had to reveal all his secrets. He shoved the laptop into the middle of the table. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to hit the hotel gym before I start my transformation.”

  “That’s fine.” She poked her head in the closet to retrieve the small evening clutch she’d bought earlier and stuffed the ticket inside.

  Did Beau suspect her of hiding something from him? Every time he mentioned keeping secrets, she felt as if he were drilling a hole into her brain to discover hers.

  If he couldn’t see the obvious similarity between himself and Bobby, she didn’t want to bring it up. This was not the time or place to tell a man he had a son.

  “I’m going to get some rest and then start my own transformation. I’m sure mine’s going to take longer than yours.”

  He pointed to his head. “You already got started. You... It looks great, different.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  He left for the gym and waited outside the door, listening for the chain. She appreciated the protectiveness but she’d feel a lot safer if she had her weapon.

  He’d locked both guns in the room safe but had neglected to give her the combination. Did he really think she’d up and shoot him to escape after everything he’d done for her?

  He might up and shoot her once she revealed she’d kept
his son from him these past two years. He had to understand. She’d make him understand, or maybe she wouldn’t have to try. Once he finished this assignment, he’d be traipsing off to his next one.

  Maybe not traipse. Beau wasn’t a man who traipsed.

  Sighing, she dropped onto the edge of the bed and slipped off her new flats, and then curled onto her side. She reached for the phone on the nightstand and clicked open the picture of Bobby holding the newspaper.

  She traced his sweet face with her fingertip. “Hold on, precious. Mommy’s coming. Daddy, too.”

  Chapter Seven

  By the time Beau returned from his workout, Deb had showered, slipped into her lingerie and hugged a white terry-cloth robe around her body to let him into the room.

  He tilted his head back and sniffed. “It smells sweet in here—a lot better than that gym.”

  “It’s the perfume. I talked the girl at the cosmetics counter into giving me a few sample sizes of perfume, even though I crossed the street to buy my makeup at the drugstore.”

  He snorted. “Don’t waste your time trying to be thrifty with Zendaris’s money.”

  “Oh, I don’t care about that.” She pulled a chair up to the mirror. “I just want to be able to dump all this stuff once this mission is over. I don’t think I could bring myself to throw out expensive makeup regardless of who footed the bill for it.”

  She spread a hand towel on the table and started lining up tubes and jars and brushes. “How was your workout?”

  “I really needed it.” He stripped off his sweaty T-shirt and shoved it into a plastic bag in the closet.

  Deb leaned close to the mirror, but shifted her gaze to the reflection behind her. Beau must’ve done some shopping on his own, too. She hadn’t remembered the gym shorts that now hung low on his waist.

  When he raised his eyes to meet her stare in the mirror, she snatched at a bottle of foundation, knocking it over. She’d better stop acting like a love-struck teenager around him.

  Her focus had to remain on Bobby and freeing him from his captors. Somehow she felt as though, if she stopped thinking about him for one minute, he’d be snatched from her.

  She’d been preoccupied the day he’d disappeared. Logically, she knew her preoccupation had nothing to do with Bobby’s abduction, but that didn’t lessen the guilt. She didn’t need any more guilt weighing her down.

  “I’m going to step in the shower.”

  She waved a hand in the air as if she couldn’t care less that he’d be in the other room—naked.

  Deb applied the drugstore cosmetics with a heavy hand. The foundation changed her skin tone down to her décolletage. She stroked on black mascara, eyeliner and three different shades of eye shadow until an unfamiliar pair of deep-set smoky eyes stared back at her from the mirror. The coral blush she feathered onto her cheekbones altered the contours of her face. She’d save the lipstick until after she slipped into her dress.

  The water from the shower had stopped at about the same time Deb had finished her eyes.

  As she turned from the mirror, Beau burst from the bathroom with his arms spread. “Well?”

  He’d purchased his own wig—dark hair brushed back from his forehead with the hint of a widow’s peak. He’d changed his blue eyes with dark contacts, just like hers, and a bushy moustache and beard covered the lower half of his face.

  He would look almost nerdy if it weren’t for all those muscles on display above the towel wrapped around his waist.

  “Wow, you sort of look like a scientist.”

  His mouth formed an O amid all that hair. “And you look sort of amazing in a mistress-of-the-dark kind of way.”

  “Too much?” She bit her lip. She didn’t want to stand out in the crowd.

  “It’ll work. Zendaris wouldn’t even be able to pick you out.”

  “If he’s there. I don’t think he’ll show his face.”

  “I think we can both show ours without being recognized.”

  “Wouldn’t you want Dr. Herndon to recognize you?”

  “There are other ways I can make myself known.”

  Which he obviously wasn’t going to tell her about. She pulled the heavy dress from the hanger. “I’m going to put this thing on. Are you done in the bathroom?”

  “You don’t have to get dressed in the bathroom. We can just turn our backs to each other. I have to get into my monkey suit, too.”

  Deb staked out one corner of the room while Beau staked out the other. Did he find her modesty juvenile? Little did he know she had a hard time controlling her thoughts when confronted with his half-clothed body.

  She untied the robe and let it drop to the floor. She stepped into the dress and tugged the bodice over her breasts. “Can you zip this for me?”

  “My pleasure.” His warm fingers skimmed her bare back as he pulled the dress together and tugged on the zipper. “There’s a little hook at the top. Might take me a minute to get it with my clumsy fingers.”

  He could take more than a few minutes if that meant she could continue feeling the warmth emanating from his body and inhaling his clean, masculine scent.

  “There.” He placed his hands on her shoulders and turned her toward him. His dark eyes kindled, a different light from his usual blue fire—but it still melted her insides.

  “You look stunning.”

  She gave a half laugh and stepped back, almost tripping on her gown. “It’s the makeup. Men always claim they like a woman with a fresh, natural face and then go all gaga over the woman with the artfully applied makeup.”

  “I go gaga over you, natural or made-up.”

  “Yeah, well, we tried that before.” She brushed past him to get her heels from the closet. “Didn’t work out that great.”

  He appeared behind her in a flash as she lifted her skirt to slip a foot into her shoe.

  “It didn’t? I always thought it worked out pretty great. I had no regrets. Did you?”

  Balancing on one high heel, she gripped the closet door frame as she put on the other shoe. When she’d discovered her pregnancy, that night loomed as a disaster. But once she’d held Bobby in her arms, she wouldn’t have changed one moment of it although her son had never had a father.

  If Beau knew the outcome of their brief encounter, he wouldn’t think it had worked out so great.

  “I—I just mean we never saw each other after that. I didn’t even know how to contact you.” She had her excuse for not telling him about Bobby if it ever came to that.

  He brushed her hair from her back, holding the heavy strands of the wig in one hand. “If you had known how to contact me, would you have done so?”

  She whipped around and her hair slid from his grasp. With the five-inch heels on, she could almost glare at him eye to eye. “You knew who I was. Why didn’t you ever contact me?”

  He parted his fingers across his moustache and around his mouth. “We didn’t exactly discuss our next date, did we?”

  “It wasn’t the time or the place.”

  “Exactly. Don’t forget, Deb. You were the one who slipped out at the crack of dawn, leaving me with nothing more than a scribbled note and the scent of you all over those sheets.”

  With his words, the memory of that night slammed against her full-force and she grabbed the closet again and closed her eyes. “I did leave you the note.”

  He chuckled. “Just like a woman to expect a man to figure out something from that. That note made me think you saw that as a one-nighter, and hey, if that’s all I could get, I could die a happy man. But I didn’t figure you wanted any follow-up, and I guess I was right since you had a boyfriend or a lover at the time—Bobby’s dad.”

  “I’m sorry.” She clasped her hands over her aching heart.

  “No need to apologize.” He chucked her under t
he chin and crossed back to his side of the room. “Now I can die a happy man.”

  “Don’t talk about dying.” She dipped her head and fussed with the skirt of her dress.

  He slipped his feet into a pair of shiny black dress shoes and shrugged into his cummerbund. “Can you help me with the bow tie?”

  “Of course.” She flexed her fingers and he returned to her realm just when she’d gotten her breath back. His proximity made her pulse race and her skin prickle with heat.

  She wanted to correct his false impression that she’d had a lover stashed away somewhere else the night she’d met him. But to do so would be to confess that he was Bobby’s father. She wasn’t ready for that yet—and neither was he.

  They had to rescue Bobby first.

  He tilted his chin up as she tied the bow tie, and his fake beard tickled her fingers. She straightened the ends of the bow tie and then smoothed her hands across the front of his starched shirt. “There you go.”

  “Perfect.” He sidled in front of the mirror, but his gaze shifted to her. “Why did Bobby’s father let you and Bobby go?”

  “It’s a long story suited for another time and another place.” And that had to be the understatement of the evening.

  He shrugged his broad shoulders and stepped around her to rummage in another bag. “And now the pièce de résistance.”

  He perched a pair of dark-framed glasses on the end of his nose, and she laughed.

  Running a hand over his slicked-back hair, he said, “Overkill?”

  She shook her head. “It’s just that the way that tux fits you, you’re going to be the hottest absentminded professor at that shindig.”

  His grin only served to emphasize her point. “Ladies first. You take a taxi to the Grand Marquis, I’ll follow in another taxi and I’ll see you at the party.”

  She swept up her beaded clutch from the bed and hugged it to her chest. “Shouldn’t I have some kind of weapon?”