Honeymoon with a Stranger

by Frances Housden

  At last he stopped looking at her as if she was something disgusting that had crawled out of a drain, and asked, “Okay, out with it. Tell me who you’re working for.”

  Damn, she thought they’d settled this. She scrunched up her eyes as if in disbelief. “What do you mean who am I working for? I told you. Charles Fortier.”

  “Yeah, that’s likely. What interest does a couturier have in Green Shield?”

  Roxie blinked. “So that’s its name.”

  Le Figaro had concluded that the reason for Sevarin’s resignation was the disappearance of a biotech weapon, but such things had never come within her scope before. “And before you go on about Charles, I doubt if he’s heard the name either.”

  His hand splayed over the tabletop with a quiet yet sharp bang, like five fingers pointing accusingly at her. “But you do. So what group, slash agency, slash cell do you work for? Is it MI6?”

  MI6? As if. “You crack me up. Because I’m English, you’ve added two and two and made five and come to the conclusion I work for MI6.”

  Roxie rolled her eyes incredulously, then shrugged, letting the slippery quilt slide off her shoulders. “I’m also part French. I don’t think they’d have me.”

  She watched his stare drop lower, to her breasts stretching the lace as the brush of cold air flowed over them.

  He looked away quickly.

  Too late. The touch of his gaze hardened her nipples into tight points. Did he think she was trying to tempt him with the memory of his hands shaping her breasts, or the taste of her as he’d sucked her into his mouth?

  This was not a good moment to become aroused.

  She hitched up the quilt, but it wouldn’t stay put.

  “I told you the truth,” she said. “I’m a fashion designer. Me being at your apartment was a mistake, and before you think of putting a dent in my windpipe like you did Yves, I’m telling you we should escape while we can.”

  His taut, muscular forearms rested on the table as he leaned forward, hands clenched, his face no more than eighteen inches away. “So, you think I should walk away and leave the field open to you? In your dreams, bébé, you need me. Tell you what, though. Give me the name of the agency running you and maybe we can make a deal.”

  She deliberately misunderstood him. “I don’t have an agent yet. Maybe one day when my name becomes known.”

  Holding the edges of the quilt in her hands, she closed the distance separating them by letting her forearms rest on the edge of the tabletop. Her breast brushed against the lace as she heaved a sigh. “The fashion industry can be fickle. I might never make it that high.”

  “I get it. You’re scared of what will happen if you talk. What if I guaranteed your protection?” He reached over and touched her wrist. Heat blossomed.

  God, did he really think she was such a pushover?

  “The only person I’m frightened of is Sevarin. You don’t know him….” He might kill you.

  “And you do?” His whisper was harsh, urgent, and surged into action with his fingers tightening round her wrist.

  She winced and pulled away, her heart plummeting. “You didn’t have to do that. We both know you’re stronger than I am. You don’t have to prove it.”

  She made a point of rubbing her wrist. Yes, she was weaker, but she had other skills. It might take all of them to persuade him to leave now, tonight, before it’s too late.

  If only Mac would understand. “I was trying to tell you, I know Sevarin’s family history. And people don’t change—it runs in their blood.”

  Mac didn’t believe her.

  Look at the difference between him and his father. Joshua McBride Senior reached his goals by diplomacy, Mac with cunning and a little necessary force. His father would never have grabbed a woman hard enough to break her wrist.

  He watched Roxie’s fingers rub where he’d held her. Without a cloud in the sky, the pale watery light from the moon was clear enough for him to see she was going to sport another bruise.

  “If that’s so, whom do you take after?” Mac asked.

  She blinked in surprise, and he was struck by how the moonlight glanced through the curve of her eyes and turned them luminous.

  “You know, until a couple of years ago I would have said my mother. She loved pretty clothes, yet look at me now.”

  She ran her fingers through her tousled curls, and he wondered again if the slip of the quilt was deliberate.

  “But now I’m sure I take after my grandmother. Grandmère was in the French Resistance and a leader by the age of sixteen.”

  She stopped playing with her hair as a smile played around her lips. “My grandfather said she wouldn’t take lip from anyone, including him. He came over from England to work undercover in 1942, just before the rest of France was overrun by the Nazis.”

  God, she could be so annoying. What was about her that made him want her so much? He cleared his throat and asked, “What’s that got to do with anything? Stick to the subject.”

  She looked irritated. He wasn’t the pushover she expected. “But I am. Grandmère had to contend with Sevarin’s father, Michel. He was a traitor to France and its people, yet he managed to walk away without even a slap on the wrist.”

  This time she reached out to him, her fingers threading through his. “Please don’t let history repeat itself.”

  He had to close his heart to her touch, her warmth. He shook his head to clear it.

  Poor kid, it looked as if Roxie’s grandmother had done a number on her—how she could have won the war if it hadn’t been for the big bad man.

  He’d heard those stories before from older agents and put them down as excuses.

  “Listen to me, chérie. You’re talking ancient history, long gone. What happened then has no bearing on my deal.”

  “Don’t be too sure. Sevarin started as a small cog in the Vichy government, but he had big ambitions, so he moved to Paris. Just like his son.” Her other hand covered the one she was already holding.

  Trapped.

  “He claimed,” she continued, “to want to help the Resistance and got a job working in Gestapo headquarters so he could warn them of raids.”

  Mac tried to butt in, to redirect the conversation.

  She halted him with a peremptory wave of her hand.

  “Uh-uh, let me finish. Sevarin was passing the information both ways, and a lot of loyal Frenchmen and women died because of him…I don’t want you to die because of his son.”

  Her voice caught as she turned to face the room, hiding her expression in shadow.

  He wasn’t buying it. It hurt to admit, but he’d been conned by a better artist than Roxie and it had nearly cost him his life.

  Though Lucia’s beauty had been more blatant than Roxie’s subtle sexiness, he knew which had shattered his notion that Mac McBride could move from one sexual experience to another without breaking a sweat.

  He’d never forget Roxie. Never be able to replace what he felt as he thrust inside her, or for that matter, lay quietly holding her in his arms.

  But he’d be an idiot to let a woman fool him again because she had his hormones in a twist.

  “And how do you—” his drawl bordered on the sarcastic, but Roxie didn’t seem to notice “—think we can get away from this place, walk? They’d soon catch up with us on foot.”

  “I know of this place. It’s near the Loire. We could find a boat or steal a car.”

  A boat? Even for Roxie that was a stretch of the imagination. “Supposing we get away without getting shot. How would we start a car? You gonna hotwire it, chérie?”

  He was being a typical male, but she couldn’t let that stop her from saving his life as he’d saved hers. “You’re the criminal, I thought you would know how to do all that stuff.”

  His eyes lit with laughter. She could see he didn’t believe a word she’d said. Give Mac his due, at least he hadn’t pegged her as another terrorist. What else could he be if he wanted Green Shield? And she could get shot for even t
hinking of helping him.

  “Give it up, Roxie. I’m not leaving here without getting what I came for, and no amount of persuasion will change my mind. You can make up all the tales you want, about Sevarin and your grandmother, they aren’t going to work.”

  He leaned back in the chair and folded his arms. “Do you really think I believed you turning up at my apartment was a coincidence? You were following Zukah. Come on, admit it.”

  Smug and a know-it-all. He made her so mad. Why did men have to be so stubborn? So suspicious?

  She was trying to save his life!

  Her frustration doubled, trebled as she fed the flames with more fuel aimed at men in general and Mac in particular. Then it came to her. Why hadn’t she thought of it before?

  She would trap him at his own game.

  “All right, you’ve got me. I work for MI6. We’ve been watching Sevarin since he made moves to hire Zukah. That’s why I was following the Algerian, to discover who his meeting was with.”

  She pushed her hair back behind her ear and straightened in her chair. “We knew something was in the wind, that he had set up a meeting, but I was expecting to follow him to a café, not your apartment.”

  “La Grappe d’Orgueil?”

  “Yes.”

  “Son of a—” He slapped his palm on his thigh, expressing his delight. “I knew it the moment you turned up.”

  He had the cheek to wink at her as he said, “You have flair and style in the way you dress, and that sexy walk was just made to turn men’s heads. What gave you away was how easily you slotted into the role of my petite amie. Any ordinary woman would have given herself away right then.”

  “You’re right,” she agreed. “I was just too good and that’s what gave me away. You must admit it’s been fun, though.”

  “More than fun.” His smile turned knowing as if at a memory.

  He confirmed it a moment later. “I have to say, you had me going when you let me go all the way. It takes guts to sleep with the enemy.”

  Her heart turned over and dived for the floor. It shattered in too many pieces to recover them all. Now there would always be a part missing to prove how stupid she’d been.

  As if to press home her mistake, she asked him, “Now you know who I am and the agency I work for, what about you, where do you call home?”

  Mac stood up. “I was born in the States, but most of my adult life I’ve called Chechnya home.”

  It was worse than she’d thought.

  She felt giddy, as if the floor had come up to hit her, but she couldn’t let him see that. “That’s not a place I’ve ever fancied visiting.”

  “Who could blame you? With your looks you’d never escape attention. But in Paris?” He gave an almost pure Gallic shrug, as if to say in Paris women like her were ten a penny.

  This time she was at a loss for words. To think she’d wanted to give that man her heart.

  “Don’t think that because we’re on opposite sides it changes anything. I won’t give you up to them. You’ve come in useful. My mother always said, Find a woman who can cook.”

  He squeezed her shoulder and it took an effort not to flinch.

  “We stick to my original plan. You go down the stairs to the study and I’ll do the deal with Sevarin.” He picked up his jeans from the end of the bed and slid his feet into them, zipping them up across his hard, flat stomach.

  “If anything goes wrong, it will be good to know your agency will come in and pick up the pieces.” After he grabbed his leather jacket, he walked back to her and gave her shoulder another squeeze. She supposed it was meant to be reassuring.

  It didn’t work.

  She’d have one more try to save him. “If you think I meant to hand you over after we escaped, you’re wrong. I wouldn’t do that.”

  He shrugged the jacket over his wide shoulders, saying, “For God’s sake, don’t tell anyone else that. I don’t want to have saved you to face a firing squad. They’ll throw the book at you.”

  “I’d deserve it.”

  “Look, lets not get morbid. I meant what I promised. I’ll protect you from Sevarin and the others. Just do as I say.”

  He walked toward the armoire and swung it back. “I’m going to take another look downstairs and see if there’s some way you can lock the office door from the inside.”

  Just when she thought he was gone, Mac reappeared at the top of the dark stairwell. “Here’s something to think on. When you get back to England, I’d learn some martial arts.”

  Though he was almost invisible, she could detect the grin in his advice, and to turn the thumbscrews tighter he finished with “It will make life easier than depending on your looks.”

  Her first impulse was to swing the armoire back in place and lock him and his smug grin out. But what was the point? She dragged the quilt back to the bed, which it seemed she’d made for herself and would now have to lie upon.

  Grandmère would be so disappointed in her.

  Roxie threw herself onto the bed.

  She just couldn’t leave it at that. There had to be some way she could prevent Mac handing the Green Shield weapon over to the Chechen rebel forces.

  Perhaps if she slept on it, an idea would come to her in the night. An idea to make her forget how she’d let her temper get the better of her and claimed to be something she wasn’t.

  But Mac had had the last laugh.

  And that’s what hurt the most.

  Mac needed to contact Thierry, urgently. Was he the only person in the world who hadn’t known Sevarin’s government job had blown up in his face?

  If Sevarin failed to show, the biotech weapon that the French Defense Department had supposedly destroyed could disappear into the woodwork and surface years later, God knows where.

  The only thing keeping his hopes alive was that Sevarin must now need money badly and would still show tomorrow.

  When Thierry came on the secure line Mac didn’t bother with formalities. “What’s this about Sevarin resigning?”

  “Jason Hart gave the okay to pass the word about Sevarin and Green Shield on to the French government, but someone there jumped the gun.”

  Mac didn’t like what he was hearing. He wished he hadn’t dragged Roxie deeper into the affair than she had obviously intended. Hell, she hadn’t even been armed when she’d blundered into his apartment.

  But Thierry’s story wasn’t finished. “They went down to the secure facility and began questioning the scientists. The upshot is that one of them blew his brains out in the men’s room.”

  “Great work. So, am I wasting my time here? Have they picked up Sevarin?” Mac waited on tenterhooks for the reply.

  He’d lived with this mission for more than a month, and just as the finish line came into sight some overzealous nitwit had tripped him up.

  “No. Sevarin did resign, but it wasn’t because he’d been accused of anything. He reckoned that the French Internal Security Agency had impugned the integrity of his department and he had no other choice but to resign.”

  “Thank God for that. Now I’m simply back to waiting. Zukah reckons Sevarin will show tomorrow. He still thinks I don’t know who le patron is.”

  “Won’t he be surprised? Oh, by the way, I got you the rest of that info on Roxie.”

  “That’s okay, I managed to get it out of her myself tonight. No force necessary.” Mac smiled to himself when he thought of the merry dance she had led him.

  He’d felt quite upbeat, but he couldn’t trust her with his own identity, not till all this was over. For all her protests, he didn’t trust her not to give him away if she was tortured.

  “I’ve seen her picture.”

  Yeah,” Mac drawled, “the lady’s got great genes.”

  Thierry wasn’t done. “Oui. French Internal Security must have taken her on because her grandmother was one of our legendary heroes of the Second World War. De Gaulle himself presented her with the Legion of Honor.”

  Mac felt his good mood take a nosedive. He�
�d been so sure of himself, and his efforts had cost him more than he could ever imagine. His hand shook as he said, “Yeah, I guess I lucked out.”

  She’d conned him again and he’d let it happen.

  Jason Hart wasn’t going to be overimpressed if he let anything happen to the granddaughter of one of France’s legendary Resistance heroes.

  “Oui, a lucky dog,” Thierry agreed.

  Lucky? He wished.

  “Her job with Charles Fortier is real. Fortier’s mama worked for the Resistance as well. That’s how they met.”

  For most of his Paris assignment he’d lived from one moment to the next, and unlike Roxie his work wasn’t personal. But like her, he was proud of his family history and he never forgot he was a McBride, no matter which name he was using at the time.

  “Is that it, Thierry?”

  “Non. Though she did receive some training, it seems the most Mademoiselle Kincaid has done until now is pass on information. The rich, famous and politically unscrupulous feel at ease behind the salon’s doors. Sevarin’s mistress shops there.”

  “Where are the FIS when she needs them? What if I’d really been Jeirgif Makjzajev?” The thought of anything happening to Roxie made his gut roll over.

  When she’d come out with that lie, all he’d felt was relief. If she worked for MI6, any relationship between them was banned. The bureau might cooperate with the British agency upon occasion, but both agencies frowned on the secrets that could be passed during pillow talk between agents.

  But, if she only worked for FIS on the side…pillow talk might be the only way out from the rock and the hard place his overconfidence had landed him in.

  No way could he explain how he knew she’d lied about MI6.

  On the other hand, he couldn’t apologize for belittling her story of Grandmère’s life in the Resistance.

  After his reactions, an apology just wasn’t going to cut it.

  Dawn wasn’t that far behind him as he slipped back into the attic. Outside, the moon had set and his view of dark blue velvet sky had grown a fringe of palest pink.