His Christmas Assignment

by Lisa Childs

  “Don’t get used to being my fiancée,” he said. “Because you’re going to be my wife as soon as Penny Payne can plan our wedding and make it happen.” Penny didn’t have the connection in the courthouse that she’d once had—the judge who’d waived the waiting period for marriage licenses. But knowing her, she had other means to get him and Candace married quickly.

  Candace smiled. Then she reached for him. His clothes fell as quickly as her dress had. Their naked bodies entwined so completely he couldn’t tell where one of them ended and the other began. He could feel her heart beating against his—just as fast and frantically—as he slid inside her.

  She was hot and wet and ready for him. Her body tightened around his, pulling him deeply inside her—joining them completely, irrevocably. They made love as one—came as one. And they lay, panting for breath, beneath the tree, wrapped in each other’s arms. He had never been so happy and couldn’t imagine ever being happier than he was at this moment.

  Epilogue

  Candace saw it—finally—as she stared into the mirror of the bride’s dressing room. She saw the beauty Garek saw when he looked at her—the way he always looked at her. Her breath caught in surprise and pleasure. Her skin was pale and flawless, her eyes such an enormous and brilliant blue.

  “You are stunning,” Stacy told her.

  The woman stepped up behind her and adjusted her veil. It was just a short little veil coming out of the hat atop her shiny black hair. Her dress was short, too, but with long sleeves and a lot of antique lace. She couldn’t believe how quickly Penny, Stacy and Nikki had helped her find the perfect dress. She couldn’t believe how quickly they had put together the perfect wedding.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Stacy shrugged off her gratitude. “I’m just stating a fact.”

  Candace shook her head. “I’m thanking you for so much more than the compliment. I’m thanking you for being my matron of honor.”

  “Thank you for asking me,” Stacy said, and there was still the hint of surprise in her voice she’d had when Candace had asked her. Their history wasn’t pretty, but they’d overcome their differences. And Candace had replaced her resentment of the female Kozminski with appreciation and respect.

  “I wouldn’t be here if not for you,” she said. “You found me—”

  “Nikki found you,” Stacy said.

  Nikki was a bridesmaid—dressed in the same blue velvet gown that Stacy wore. Candace hadn’t left her out. But her bond with Stacy was stronger.

  “You’re the one who convinced me to come home,” she said. “To Garek.” More than the house he had bought, he was home to her. “You knew he had real feelings for me, and you helped me realize it was possible he could actually care about me.”

  “He adores you,” Stacy assured her.

  But Candace didn’t need the assurance. She knew how much he loved her. And as her father walked her down the aisle to her groom, she saw it—as she always did now—when he looked at her. She barely noticed how pretty the church looked—aglow with Christmas lights and fragrant pine boughs. She saw only her groom, standing tall and straight, in a black tuxedo. He was so handsome, so sexy. And so in love…with her, as she was him.

  *

  This was his real Christmas assignment—his Christmas day wedding to the woman he loved more than his life itself. He had been wrong—so wrong—the day he had proposed. He’d thought then it wasn’t possible for him to be any happier than he had been at that moment.

  But he was happier now. So happy. And so in love. He took Candace from her father. The man wore his military uniform and a smile of reluctant approval. Garek, with his checkered past, probably wasn’t the man he would have wanted for a son-in-law. But there was no denying he made Candace happy. And he would spend the rest of their lives making her as happy as she had made him.

  Garek held her hands in his. And he stared deeply into the eyes of the woman he loved. The love she felt for him reflected back as they repeated their vows.

  He was so happy he felt a twinge of guilt when his brother handed him Candace’s ring. It wasn’t fair he should be so happy and Milek so miserable. But his brother had been acting differently lately—almost as if he had some hope again. Maybe he would recover from his loss.

  “I now pronounce you man and wife,” the minister proclaimed.

  Garek knew what came next, so he didn’t wait until he was given permission. He stole the first kiss from his bride—just like she had stolen his heart. It was hers now and so was he—for the rest of their lives.

  *

  Don’t miss the next thrilling installment

  in the BACHELOR BODYGUARDS miniseries, coming in early 2016!

  Available now from Harlequin Romantic Suspense!

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  AGENT GEMINI by Lilith Saintcrow.

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  Agent Gemini

  by Lilith Saintcrow

  Part One: Finding Trinity

  Noah Caldwell had good news, for once, so he didn’t wait to make the daily report. When the brief codescramble of encryption was over, its whine through the earpiece enough to make him wince, he didn’t waste time on niceties, either. “Bingo, sir.”

  “What?” Control sounded irritated, but that was usual. The past few months had been one irritation after another, and even Gibraltar Two getting off the ground with flying colors hadn’t sweetened the old man’s temper.

  Caldwell himself was of the opinion that you had to be prepared to overcome obstacles to get near anything worth having, and it had served him well. It got him to his major’s acorn, at least, before he’d been put at Control’s disposal.

  And he’d performed well. He was Control’s fireman now, rushing around the front to patch up holes. The chance for further advancement was very good—if he didn’t screw it up. “We have a security breach.”

  “Where?” Control didn’t waste time getting angry. If it was bad news, Caldwell would own up to it soon enough.

  Still, Caldwell reminded himself to step carefully. His heart hammered. He shifted his weight fractionally, looking out through the smoked glass of the office wall at the banks of computers, shuffling paper, glowing screens and uniformed people drinking overboiled coffee, collating, speaking into ugly but efficient headsets or phones. The only difference between this space and a telemarketer’s call center were the guards at the two doors, sidearms on display and their expressions granite-stony. “Beta Four.”

  “Pocula Flats.” Control caught on, but not as quickly as he usually did. The old man must be tired—or worried. “That’s—”

  “It’s our girl. The gamble paid off—now we have a location.” Caldwell kept his tone even. The old man didn’t like being interrupted, but would tolerate it in certain circumstances. If these didn’t qualify, none did.

  “If she hasn’t already blown by now.” The cigarette-roughened words rasped, even through encryption and auditory filters.

  So Noah sprang his little surprise. “She hasn’t. She didn’t get everything she came for.”

  A long pause. Then careful, even and measured words. “How do you know?”

  “Because that’s how the trap was set, sir. I’m requesting on-site assets and full authorization.”

  Another short silence. There was a click—probably a lighter. “You have both. Don’t screw this up, Caldwell.” Control sounded weary
, but also mildly pleased, which was a banner occasion in and of itself.

  Agent Three, the crown jewel of the Gibraltar I program, was a high-priority recapture. And she had, after months of keeping just ahead of the game, committed her first mistake. All Caldwell had to do was bring her in alive, and his promotion, not to mention survival, was assured.

  There were other reasons to bring her in, too. More…personal ones.

  He still remembered her walking across a slick rooftop, gliding across ice like a panther, all fluid grace. Her wide dark eyes and her slim shoulders. He’d always liked blondes, and this one was a doozy.

  “No, sir.” Noah Caldwell hung up, smiling.

  *

  The cereal aisle was by far the best. Bright boxes soothed her—all standardized sizes, arranged with a clear plan, bright sugary kids’ breakfasts just below adult eye-level, healthful blandness up top, the very bottom reserved for generics and other alternatives. The bags of generics in their bins were a little troublesome, you couldn’t quite get them perfect, but a little deviation was to be expected even in the most smoothly running system. Instead of overheating over a natural law, it was better to build some tolerances into every complex pattern.

  Even, and especially, the ones inside your skull. It had taken her some time to arrive at that conclusion, but it worked wonderfully.

  Trinity ran her finger down a line of General Mills products—their finest corn-syrup-laden offerings—tilted her blonde head and narrowed her dark eyes slightly. Constant Muzak, bland and inoffensive, seemed louder when the store was deserted; whether it was a function of selective attention or the absence of warm round human bodies to soak up stray sound waves was an open question, saved for when she needed calculations to stave off shutdown. Fluorescents buzzed overhead, outside a city slept or dozed, and inside this concrete cube a rogue United States government resource broke down cardboard with mechanical grace, slicing with a box knife then applying just the right amount of force to snap any remaining tape as the headache returned and her ribs ached.

  She’d slightly miscalculated the fall onto the trailer of a passing semi to exit the Pocula Flats installation, and perhaps one of her ribs had cracked. The Gibraltar virus’s strengthening of her natural healing processes would soothe that pain in short order, but the headaches were growing more frequent and nothing eased them. With enhanced metabolism, pain medication was burned through extremely quickly unless she took a massive dose of opiates, and the concurrent risk of being incapacitated was unacceptable each time she ran the relevant equations inside her skull.

  Trinity suppressed a useless sigh. You were supposed to work down the aisle and stock as you went, not break open boxes by size and waste time going back and forth, but Trinity had calculated any time lost backtracking was made up when she heaved the already-sorted cardboard into the binder, where it would be turned into a tightly wrapped brick of recyclable plant fiber. Perhaps the binder appreciated her thoroughness, and she was certain she had more in common with its metal jaws and brisk movements than she did with Tengermann, the night manager, or even with her fellow stockers.

  Her hands moved without much conscious direction, making sure brightly colored cardboard blocks were brought flush to the edges, each shelf arranged for maximum aesthetic pleasure. It…irritated her, to work slowly enough the other stockers wouldn’t notice anything strange. East Felicitas, squatting like a surprise mushroom in the middle of parched heat-glimmering flats, drew from a labor pool large enough that a single woman with a disposable SSN could pass anonymously, and poor enough that most people were too exhausted to mind anyone else’s business, too occupied with their own. This Sav-Mor Supermarket on the west side was the perfect cover.

  Military employees and families from the Pocula Flats base—an hour’s drive away, behind its razor wire and its two visible gatehouses—were the only reason this burg had swelled to its present size. Anyone who had the proper identification shopped at the PX; anyone who could afford it shopped on the north side of town, rarely venturing past the railroad tracks into the southwest quadrant, where the ranchero music blared, the street vendors clustered and the fields beyond the pavement held coyotes both human and otherwise at night.

  It was Pocula Flats that Trinity was interested in. Not the training ground or the labyrinthine medical buildings, though the latter probably held something useful and was on her secondary list of objectives. She didn’t care for the historical markers scattered all through the area or the scars of past nuclear testing, either, beyond wondering if radioactive waste still lingered in the air and what the Gibraltar virus would do when faced with such a stressor.

  No, it was the highly secure northern quadrant of the base she had fixed on, with its ancient brick buildings hosting basement warrens of ceiling-to-floor file cabinets. It was time for the second and last try; the process of elimination meant the files had to be here. If she wanted to answer any of the questions crowding her before they were rendered academic by her own demise, this was her only chance.

  “Yo, Alice!” Eddie appeared at the end of the aisle, next to the instants—instant oatmeal, instant breakfast, Pop-Tarts and other easy foods created for convenience. They were her least favorite, so she did them last before she dragged the cardboard back and returned to repair the damage done daily to the baking aisle. “Goin’ on break.”

  Why tell me? I’m not a manager. She nodded, a single efficient bob of her head. Her hair, scraped back in a ponytail as usual, felt like straw—she’d stripped the black dye from the indifferently trimmed mane just prior to beginning this job. All dye eventually flaked free, her hair not accepting the color as a normal woman’s would.

  The patchy coverage such simple cosmetic applications afforded was protective coloration she may not need, since scrawny washed-out blondes were a dime a dozen. Camouflage was also afforded by the scratchy, stained red polyester vest and the jeans night stockers were allowed to wear. After all, nobody saw them except for blur-eyed insomniacs, addicts, or the occasional blinking, hair-mussed parent in desperate need of formula, diapers or an emergency bottle of baby Tylenol.

  No customer took any notice of the muscle on Trinity’s slim frame or the sloppiness of some of her coworkers. She was an invisible appliance, an anonymous drone, and that made it safe.

  “It’s cooling off out there,” Eddie persisted. “You wanna catch a smoke with me?”

  I don’t smoke. Why is he asking? She spared him a single glance, from his shaggy head to his broad but softening shoulders, the top of his collared shirt undone and his sad, worn-down work sneakers splattered with rancid milk from the latest disaster back in the dairy section. He seemed to have more than a few problems with milk crates, racks and the eggs, as well.

  His steady staring, his attention to her—they were both troubling. A surreptitious sniff gave her the news that he had showered before work and put on a dab of cologne—both unique occurrences. His pheromones held an edge—acrid maleness, nervous sweat, the metabolizing of the cigarettes he’d already smoked tonight—and a faint whiff of the microwaved turkey potpie he’d had before his shift warring with a cloud of burned coffee.

  Every one of the stockers except Trinity drank gallons of boiled or sugar-laden, effervescent caffeine, and she had amused herself by calculating flow-through rates and uptake algorithms for a few days when she first started.

  It helped keep her on track. Any calculation did. The deconstructing had slowed, or perhaps she was simply losing the acuity necessary to gauge its creeping progress. One more reason to hurry, but she wasn’t finished planning yet. And if the past few months had taught her anything, it was that planning was indispensable, even if the plan had to be altered as soon as it engaged with reality.

  It was a military cliché, but it had the advantage of being completely true.

  “I have to finish this.” She pitched it with care—just loud enough to be heard over the music, pleasant and neutral, her face stretching in the approximation of a smil
e most likely to seem unthreatening and regretful. “I’m behind.”

  “You? You’re never behind.” A little forced, nervous laughter. “You sure you don’t want to? Just for a minute? It’s a nice night.”

  His idea of a nice night was a hot, sterile breathlessness, with clouds of insects clustering street lamps and any mammal they could find in equal measure? The street lamps reminded them of the moon, probably, and the mammals were a rich food source, but understanding the insects did not manage to overcome the faintly sick unsteadiness Trinity was subject to when she thought of them.

  Comprehension brought comfort, but no reduction of repugnance. The uneasiness was unwelcome and just another symptom of her decline.

  “Gotta finish this.” She took care to inject just enough of a drawl into the words to match the regional-local speech patterns. “Maybe later.”

  A rough raw pink of disappointment, like seeping, undercooked beef, spread through Eddie’s scent. “Okay.” He dawdled a little, but she went to work facing the instant oatmeals. He finally turned and plodded away. His chinos had a stain on the left side of the seat, shaped almost exactly like Florida.

  Hopefully, it was coffee.

  He was paying too much attention to her. She should quit here. But sitting in the apartment with nothing to calculate unless she turned the television on and began free-associating would only lead to…disturbances, inside her head or the rest of her body. Ones she couldn’t pinpoint, even with the viral load she carried giving her vastly heightened control over autonomics and a dose of high-grade neuroplasticity.

  The virus. A strange sensation rippled down her back. She was coping, and she had tied off every loose end she could. She was hiding successfully and about to make her third and final run to find the records. Before she deteriorated completely, she would at least know who she was. Or had been, before the Gibraltar virus and the induction procedure erased everything but faint, misleading cortical ghosts.