Running Hot

by HelenKay Dimon

  It was the weirdest welcome ever. The man she needed so much, the one she dreamed about and spun fantasies around, stared at her with a blank expression. He acted as if he barely knew her. He seemed so disconnected that she wondered if his CIA boss hid in the corner watching.

  She plastered a smile on her face as her gaze traveled over the covers to Ward’s bandaged hand then to his pale face. Even her fake expression faltered then. “You look like hell.”

  “Thanks.” That was it. He didn’t say another word.

  The moment couldn’t be more awkward or tense. She almost backed right out of the room and kept walking until she hit water.

  Ford smiled at her. “He passed out on the job, and it pisses him off.”

  “I’d lost a lot of blood.”

  “Splat.” Ford made a dropping motion. “Fainted.”

  She listened to the banter. Heard them joke. She was happy for them and the friendship, but this is not the conversation she wanted.

  Ward turned his head on the pillow and looked at Ford. “Go away.”

  “Right. I’ll go find bad coffee.” Ford gave Tasha’s arm a gentle squeeze. “By the way, nice job.”

  “Thanks.” The compliments had her reeling. He hadn’t said two words to her in the field. Now he acted like they got along.

  He winked. “For a girl.”

  That was more like it. This she could handle. “There are needles everywhere. You should remember that.”

  “Don’t have to tell me twice.” Ford waved as he walked out. “I’ll be back later.”

  Then the silence fell. Neither one of them said a word until Ward finally broke in. “You scared him.”

  She shrugged. “Comes with the job.”

  “And you’re impressive at it.”

  Admiration was not really what she was looking for here. She’d hoped they could skip over this part and talk about something else. Like how her world crumbled when that knife went through his hand. How she held him as US military recon crashed into the complex and confiscated the stolen weapons. She hadn’t even known they were stationed nearby, waiting.

  But mostly she wanted to talk about seeing him again. He kicked something to life inside of her. A light clicked on and she wanted to explore that, but he’d gone into shutdown mode, and she had no idea how to break through or if he even wanted her to try.

  “Apparently not, since I’m being called home to account for Gareth and explain why I was working with you and firing missiles.” She half expected to be fired for doing her job. The grumbling and strange buzz had grown so loud that she didn’t know what she was going back to the office to find.

  He cleared his throat. “Are you leaving for London soon?”

  She wanted him to ask the right question. Say the right thing. “I live in England, so yes.”

  “Thank you.” He held out his hand. Actually laid there and acted as if they were business acquaintances.

  She stared at his palm. “Are you kidding?”

  He let his hand drop. “I didn’t want to presume.”

  There was nothing. The flirting was gone. Whatever feelings he’d had disappeared. Maybe it all had been an act for the mission. If so, he was damn good because he had her believing. Had her hoping.

  This she couldn’t do. She was not the breakdown type. She didn’t fumble over a guy. And if she was going to start now, she would do it in the shower in her hotel room.

  That meant she had to get out of there. She couldn’t stand there and pretend not to care.

  She leaned down and kissed him on the forehead. “Good-bye, Ward.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  She had to if she wanted to preserve any sense of dignity. “Try not to get yourself killed.”

  “I can’t promise that.”

  She threw him one last weak smile and walked out. Stepped away from something she thought had sparked but clearly only ran one way. Now she had to forget it all. She looked down at her purse and the airline ticket sticking out of the side pocket. She didn’t need that later flight now. It was time to get back to her life.

  She got as far as the elevator before she ran into Ford. He was coming off, and she was getting on.

  He saw her and stepped out of the car, blocking her ability to move around him. “You’re going?”

  Her chest hurt. Hell, everything hurt. “It’s time.”

  The doors closed behind him and she reached around to hit the down button. He watched her, and she stared at the closed doors, willing them to open again.

  Just as the bell dinged, Ford started talking again. This time in a whisper. “He’s not a jackass.”

  “What?” She stepped into the car but held the door.

  “It’s the hand and feeling useless.”

  “In other words, it’s not about me.” Yeah, he’d made that clear. She’d been thinking about him, worrying, and ignoring what she needed to do in terms of a debrief for work. He . . . well, she didn’t know what he was doing because he clearly didn’t want to share.

  “He’s been talking about you nonstop.”

  She punched the button for the lobby and watched the doors begin to close. “Nice try, Ford.”

  “I’m serious.”

  And she was done. “Good-bye.”

  WARD STOOD OUTSIDE the office and flexed his messed-up hand. Three months had passed, and he still didn’t have feeling in two of his fingers. The slice through the tendons and everything else in there had destroyed his grip, leaving it hard for him to close his hand. He’d tried shooting but felt the pain from his palm to his feet. The injury hurt, being taken out of the field pissed him off . . . losing Tasha crushed him.

  But he was hoping to fix that part today.

  He knocked once and went in when he thought he heard a faint noise on the other side of the door. He shut it behind him and looked around the room. Blue walls and a big desk. Files stacked on every corner and more on the small conference room table by the door. The one problem was the lack of humans.

  He heard an intake of breath and looked around. Tasha stood there, by an open closet, gawking at him. And not in a good way.

  “Why are you here?” she asked in a flat voice.

  He had hoped that would be obvious since one of the files in this office should be his résumé. “For a job.”

  “What?” The door clicked as she shut it and moved around to the front of her desk.

  Seemed they were not on the same page. He took the blame for that. She came into his hospital room back when he was still in pieces and he’d pushed her away. Dumbass that he was.

  “The Alliance.” He dropped the top-secret name and waited.

  She didn’t break her stare. Didn’t talk either.

  “Okay, I’ll keep going, and you can jump in when you want to.” He inhaled, trying to calm whatever bullshit was jumping around in his stomach.

  It would have been easier if she didn’t look like that. Her wavy blond hair fell over her shoulders and . . . did she have a tan? Where the hell did someone get a tan in London?

  “Thanks to our venture and us almost blowing up Fiji by accident, the CIA and MI6 are starting a joint project. Black ops. Limited oversight. Not bound by the rules of either organization.” She hadn’t blinked, and that was starting to freak him out so he wrapped it up. “That’s why I’m here.”

  Her gaze went to his hand then bounced back up to his face.

  He decided to fill in that blank since she’d apparently lost the power of speech. “I’m out of the field. Can’t be on operations if you can’t feel your hand or shoot a gun. But I’m not here for that position. You need people to run the projects who have experience in MI6 and the CIA. I’m here for the CIA, obviously.”

  She leaned against her desk in her gray pantsuit but didn’t show any other visible signs of life.

  Now he was getting worried. Maybe Ford was right that he’d waited too long. Three months without communication was a bit much. In Ward’s head it made sense. He’d come to her as w
hole as possible. But now he thought he might have fucked up.

  “Any chance you can say something?” Though he was starting to worry about what that might be.

  “You want to work for me?” she asked.

  Not exactly the I’m-miserable-without-you statement he was hoping for, but at least she said something. That was a start.

  But this part could get bumpy. “Not really.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You don’t want a job? I’m confused.”

  This is not how he wanted it to play out, but when a guy was desperate, he did desperate things.

  “I want to be with you. To date you. To see you. The job is the practical part, but it happens to put me near you all the time.” He took another deep breath. “Tasha, could you—”

  Color moved into her cheeks. “You practically ran me out of your hospital room with your lack of interest. You don’t call or answer my texts.” She ticked off his sins on her fingers. “Now you want to date?”

  This Tasha he recognized. Full of life and fighting back. This is the woman he couldn’t forget and needed so much to forgive him. “It sounds ridiculous when you say it like that.”

  “Good-bye, Ward.” She walked around her desk and sat down. She snatched up a pen and held it tight enough to break it in half.

  Yeah, that wasn’t happening. He deserved to be written off, but he had to keep fighting. “Can I just explain?” When she didn’t say no right away, he raced ahead. “I spent my entire adult life in the field. Undercover operations is all I know. Losing that felt like I lost everything I am. Everything that mattered.”

  Her grip tightened, then loosened on the pen. “The use of your hand could come back.”

  “Never fully. Never enough. There’s too much damage to the nerves and muscles.”

  “So I’m the consolation prize?”

  This got all screwed up, and now she was thinking about work when he wanted her thinking about him. He doubled back.

  “Okay, I totally fucked this up.” He came away from the door and around to her side of the desk. He knew it was an invasion of her space, but he needed to take this one shot. “Let me try again.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” But she didn’t kick him out or order him to leave.

  So, he pushed it one step further and slid his thigh on the edge of her desk. “I couldn’t help you. If something happened to you in that room when Tigana left and ordered us killed or in that warehouse or while we were out on the tarmac and gunmen opened fire, I couldn’t have saved you.”

  Something in her eyes softened. “I don’t need you to save me.”

  “I know, I just . . .” He wiped his hand through his hair and tried to find the right words. “You left my hospital room, and it felt like a kick to the gut. I have missed you every fucking day since.”

  Her eyebrow lifted. “You never called.”

  He wanted to gloss over this and forget it but he had to put it out there. She deserved to know it all. “I went to physical therapy, and it sucked. I couldn’t even squeeze a damn rubber ball at first. Still really can’t hold one in a tight grip, but at least I can move some of my fingers. But that’s after months of sweating it out, dealing with scar tissue, and fighting through nerve pain.”

  “Ward—”

  “The only thing that kept me going was following you from a distance, which wasn’t easy thanks to your security clearance and your country’s insistence on you not being my business.”

  “From a distance . . . what does that mean?’

  This part made him sound like a stalker. He’d told Ford, and Ford told him to either get over her or buy a plane ticket. Ward went with the latter. “I know you lobbied for the Alliance. I know it’s your baby, and it is so smart and . . . well, you.”

  “Working together is the right answer,” she sputtered. “For the UK and US, I mean.”

  “I know you don’t get to pick the CIA person. That person is more or less assigned, and all you get is veto power.” God, he needed her not to exercise that veto. He hoped that being British, she didn’t even know what a veto power was.

  “Uh-huh.”

  She sounded angry, but he saw something. Maybe that old spark. That light that filled her face and made him stupid. “You’re getting me as the CIA head.”

  Her eyebrow rose. “You think you decide?”

  He detected a thread of amusement in her voice, so he kept going. “Well, I want to date you and live in the same city as you and all of that stuff, and if you hire me, I’ll have a job. That will make paying for dinner easier.”

  She had her armrests clenched in a death grip now. “Why?”

  He didn’t pretend to be confused. “Because I think about you all the time. Because I’m miserable without you.”

  “Leaving you was the worst thing.” She shook her head as her words cut off.

  “I close my eyes and you’re there. I pick up my phone and play that message you left months ago just so I can hear your voice.” Because he couldn’t stand not touching her for one more second, he stood up and reached down to drag her up beside him. “For the longest time, I was sorry you saw me weak.”

  Her head tilted to the side, and all traces of anger fled her expression and body language. “Ward, that’s not true. I never viewed you that way.”

  “Now I’m sorry I ever let you leave.” He slipped his fingers through her hair. “Please give me a chance to prove I’m not an ass.”

  “You’re not.” Her hands found their way to his waist and rested there. “And you are not weak. You might actually be the toughest guy I know.”

  “Then you should take a chance on me.”

  She winced. “You understand that if you get this job, I’ll be your boss.”

  “Doesn’t bother me.” He ducked his head to meet her eye to eye. “You being strong and smart and beautiful doesn’t threaten me.”

  “I believe you.” She nodded. “You showed me that several times.”

  Hope grabbed on inside of him. She wasn’t pushing him away or making him pay for what happened. She might not understand. It could take weeks, maybe even months for that, but he’d wait. For her, he’d learn to be patient.

  “And I checked. I can date the boss.” That was a dealbreaker for him. That and bringing Ford along with him.

  She pulled back, and her mouth dropped open. “What?”

  “That was one of my conditions when I said I would take the job.”

  She shook her head. “What are you talking about?”

  “I told the higher-ups that I was already falling for you and would not stop just because I was in an office and attending meetings with you.” It was his turn to wince. “I also admitted that you weren’t all that fond of me right now, so I had to work to put us back together again.”

  “Falling for?”

  He decided it was a good sign she grabbed onto that. The way her fingers tightened on his skin probably meant he had a chance, too. “That old guy with the heavy British accent nearly spit up his tea, but he got it.”

  “I’m trying to imagine that scene.”

  Her wrapped his arms around her and pulled her in tighter against him. The feel of her body along his eased some of the constant burning in his gut. “Look, I can follow orders at the office. So long as at home I get to be in charge, and by that I mean in the bedroom.”

  “That sounds . . .” She smiled. “Wait, at home?”

  “Did I forget to tell you I don’t have a place to live?” He wanted to be in every part of her life. He could wait on some, and would, but he was tired of sitting around not saying anything.

  “You’re being pretty presumptuous.” Tough words, but her hands slid up his back.

  He cupped her face. “I want it all.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He balanced his forehead against hers and inhaled her scent. “Any chance you missed me?”

  She placed a quick kiss on his lips. “Every single day. I was sick with it.”

  �
�Thank God.” Relief washed through him. He closed his eyes to get his bearings, and when he opened them again, she was staring at him.

  “Nice.”

  “We can make this work.” He knew that was true. Believed it with every cell and every muscle. “Because honestly, I’ve tried living without you and I don’t like it.”

  She sighed. “I can be difficult.”

  “I think you’re sexy.” And to show how much he meant it, he kissed her. No soft and sweet. No, this was deep. Full of need with a promise of the future.

  When they broke apart, her breathing had grown heavier. She rested her cheek against his. “You’re not going to win every argument with that kind of thing.”

  He could live with that. “Will I win any?”

  “Yes.”

  Even better. “Then I think you should take me home and have your way with me.”

  She smiled. “In Britain we call that shagging.”

  They were finally back on the same page. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  Keep reading for a sneak peek at

  PLAYING DIRTY

  by HelenKay Dimon,

  the first full-length novel in the BAD BOYS UNDERCOVER series.

  On sale everywhere January 27, 2015.

  A Sneak Peek at

  PLAYING DIRTY

  As an elite Alliance agent—the joint undercover operation of M16, the British Secret Intelligence Service, and the CIA—Ford Decker lives for the adrenaline. But when he befriends sexy property manager Shay Alexander in hopes of finding her cousin, a known national security threat, Ford crosses the line, getting to know her better . . . in bed.

  After being burned by her last relationship, Shay wants to take things slow. Yet she can’t keep her hands off the drop-dead gorgeous hottie who’s moved into her apartment building. So when Ford’s identity as an undercover agent is exposed, his betrayal cuts deep. Shay never wants to see him again, but Ford can’t let her go, not when her life is still in danger. He will sacrifice everything to protect her, then be prepared to walk away from the only woman he’s ever loved, even if it breaks him.

  SHAY ALEXANDER HEARD the dueling sounds of off-key humming and a blaring radio as she entered her first-floor condo. She closed the door to shut out the traffic noise and mumble of conversation from people walking by on the sidewalk, but the bad singing remained.