Honeymoon with a Stranger

by Frances Housden

  Mac sucked in his gut so Roxie wouldn’t get the idea he was lying. He couldn’t be around her without wanting her. The hard ridge under his zipper was a dead giveaway, and trust had become a big issue last time they spoke.

  Keeping his hands off her would be difficult, but needs must when the devil drove. Their relationship had begun with what for most couples was the penultimate point. Begun with a honeymoon for strangers, and now he wanted to rectify that.

  To give her the courtship she deserved.

  The trouble was, now he knew how it felt to be inside her. Knew the way her body welcomed his.

  Keeping his distance was going to be hell.

  Especially since once again there was only one bed.

  He looked down at her, saying nothing, waiting for her answer.

  “You’d better help me pack,” she said, and at last he could breathe again.

  “Well, if you won’t let me work with you, at least you could let me return to work. I’m tired of being hidden away,” Roxie complained.

  “It’s only been three days,” Mac reminded her.

  “A lifetime.” It had taken her only three days to fall in love with him. Not that she’d dared put it into words.

  She’d spent three nights of torture lying beside him in the darkness. Wondering each time he rolled over if he would touch her. Roll her over onto his chest and kiss the living daylights out of her. But he didn’t.

  Such control.

  It made her wonder if he really loved her as much as he said.

  “I know you’re bored, but I don’t want to be worrying about you, chérie.” He reached over the breakfast table and touched her face, as if safe with three feet of cherry wood between them.

  Though it had never before seemed part of Mac’s context, she wondered now what he was frightened of.

  “But I’ll be safe with Charles. What could be better than being surrounded by other people all day? I’ll let you drive me to work and pick me up at night. Is it a deal?”

  “Deal,” he said, then went back to his half-eaten croissant.

  “While I’m on a winning streak,” she continued, “I want your solemn promise to let me be there when you finally close in on Javier.”

  Her request made him cough on the buttery flakes of pastry.

  “I’ll take that as a yes, and let you finish your petit déjeuner while I change into my black suit. I hope it won’t take you too far out of your way.”

  So far he hadn’t told her where the IBIS agency had their Paris headquarters. And it was annoying that he still didn’t trust her not to give the address away.

  What did he think she would do with the information? Take out a banner on the Internet Web site of Spies Are Us?

  Though the tightness in her wound hampered her as she dressed, she was determined not to keep him waiting. If he wouldn’t treat her as a lover, the next best thing was to be treated as an equal. They were both in the same business, after all.

  At least she thought she was, but an hour later Charles wasn’t so sure. “Dumont thinks your usefulness to FIS may be over.”

  “What?” she exclaimed from her seat on the wrong side of Charles’s ornate desk.

  His surroundings might be elaborate—hardly the scene for official intrigue—but Charles himself dressed quite casually. Wearing a light blue cashmere sweater that matched his eyes, topped with a silk self-patterned silver scarf knotted like a necktie, over pale gray pants, the man was soigné, as always.

  But Roxie was more interested in the mistake she felt he and Dumont were about to make. “After all I’ve done, all I’ve uncovered, not to mention getting shot for his cause, Dumont thinks he can just toss me aside?”

  Charles’s habitual smile thinned. “Don’t bite so quickly, ma petite puce.” He threw in the endearment to soften his words. “I told him he was jumping the gun, to wait and see.”

  But his face grew grim as he twisted the pen in his fingers. “It was the diary that made him nervous. Maybe you should not have released its contents.”

  An angry urge to jump up and stamp her feet shot through Roxie. She controlled it. Charles might put up with tantrums from a top model; a wannabe designer was a different matter. “I had to…for Grandmère’s sake. Anyone would have done the same—Dumont even.”

  “Dumont is not such a one.” Charles put aside the pen he’d been playing with and stood. “We are lucky, you and I, little flea. Intrigue may run in our veins, but we have our true calling to fall back on. Not so Dumont.”

  He came around the desk to Roxie and took her hand, pulling her to her feet. “No, you can go back to your drawing board and continue your work on the ready-to-wear collection. Did I tell you I have great hopes for our March release of your line?”

  Placated, Roxie did as he asked, but as the day passed, it appeared the House of Fortier’s clientele weren’t as worried by her sojourn in the media as Dumont was.

  The Kincaid family wasn’t the only one with an axe to grind with the Sevarins. Other politicians’ wives applauded her courage, but then they didn’t gossip as much as they used to.

  But as another two days passed, Roxie had more to fill her thoughts than if her use-by date with the FIS had arrived. Such as who would catch up with Javier and Green Shield first?—the FIS or IBIS?

  The rivalry on Dumont’s side was like a living, breathing dragon—the fool expected her to report on Mac.

  But more important, she was constantly wondering just how long Mac was going to make them both remain celibate.

  Leaving a gaping concierge hiding below in his rooms, Mac raced up the stairs of an old building in Montmartre, with Thierry and two other armed agents on his heels searching for Javier’s apartment.

  They’d had a positive sighting of Javier that morning and the agent had followed him here. Of course, in the true spirit of cooperation, they had informed Dumont about it when they were approximately two blocks away from the corridor they were hurrying along now.

  When they all reached the door, Mac looked the others straight in the eye as he whispered, “The rules don’t count here. No warnings, no playing fair, just take him down anyway we can. Got it?” That said, he turned and kicked in the door.

  The locks held but the hinges gave way and two seconds later they were inside, but though they’d had someone watching the exit, Javier wasn’t.

  “Goddammit! If someone tipped him off, I’ll have his head on a platter.” He eyed the others, but nobody flinched. “Search the place.”

  It was Thierry who came across the radio receiver, the type that picked up police frequencies. “What do you think, Mac? Which band does FIS use? Would Dumont have radioed his men after we gave him the heads-up?”

  Mac looked up from the small freezer door under the fridge. He’d tossed a few unopened packs of vegetables out onto the floor of the minute kitchen, but for someone his height, it was hard-going to see the rear of the low compartment.

  “I can’t think of a better explanation,” Mac said, more than willing to blame Dumont. The man rubbed him the wrong way.

  Thierry agreed. “We were watching the front, but the bedroom window is open, so he could have climbed down the back way.”

  “So, my friend, our only hope for a good result, is if he kept Green Shield here, and didn’t have time to take it with him.”

  That said, Mac reached into the back of the freezer and found a couple of one-liter ice cream cartons. “Do you think Javier might have a sweet tooth?”

  “Judging from the bare cupboards, I wouldn’t have said he was eating here.”

  Mac cautiously straightened his knees till he reached his full six feet five inches. “Yet his freezer is filled with frozen vegetables and ice cream. Let’s see what we have here.”

  He plugged the porcelain sink and ran the hot water over packs to soften the contents before opening them. “If all we have here is ice cream, I’ll wash it away, but if it’s Green Shield, I don’t want any of it to reach the drains.”

 
; He lifted the lid of the first carton and, with a spoon he’d grabbed from a cutlery stand, gingerly scraped away the top layer. The curved steel edge soon scraped against glass.

  “That makes one. I’ll leave the other carton until we get back to the agency. No sense in getting covered in ice cream on the way home. I want it out of here before Dumont arrives.”

  “Thierry.” He nodded for his friend to join him. “You stay here and see what else you come up with. I need someone who won’t take any nonsense about jurisdiction from Dumont. Costes, you come with me. I need a driver, a careful one.”

  And that’s how he retrieved Green Shield—very, very carefully. If the end of the world were to be on anyone’s shoulders, it wouldn’t be his.

  Mac was a little late picking Roxie up from work, but thankfully she’d had the sense not to wait for him on the sidewalk. It was safer that way.

  With Javier still not under lock and key, he would be twice as dangerous now that they’d stolen his only means of making a deal with the authorities.

  The doorman had gotten used to him picking Roxie up, and Mac knew he would tell her he’d arrived. He was right; soon she was flying down the three steps fronting the House of Fortier and diving into the passenger seat.

  “I’ve had a wonderful day—wait till I tell you,” she chattered excitedly, hardly waiting for him to respond. “Charles loves my ready-to-wear line. So much so that he says he will design a new label just for me.”

  She beamed at him and he couldn’t hold back a grin. He had a lot to be pleased about, too. “That’s fantastic. I bet you can’t wait for March.”

  “He says that my name will look better for the younger clients he wishes to attract.” She chuckled. “Imagine it, Roxie, and underneath, House of Fortier. I’m going to be famous.”

  “I thought you already were—famous, that is.” Mac reminded her that some of the more serious the magazines had now caught up with the story of her grandmother and Sevarin.

  “Oh, that? Comme ci, comme ça. Fifteen minutes of fame is nothing compared to a lifetime of my own name on a label. One day I may even have my own business. I’ll keep it simple, just one name—Roxie.”

  Her excitement lasted all the way to Hôtel Margeaux. Mac knew it was cowardly, but the longer he put off telling her, the longer her excitement would last.

  Once they were in the lift, he pulled her toward him and kissed her. It was moments like these, moments when they touched, that he knew he wasn’t going to be able to keep his hands off her much longer.

  She melted into him and confirmed she felt the same. Her soft, svelte body conformed to the hardness of his.

  And he heard himself say, “I’m really proud of you, chérie. Let’s go to bed to celebrate. It’s been torture lying next to you each night without taking you in my arms.”

  “I was thinking more along the lines of champagne, but yes, that will do, Mac. Mmm.” She stretched up to kiss him. “I can’t think of a better way to celebrate,” she said, sounding happier than she had in a long time, happier than she’d been since he’d known her.

  November had only tumbled into December the day before, so that wasn’t even a month. He just hoped she retained her exuberance when he told her about his day.

  The elevator reached his floor. “No reason we can’t have both. I’ll ring down for a bottle almost as soon as we reach my suite. But before then, there’s something I have to tell you.”

  “You sound so serious. It’s not something bad, is it?”

  They reached the door and he unlocked it, turning to look down at her as he pushed the door wide. “Actually, I was kind of pleased about it, but I didn’t want to steal your thunder.”

  Roxie danced around him while he unbuttoned his topcoat. “Tell me, tell me now.” Then she quieted down and asked, “Is it Javier? Have you discovered where he is?”

  He slipped his arms out of the sleeves before answering while he tossed the coat over the back of the sofa more casually than he might be tossing away his relationship with Roxie.

  “Yeah, someone sighted him buying lunch and followed him back to his bolt-hole, but then we lost him.”

  “Oh, no-o-o. You lost him. How?” she gasped.

  “We think Javier might have been tipped off by a message on the police-band radio we found in his apartment. When I gave Dumont the news that we’d sighted Javier he seemed pretty excited.”

  Especially since IBIS was a jump ahead of him.

  Her mouth dropped open. “You lost him,” she repeated.

  “Yeah, I know it sounds careless, but although we’d kept radio silence, we think that’s how Dumont rounded up his agents, since Javier was all set up to monitor the FIS frequ—”

  She cut him off midsentence, crying out as if she was in pain, “But Mac, you promised I’d be there when you caught Javier!”

  Before he could catch his breath, she was racing for the bedroom. “Hey, chérie, I didn’t get to the good part. We recovered Green Shield.”

  She slammed the door in his face.

  Chapter 17

  Roxie charged across the room to the bed, intent on throwing herself across the covers, then hiding her head in the pillows. Like an ostrich burying its head in the sand, she didn’t want to believe Mac had deliberately excluded her.

  But with no lock inside the bedroom door to prevent Mac following her, she had less than two seconds to regroup her emotions. Mac was too quick for her.

  As the door swung inward behind her, Roxie dropped onto the edge of the mattress and seized the nearest weapon to chuck at him—her shoe. “Get out, Mac!”

  “This is my room, remember?” he said, continuing to advance.

  She remembered, all right.

  Remembered he’d broken his promise to let her be part of taking Javier down. She threw a second shoe.

  Mac was too big a target to miss. And her aim didn’t go askew; he simply dodged, let it sail past and land in the sitting room with the force she put behind it.

  Roxie leapt off the bed before she realized her mistake. In four-inch heels she was still somewhat smaller than Mac.

  Without them she was at a definite disadvantage.

  And never more so than when his hands clasped her shoulders. “Chérie,” he coaxed, “Bébé, I’m sorry, I know how much it meant to you, but your being there wouldn’t have made a difference. The bird had flown.”

  She hardened her heart against his soft talk, telling him, “That’s only an excuse. The truth is, you still don’t trust me enough to take me along with you. You decided I would slow you down. Instead, you let me down by breaking your promise.”

  He let out a sigh that stirred her hair, tickling her cheek. “If we are going to be pedantic about it, I never actually promised. My mouth was full of croissant. I couldn’t speak.”

  “That’s right,” she retorted. “You didn’t say anything. The word no never crossed your lips on the subject.” Frowning at his semantics, Roxie tossed her hair back from her face. “And you’ve had days to put that right.”

  “Dammit, Roxie,” he barked. His voice sinking to a low growl, he continued, “I love you. I couldn’t bear the thought of you getting hurt again.”

  Tension vibrated through his hands, a signal that his emotions were involved, but that wasn’t enough.

  She twisted away. “That’s not a good reason for keeping me out of the fun,” she said bleakly, keeping her head down, but he wouldn’t let her get away with hiding her face.

  He swung her round and wrapped her in his arms, pulling her high against his chest in a bear hug that meant the only way not to face him was by closing her eyes.

  His breath whispered across the bridge of her nose and her eyes, with his lips in quick pursuit, peppering her with kisses.

  “I love you.” Mac’s voice was raw with emotion. “You don’t know how it felt to watch you lying there, your life’s blood flowing onto the ground. I thought I’d lost you.” He kissed her again. “God, it really felt as if my life was over.
”

  Roxie’s eyes blinked open. His expression matched the emotion quivering in his voice, and she looked at him with wonder, knowing what it must have taken for a man of his caliber to open his heart and mind to her that way.

  His features were finely drawn, the lines dark as if penciled in. “I…I didn’t know,” she whispered, tears welling in her eyes. Joy or sadness, it made no odds, her emotions overflowed.

  “Bébé, you were out cold, and I thanked God for it. I didn’t want you to watch me killing those men. I didn’t like the idea of that memory in the background of what I knew we could have together, God willing.”

  “I know…” she began.

  “That’s just it, you don’t know. You think you had your revenge on Sevarin by blackening his name? The one I took was worse. Final.”

  He sank down onto the bed and took her with him so she landed on his lap. His lips were on her hair, at her ear, as he murmured how much he loved her. “You and everyone else believe I burned Sevarin’s château down to kill off Green Shield and keep the world safe. That’s true, but it’s not all.”

  Mac hugged her close and groaned as her hip pressed into his groin. She put up her hand and felt the slow, heavy thud of his heart against her palm. She felt too moved to speak.

  She heard him swallow before he went on. “There is a deep dark core inside me that I hadn’t discovered before that day. What the hell, I burned down his château because he prized it and it’s history above everything else. You’d only noticed the money he’d spent on it, but if you had heard him talk…”

  He shook his head and let out a short and sharp huff through his nose. “And here is the sad bit. I was damned delighted to blow up that kitchen where you had to cook for those animals.”

  Roxie wrapped both arms round Mac, then, with the top of her head tucked beneath his chin, she held him tight, gulping back the residual fear from the day she’d thought Yves would rape her.