by Lucy Score
“You kept files?”
She nodded. “They’re on an offline hard drive in my study.”
“We can just wait until after the spa and take them to him together,” Xavier argued. She knew what he was doing. He didn’t feel safe leaving her alone.
Waverly grabbed his hand on his next pass around the room. “Brad isn’t going to try for me. Not when I’m about to get him something he wants. The sooner we can get some answers about what he’s actually up to, the sooner we can get out of this mess.”
“What happens then, Waverly?” Xavier knelt on the floor in front of her. “What happens when this is all over?”
She shook her head and pushed her fingers through his hair. “I don’t know. But I do know that I need you.”
He swore quietly. “Tell me where the hard drive is.”
She gave him instructions and a key. “We’re not back together, by the way,” she reminded him.
“Do you mind if I have sex with other women while we’re having sex?” Xavier asked casually.
She saw bloody murder red at just the thought of it. “You’re not putting that anywhere near another woman,” she said, pointing at his crotch.
“I don’t plan to ever again, Angel. And you sure as hell aren’t sleeping with anyone else because I’ll kill them. Which means we are exclusively seeing each other.”
“Exclusively having sex with each other.”
“Exclusively having sex and living together.”
“Until this is over and you go back to New York or D.C. or London or wherever the hell you live.” Waverly crossed her arms over her chest.
“After this is over, I’m flying you to Barbados, and we’re getting married.”
“You drive me insane!”
“Get used to it, baby.”
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The limo pulled away from the curb and Kate raised the privacy glass. “You’d better call Chelsea, but make it fast because I want to hear about the sex.”
“You’re vicariously insatiable,” Waverly shot back as she dialed Chelsea’s number.
“Hey, Wave! You guys were hysterical on the show last night! I’ve never seen my brother covered in puppies like that before.”
Good God. Waverly had forgotten all about the Max Heim show. It felt like it had been a lifetime ago. “Thanks, did your parents get to see it?”
“They did. We video chatted during the broadcast. You realize there’s not a soul on the planet who’s going to buy that you’re not together, right?”
“I’ll deal with that when I have to. Right now, I’ve got some money quests for you.”
“Yippy! I love a good money trail.”
Waverly filled her in on what she was looking for.
“No problem. I can start digging here on my end and see what I can come up with.”
“Also, your brother now knows about my other employment,” Waverly warned her.
“I bet that went over well,” Chelsea said dryly. “The woman you’ve been pining over for years just told you she’s basically Batman.”
“I don’t think it’s fully hit him yet. But I wanted to let you know that I’m not going to blow your cover. He asked to speak to my hacker friend so he could offer you any of his resources. I told him it wasn’t possible.”
Chelsea snorted. “I appreciate that. Zave would freak. He’d go apoplectic.”
“I don’t know. Maybe we underestimated him. He handled my news okay.”
“Just wait,” Chelsea warned her. “It’ll catch up with him, and he’ll go ballistic.”
Waverly hoped Chelsea was wrong.
She hung up and flopped back against the buttery leather of the limo’s seat. “Don’t you go all mental hibernation on me,” Kate said, throwing aside the glossy magazine she’d been looking at. “Tell me what happened last night.”
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Xavier sat back in his desk chair and stared at his screen. It was just another unprecedented surprise to add to the teetering pile of the last twenty-four hours. He’d followed Waverly’s instructions and found her hard drive under the false bottom of a locked drawer in an unassuming credenza in her study.
The hidey hole also held a small arsenal including three handguns, six knives in varying sizes, and a jumbo pack of pepper spray all with cozy homes in the molded foam base.
The hard drive had been tucked in next to a package of tiny listening devices and GPS trackers.
He and Micah had handpicked a small team to start sifting through the assignments detailed in her files. She’d been meticulous with what she recorded. And she’d been damn good, too, he realized as he scrolled through case after case on the offline workstation.
Waverly was a spy. The woman whose safety he’d been obsessed with purposely chose to put herself in harm’s way. And for what? Information that other agencies were too lazy or busy or clumsy to collect.
He could see how it had happened. Fresh out of college, Dante Wrede tempted her with the offer of a little excitement. Finally, something she could choose. Given her unpredictable childhood and then the cage of expectations she’d found herself in as a young adult, Waverly had always found small ways to feel that rush of adrenaline. Jumping off yachts, racing motorcycles. But running around playing spy games? Operatives got killed. It could and did happen. It had likely happened to Wrede. And if the man was alive, odds were he’d led Waverly into a trap.
Things had seemed so clear last night. The magnitude of the need that each felt for the other, the moments when they were so close they stopped being two and became one. It didn’t happen like that for everyone. They had it. And he’d finally had tangible hope that she’d find her way back to him. She had to feel it, too. There was no denying what they ignited in each other.
But when he’d looked around her study and now at her assignment notes, at the evidence of her worlds of screen and spy, he wondered how he would fit in anywhere besides her bed. Could he handle it if she chose to continue her work?
So many questions and so few answers. He roused himself from his reverie. He would find a way to make Waverly his, even if it killed him. For now, he’d settle for putting her two steps ahead in the game.
Micah was making calls to intelligence community buddies trying to unofficially confirm some of the more hush-hush investigations. Cayman, Invictus’ ever-fashionable head of research, was plowing through the rest with a handpicked team. With the investigation moving forward, Xavier decided to do a deeper dig through Waverly’s case notes.
He was cross-referencing a particularly hairy assignment to clone the phone of a playboy son who looked to be in line to take over his ailing father’s Middle Eastern weapons business. He pulled up paparazzi footage of Waverly entering a Miami hotel in South Beach for the son’s midnight club party. She looked like the picture perfect party girl. The short kimono dress in jade green covered what he could only assume was a very tiny bikini. Her blonde hair was pulled up into a knot on the top of her head, and despite the dark, she wore oversized sunglasses to protect herself from the photographers’ flashes.
He spotted Kate a few paces behind her. Casual in a ball cap and jeans and a t-shirt.
Where she once would have kept her head down and scurried inside, this Waverly smiled and waved, blowing kisses as photographers and fans shouted her name. She strutted inside on ankle-breaking platform wedges. The videographer followed her shapely ass to the door and then panned away as another celebrity arrived.
Xavier did a search for videos from that same night and found one of Waverly leaving the party at two o’clock in the morning. The amateur quality left much to be desired, but the video showed Waverly teetering out of the hotel on the arm of a burly security guard. She was grinning and cracking her gum, and though the crowd outside the hotel was smaller now, she thrust an arm up in a salute. The cuff bracelet on her arm slipped a bit, and Xavier paused the image.
He zoomed in, enhancing the image on screen, and k
icked back in his seat. That wasn’t Waverly. That was Kate dressed as Waverly. It was a trick they’d pulled back when he met Waverly. He’d almost fallen for it, too. It made sense here. “Waverly” would be long gone before the host’s phone disappeared and magically reappeared. No one would suspect a woman who wasn’t even there.
Memories of the day he’d caught her leaving the house as Kate, of kissing her that first time, pushed to the surface. It was the first of many times that’d he lost his cool around her. He’d thought being older and wiser and with the distance of so many years between them that her pull on him would have lessened.
But that longing that he’d refused to name had made him just as reckless now with her. He’d taken her in the courtyard of a church. Sinner and Saint, he thought wryly. If that wasn’t the perfect definition of their relationship, he didn’t know what was.
He stared at the image of Kate dressed as Waverly onscreen and smirked. Kate was incapable of walking in heels, and he wondered if that’s where the drunken party girl rumors had begun. With Kate stumbling out of clubs in shoes that didn’t fit. He’d have to ask them.
For now, satisfied that he could confirm one of her assignments, he moved on to another. This was a joint assignment with Wrede handed down from the SEC. They were to get information that could confirm suspected insider trading by a young tech startup billionaire. This case Xavier recalled from the extensive press coverage. The weasely little dick had taken investors’ money out of his company and used it to short sell securities. When the market price tanked, he’d purchased it all back at a huge profit.
According to Waverly’s cryptic notes, after attending a dinner party hosted by the weasel in London, not only were they able to confirm the man’s participation in the short sell, but they’d also uncovered a Ponzi scheme. Xavier’s eyebrows winged up. While it was impressive work, it was the paparazzi photos of Waverly and Dante leaving their hotel together that he couldn’t stop studying.
They looked as though they belonged together. Wealthy, confident, decked out in designer fashions, they’d paused to pose for the cameras outside the hotel before sliding into the back of a white Range Rover. Waverly wore purple, a body-hugging dress that drew the eye and didn’t let it go until it had skimmed every perfect curve. Beside her, his hand at her back, Wrede wore a couture crushed velvet dinner jacket in navy with satin lapels. Xavier didn’t know if he wanted to punch Wrede more for daring to touch Waverly or wearing that douchey jacket.
Waverly was looking up at him, her expression sweetly serene. Xavier tilted his head and keyed in a command. The image of just her face filled his screen. God, she was beautiful. Flawless skin, eyes that drew a man in just to drown, that thick curtain of hair that made his fingers twitch with the need to dive in. And her lips, painted a dusky rose here.
Lips that were curved subtly. He frowned and looked again. Waverly Sinner had a bombshell smile that could reach into a man’s chest and stop his heart. And then she had her “working” smile that never quite lived up to her genuine one. It didn’t light up her eyes. That was the smile she was giving Wrede.
Hope bloomed in his heart, and Xavier abandoned his research to pull up every picture of Waverly and Wrede together. Over and over again, he spotted that smile. Never quite the full wattage. Was it his imagination? Or was there really hope that when all was said and done, Waverly loved him more than Dante Wrede? He wanted to call her and demand an answer.
Micah ambled in the door and took a glance at Xavier’s screen. “Oh for Christ’s sake. I thought you were helping out, not obsessing over Lover Boy,” he accused.
Xavier shut off his monitor. “I’m researching.”
“What? How to dress like an asshole?”
“What kind of a man goes out in public wearing red skinny jeans?” Xavier complained.
“Apparently your girl’s boyfriend does.”
“What’s your take?” Xavier asked. “Dead or double cross?”
Micah shrugged his linebacker shoulders. “My take is that there’s something rotten in Denmark.”
“Look who’s quoting Shakespeare,” Xavier said, giving his friend a sarcastic golf clap.
“Suzanne’s latest obsession. Family book club.”
“When is she going to get into something you can get behind like home brewed beers or fantasy football?”
“Why would she do that when it’s so much fun making me quote Hamlet and knit shitty potholders?”
“The joys of marriage,” Xavier empathized.
“You want to talk about last night?” Micah offered.
“Nope,” Xavier shook his head. As protective as he was of Waverly, he’d prefer that no one knew the heights their lovemaking took them to.
“I could draw a few conclusions from that cozy scene this morning.”
Xavier shot him a look.
“All I’m saying is I don’t want either of you to end up in the same place you were five years ago.”
“Micah, she’s it for me.”
“Is that why you’re dragging our company into your personal business?”
Xavier stared at him coolly. “I know you’re not happy with where this investigation could take us.”
“It’s not our investigation. We should be passing this off to the feds.”
“Micah, I’m asking you as a friend to trust me here. If we turn this over, it’s going to sit for a year before they assign anyone to it. We don’t have a year. She’s in trouble. And this is going to go deeper than a missing actor in skinny jeans.”
Micah covered his face with his hands. “I know it is. And your ass is going to owe me big time for this.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Shut that shit down,” Micah sighed. “We’re going to lunch.”
Xavier obliged and followed Micah out the office door.
“Have you seen any of the intel from Sinner’s hacker pal?” Micah asked on the way out. “She’s good. We should talk to her.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Palisade Spa Resort was a luxurious slice of heaven on earth. Perched on the edge of a golf course, the rambling white adobe buildings clustered around a courtyard with a huge saltwater pool and private cabanas. Inside skylights and walls of glass brought the natural light and expansive canyon views indoors.
Sylvia Sinner greeted them at the front doors. She was decked out in capris and a flowing, crisscross back tank top from her own line of yoga wear and holding a glass of cucumber lemon water.
“I’m so glad you girls could join me today,” she said, her face bright with enthusiasm.
Sometimes Sylvia’s evolution from a downward spiraling alcoholic to the picture of health and vitality still struck Waverly. It hadn’t been that long ago that her mother had passed out in a puddle of her own sickness on a family vacation in the Mediterranean. Xavier had been there for that, Waverly remembered clearly. He’d seen her family at their worst, and he’d stuck… until he hadn’t.
“Hi, Mom,” Waverly gave Sylvia a kiss. “Thanks so much for organizing this.”
“What better way to welcome you home? Now, you and I are starting with a yoga class in fifteen minutes, and Kate has a sixty-minute massage with Arturo.”
“Arturo?” Waverly arched an eyebrow.
Kate fanned herself in anticipation.
They went their separate ways, Kate heading off to the languid promise of Arturo’s heavenly hands and Waverly and Sylvia peeling off toward the yoga studio. It was a bright, glassed-in yoga studio with wide-planked oak flooring. The room was naturally heated by the spectacular southern California autumn sunshine.
Waverly chose a pink and purple tie-dye mat from the shelf and spread it out in the front row. Her mother hopped onto the elevated stage at the front of the room and smiled prettily as the rest of the mats began to fill up.
Sylvia’s recovery had drawn her from the arms of addiction into the exact opposite direction. During her journey, she had become a ce
rtified yoga instructor and occasionally, when her schedule allowed it, would lead a class. Venues clamored for her, and any class she taught booked full within half an hour of its announcement.
She winked at Waverly and sent her a little finger wave before calling the class to order.
Waverly spent the next hour flowing through poses and finding soreness in every posture. The twinges in her side from the bullet wound were negligible compared to the marks her night with Xavier had left on her body—and her heart.
There was zero chance of her moving on unscathed. She’d known better yet still couldn’t say no.
No one made her feel the way Xavier Saint did. Raw, stripped bare, vulnerable yet still protected, cherished. It was impossible to maintain a safe distance as they worshipped each other’s bodies into the night. There wasn’t an inch of her he hadn’t touched, hadn’t loved.
And still she wanted more. It was the pull that he had over her. The more she had him, the more he feasted on her, the more she needed.
He knew nearly all of her secrets. The last obstacle, her last layer of protection, was Dante. What would happen when Xavier found him for her? Because she knew he would. He’d stop at nothing to give her whatever he thought she wanted. But if Dante was found alive, that last secret would be told. There would be nothing left to stand between them.
Not that her “relationship” with Dante had been enough to slow Xavier’s seduction.
Waverly rolled onto her back and closed her eyes and followed her mother’s instructions into the final pose.
“It is in savasana, or corpse pose, that we finally let go,” Sylvia’s soothing voice sighed through the studio. “Here we find the spaciousness in our bodies, in our hearts. Here we let our worries, our fears, our need to control gather and die away. Here we welcome everything as it is.”
Waverly let everything go on her mat, everything except Xavier. There was no letting go of him.
“How do you feel, darling?” Sylvia asked, joining Waverly on her mat after the classroom emptied out.
