Assassin Games (Tarnished Heroes)

by Bristol, Sidney

Andy braced his hands against the edge of the sink and leaned toward her. Carol glanced up, brows lifting. Did she even know what she was saying? Or had the alcohol numbed her inhibitions enough she wasn’t herself? Nothing he’d seen had indicated she was a heavy drinker. The stress of it all could be enough to push her over the edge. If she had a little breakdown he couldn’t fault her, but he would have to do something about it.

  “I tried very hard to keep from lying to you. No, my name wasn’t Mark, but the rest…it was shades of the truth.” He’d spent time crafting replies, figuring out how to ensure he wasn’t exactly making things up.

  “It’s still a lie. All of it.” She picked up the wineglass and finished off the tiniest bit in the bottom.

  He grit his teeth. She should hate him, even if it bothered him. Her hate would make her wary of others. It would protect her when she might otherwise proceed as normal. After this, she would be nothing to him. Either she would go back to her life as Carol Sark, or she’d become something else. She didn’t need his help to succeed, even if he wanted to help. To look out for her. She’d become something to him. Why? Because he wanted to save the innocent, be the good guy.

  He hadn’t been the good guy since the day he began asking questions. At least until that moment he could believe the lie of his life.

  “You make me think of my aunt. She’s so stubborn and pigheaded, but if anything needs doing, she gets it done.” He turned back to the stove.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You’re a very capable woman, Carol. You’ll do fine.”

  “What do you care?”

  I care.

  He bit his tongue instead.

  Allowing himself to care put her at risk. Hate would protect her. At least from him. Though, the kicker was, she would never be in danger from him. He wouldn’t hurt her. Couldn’t. He’d come to care for her during those hours watching her, talking to her, studying her movements, reading between the lines of her text messages, seeing how she lived, what she was passionate about. Maybe that was why he was so dead set on getting her back to that normal, everyday life of hers.

  If anything, it would make his role in her world obsolete. He could forget she was ever there, like so many other people who’d crossed his path.

  This—his attraction to her—had to stop.

  Even if it was all in his head, it compromised his thinking, his priorities. Yes, Carol’s life was important. She mattered. But so did what they were doing.

  “I’m such an idiot.” Carol sighed and picked up the now-empty wine bottle. She squinted into the bottom before trying to pour the last drops from it.

  “You aren’t an idiot,” he said.

  “I should have known the moment you started flirting with me something was up.”

  “It’s unreasonable for a man to find you attractive?” Andy turned back to the stove and the bubbling contents of the skillet.

  “Yes.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Then why am I permanently single, hm?”

  Andy flipped off the stove to allow their dinner to rest. He turned toward her, once again bracing his hands against the sink.

  “You want me to answer that?” He stared into her unfocused gaze. He had an evaluation prepared, but she might not want to hear it.

  “Enlighten me.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Tell me what you see.”

  “All right. Fine. People don’t approach you because you don’t give them the opening to.” He spread his hands.

  “I’m not—”

  “I’m not done. You bury yourself in your work because maybe you think that’s what’s most important. You enjoy your work, so it probably doesn’t bother you much or often, just every now and then. When you aren’t working you’re thinking about work, and it shows.” He gestured at her face. He’d seen it a dozen times in the tilt of her mouth and the furrow on her brow.

  Her lips curved down and lines marred her brow.

  Yup.

  There it was.

  That thoughtful look.

  “You frown when you think, which gives you a perplexed expression some might call resting bitch face. It’s not you. It’s how you carry yourself. People find a confident woman intimidating, and you carry yourself with the full weight of your education and knowledge on your shoulders for everyone to see.”

  “Oh…” Her shoulders dipped a bit.

  “It’s not that you aren’t attractive—you are. Height, coloring, your figure…you have it all. Most men would probably rate you between a seven to nine based on your body and their preferences. You’re too much for most men, though, and they know it. They’d rather think about you in private and mock you in public because they know they couldn’t handle you. If I were to guess there’s probably some sort of pool at work between the men to see who might bang you, but they’re all too scared of rejection to try, which just perpetuates this image that you are unobtainable.”

  “Wow.” Carol tipped her glass up, draining the last few drops. “How long have you been watching me?”

  “Not that long.”

  “There is a pool at work. Mitch told me about it, shocking as that is.”

  “Maybe he wants to win it?” Andy tightened his hold on the counter and visualized choking the life out of the golden boy agent.

  “Mitch?” Carol squinted at him. “No. He’s arrogant, but he’s not…that’s not him. He’s actually pretty nice. Don’t get me wrong, he can be a dick, but it’s usually… I kind of feel bad for accusing him of being a traitor.”

  “Drink some water.” Andy pulled a bottle out of the fridge and slid it across to her.

  “I think I feel worse after that pep talk. Thanks.” She twisted the top off and wrapped her lips around the mouth.

  Andy swallowed. He needed to move, to do something, to get away from her. He’d spent so long watching her, picking apart her life, but he couldn’t separate his thoughts from fact. The facts were, Carol was beautiful, intelligent, and confident. The rest? It wasn’t his business and he shouldn’t care.

  He turned back to the stove and plated the chicken and pasta, sprinkled it with cheese. Since he didn’t often get to eat anything that didn’t come out of a freeze-dried package he’d gone a little overboard planning for this. He could tell himself it was a splurge, the goods had simply been available, but the truth was—

  “Chicken parm—you know this is what I order from the place down the street, don’t you?” Carol leaned back on the stool and peered up at him.

  “Yes.” He saw no point in lying.

  “You’ve been inside my home watching me, haven’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “That must have made for some boring TV.” She continued to stare off into space.

  Andy wanted to fix this, to breathe that fight back into her. Answers didn’t always make things better. Knowledge didn’t resolve issues.

  He circled the bar until he stood next to her.

  “On a scale from one to ten, how drunk am I?” she asked.

  “I’d say a six. You’re still upright, you aren’t ill, and you’re carrying on a conversation, but your inhibitions are lowered.” If she was lucky she might not remember this tomorrow.

  “Sit, please?”

  His common sense screamed at him to run away. That something was happening which couldn’t be undone. But he didn’t.

  Andy plated his dinner, then slid onto the stool next to Carol. They were close enough their arms touched, brushed and bumped with the smallest movement. Each contact sent a jarring sense of awareness through him.

  Maybe Carol needed to be protected from him. He wasn’t exactly impartial where she was concerned.

  He ate without tasting the food, wrestling with his mind, trying to keep it focused.

  Carol picked at hers without much interest. Because of the alcohol? Or had he broken her?

  He wasn’t good with civilians. Or women. Carol was both. Despite her confidence and skill
s, she was delicate.

  She put down her knife and fork after half a dozen bites.

  “I should stab you or something,” she said.

  “The amount of force you’d have to apply for that to do any real damage—”

  “I don’t want to do it for real. Stop being so literal.” Carol slumped sideways and rested her head on his shoulder, her body leaning into him. “I’m a sad drunk.”

  Andy held his breath, but she neither said anything else nor moved away from him. After a while his lungs began to burn, forcing him to draw in air, but only a little at a time. He didn’t want to jostle her. Slowly, she relaxed further, her breathing deepening.

  He peered down at her.

  She was right to hate him, he just wished she didn’t.

  Chapter Six

  Carol’s bladder was too full. Breathing jostled the liquid to the point that if she didn’t get up now, there was going to be an accident. She groaned and pushed herself up.

  Her mouth was dry and her head ached.

  The starlight from the windows and the chill in the room weren’t familiar. Because she wasn’t home. This wasn’t DC. And she wasn’t going to find relief sitting here.

  Carol slid out of bed and shuffled to the bathroom. She was still dressed, right down to the house boots. What’d happened? After they broke for dinner things got fuzzy.

  She put her walk down memory lane on hold long enough to relieve herself, wash her hands, and splash some water on her face.

  Wine.

  It was bad for her.

  In vino veritas. In wine there is truth.

  Oh God. Hopefully she hadn’t told Andy he had a great ass.

  It was the truth, but it wasn’t an opinion she wanted to admit. She scrubbed a hand over her face and eyed the tap.

  He’d cautioned her against drinking from the faucet.

  She wrapped her arms around herself.

  It wasn’t all a blur, or at least not as much as she wished it were. The highlights of her drunken conversation were on a loop in her mind.

  She’d had all day to think about her situation, the people who’d put her here, and she had come to a few conclusions.

  First, Irene would do whatever was best, even if that meant burning Carol. It wasn’t personal, it was simply what she thought was the right course of action. Irene had been doing this long enough that Carol should trust her. If only a little.

  Second, she didn’t hate Andy. She was a fool for falling for the idea of Mark, but that was on her. Not him. He’d done what he thought he needed to so he could save her life. And they did work well together.

  The problem with relying on her analytical side was that there were things being in the field taught a person that were foreign to her. Andy saw that. The program would be infinitely better because of him.

  She had to have water.

  Carol plodded across the room to the door and stepped out. Despite the late hour, most of the lights were still on. She padded into the living room.

  Andy sat at the sofa, rubbing his sleeve across a plastic bottle. Odd, but whatever.

  “Have a nice nap?” he asked without looking up.

  “No.”

  She crossed to the fridge and grabbed some water. Her stomach was at the finicky stage where she didn’t dare try food anytime soon.

  “What are you working on?” She circled the sofa and sat down next to Andy, peering at his screen.

  “Uploading a version of the program to a remote CIA server now.”

  “What?” She stared at the little squares marching across his screen indicating how much had been uploaded. “I thought—”

  “I can get a satellite signal for a small window of time at night if it’s clear. We don’t have wifi or regular access.”

  “You really focus on the nuances, don’t you?”

  Andy didn’t reply, but his frown did deepen. Lies bothered him, so he pushed for versions of the truth, even if it wasn’t the whole truth. Which meant everything they’d said, talked about, shared, was some version of his reality. Not everything was a lie.

  She sipped more water to keep from staring.

  Then…

  No.

  This was stupid. She must still be tipsy.

  It would make a great excuse.

  “Done,” Andy announced. “Just in time. Satellite’s about to move out of position.”

  “How do you hide that it’s you?”

  “I log in as someone else.”

  “Who? But, the security—”

  “I’m not telling you, and I loaded the program onto a virus. The virus is the delivery system that will trick the security into allowing the program to install.”

  “How are you this dangerous and smart?”

  “I learned at an early age that education mattered. It wasn’t just what I could do that counted, it was what I thought.” He closed the laptop and set it on the coffee table.

  She turned to face him. He peered at her out of the corner of his eye. His posture, the slight way he leaned away from her, they weren’t exactly receptive body language.

  “You like for people to underestimate you, don’t you?” She studied his profile, the crease at the corner of his mouth.

  Andy didn’t answer or move. Because he didn’t want to admit the truth?

  “I don’t hate you.” She screwed the top back on the bottle, then propped her elbow on the back of the sofa. “I should, but I don’t. Maybe I liked the Mark parts of you too much, maybe I get why you guys made this decision.” Mostly, she’d fallen for Mark more than a little, and he was somewhere inside of Andy. A part of him.

  “Good.”

  Carol chewed her lip. Either she was still tipsy or going a little loopy.

  What would he say?

  Andy liked shades of the truth, so what version would he feed her?

  “I have the strangest urge to kiss you,” she said without embarrassment tightening her throat. Must still be a little tipsy.

  “Don’t.” Andy’s voice was sharp, his reply immediate.

  “Why not?”

  “It wouldn’t be a good idea.”

  “What constitutes a good idea?”

  “Anything that doesn’t put you at risk or would result in some form of positive gain.”

  “But you aren’t a risk to me, are you?”

  “Carol, you should go back to bed. It’s late.”

  “You don’t want to answer the question. You have that moral code, and I don’t fit in those boxes. That’s your problem with me. You kill people and gather information. I’m a round peg when you deal with square holes. Why is kissing you a bad idea? If it’s not good, then it’s bad. What’s so wrong with kissing? If we’re analyzing good and bad—”

  “Stop, Carol. I’m warning you.”

  And yet, he didn’t move, he didn’t flee; he remained right where he was.

  “If we’re classifying good as no harm and leads to gain, well, it seems like it would be more good than bad. Fostering physical familiarity, building that trust. You know, you could have probably continued to pretend to be Mark, whisked me away somewhere, and kept playing that role, which would have endeared me to you emotionally and created greater trust, but you didn’t. You destroyed the persona of Mark—why? Because it wasn’t a truth, because he was a lie, because it was a danger to you?”

  “We’re all on the same side. I wasn’t going to lie to you. Just—stop it.”

  “Even if lying means everyone gets what they want? You get the program, I get the fantasy, everyone gets something?”

  What had he said before? He liked talking to her. He hadn’t expected to have to play the part of Mark that long.

  Part of Andy was Mark.

  Was it all a lie? Or was this the wine still talking?

  “You keep saying stop it, but you don’t move, you don’t act. Are you telling me to stop it, or yourself? Is the big truth here that it wasn’t all a lie, but you want it to be? Is that what’s going on here? Is that why you’
re doing all of this? Look at me and tell me to stop talking, stop asking questions. Do it.”

  She was playing with fire. Just because she didn’t fit Andy’s system, because he thought of her as a good person, it didn’t mean she was safe. She was facing a new reality outside the CIA and the country she’d grown up in. And that meant she had to be different. She had to face her problems head-on, and she was starting with Andy.

  He turned his head so that he faced her. His nose had been broken a time or two and little scars marred his face here and there. Dark eyes stared at her, so hard and dark he might not even be Andy right now.

  Was she right? Was Mark in there?

  Fuck it.

  She’d followed the rules, she’d done what was right, and look where it’d gotten her.

  Carol leaned forward and pressed her lips to his. His mouth was hard, unyielding and unwelcoming. She splayed her hand against his chest, otherwise she’d tip forward onto his lap. He sucked in a breath.

  At least she’d tried it.

  She pushed back, or tried to.

  He cupped the back of her head. He tilted his head and his lips moved against hers. She gasped and it was her turn to freeze.

  One moment she was sitting on the sofa, the next she was across his lap with his hands tangled in her hair. His tongue stroked hers. All at once it was too warm, her skin too tight, and what the heck was she supposed to do now?

  He nipped her lower lip, startling her mind into action. She curled her hands over his shoulders and leaned into him.

  She’d wanted a kiss, to feel alive, the truth, and to test her theory, and she’d gotten it. From here on out she was winging it.

  Andy made an inhuman snarling sound. He pulled her head back by her hair, breaking the kiss. He stared at her, the lines of his face angry, almost furious.

  Because of a kiss?

  He stood, slinging her over his shoulder. She was too shocked to react, her head swimming. Each step he took jarred through her body, his shoulder cutting into her abdomen.

  Andy carried her into her bedroom.

  She stopped breathing.

  He dumped her onto the still-rumpled bed.

  The hall light threw his face into deeper shadows, but she didn’t need to see his expression to know she was in dangerous territory. Even men with clearly defined senses of right and wrong had boundaries.