by Cassie Miles
“You’re a goddess,” he whispered.
And she felt like some kind of superior being who was beautiful, brilliant and powerful. If she could be like this in everyday life, Emily would rule the world.
Somehow, magically, they changed positions and she was on top. She kissed his neck, inhaling his musky scent and tasting the salty flavor of his flesh. She bit down. He was yummy, a full meal.
He nudged her away from his throat. “Did you turn into a vampire or are you just giving me a hickey?”
“I’ll be a sultry vampire.” She raked her fingers through the hair on his chest. “And you can be a wolf man.”
“I like it.”
“Me, too.”
Sex with Sean was a full-contact sport, engaging mind and body, mostly body, though. He teased and cajoled and fondled and kissed and nibbled.
She’d missed the great sex that only Sean could give her. Not that it was all his doing. She played her part—the role of a goddess—in their crazy, wild affection. And when she reached her earth-shaking climax, she came completely undone, disassembled. It felt like she’d actually left her body and soared to the stratosphere. When she came back to earth, she couldn’t wait to do it again.
So they did. Twice more that night.
Chapter Twelve
The next morning, Sean lifted his eyelids and scanned the open-space suite at the Pendragon Hotel. Yesterday might have been the longest day of his life with more ups and downs than a roller coaster, but he wasn’t complaining. The day had turned out great. Sex with Emily was even better than he’d remembered. Their chemistry was incredible. No other woman came close.
He gazed at her, sleeping beside him. She was on her stomach, and the sheet had slipped down, revealing a partial view of her smooth, creamy white bottom. He wanted to see more. Carefully, so he wouldn’t wake her, he caught the sheet between two fingers and tugged.
Immediately, she reached back to swat his hand away. She peered through a tangle of hair as she rolled to her side and rearranged the sheet to cover her lovely round breasts. A bit late for modesty, he thought, but he said nothing. He wanted another bout of sex, and he was fairly sure she was ready for more of the same.
“Time?” she asked.
He stretched his neck so he could see the decorative clock on the bedside table. The combination of chrome circles and squares showed the time in the upper-left corner.
“Eight forty-six.” He looked past the archway into the living room, where faint light appeared around the shades. “The sun’s up.”
“I thought we were going to run out the door early and have breakfast with Levine.”
“It’ll have to be brunch. Maybe even lunch.” He made a grab for her, but she evaded him. “About last night...”
“Enough said.” She climbed out of bed with the sheet wrapped around her. “I’m glad we got that out of the way.”
She made wonderful sex sound like a distasteful chore. Surely he’d heard her wrong. “Are you talking about us? You and me? About what happened last night?”
“It was just sex.”
“Sure, and Everest is just a mountain. The Lamborghini is just a car.”
“The tension was building between us, and we had to relieve it. That’s what last night was about.” With one hand, she clutched the sheet while the other rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. “I promise you—it’s never going to happen again.”
She pivoted, squared her shoulders and marched into the bathroom while he sat on the bed, gaping as he watched her hasty retreat. Never going to happen again? He’d be damned if he believed her. She might as well tell the birds not to sing and the fish not to swim. He could not deny his nature, and his inner voice told him to have sex with her as soon and as often as possible.
His number one job, however, was keeping her safe, and meeting with Special Agent Greg Levine was a good place to start. Sean decided not to make the phone call to set the time and the place until he and Emily were near the restaurant; he didn’t want Levine to have time to plan ahead.
After they were dressed, he gave her a glance, pretending not to notice how tiny her waist looked in the belted slacks that hugged her bottom. He stared pointedly at her flat ballet shoes. “Do you have sneakers?”
“They don’t exactly go with this outfit.” She slipped on the matching gray jacket to the pantsuit. “I want to look professional to meet with Levine, and my suitcase is packed with outdoorsy stuff for Colorado.”
“You need to wear running shoes. Obvious reasons.”
“Okay.” She exhaled a little sigh. “Anything else?”
“A hooded sweatshirt?”
“Don’t have one with me. I’ve got several at my apartment. Can we swing past there?”
She wasn’t actually disagreeing with him, but her reluctance to follow his instructions was annoying. “Don’t you get it? These guys want to kill you. If they recognize you, you’re dead.”
Her full lips pinched together. “If we can figure out a way to go to my apartment, I have a couple of already-made disguises to go with my pseudonyms. There’s a really good one that makes me look like a guy.”
Impossible!
He turned away from her and went to the kitchenette to fill his coffee mug again. “Try to find something that makes you look anonymous. Wynter’s men might be following Levine.”
When she emerged from the bedroom, she threw her arms wide and announced her presence. “Ta-da! Do I look like a punk kid from the city streets?”
Without makeup, her face looked about fourteen. But her jeans were too well fitted. And her Berkeley sweatshirt looked almost new. “Not a street kid,” he said. “You look more like a cheerleader.”
“Is that anonymous enough?”
“Still too cute. Men will notice you.” He motioned for her to come closer. “Give me the sweatshirt.”
In one of the kitchen drawers, he found a pair of heavy scissors, which he used to whack off the arms on the sweatshirt and to make a long slit down from the collar. He turned it inside out and tossed it back to her.
“You ruined my sweatshirt,” she said as she pulled it over her head. Underneath, she wore a blue blouse with long sleeves. “How’s this?”
“Better, but I still can’t erase your prettiness.” He tilted his head to the side for a different perspective. “Maybe we should cut off the jeans.”
“I’d rather not. These cost almost two hundred bucks.”
He stalked into the bedroom, dug around in his backpack and took out two baseball caps. The one that was worse for wear, he gave to her. “Whenever you go outside, wear this. It won’t change your appearance, but it hides your face.”
His clothes were more nondescript than hers; people tended not to notice a guy in jeans, T-shirt and plaid flannel overshirt. If he stooped his shoulders a bit to disguise his height, he’d fade into almost any background.
They left the hotel shortly after ten o’clock, late enough that the morning fog had lifted. When he’d been living in San Francisco, he had a hard time adjusting to fog. Sunny days in Denver numbered about 245 a year, and when it was sunny the sky was open and blue. Sean came to think of the morning fog as the day waking slowly, reticent to leave nighttime dreams behind.
This was the city where he first fell in love with Emily, and he saw the buildings, neighborhoods and streets through rose-colored glasses. If last night’s sensuality had been allowed to grow and flourish, he would have felt the same today, but she’d squashed his mood.
Behind the wheel of his rental car, he asked, “Is that North Beach café with the great coffee still there?”
“You mean Henny’s,” she said. “It’s there and the coffee is still yummy.”
The location wasn’t particularly convenient to the FBI offices near Golden Gate Park, but Sean wa
sn’t planning to go easy on his former coworker. The best explanation for how Wynter found out about Emily was that Levine was incompetent enough to get his phone tapped and not know it. At worst, he was working with Wynter.
There was street parking outside Henny’s Café, a corner eatery with a fat red hen for a logo. He found a place halfway down the block and parallel parked. He ordered her to stay in the car while he did swift reconnaissance inside the café, which was only half-full and had a good view of the street and an exit into the alley.
Back in the car, he called Levine. The trick to this phone call would be to keep from mentioning Emily or Wynter or the possibility that the FBI phones were tapped.
After the initial hello, Sean said, “Long time no see, buddy. Do you remember that case we worked? With the twins who kept spying on each other?”
“Uh-huh, I remember.” Levine sounded confused.
“The big thing in that case has been getting more and more common.” Sean’s reference was to wiretapping, which had been the key to solving the twin case. “Have you ever had a problem like that?”
“What are you getting at?”
“It’s probably nothing. I just hope you aren’t infected...” With a bug on your phone. “Know what I mean?”
“Damn right I do.” His confusion was replaced with anger. As a rule, feds don’t like having somebody outside the agency tell them that their phones aren’t secure. “What about that other matter? The problem with—”
“The Em agenda,” Sean said. “Meet me, within the hour, and we’ll talk.”
After he rattled off the name of the restaurant and the address, he ended the call and turned to Emily, who had been patiently, quietly waiting.
“He’ll be here,” he said. “We’ll wait in the car until he shows up.”
“Did you refer to me as the Em agenda?”
“To avoid saying your name.”
“Cool, like a code name.” She was off and running, chattering on about how she could be a spy. “Just call me Agent Em.”
She needed to understand that they weren’t playing a fantasy espionage game. The danger was real. But when Emily followed one of her tangents, she was bright and charming and impossible to resist.
When they were married, it was one of the things he had loved about her. He could sit back and listen to her riff about some oddball topic. She called it free verse; he called it adorable.
“Hold on,” he said. “I’m still mad.”
“About what?”
“You gave me the brush-off this morning.”
“Didn’t mean to upset you,” she said. “We had an agreement, ground rules. I’m just making sure I don’t fall in love with you again.”
“There’s a difference between sex and love.”
“Well, listen to you.” Her eyebrows lifted. “Aren’t you surprisingly sensitive?”
“I told you I’ve changed.”
“You hardly seem like the same guy who took me to a Forty-Niners game at Levi’s Stadium and got in a shouting match that almost came to blows.”
“They insulted my Broncos,” he said.
“Heaven forbid.”
The near fistfight at the football game hadn’t been his finest hour, but the undercover work had been eating away at him. He’d needed to let off steam. “I know there were times when I was hard to live with.”
“Me, too,” she said. “Let’s keep it in the past. And never fall in love again.”
“As long as we agree that not falling in love doesn’t mean we can’t have sex.”
“That’s a deal.”
When she held out her hand to shake on the agreement, he yanked her closer and gave her a kiss. He caught her in the middle of a gasp, but her mouth was pliant. Soon she was kissing him back. Emily’s recently logical brain might be opposed to sex, but her body hadn’t gotten the message. She wanted him as much as he wanted her.
When he turned away and looked out the windshield, he spied Special Agent Greg Levine crossing the street and heading toward Henny’s. Walking fast and staring down at the cell phone in his hand, Levine gave off the vibe of a stressed-out businessman and had the wardrobe to match: dark gray suit, blue shirt and necktie tugged loose. His dark blond hair was trimmed in much the same style as Sean’s but wasn’t as thick. The strands across the front were working hard to cover his forehead.
As Sean escorted Emily up the sidewalk to the café, she asked, “Is there anything I should be careful of saying or not saying? You know, in case Levine isn’t on our side.”
“Don’t mention Hazel. Definitely don’t mention that Dylan might hack in to his system.” Until they knew otherwise, Sean would treat Levine like an ally instead of an enemy. “First I’m going to pump him to find out how Wynter learned there was a witness. And then how he knew the witness was you.”
“I want to ask him what the FBI knows about Patrone’s family in Chinatown, the people who took him in when he was a kid.”
He nodded. “Anything else?”
“It goes without saying that I want to see if Levine can get me into the hospital to see Strauss.”
Inside Henny’s, they joined Levine in a cantaloupe-orange leatherette booth at the back. Henny’s specialized mostly in breakfast and lunch. The decor was chipper with sunlight filtering through the storefront windows, dozens of cutouts and pictures of chickens and a counter surrounded by swivel stools. A cozy place to wake up, and yet they served alcohol.
Sean did a handshake and half hug with Levine. They’d worked together but never had been close. Since Sean worked undercover, he was seldom in the office; the only agent he cared about was his handler/supervisor, and he knew she’d returned to Quantico. He listened while Levine updated him on other people they knew in common.
The waitress returned to their table with a Bloody Mary for Levine. He must have ordered when he walked in the door. Vodka before noon; not a good sign. Remembering her preference, Sean ordered a cappuccino for Emily. He wanted a double espresso.
“You and Emily,” Levine said with a knowing grin. “I always thought you two would get back together.”
“We’re not together,” Emily said. “I hired Sean to act as my bodyguard.”
“You’re his boss? The one who cracks the whip?” His grin turned into a full-on smirk. “I underestimated you, girl.”
“Don’t call her girl,” Sean said coldly. “And yeah, you didn’t give her enough credit. I haven’t seen your files, but she’s got enough on Wynter for an arrest.”
“I’m working on it.” Levine swizzled the celery in his glass before he raised it to his lips. “I’ve got a snitch on the inside.”
Sean hadn’t expected him to be so forthcoming. As long as Levine was being talkative, he asked, “How did Wynter find out there was a witness to Patrone’s murder?”
“The murder was investigated by the SFPD. Patrone was a known associate of Wynter, which put suspicion off Wynter. At first, they investigated Wynter’s rivals.”
Sean didn’t need a history of the crime. “But they came around to the real story. How did that happen?”
Levine couldn’t meet his gaze. Dark smudges under his eyes made Sean think he wasn’t sleeping well. His chin quivered as he attempted to change the direction of their conversation. “Why do you think my phone is bugged?”
“Simple logic. There’s no reason for anybody to connect Emily to me. We haven’t seen or talked to each other since the divorce. But you called my office in Denver—”
“I told you,” Levine said. “I always thought the two of you would get back together. Hell, you’re the reason Emily showed up on our doorstep instead of going to the police. She knew us because of you.”
He looked to Emily for confirmation. “Is that true?”
“I thought the FBI would be more
careful about keeping my identity secret.”
Anger heated Sean’s blood. She should have been able to trust the feds, but they’d been sloppy. He glared at Levine. “Did you tell them about Emily?”
“I had to give them something. The cops were off base, asking questions that riled other gangs.” His voice held a note of believable desperation. “I said there was a witness and leaked her account of the murder. But I didn’t give her name.”
Assessing his behavioral cues, Sean deduced that Levine was honestly sorry about the way things had turned out. He’d never meant to put Emily in danger. “I believe you.”
“Damn right you do.” Levine nodded vigorously. His relief was palpable. “You would have done the same thing.”
“I don’t think so.” Sean didn’t allow him to get comfortable. “There are other ways to play a witness, but I’m not here to give you a lesson. You asked why I suspected a wiretap on your phone.”
“Right.”
“After you called my office, one of Wynter’s men made the same contact. How would they know about me if they weren’t monitoring your phone?”
Levine took another drink. His Bloody Mary was almost gone, and he ordered another when the waitress brought their coffee drinks. Sean and Emily also ordered breakfast. Levine didn’t want food.
While the waitress bustled back to the kitchen, Levine leaned across the table on his elbows and asked, “Did you talk to the guy Wynter sent?”
Sean nodded. “John Morelli.”
Levine bolted upright in the booth. It looked like he’d been poked by a cattle prod. “Morelli is my snitch.”
Chapter Thirteen
Emily twisted her hands together in her lap as though she could somehow physically hold things together. Nothing made sense anymore. Morelli was her contact but also a snitch, and then he’d pulled a gun on Sean, which made him an enemy. The more Levine talked, the more confounded she felt. Had Morelli been lying to Sean when he said he only wanted to talk to her? He’d said she had information about who was stealing from Wynter. It might be important to go through her notes and figure out what he meant.
