She would tell him hello—she always did—with a deep, searing, burning kiss. God, he loved kissing her. Loved and hated it.
Hated it because her kisses so completely overwhelmed him. When Zoe kissed him, nothing else existed. His world narrowed down to him and her, his mouth, her mouth, his arms around her, her body against him.
When Zoe kissed him, he could barely even remember his own name, let alone the taste of Daisy’s kisses.
Zoe had completely invaded his dreams, as well. More than once he’d woken up reaching for her, so certain that his impossibly detailed, incredibly erotic dreams had been real.
Lately in his dreams, he only saw Daisy from a distance. He’d spot her from the bedroom window of his Washington apartment and go out the French doors onto the deck to call to her. Halfway there, he’d realize he was naked, that he’d just been in bed with Zoe. His voice would catch in his throat, and Daisy would disappear.
He didn’t need Joseph and his dreamcoat to figure out what that meant.
He’d wake up, aching from guilt and need. It was not a good combination.
Jake glanced at his watch. Dammit, where was she?
Tonight he wasn’t just anticipating her arrival because he wanted to kiss her. Tonight he had some vital information he needed to pass along.
“If you’re looking for Zoe—” Carol, one of the other waitresses, the pretty, dark-haired, forty-something one, stood behind him, holding her tray “—she called in sick again tonight.”
Sick. Again? Oh, damn, he’d purposely stayed away for a few days. What if she’d been sick all that time? What if she’d needed him? “Is she all right?”
Carol shrugged. “Gus thinks it’s the flu. Personally, I just think she’s pouting.”
“Thanks for letting me know.” Jake finished the rest of his beer and carried the empty bottle toward the bar.
“Before you go racing out to her place,” Carol said, following him, “you should probably be ready for her to hand down an ultimatum. That girl wants some kind of commitment, Jake. She told Monica you’ve been dragging your feet so hard, she was starting to give second thoughts to becoming Christopher Vincent’s fourth wife.”
Jake nearly dropped the bottle. “What?”
Carol smiled. “Yeah, I figured you didn’t know about that. Apparently your friend Christopher has been hitting on Zoe, too. He wants to add her to that sick little harem he’s got going up there at the old Frosty Cakes place.”
“She never said a word about that to me.”
“I’m going to give you some unsolicited advice, Jake. Zoe’s a little wild, a little out of control. That’s her nature. But she wants a ring. This is probably the first time in her life she’s held out for something like this, and I’m certain that she’s serious. I know you haven’t known her for that long, but she wants to get married before she turns thirty, and she’s getting close to the point where she doesn’t particularly give a damn who she marries. But she is in love with you. You should hear her talk about you—it’d make you blush.”
“She does go on and on and on about you, Jake.” Somehow the bartender had become a part of this conversation. The two old men who were permanent fixtures in the bar were also unabashedly listening in.
“If you feel anything for her at all, buy her a ring,” Carol advised him. “Have Christopher Vincent do that mumbo-jumbo wedding ceremony that he does. It’s not real, anyway. He has no more authority to officiate at a wedding than my pet poodle. But it’ll make Zoe happy, you’ll get what you want for as long as you want it, and it’ll keep her away from Christopher. He’s just a little too rough with women, if you ask me.”
“You’d be a damn fool not to marry Zoe for real,” one of the old men said. Roy. Zoe had told him that Roy was ninety-two years old. “If I were just twenty years younger, I’da asked her myself the first time she came in here.”
Zoe’s trailer was parked just down the block, in the empty lot alongside Lonnie’s gas station. The light was on as Jake approached.
She opened the door before he even reached the steps—she’d been watching and waiting for him.
She was wearing her jeans and that little flowered T-shirt she’d had on in Washington the first time they’d met. Her hair was down, long and silky around her shoulders. She wore almost no makeup, and her skin seemed to glow with good health.
“I guess you don’t have the flu,” he said as she closed the door behind him.
“Gee, you sound almost disappointed.”
Her gym bag was packed, her backpack, too. They lay on the floor of the tiny hall that led to the trailer’s single bedroom.
Dammit, she was actually trying to force his hand. She wanted him to marry her and bring her to the CRO compound.
“Going somewhere?” he asked. He tried to keep his voice and his smile pleasant, but he knew they were both a little too tight.
She met his gaze and didn’t try to pretend either one of them didn’t know exactly what was going on. “It’s time, Jake.”
“What if I say no, it’s not time? What if I tell you no, you’re not getting inside the CRO fort? Is that when you blatantly defy me—and sign on to be the fourth Mrs. Vincent?”
He was furious with her, but his anger wasn’t entirely because she was attempting to override his authority. He was mad as hell that she could consider sex to be so insignificant, that she could hold her own self in such low esteem. He was livid at the idea of her giving herself to Christopher Vincent. Her motivation might be selfless, but dammit, it was wrong.
And it drove home the fact that she was willing to be with Jake, too, for the same wrong reasons.
And in a flash of insight that was a little too glaringly clear, Jake knew that he didn’t want Zoe to want him, too—in addition to her desire to make this mission a success. He wanted Zoe to want him, period. In spite of the mission. Outside of the mission.
The way he wanted her.
She didn’t blink. “You know that I’d prefer doing it this way. Going in there with you.”
He let himself glare at her, let his words crackle with his displeasure. “Yeah, and I’d prefer doing it my way. I am the team leader, or have you forgotten?”
Zoe flinched at his high volume, but then lifted her chin in that way she had that could infuriate him and make him admire her, all at once. “Are you the team leader, Admiral? If so, why are you letting Jake the protective man interfere with what’s best for this op? The plan was to get me inside that factory so I could help you find that Trip X. It was a good plan—until you stopped thinking like an admiral. You promised me that as far as my safety and comfort went, you’d let me draw the line. We had a deal—until you turned around and reneged.”
“You want me to let you draw the line?” Jake couldn’t believe it. “Where’s your line, Zoe? As far as I can tell, it doesn’t exist. You’re not drawing any line at all, if you’re willing to marry Christopher Vincent to get inside the CRO fence!”
Chapter 9
Jake was beyond upset.
For the first time since Zoe had met him, he didn’t have a smile ready to pull out to help diffuse or relax the situation.
His eyes were cold and as hard as blue steel, and he looked at her as if she were a stranger, as if he didn’t recognize her.
Zoe didn’t know what to tell him. She opted for the truth. “I wouldn’t really have married Christopher Vincent,” she admitted. “I just thought…. I don’t know. Maybe it would give you the incentive you needed to get me in there this other…this safer way.”
He clearly didn’t believe her. Why should he? She’d worked hard to make him think she was tough and ruthless. “Things weren’t progressing at a speed that satisfied you, so you decided to resort to emotional blackmail, is that what you’re saying?”
She couldn’t deny it, but she could try to justify it. “I’m the expert, Jake. I should be in there.”
His eyes were as cold and as empty as the darkness of outer space, his voice flat. “I
should send you home.”
Her chin went up. “You could do that, Admiral, but you couldn’t stop me from going to Pat Sullivan and getting reassigned right back here.”
“And then you’d use the fact that Christopher Vincent wants to sleep with you to get through the CRO gates, right?” He laughed, but there wasn’t any humor in it. “Funny, I thought I heard you just say you wouldn’t do that.”
Zoe felt like crying. She’d worked overtime to make Jake believe that she was blasé about sex. She’d pretended so hard that it was no big deal. She was not demure, she was not shy. She could use her looks and her body as just another tool of her trade.
She’d started out wanting to shock him, wanting to shake him up and, yes, wanting to impress him. She was a modern woman, a Gen X-er. She might be young, she might be a woman, but she was an expert in dealing with weapons of mass destruction, an authority in a field that was more frightening than the most terrifying horror movie. Yet despite that, she had the ability to remain detached and in control while sheer chaos raged around her. She was cool, she was tough, she could get the job done—see, look? She could remain as emotionally unattached as James Bond when it came to matters of the heart. That proved she had what it took to be good at her job, didn’t it?
She was good at her job.
But none of the rest of it was true.
Except now he believed it was. And he was not impressed.
She’d painted herself into this unfortunate corner, there was no doubt about it.
Jake sat tiredly on the built-in sofa. “You know what the really stupid thing is, Zoe?”
She was. She was the stupid thing.
“I came into town tonight to tell you that we’re out of time.” Jake looked at her and gave her a crooked smile. “I came to find out if you still wanted to marry your way into the CRO compound.”
Zoe sat across from him, suddenly sharply focused. “Out of time? How?”
“I found out when Christopher’s planning to use the Triple X,” Jake told her. “He’s celebrating his fiftieth birthday in three weeks. He and his lieutenants have been talking about the big party they’re having in New York City. How the big party’s going to get covered by CNN. I figure we’ve only got about a week and a half before they’ll try to move the T-X. We need to find it before then, for obvious reasons.”
The CRO could carry it out of state in plastic baggies, in small amounts. And then the team would have a hell of a time tracking it down. They could recover most of the Triple X and thousands of people could still die.
They had to find it. Now.
“Yes,” Zoe said. “Yes, I’ll marry you.”
Someone had found Zoe a white dress.
It wasn’t a wedding dress, but with her hair up, she looked angelic.
Jake stood in the front of Mel’s Bar, watching as she proceeded toward him, down an aisle they’d made by moving the tables and chairs. He didn’t know the name of the song that was playing on the jukebox, but the melody was haunting.
Zoe was so beautiful, his throat ached.
But this wasn’t real. None of this was real.
The CRO didn’t believe in marriage licenses. They opposed state intervention in something as personal as marriage. And thus, according to their rules, Jake could propose marriage at 8:37 p.m. and be watching his bride walking down the aisle toward him by eleven that same night.
Beside him, Christopher Vincent cleared his throat. He smiled as Jake glanced at him. Jake smiled back. And felt a small surge of triumph. There was a lot that was really, really wrong about this mock wedding ceremony, but at least Jake knew one good thing that would come of it. After tonight, Christopher Vincent would have no chance of getting his hands on Zoe.
He could see apprehension in her eyes as she got closer. Her smile was tentative, and he knew he hadn’t completely managed to hide his sense of dread.
Jake didn’t want to marry her. He didn’t want to pretend to marry her. And he really didn’t want to bring her back to his bedroom at the CRO compound. It was hard enough resisting her here, in a public bar. How was he going to handle sharing quarters with her?
Somehow, he was going to do it. He was going to pretend to make love to her, and he was going to sleep in the same bed with her night after night. If anything could cool his body’s eager response to her nearness, it would be those three security cameras positioned around his room.
Zoe handed the flowers she carried to Carol and took his hand. Her fingers were cold. Her dress was lovely, with no sleeves and a sweeping low neckline that exposed the tops of her full breasts, but it was a summer dress, and fall was cold and crisp and far more suited to turtlenecks here in Belle, Montana.
He took both of her hands in his, trying to warm them. She was wearing perfume—just the slightest, subtlest scent.
“Kneel,” Christopher Vincent commanded.
Jake helped Zoe down onto the floor, then prepared to join her. But Chris stopped him.
“Just Zoe,” he said.
She looked up at them, frowning slightly. “Just me?”
“You have to show the proper respect to your husband and to the other men of the CRO,” Christopher told her. “On your knees, head down, eyes averted.”
This was it, Jake thought. This was where Zoe would stand up and laugh in Christopher’s face.
But she didn’t. She stayed there on the floor, and she bowed her head. And he knew again how high she thought these stakes were. If she would do this, she would do anything to find that missing T-X.
Anything.
The thought made his stomach hurt.
The ceremony was short, filled with words like “obey” and “submit,” “abide by” and “yield.” It was a step back toward the Dark Ages for women everywhere.
Yet throughout it all, Zoe murmured her acquiescence.
It was nothing like his wedding to Daisy, and yet Jake found himself hesitating as he reached down to take Zoe’s hand. It was time to slip a plain gold ring on her finger, but the depth and meaning of the powerful symbolism was tarnished by the loss of equality. The ring seemed far more imprisoning as she knelt slightly behind him, as he tagged her as if she were some kind of pet or possession.
Taking a deep breath, he pushed the ring onto her finger. If she could kneel and bow her head, he could do this.
There was no ring for his finger—he was grateful at least for that.
Finally, at last, Zoe was allowed to rise.
It was time to kiss the bride.
She looked at him then, and there were tears in her eyes. And he knew that as hard as this had been for him, it had been a million times harder for Zoe—Zoe, who’d probably never knelt for anyone before in her entire life.
He kissed her softly, gently, trying to reassure himself as well as her that none of this was real.
She clung to him then, and he closed his eyes and held her close. Wishing…what? He didn’t even know.
“I’m sorry,” she breathed into his ear, barely loud enough for him to hear. “I’m so sorry, Jake. I know how hard this must be for you.”
He pulled back to look at her in surprise as he realized that the tears in her eyes were for him.
The crowd in the bar was applauding. Carol and her friend Monica threw rice. And Jake stood there watching a tear escape from Zoe’s eyes and slide down her cheek.
And he couldn’t help himself.
He kissed her.
Not because he had to.
But because he wanted to.
Her lips were so soft, and she tasted impossibly sweet. How could someone as tough and strong as Zoe taste that sweet?
He gently coaxed her mouth open, taking his time, kissing her slowly, completely, deeply. Very, very deeply.
Time ground to a halt and the noise in the room faded to a dull roar. Nothing mattered, nothing existed but the woman in his arms.
He wanted to kiss her forever. He wanted this moment to go on and on, endlessly.
He felt her melt
against him, felt heat pool in the pit of his stomach, felt his knees grow weak.
God, if a single kiss could be this good…
He pulled back, breathing hard.
Zoe’s eyes were wide as she looked at him.
And then Chris and some of the other men from the CRO were slapping him on the back, shaking his hand, buying him a drink.
He looked at Zoe, surrounded now by Carol and Monica, old Roy and Lonnie, and she was still gazing at him, a question in her eyes.
He nodded. Yes. But she still didn’t get it. Or maybe she didn’t believe him.
“That was me kissing you,” he told her silently, knowing she could read his lips.
She smiled, but her eyes welled with fresh tears. And this time he wasn’t surprised.
Chapter 10
It was definitely weird.
Walking into the CRO fort was like walking onto the set of her favorite television show.
Zoe had seen it, in complete detail, on the surveillance video screens many times before.
She’d studied the entire former factory while in the team trailer. She knew the layout nearly as well as Bobby Taylor now.
She could find the main kitchen in a blackout with her eyes closed if she had to. She knew where all the cameras and microphones were located in the compound yard. She knew the shortest route to Jake’s quarters from any given point in the place.
But she hung back, letting Jake lead the way.
She would have to remember to let him walk several paces in front of her. A CRO rule.
He’d left his room unlocked—apparently everyone did. He opened the door, holding it politely, the way her father might have done for her mother, to let her go in first.
She knew this room well, too. The colors were slightly different than they’d appeared on the video monitors, though, the red-orange of the shag carpeting a little more brassy, the paneling a little more nicked and worn.
She looked into the mirror, wondering who was watching them right now. Were Bobby and Wes pulling a shift? Or Harvard? Or was it Luke O’Donlon? The entire team knew that everything said and done in this room was purely for the benefit of the cameras. They knew that nothing was real, but still…
Tall, Dark, and Dangerous Part 2 Page 57