“You’re beautiful,” Mark said, and he smiled that slow, sexy smile that God must have expressly designed to make strong women melt.
She narrowed her eyes at him.
“You’re squashing me.” She pushed at his shoulders, wriggled to be free. “Let me up.”
Panic was already building inside her, and her tone bordered on sharp.
What have I done?
Because she could feel it all starting to come back, the magic, the bedazzlement, the infatuated high-school-girl-like devotion she’d felt for him before, when she’d been totally under his spell. The kind of I’m so in love feeling that could break her heart.
Been there, done that, not ever making myself that vulnerable again.
She fought to beat the panic back.
“O-kay.”
Uncoupling was awkward. Bright fluorescent light bathing two naked people who’d just had great sex, one of whom was sitting on a bathroom counter with her feet dangling some inches off the floor feeling ticked off at herself while the other one watched her like a hawk zeroing in on a mouse, did not for a graceful dismount make. She slid off the counter, discovering in the process that bare flesh didn’t slide all that well. She landed on both feet, winced, then shifted her full weight to her uninjured foot. Since being naked was not conducive to dignity and her nightshirt was on the floor out of reach, she pulled a fluffy blue towel from the rack and wrapped it around herself.
She retrieved her glasses, but her nightshirt was too far away. She would have had to go around him to get to it, and she really wanted to get this over with.
Putting her glasses on, she said, “I’m going to bed now. Good-night.”
Limping, she escaped into the bedroom. Her dresser was against the wall opposite the bed. Pulling open a drawer, she extracted another nightshirt and turned around to find him standing in the doorway between her bathroom and bedroom. He was wearing his boxers, thank God. The bathroom light was still on behind him, making his face impossible to read.
“I take it that wasn’t make-up sex.” His voice was dry.
She finally looked him in the face. “No.”
“Want to tell me what the hell it was, then?”
Her chin came up. “Just sex.”
“Is that right?”
“You have a problem with that?”
“You don’t do ‘just sex.’”
Her lips compressed. “Maybe I’m taking a page out of your book. Maybe I just chalked up notch number two thousand seven hundred and three on my bedpost.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it.”
“Look, do we have to talk this thing to death? I’m tired, and I’d like to go to bed.”
“Alone.” One shoulder leaned against the jamb as he folded his arms over his chest and seemed to study her.
“Yes.”
“I’m going to say it one more time, and this is the last time I’m ever going to say it: I did not sleep with Mary Jane Cates. Or with anyone else while we were together. What happened was, she kissed me, and I kissed her back. But that’s all.”
This would have been a lot easier if she’d pretended she absolutely did not believe him. But it also wouldn’t have been fair.
Reluctantly she said, “I asked her about that yesterday.”
“You asked her? What did you ask her?”
“Whether she initiated that kiss I saw. And whether that kiss was all there was.”
“What did she say?” He sounded slightly fascinated now.
“She said that’s what you would say if you were trying to convince me.”
“Goddamn it.” He straightened away from the doorjamb, and she thought he was going to come toward her.
“Wait.” Jess held up a hand to hold him off. “You know what? Now that I’ve cooled off some, now that I’ve had time to think about it, now that I’ve talked to Cates, I believe you. Well, enough to give you the benefit of the doubt. There, I said it. But even if I do, that doesn’t change a thing.”
“You want to explain that to me?” There was a dangerous note to his voice now.
“I don’t want to be in a relationship. Not with you, not with anybody. For one thing, I don’t have time for one in my life right now. You said it yourself: my job is very demanding and I mean to work hard at it. And—and we’re basically incompatible, you and I.”
“I thought we just demonstrated that we are very compatible.”
“There’s more to a relationship than sex, Mark.”
He stared at her for a moment. “You have got to be kidding me. Fine. At least now we’re down to the truth. You don’t want to be in a relationship. Baby, I’m hearing you loud and clear this time.” He moved then, heading toward the bedroom door. “You get horny again, I’ll be on the couch.”
Her temper started to ignite. “You know, I don’t think I want you on my couch. I think I want you to leave.”
“Tough shit,” he said, then added, “catch” as he tossed something at her. Her nightshirt, she realized as her fingers closed around it.
For a moment she simply stood there, listening as he stalked away and threw himself down on the couch. She was experiencing a whole kaleidoscope of emotions, of which anger and regret were the most recognizable. Mark was being a jackass, she told herself. But then the part of her that was always inconveniently, scrupulously honest faced the truth: maybe you’re being a jackass, too.
If she was, she couldn’t help it. Some women might have been able to forgive an illicit kiss. She could not. She’d made her choice, and even through the pain it was causing her, she knew it was the only one she could live with. This relatively small pain would be nothing compared to the huge, shattering agony that allowing herself to love him with all her heart could lead to. She might have a fatal tendency to be attracted to dangerously good-looking men, but that didn’t mean she had to give in to it. Like someone with a genetic tendency toward alcoholism, she could ward off disaster by refusing to walk that path. She might be her mother’s daughter, but she didn’t have to relive her mother’s life.
He was pissed. Mark finally acknowledged it at about 5:00 a.m. when he gave up trying to sleep and got up, got dressed, put on a pot of coffee, and got to work instead. Being kicked to the curb twice by a woman he was crazy about was not an experience he enjoyed, he discovered. Especially when he knew damned well—well, he thought he knew—that she was in love with him. Granted, he’d made a major mistake kissing MJ, but one mistake shouldn’t have been enough to destroy a relationship as special as his and Jess’s had been. It had been a kiss (okay, a hot, salacious kiss), not an affair, which he had since explained, repented, and promised not to repeat. Not a deal breaker, or at least it shouldn’t have been. Except for the fact that Jess was emotionally fucked up, of course.
He kept telling himself, A woman who’s as emotionally fucked up as that is a woman I don’t need in my life. Problem was, he hadn’t quite convinced himself yet.
The worst thing about it was, it was an own goal. He’d done it to himself. The whole sorry-ass debacle was his fault entirely. Including tonight’s blazing-hot encounter.
When he’d heard those noises in the kitchen, he should have just stayed on the damned couch.
What made it all the more frustrating was that he couldn’t just cut his losses and walk away. Pissed or not, he was stuck with her, stuck on this way-too-personal protective duty, until he, or the deep-cover Service investigators assigned to the case, or the D.C. Police Department, whoever got there first, figured out who had attacked her. Not being a glutton for punishment, he would otherwise take her latest kiss-off as the blessing in disguise it undoubtedly was and move on. Plenty of very pretty fish in the sea, and all that. But for now, he was locked into being an on-loan consultant for Ellis Hayes with the primary mission of keeping Jess alive while the Secret Service busted a gut trying to figure out if some clandestine cov-ops hit squad had her in its sights. Hasbrough had pulled some strings to get him inside her law firm. Mark had asked
for the assignment, he’d gotten it—of course he had, who better than him, who not only knew the truth but was in the crosshairs right along with Jess?—and now he had his own first-floor office at Ellis Hayes. Said office was right down the hall from the office of the head of security, Ed Lally, a former FBI agent whom he knew and who kept congratulating him on his move up to corporate America with its big-time salaries and commensurate perks.
If Lally said “Ka-ching” to him one more time when they passed in the hall, Mark was afraid he was going to lose it.
Although maybe corporate America was something he ought to be thinking about. When Annette Cooper had gotten killed on his watch, it had pretty much put paid to his Secret Service career as he had known it. He was still on the payroll, still doing a damned good job in the Service’s investigative arm, but he was starting to recognize that his heart was no longer in it. Working the White House security detail had been an adrenaline rush, a high-wire act where one misstep could prove fatal. Investigating crimes was a worthy endeavor, but it lacked thrill.
Just putting in his time until he qualified for a government pension might not work for him.
The government wasn’t paying him enough to spend the next twenty-some-odd years riding a desk, bored to tears.
He had his daughter to think of, too. In the next few years, besides college expenses, which he hadn’t been kidding about, Taylor was going to be wanting a car, and maybe some more trips like the school-sponsored excursion to Italy she was hoping to be able to go on next summer, and possibly grad school, and for sure, one day, a wedding for which he would be expected to pay.
He was a highly trained operative with an impressive set of skills. So maybe he ought to start seriously considering looking for a private-sector job that appreciated those skills, a job with a big-time salary and a boatload of perks. Maybe it was time to get out and cash in. Maybe he should go for Lally’s ka-ching.
Since an injury had forced him out of pro football at the age of twenty-two, he’d been working for the government in one capacity or another. But when he’d cast in his lot with Jess, when he’d stepped in to protect her instead of looking the other way while she was killed, he had made enemies of some of the world’s most dangerous people.
If Jess had a target on her back, he did, too.
There was no going back for either of them.
Finding himself on the wrong side of the government he’d sworn to serve and protect was a new experience. He didn’t like it, but he was starting to get the hang of it. New game, new rules.
Feeling like he’d just been used for sex was a new experience, too, and another one he didn’t like. Usually the woman he was with was the one angling for commitment. Usually he was the one wanting fun with no strings.
Payback’s a bitch, as they say.
His thoughts didn’t please him. His mood verged on savage as he checked his e-mail via his iPhone and discovered that the information he’d been waiting for had been sent overnight. In the absence of footprints, fingerprints, any kind of physical evidence at the scene that might have been used to identify the bastard who’d attacked Jess, he’d reached out to the digital age’s best friend: security cameras.
The only one on Jess’s street was up by the bus stop. It hadn’t captured anything of interest. But by searching in concentric circles from her building out, and gradually broadening the area of the search, they’d found something. A camera at a drugstore four blocks away had captured someone tossing a bundle into a Dumpster some five minutes after the attack. The image itself wasn’t all that useful: the shot only included a sliver of the man’s face, his right hand, and maybe a third of his forearm. But the technicians the Secret Service employed were the best in the business. If anybody could get anything from a picture like that, they could.
Better still, they had searched for the bundle in the dump where the refuse from that particular Dumpster had been taken. The message on his phone was: found it. The accompanying picture showed a black turtleneck, black balaclava-type ski mask, and a pair of black leather gloves laid carefully out on top of a plastic grocery bag. He had no doubt that what he was seeing held DNA evidence galore.
Looking at it, Mark sent a mental message to the unknown assailant: You’re mine, asshole.
Then he called Randy Rothenberg, his contact in the forensic pathologist’s office.
“Are you nuts, Ryan? It’s six thirty in the morning,” was how Rothenberg answered the phone.
“What can I say? The Service never sleeps. I need to know what you’ve got on the Cowan case.”
The sound of a yawn came over the phone. “We’re still doing toxicology tests.”
“I don’t give a damn about toxicology tests. I know you’ve had time to get a pretty good feel for cause of death. Did Cowan shoot himself or not?”
“At this time, anything I could tell you would be preliminary.”
“So give me preliminary.”
“The residue on his right hand says yes. The trajectory of the bullet through the skull is more problematic. The angle doesn’t seem quite natural, but we’re still running it through the computer, going through various scenarios, that kind of thing, to see if we can work it out.”
“What’s your best guess?”
“I’m a scientist. I don’t do best guesses.”
“Remember when we were in Mexico, and I got your sorry ass out of jail?”
“You’re never going to let me live that down, are you? All right, you want my best informed judgment at this preliminary stage of the investigation. No, I don’t think he shot himself. But until all the tests are complete, I can’t be sure.”
“Shit.”
When Mark disconnected, he was feeling grim.
He and Jess might be over. Hell, he might even be glad they were over. But that was personal. As a professional, he was going to stick to her like a tick on a dog until he could be sure that, when he walked away, she would be safe.
When he’d gotten the call about Leonard Cowan, his first stop had been Rock Creek Park. Cowan’s car had still been parked in the overlook where it had been found. Since it had been getting on toward noon, the heat had been oppressive. The smell of putrid meat, the death smell which over the years he had learned to instantly recognize, had hit him even before he had ducked under the yellow crime scene tape roping off the area. Uniforms and a couple of plainclothes detectives had still been on the scene, and a police photographer had been taking pictures, although the body had been removed. Flies had swarmed in a buzzing black cloud above the roof of the blue car. At first he’d thought the driver’s side window had been tinted black. Then he’d gotten close enough to realize that the glass had been coated with blood.
“Cause of death?” he’d asked, flashing his badge at the detective who’d approached him.
“Gunshot wound to the head.”
A gunshot wound precise enough so that there hadn’t even been any splatter on the windshield. A professional hit, had been his thought then, and it was his thought now.
If his suspicions were correct, he was all that stood between that kind of death and Jess.
Which meant, bottom line, that he wasn’t going anywhere. No way, no how.
“What do we do now?” Jaden stared in horror at the flyer taped to the wall of the metro station.
“Get out of here,” Lucy whispered urgently, because that was obviously the first thing they needed to do.
MISSING was written across the top of the flyer in big, bold black letters. Beneath it were side-by-side photos of herself and Jaden with their names and other information below the pictures. Lucy recognized them: they were the ones that had been shot for their ID photos when they’d first been taken to Shelter House, which meant they were nice and current and all that.
Skinny, black-haired Goths like Jaden might have been pretty common on the streets of the city, but her own frizzy red hair stuck out like a blowtorch on a dark night.
Fear made Lucy sick to her stomach.
“If he’s seen these, he knows who we are. He knows our names.” The words burst out of Lucy’s mouth seconds after the realization hit her brain. The knowledge petrified her. She heard Jaden suck in air. Her friend’s face went white as death. Her eyes looked like two big black holes in the middle of it.
Lucy didn’t have to explain who “he” was. Both of them knew: Miss Howard’s killer.
“Do you think he has?” Jaden’s voice was unsteady.
“I don’t know.” Lucy swallowed. “Come on. Keep your head down.”
Heart pounding, rigid with tension, feeling as if every eye in the busy metro station had been on them, Lucy linked her arm with Jaden’s and held her to a hopefully casual-looking walk as they headed for the escalator. It was still real early in the morning—6:42 a.m. according to the big digital clock above the train schedules—but this was the heart of the city and there were a lot of people around. Lucy would have thought that was a good thing if her and Jaden’s faces hadn’t been taped up all over the walls.
As it was, she expected somebody to grab them at any minute.
“I want to go home,” Jaden whispered as they rode to the street. Her mouth quivered. Her eyes as they met Lucy’s were shiny with tears.
“Yeah, I know.”
But they both knew that wasn’t happening. Home wasn’t there anymore, not for either of them. Jaden’s mom, having had four different fathers for her four children, three of whom were currently in the system, was in jail on drug charges. Lucy’s mom had taken off when Lucy was five, leaving her with her grandmother. The grandmother had died three years ago, putting Lucy in foster care. Both their dads were missing in action. Lucy didn’t even know who hers was. Her mom’s hair was dark brown, so every time she saw an old guy with red hair she checked him out. What she wanted to ask was: am I your kid?
“I don’t feel good,” Jaden muttered. She looked almost skeletal in the gray early morning light, Lucy thought, like a character out of that movie The Nightmare Before Christmas.
“You want to sit down or something?” There was a park across the street with benches in front of it, so that was possible, but Jaden shook her head, which was probably a good thing. Besides the fact that they needed to get off the streets, there were mountains of dark clouds piling up overhead. The air was heavy, thick. Even as Lucy glanced up, a rumble of thunder warned of a storm to come.
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