Packing Heat

by Penny McCall

  That would be the biggest mistake of all.

  chapter 13

  WHEN COLE FINALLY VENTURED OUT OF THE BATHROOM, feeling like he had some self-control, thanks to cold water and distance, Harmony was working on the laptop. Every guy had his trigger; for Cole, seeing a woman he had the hots for with her hands on his keyboard only made the hots hotter.

  She glanced over her shoulder, did a double take. “You were in there so long I was expecting George Clooney to walk out.”

  “If you want Clooney, just close your eyes and pretend.”

  “Even I don’t have that much imagination.”

  “Your loss,” he said, taking the chair across the table from her. “What’re you doing?”

  “I thought I’d take a stab—”

  The next thing Cole knew he was across the room and bending over her shoulder. He didn’t hear the rest of what she said, his eyes scanning the screen, his hands flying on the keyboard as he shut it down.

  “Tell me you didn’t use a recognizable ID.”

  “No,” she said. “And I, uh, b-bounced the signal through Eastern Europe.”

  Cole backed off, the breathiness of her voice, the quaver in it spearing straight through his panic. He went from terror to desire so fast it left him light-headed, and then he went back to terror—a different kind of terror that had to do with who and what she was, how drastically he wanted her, and what it would cost him to have her. By the time he found his emotional feet again, he could see that Harmony was every bit as rattled as he was.

  So he pretended like the last five minutes had never taken place, knowing she would do the same. “No harm done,” he said. “You weren’t even close to the FBI firewall.”

  Harmony let out a soft sigh.

  “So what’s the plan?”

  “I think we’ve put enough distance between us and our pursuers to stay here a day or two. Get some rest, and see what kind of progress you can make on moving the money.”

  Two days with her in that tiny room with one bed? There’d be no rest for him, Cole knew. Hell, she’d probably shoot him before they checked out. It was the only form of rejection she hadn’t tried yet, and if she gave him even half the encouragement she had last night, it would take a gunshot wound to stop him. “I thought you were in a hurry to get to LA.”

  “I am, but I have to call the kidnappers again tonight.”

  Or maybe just her, sounding forlorn and looking a little scared and sick to her stomach. The urge to get her into bed wasn’t gone completely. It never really was, but it was a hell of a lot easier to ignore when she looked like that.

  “They’ll be expecting progress,” she continued more briskly, putting on her FBI agent face. “If they don’t hear it . . .”

  “I haven’t broken into the bank accounts yet.” He hadn’t broken the system yet, for that matter.

  “You’re not sure you can get in without being tracked,” she said.

  Cole shrugged, conceding the point. “I have to make sure I’m not being tracked, and there’s no way I can get in safely and accomplish what you want in the next few hours.”

  She mulled over that for a minute. “Can you open an offshore account and give them access to view the balance without making withdrawals?”

  “Child’s play.” At least it was after a decade in jail, but he decided it was better not to let her know just how many laws he’d actually broken while he was being rehabilitated from his honest former life.

  “Good,” she said, “let’s start there.”

  Cole shut down her browser and pulled up another, using one of several fake IDs he’d set up while incarcerated. Even if Treacher knew he’d been hacking in prison and put geeks on it around the clock, there was no way for them to tie Joe Smith to Cole Hackett. There were literally millions of Joe Smiths in the western hemisphere. That was why he’d chosen it. As long as he stayed away from the FBI’s system, they should be perfectly safe.

  “So,” he said while he worked, “are you really going to steal the money?”

  “Yes and no.” Harmony got to her feet, came around the table, and leaned over his shoulder. “I’m not going to hand over the money unless there’s no other option, but we have to transfer enough to make the kidnappers think we’re doing what they want us to do, and that means millions.”

  Cole glanced over his shoulder at her, which only made matters worse since her breasts were right in his face. “Why don’t you just climb into my lap?”

  “I’m sorry, is this bothering you?”

  Cole lifted his eyes to hers.

  “I just wanted to see what you were doing.”

  He still didn’t respond verbally. He let his expression speak for him.

  She stopped smiling and eased off a couple of steps.

  It wasn’t nearly far enough, but he faced forward again and took some deep, calming breaths.

  “Chanting mantras?” she asked sweetly. From a safe distance.

  “That’s the second time today you were all over me. Do it again and there won’t be enough mantras in the world.”

  “I wasn’t ‘all over you.’ I didn’t even touch you. I only wanted to watch. Call it a learning opportunity.”

  He could have given her a learning opportunity. But she had a point that couldn’t be ignored. “In case I get killed?”

  “Or run off.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

  “I noticed.” Harmony gave him a wide berth, circling the table to take the chair across from him again.

  If he kept his eyes on the screen and slouched a little, he couldn’t see more of her than the top of her head. And if he concentrated hard enough, it kept the mental pictures at bay. Now, if he could just get her to shut up.

  “I never really had to hold you at gunpoint, Cole, but I always had the feeling you were holding back, waiting to see if I could pull any of this off. After Juan’s that changed. Why?”

  He shrugged. “I decided to make the commitment to your cause.” An obvious lie, and even after saying it he agonized over telling her what was really going on. But he still couldn’t quite trust her, and short of torture she wasn’t going to drag Victor Treacher’s name out of him. “It’s getting you what you want, so just go with it. I really need to work, and I can’t with you breathing down my neck.”

  She got to her feet and wandered over to the window, then to the bed. She was wearing the halter dress again, the one she’d had on that first day at Lewisburg. The one that left nothing to the imagination, especially as the jacket was nowhere in sight.

  “Or pacing around the room,” he said, adding, “or watching television,” when she retrieved the TV remote and sat on the end of the bed.

  “I guess I could wash some things out.”

  Right, like the idea of her rinsing out her panties was any less distracting than her lounging on the rumpled bedclothes with her long legs bare and just a couple of thin halter straps between him and paradise.

  “I could use something to eat.”

  There was a split second of silence while Cole tried to convince himself they weren’t both replaying that sentence and considering the possibilities.

  Then Harmony shot off the bed, and raced across the room. “You want food,” she said, slipping on her shoes and taking a tiny little purse out of the duffel. “I’ll get you food. What do you want? No, never mind, I’ll surprise you.” She all but ran out the door.

  It took Cole a few minutes, and he had to open a window, get the scent of her out of the room, but after a little while he managed to lift his hands to the keyboard. The familiarity of it helped put Harmony out of his mind, enough that he was able to set up the bank account she’d asked for. And another for himself.

  ONCE SHE WAS OUT OF THE ROOM, HARMONY FIGURED it would be a bad idea to go back any time soon. Cole would probably gripe about his stomach, but at least he wouldn’t be looking at her like he wanted to take a bite.

  Great, now she had to start all over again, forgetting
the way he looked at her, and the way he felt wrapped around her, his arms and his chest and—

  Fantasies were off-limits, too, especially when they were backed up with enough firsthand knowledge to make them sizzle but not enough to stop the ache. It didn’t help that she was buying him underwear. Boxer briefs. Which meant she had to guess at his size, except there wasn’t a whole lot of guessing involved because she’d seen him in his boxer briefs, in just about every state possible for a man, from couldn’t-careless to oh-my-god.

  She tried to concentrate on his face, which was too rugged for her taste, not to mention his expression was almost always some form of barely disguised tolerance. Except when his eyes went all bedroom, smoldering from under half-closed lids. And there was his mouth, and no matter how she tried to focus on the snarky comments that usually came out of it, he’d kissed her with that mouth, and it had been a hell of a kiss because he put his whole body into it. Which led to her wondering what else he could do with that mouth and that body, and that led to her trying to find a loophole in her ground rules.

  It would ease the contention between them if they slept together, she told herself. He’d stop being so touchy, and she’d be able to concentrate on Richard. Sex was the elephant in the room. Once they’d slept together, it would be out in the open and out of their systems, the elephant banished. And she’d be an idiot if she believed that. For her, having sex with Cole would send the elephant on its way. Maybe. But the elephant would still be there for Cole, and it would have a big blue V tattooed on its side. Her capitulation would be like putting him on a mammoth dose of Viagra. As things stood now, he was at half simmer most of the time. If she jumped in the sack with him, he wouldn’t let her out for a week.

  Not that she thought for one minute she was the great love of his life, or even to his taste, as women went. In fact, he’d made it more than clear that under normal circumstances she wouldn’t be the kind of woman he preferred. But the man had been in jail for eight years, and she was the only game in town.

  Except it wasn’t a game. She had a phone date later that evening with Richard’s kidnappers to remind her of that.

  She put all but the immediate necessities out of her mind while she visited a moderately priced chain store and an Italian restaurant before heading back to the Hurry Inn. She expected Cole to gripe about his empty stomach, but he didn’t mention the hours of absence, just thanked her for the clean clothes and dug into his dinner. He didn’t lift his head until his food was gone, and even then he focused his attention on her take-out box.

  “You going to finish that?” he said.

  Harmony met Cole’s eyes, but he was keeping his feelings to himself, like usual. She slid her chicken Caesar salad across the table. “Be my guest,” she said, taking to her feet.

  No point in putting off the inevitable, and she wasn’t calling the kidnappers while she was sitting across the table from Cole. He didn’t have a lot of respect for her or her abilities; letting him see how much these calls tore her up would hardly help his opinion.

  She dialed the number on her regular cell, and the call was picked up on the first ring.

  The same man answered, with the same Russian-accented arrogance. “Who is the man with you?”

  “There’s no man with me,” she said. “Let me speak to Richard.”

  “I tell you before, you don’t make demands.”

  “And I told you before, I talk to Richard or the deal is off.”

  There was nothing from the other end of the call, and for one sick second she thought they’d called her bluff. Then Richard came on the line. “Harmony?” he asked, sounding weaker, but not like he was in pain.

  “Hello,” she said, turning to the window and blinking furiously, swallowing to keep the tears out of her voice. “How are you holding up?”

  “Not very well,” he said, his voice going hoarse before he cleared his throat. “You’re doing what they want, right?”

  “Richard—”

  “Just do what they tell you to, Harmony.”

  “But—”

  “I know you won’t respect me for begging, but you can’t imagine . . .” His voice dropped. “What they’ve done to me so far is nothing. They have all these knives and torches . . . Don’t be a hero, Harmony, just get them the money, and they’ll let me go.”

  “Do you really believe that, Richard?”

  “That is a dangerous question, Agent Swift,” the Russian said. In the background there was a hoarse scream. “Your friend suffers because you do not follow instructions.”

  “Stop hurting him or I swear it’s all over.” She put as much steel into her voice as she could with Richard sobbing at the other end of the line. She pulled it off because she had nothing to lose. No matter what Richard believed out of desperation, the Russians wouldn’t let him go if they got the money. But he wasn’t going to stay alive long enough for her to rescue him if they kept up the torture.

  “I will not be threatened by a woman,” the kidnapper snapped.

  “It’s not a threat.”

  “So far you have accomplished nothing. Perhaps I should simply kill him.”

  “No, I have made progress.” She flew across the room, waving a hand at Cole. That and the panic that must have been in her eyes had him tapping the keys.

  “I opened an offshore account,” she said to the kidnapper, giving him the account number that popped up on the screen. “There’s no money in it yet, but I’m getting closer to breaking the FBI’s banking system.”

  “This is a disappointment. You have twenty-four hours to demonstrate your ability to meet our demands. If you cannot, we send body part.”

  “What did you do, read the Kidnapper’s Handbook? Chapter Four: Chop Off a Finger.”

  “What is this Kidnapper’s Handbook?”

  “I mean you have no imagination.”

  “We need none, Agent Swift. Just very sharp knives and earplugs. And it will not be a finger.”

  chapter 14

  “I TAKE IT THEY DIDN’T APPRECIATE YOUR HUMOR.”

  “Russians,” Harmony said. Probably she’d intended for there to be some level of derision. Hard to pull off with her voice wavering.

  Her hands were shaking, too, and she paced the room with a restlessness that told him she was trying to outrun her own thoughts, not make sense of them.

  “We have to get some money in that account,” she said. “If we don’t they said they’d start chopping off body parts.”

  “You’re right, they don’t have any imagination.”

  “I know you haven’t had much luck breaking the FBI’s system. If you’re worried about getting traced, maybe we could steal the money from somewhere else.”

  Cole stepped into her path and caught her by the shoulders. He shook her, hard enough to have her head snapping back. Her eyes focused on him, and she seemed a little confused.

  “Listen to yourself, Harm. You’re talking about stealing money from innocent people. Would Richard want you to do that?”

  She dropped her eyes, still trembling but coming back to herself. “He was begging.”

  “I’m sorry, but you aren’t going to drain random bank accounts.”

  “There are some people out there who wouldn’t miss a few million dollars. Movie stars, oil companies, the Russian mafia. That would be poetic justice.”

  Yeah, poetic justice, Cole thought. And he needed another big-time enemy like he needed another hole in the head. “So the kidnappers win, right?”

  “What?”

  “You’re talking about paying them. One phone call—”

  “Two. And you didn’t hear him—”

  “You’re right, and I’m sure he was suffering, but that means he was alive. We both know the minute you pay the ransom he’s dead.”

  Harmony took a deep breath, nodded once.

  “Then we stick with the original plan. The whole point of raiding the frozen accounts is that the theft won’t be noticed right away. It buys you enough time t
o find Richard and get him out. We just have to be careful. We can’t help him if we’re caught.”

  She met his eyes again, and then she stepped forward, lifting her face to his, her eyes fluttering closed. Cole took a step back. Clearly it surprised her as much as it did him.

  “I thought—”

  “If you were thinking, you wouldn’t have—”

  “You’re right.” She went to the window, looking between the edges of the drapes without opening them. Night was falling, and the window looked out over the parking lot, so there wasn’t a lot to see.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” Cole asked her out of the blue.

  “No. Do you?” She turned to face him, but she stayed on the other side of the room.

  “I had a few offers.”

  Harmony gave a slight laugh. “So did I, and they were probably the same kind you got.” She leaned back against the wall between the window and door. “Dating in Washington, D.C., is like a social prize fight. Only the most ambitious men go to work there, and they approach finding a wife like it’s a political campaign. It’s all about the win, and marriage is less about romance than it is about finding a lifelong campaign contributor—and I don’t mean money, that’s easy to come by. Who you know is who you are.

  “I’m not connected, so unless I call myself Iowa and assign myself some electoral votes, I’ll never be more than one-night stand material.”

  “Politicians are stupid.”

  She waved that off. “It’s not like I want to get married. But it would be nice to have a relationship that lasts longer than the salad, which is generally when my date discovers I don’t do casual sex and reads the latest of the text messages he incessantly gets. The next thing I know there’s some emergency on Capitol Hill, and democracy as we know it will be in great danger unless my date races to the rescue. And I get stuck with the check.”

  “Great leftovers,” Cole said.

  “It’s still dinner for one. And that was more information than you wanted.”