“Your mom did that?” It was amazing, and his knowledge of art would fit in a salt shaker. Bold curves arced over the canvas in brilliant shades from apple green to blue to fiery yellow. “What is it?”
“It’s called Sunbather.”
He squinted. “A woman lying on a hill? Or in a garden?”
“Everyone sees something different. I thought it was a beach.”
Maybe it was a beach. “Maybe that violet-blue part is water.”
“Or maybe it’s a garden and that’s the salvia.”
He turned back to look at her and fell into her smile—the first warm, real smile he’d ever seen. A moment ago he’d wanted to find out about her family, about the mother who used color in as sensual a way as his own mother used flowers.
But now he was caught in her smile, in a vibration of awareness that flickered between them, drawing them together whether they wanted to be or not.
Kellan broke the contact, dug into his pasta and tried for a fast recovery. He came up blank.
Linn shifted in her chair, and when she spoke, the English accent was back. “I thought you were bringing in your file folders and organization charts.”
“They’re all in the truck. I’ll get them after we eat.”
“Tell me how you got to O’Reilly.” They were back to business with a vengeance. “I’d be interested to know how you got past all the levels in his organization.”
He laid down his fork. “You know, it’s really disconcerting to hear you talk business in that accent. I don’t know whether I’m talking to Caroline or to Linn.”
“Which would you prefer, darling?” she asked, in exactly the same tone she’d used on Tricky Ricky the other day. Just before she’d offered him a blow job.
“Talking to Caroline keeps me in character, but I need to talk to Linn.”
“You needn’t think of me as two people, you know. I’m not Sybil.”
“Oh, yes, you are.” He speared a broccoli floret with his fork and pointed it at her. “Caroline is as far from Linn as—as I am from Rick O’Reilly.”
“What’s he like?” She sipped her wine and he watched her lips touch the glass and part.
“Who?”
“Rick O’Reilly. Do keep up.”
He concentrated on his food and not her mouth. He wasn’t going to think about how he could surprise her into smiling again. “He knows how to work people. He has a nose for their weaknesses and goes right for them. Naturally he rose in the ranks.”
“So has he found your weakness?”
“Not yet. That’s why he went for you. He thinks he can use you to get to me.”
“He’s very quick. We hadn’t talked for more than a few minutes.”
“See what I mean?”
“If you’re going to set him up for a deal, how do I fit in?”
“We let him think his plan is working. The only reason he’s been so successful so far is that he always lets the other guy take the fall. There’s no honor among thieves here. If he gets backed into a corner, he’ll throw someone into the line of fire to save himself. If he thinks you’re my weakness he’ll try to set things up so that he winds up in the Caymans with you and the product, and Dean winds up in the slammer.”
“Won’t he be surprised.”
“Yeah. Little does he know we could have taken him down after the two-kilo buy we did a few days ago, and made it stick.”
“What happened?”
“I’d been working up to it for months. You know, a half pound of product here from one of his people, a pound there. I did a smaller one with O’Reilly himself at the beginning of the month, and that primed him to trust me for the two keys. So the State had to ante up for that. I wanted to take him down and get the money back before he spent it all.”
“But then you wouldn’t get the guy above him. Do you have any ideas as to who that is?”
“All we know from various hints O’Reilly has dropped is that he’s Colombian. I’d like to get his in-country lab and their suppliers, too, but my expectations are reasonable. My goal is to get O’Reilly to introduce me. That’s the other part of your job. You’re a jet-setter. You’re giving me some international flavor, especially with Hidalgo to vouch for you.”
Kellan cleaned the last of the pasta off his plate and was surprised to find there was no more left in the bowl. “That was really good. Did I eat all that?”
“I like a man with healthy appetites.”
He calmed the jolt in his blood and pointed his fork at her a second time. “Stop that.”
“I’m in character, darling.”
“You’re too damn good. I keep forgetting I’m your team lead.”
Her smile was slow and lovely, full of pleasure at the confession. “I thought that was the point.”
She had him there. The problem was, by rights he should only respond to her when he was working, as Dean. But Kellan didn’t want to settle for that.
He wanted her himself.
5
LINN WAS WILLING TO BET that Kellan Black hadn’t been this off balance since, oh, maybe kindergarten. And even then he was probably batting his brown eyes at the little girls and bewitching them into giving him their cookies at snack time.
But she held all the cookies now.
He shouldered the front door open, and she closed it behind him while he settled a file box and a huge, accordion-pleated folder on her coffee table. It would have been too much to hope that his files would be like hers—in date order and organized with tabs and indexes. Oh, no. It looked as if an explosion had happened deep inside the file, and sure enough, the moment he set it down, it tipped over and spilled its contents all over her hardwood floor.
“Aw, crap.”
“Here, I’ll get them.”
“No, I know where everything is.”
That was hard to believe.
“We might as well start with this stuff.” He scooped up a folder that looked exactly like every other folder in the mess. “Here’s that org chart.”
The document was filled with labeled boxes branching off a central tree. Lots of labeled boxes. Here was where he got orderly, it seemed.
“Color coding. Very nice.”
“I had to figure out some way of keeping everybody straight. The empty box in the top row is our eventual target, the Colombian. All I know after six months in this organization is that he owns property in California and possibly other states. For the last month I’ve been working on getting his name. This two-kilo deal we just did with O’Reilly was supposed to grease the way to an introduction and The Big One, but so far Rick isn’t giving me so much as the guy’s initials.”
“What’s it like, being in deep cover for so long?”
Silence stretched out for a moment while he gazed at the chart.
“It’s dangerous,” he said at last. “There are days when I’m terrified and all I want to do is come out. Then there are days when I’m so into it I don’t ever want to come out.” He paused, then said so softly that she wasn’t sure he remembered she was there, “Those days scare me even worse.”
After a moment he seemed to collect himself and pointed to the chart. When he spoke, his voice was completely normal, as though she hadn’t interrupted at all.
“Rick and I are on the next level down, in red boxes. The distributors below us are blue. On my side, of course, they’re mostly imaginary, but I’ve had Coop and Danny make themselves visible when they’re needed. When we do the roundup, teams will arrest these guys as well as O’Reilly. Below them, the street-level traffickers are green. They’ll probably disappear into the woodwork like rats, and we probably won’t waste too many resources on them. Last, our informants are orange. They’re scattered on every level.”
In the row of blue distributors, the box for Hidalgo Martinez, the confidential informant they’d managed to flip, was orange, as were several among the street-level dealers.
“This is great,” she murmured. “I’ll need to memorize it.”
> He handed her a fat manila folder. “This is the file on Rick, as well as the few facts I have about the Colombian. You can keep it tonight to learn as much about them as you can before the meet. I’ll need it back in the morning.”
In the five minutes it had taken him to go out to the car and get the files, he’d evidently managed to forget that brief sparkle of accord between them and return to team lead mode.
That was just as it should be. But deep inside, Linn felt a little disappointed. The leather skirt was obviously just a skirt, and Tessa’s premonitions nothing more than an urge to get Linn to spend some money.
Or were they?
Over the next hour, as she sat beside him on the couch, Kellan worked his way through the box of files, pointing out people and strategies and filling in the skeleton of the org chart with living, breathing criminals with rap sheets and families and networks of contacts. But every so often, when he thought she was absorbed in making notes in her notebook, out of the corner of her eye she’d catch him looking sideways at her.
She’d managed to keep the conversation so far almost completely on business, despite her Caroline persona’s best efforts to derail it. This was a briefing, and he’d responded heroically, really. He hadn’t so much as made a remark in response to Caroline’s needling.
He was controlling himself admirably. Except for his eyes. There was no doubt there what he was thinking. That dark-chocolate gaze lingered and seemed to spark hot spots wherever it touched her.
She was playing with fire here. And why? For the sake of the job?
Yeah, right, her conscience scoffed. The man walks on the wild side, and you like it. You’ve never dated a dangerous guy like this in your life. Oh, no. That would mean giving up control, wouldn’t it? And we can’t have that in our love life, can we?
It wasn’t about control. It was about partnership between equals.
You’ve had it your way for too long. But you can’t control this one. You can barely control yourself when you’re around him. He pushes you, and that’s what you like, isn’t it?
“So,” she said calmly, silencing the voice, “that means that these two dealers get their product from you. How do you manage to stay uninvolved in the buys?”
His gaze traveled slowly up the front of her shirt, as if he were mentally doing up the buttons one by one, until it reached her face. “What?”
“The buys,” she repeated, trying to remember what she’d just said. “How do you stay out of them? Do you have a couple of people do the carrying for you?”
“Tell me the real reason why you acted as Caroline tonight.” His eyes had become hot and focused, and she knew the voice of her conscience was right. She did not have the upper hand here.
Not at all.
“To get into character,” she said.
“You could do that on your own.”
“No, I couldn’t. I need you.” That didn’t come out right. “To play from.”
“Do you?” His smile was molten, wicked. “You want to know what I think? I think you like being her. I think it gives you an excuse to be a bad girl.”
“I don’t need an excuse. I—”
“Then why so restrained all the time? Why not turn yourself loose once in a while?”
Because then I’d be like my mother.
“I can turn myself loose,” she said a little defiantly. “I just don’t get a lot of time to practice.”
“How much practice do you want?” He turned and touched her just above her knee, where her skin was cool and bare under the heat of his hand. “What parts of Caroline do you want help with?”
Oh, God. He wasn’t talking about deportment here. “The accent. The attitude. The, um…”
“Sexiness?” His hand slid a little farther up her leg, and she realized the leather miniskirt had been doing its job all along. In fact, it had scooted so far up her thighs that it was clear the damn thing was playing a come-hither game with his hand.
Maybe Tessa had been right about it after all.
“Kellan, please.” She wasn’t begging. She wasn’t. She was trying to make her body stop wanting this.
He leaned in as if to say something quietly in her ear, but instead he tasted the skin just below her jaw. “Please what?”
“This isn’t right.”
Despite her words, her head rolled helplessly to meet his mouth. That wonderful mouth that made her think of sex and sin, that whispered bad things in her ear. Bad things she shouldn’t want, but did. Other people broke the rules and took risks, but not her.
Not until now.
“I’m Dean, remember? Caroline doesn’t work for me.” The words hovered over her lips and she realized that he was waiting.
For her move. Her call.
AS CAROLINE’S—Linn’s—he couldn’t tell and didn’t care any more. As her mouth opened and she reached up in invitation, Kellan threw his sensible resolve to keep this meeting businesslike straight out the window. His fingers slid up her leg to her hip, and he pulled her closer. In response, her arms wound around his neck. Her mouth was hot and demanding, though why that should surprise him he didn’t take the time to speculate.
He stroked her tongue with his own, and she made a little noise in her throat. She tasted of wine and the scent of lime teased his nose again, as though a rise in her body temperature had released it. His own temperature was rising—no doubt about it.
Her lips were so soft, her tongue so welcoming, he fell into the kiss as though there would be no end to it.
Her head tilted back, and he released her mouth. Her throat was exposed for a second, and he lowered his head to see if the skin where her neck met her shoulder was as soft as it looked.
“Kellan,” she whispered.
“Mmm?” It was. He kissed her throat, drawing in the scent of her.
“We can’t do this.”
“Yes, we can. You said so. We need the practice.”
“It isn’t practice.”
He raised his head, confused, and met her troubled blue eyes. Then, dimly, he heard a cricket chirp.
The sound hardly registered. He had been enjoying her kisses and her skin, and he could have sworn she had been enjoying it, too, and now the spell was broken.
The cricket chirped again. Under the couch. “I think that’s your phone.” She pulled away.
His phone?
He tried to disconnect from the clash of desire and disappointment. The only phone he carried these days was the one Tricky Ricky had the number for.
“Shit!”
He scrabbled through the pile of paper and files to find his jacket. He yanked the little cell phone out of the front pocket and practically pushed his thumb through the button.
“Yeah?”
“What’s the matter? Bad time?” Rick O’Reilly sounded as if he hoped it were.
“Really bad time.”
“You’re breathing hard, guy. Don’t tell me. You ran up a flight of stairs. Or could the lovely Caroline have something to do with it?”
For a moment Kellan felt reality and fantasy collide as the two worlds he inhabited overlapped. Caroline sprawled on the couch beside him, her lips swollen and parted, looking at him with a mixture of frustration and regret.
If O’Reilly had been in the room, he would cheerfully have choked him. “Screw you, man.”
“I bet she wants to. I’m seeing her Saturday. Hope you don’t mind.”
Here’s where Jealous Guy came in. “What?”
“Oh, she didn’t tell you? She promised me she’d be careful. Careful and bad.”
“You looking for a showdown or something, Rick? Because I’m not into that. I don’t compete. If she wants to amuse herself with you because I got something else going, that’s up to her.”
“Oh, I’ll amuse her, all right. Just don’t expect her around for breakfast Sunday morning. Or Monday morning, either.”
“Is that what you called about? To tell me you were going to take my girlfriend to bed?”
&
nbsp; “Pretty much. Thought it was only fair to be aboveboard. Since we’re friends and all.”
Linn leaned over and plucked the cell phone from his hand. “Hey, what—”
“Rick?” she purred into the phone. “Yes, it’s me.” Her lashes flicked up and her eyes held Kellan’s gaze. “What do you think we were doing? No, actually, I’d just made him go out and get me a pint of lovely Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.” She laughed at something he said. “Cherry Garcia is my favorite, too…. Yes, darling, I’m sure you could, but I prefer something hot between my legs.”
Kellan stared at her. How in the hell could she go from what she’d been doing with him to saying stuff like this to slimeball Rick O’Reilly?
“Darling, I’m assuming we’re still on for tomorrow night? Just wanted to check. See you then.” She made kissy noises into the phone and snapped it shut.
Her body seemed to lose all of its spine and seductiveness as she wilted into the cushions.
“Nothing like a call from Tricky Ricky to make you lose the moment.” He tried to diffuse the awkwardness with a joke. She threw the cell phone limply in his direction, and he caught it. “I was having a pretty good moment. You can practice kissing with me anytime.”
She rolled her head to look at him. “That’s what it was, right? Practice for the job. You were kissing Caroline.” All trace of the sultry English accent had gone, and all that was left was a definite morning-after taste.
“Sure. We were rehearsing for tomorrow night. Getting comfortable with each other’s part.”
She looked pale and tired, and he’d kissed off all her lipstick. She also looked confused, as though she hadn’t wanted him to agree with her.
Maybe some moments shouldn’t be recaptured. Maybe he should just leave well enough alone. He shifted on the couch and began to gather up the files, leaving Rick O’Reilly’s personal file out on the coffee table.
“Thanks for dinner. I’m going to head out. Maybe write up a report about his call while it’s fresh in my mind.”
His Hot Number Page 5