by Black, Incy
Table of Contents
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Discover more mystery and suspense titles from Entangled Ignite… Too Wilde to Tame
Unforgettable
Bound to Serve
Killer Seduction
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Incy Black. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.
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Ignite is an imprint of Entangled Publishing, LLC.
Edited by Tracy Montoya
Cover design by Erin Dameron-Hill
Cover art from iStock
ISBN 978-1-63375-932-9
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition March 2017
Hannah, Rupert, Josh, Dylan, Max, Lazarus, Eshe, Catherine, Richard
Live, love, laugh—always
Chapter One
Don’t laugh… Don’t laugh… Do. Not. Laugh… Don’t…
The very idea of him obeying an order to shag on demand like a prize stallion put out to stud was as hilarious as it was offensive.
Not yet half a morning back on the job after five interminable months on sick leave, and Special Agent Will Berwick—British Intelligence Service, Black Ops—was fast losing grip of his Fudoshin—the Samurai warrior’s enviable state of complete composure and mental serenity he’d spent a decade mastering.
Him, bait a honey trap? Seduce Dr. Treherne, his Service-mandated psychotherapist? Not bloody likely. He’d give his life for queen and country—damn near had on his last routine undercover op, taking a bullet to the gut and one to the chest—but he drew the line at pimping his body.
“It’s imperative we find Dr. Treherne’s brother,” Godfrey Butters, the full-of-shit usurper sitting at the commander’s desk continued, his too posh accent stripping the red from Berwick’s blood.
And usurper, because the opportunity to fill in for Commander Fisk during his six-month absence should have been Will’s—by right: due to his number of years in service, intellect, and political adeptness. His chance to prove that though he came from nothing, he was the best man to face down the darkest challenges to national security.
“Dr. Treherne and her brother are close. He’s disappeared with some highly sensitive files we want back. Though she denies it, I believe Dr. Treherne knows full well where her brother is hiding. Your job is to get her to spill the current location of Rhys Treherne—even if you have to take her to bed to do it. On this occasion, the rule prohibiting sexual relations between colleagues is suspended—”
Will was forced to choke his spurt of laughter behind a rough cough. Few agents adhered to that ridiculous rule. When death stalked you, as it did most undercover operatives working out of the Cube—headquarters for the “plausibly deniable” Black Ops units of the British Intelligence Service—getting hot and sweaty with a like-minded woman who appreciated the down-to-the-bone honesty of just sex was an instinctive celebration of survival.
Butters smirked. “Consider it an assignment with fringe benefits. After all, Dr. Treherne is rather tempting.”
She was—if you liked your women uptight, which Will did not. And, if you were happy to risk getting your bollocks frozen off, which he was not.
But that’s not what offended him. He had a rule about snowing his partners-in-lust. He didn’t do it. Ever. He warned, up front, that forty-eight hours was his relationship limit. His motto: Have fun. Move on fast.
“No need to be too much of a gentleman about it, Berwick. Just fuck her, in every sense of the word. The lying bitch deserves it. Pretending sweet innocence, she’s been obstructing us for weeks. I won’t have some cheeky bint thinking she can outsmart me. No one makes a fool out of me and gets away with it unpunished.”
Don’t hit him… Don’t hit him… His tonsils are fine just where they are… The egotistical twat doesn’t need you driving your fist down his throat… Think of your career…
Gluing himself to the hard seat of the interview chair, Will reached for inner calm. He couldn’t afford another black mark against his name—his mother’s profession, his reputation for challenging those in power when he knew their decisions were half-baked, the way he’d turned to the bottle for a while after Diana, his fiancée, had died.
Even if he evaded instant dismissal for giving Butters a well-deserved punch, he’d be suspended. An inquiry would ensue. Uncomfortable questions about his fitness for duty would be asked.
And, even if he survived that, he’d be busted down so many ranks, he’d need written permission to use the photocopier. He’d lose leadership of his team. His license to carry a weapon would be yanked. His chance of one day succeeding to the position of Commander-in-Chief of Black Ops would plummet to zero.
Shit. But he still had his right to refuse an assignment, a privilege reserved solely for members of his team: the Assassins. The elite, known-to-few unit within Black Ops tasked with carrying out the dirtiest of dirty jobs—on the condition the blood spatter didn’t stain the Establishment, of course.
Maintaining his staring contest with the obnoxious little turd, he slipped a deliberately insolent smile. Butters was a little too arrogant and a lot too comfortable sitting at the boss’s desk. The man clearly didn’t understand the concept of temporarily in charge. “Sorry, but I’m keen to get back to the front line, and I don’t do the frilly stuff. The Commander knows that.”
Butters’s expression tightened to lemon-sour. “Except he’s on sabbatical, and according to the Ministry of Defense, I am in charge.”
“Yeah? Good for you… But my refusal still stands.”
Given the number of citations and commendations in his file along with the shiny medals he chucked in his sock drawer, Will could risk a charge of dumb insolence. Hell, he’d frame the reprimand, if it came to that, and hang it in his loft along with the handful of others he’d collected over the years.
Butters flushed purple. “Careful, Berwick, or the only line you’ll be joining is the unemployment one.”
Will’s eyebrows shot north fast enough to gift him a facelift. “Excuse me?”
“New management. New rules. Things needed tightening up around here, discipline, in particular. The special privilege enjoyed by the Assassins to refuse an assignment has been withdrawn. So, just to clarify, that wasn’t a choice I was giving you; it was a direct order. Go fuck the information we need from Dr. Treherne, Berwick. Without protest, and no excuse
s.”
Will forced his inner Zen warrior forward. He would not react. He would not give Butters the satisfaction of knowing his temper hung by a fast-fraying thread.
Christ, he’d only been on sick leave for five months—six weeks of abject tedium in a military hospital, followed by months of physical punishment to rebuild his fitness. Plus, the indignity of twice-weekly sessions being psycho-probed by the ultimate snow queen, Dr. A. Treherne, as now ridiculously mandated for any undercover agent injured in the line of duty, should the stress prove too great, and PTSD rear its ugly head.
And now this—an idiot despot at the helm.
It was time to change tack. “Why me?” Not that he gave a shit. Circumventing orders he didn’t like was his forte. He could get what he needed from the doc without sleeping with her.
“Because, Berwick, if the whispers circulating the Intelligence community are to be believed, the triple-O prefixing your Service serial number not only denotes your license to kill but also your ability to give orgasms.”
His anger instantly checked out. He hadn’t caught that particular piece of gossip.
Powerless to hold it back, his laughter ripped free.
Until pain seared his abdomen.
Fuuuuuck. He needed to move this little tête-à-tête along fast, so he could double dose on the elephant-grade painkillers Zac McAllister—another Assassin and his best friend—had promised would work. The lying bastard.
Zac might swear by the ancient art of Chinese medicine and the herbal remedies available over the counter in Chinatown, but his pain-zapped gut screamed snake oil fraudulent.
“And, rather than being difficult, you should be thanking me,” Butters chided him—not gently. “Without this light duty, you’d have no assignment. You failed your psych assessment. Dr. Angel Treherne has slapped a question mark over your state of mind.”
The hell she had. Not a year in post, straight off a double doctorate program in mind voodoo, that woman didn’t know her arse from her elbow.
Butters fiddled with his gold cufflinks, flicked imaginary flecks of fluff from the dark of his pinstriped suit, then smiled the smile of a lizard that had just tongue-lashed an insect. “Still want to refuse the assignment, Berwick?”
Bollocks to that. He’d never failed anything in his life. And Angel? That woman’s name was Angel? He’d spent those asinine psych sessions distracting himself with guesses as to what the initial A might stand for. Arctic had been a frontrunner. Attila, too, the way she’d tried to rout his emotional privacy. But Angel? What of? The bloody polar ice caps?
Emotionally extinct, the woman wasn’t even human— And, she’d had the nerve to red flag him?
He might draw the line at sleeping with her, but he was far from averse to teaching Angel Treherne a lesson. No one messed with his career. No one. “How long has her brother been missing?”
“Six weeks.”
That was worrying, considering Butters had to have thrown the full resources of British Intelligence into finding the doc’s brother before resorting to Will. “And the files in his possession?”
“Stolen. Downloaded to a thumb drive, the originals erased and irretrievable.”
Terrific.
“And the subject matter of the files?” Christ, drawing the details from Butters was akin to pulling wisdom teeth with a corkscrew.
“That’s classified.”
The hairs at the back of Will’s neck pricked. Classified? His sweet arse. He had “Top Secret” clearance, the highest security grade available to a Service operative. Call him a cynical paranoid, but in his experience, the withholding of information from an agent with his seniority generally meant something had gone wrong and a cover-up was in play. “So what can you tell me? Because I’m going to need something.”
Butters made a drama out of staring at the high ceiling.
He imagined the trajectory of a bullet hitting the bastard’s exposed walnut of an Adam’s apple.
“Rhys Treherne has an IQ in the stratosphere,” Butters finally conceded. “He graduated from Cambridge with a first in bio-chemistry at seventeen, and by the time he was twenty, he’d already secured sufficient funding from the World Health Organization to set up his own chemical research laboratory, with the development of vaccines his expertise. Three years ago, his funding dried up, and he contracted with the Ministry of Defense to work…ah, Special Projects.”
Special Projects? Definite euphemism for something so fucked up and illicit, none dared put a name on it.
“The data on that thumb drive is politically sensitive and poses an acute national security threat,” said Butters, his face no longer lemon-sour but rather cat-arse creased tight. “Finding Rhys Treherne is the key to getting it back. But, despite vigorous questioning, Angel Treherne—world-class liar that she is—continues to deny all knowledge of his whereabouts. Furthermore, exercising her right as a civilian, she’s threatening a lawsuit unless we back off harassing her.”
Will didn’t like the doc, but good for her for sticking it to Butters.
Butters reached sideways, slid open a desk drawer, and withdrew a package. Macho-black with heavy red and gold flourishes. He set it on the desktop and, with an obnoxious chortle, edged forward the bumper-sized box of condoms. “Break her, Berwick. Let me down and… Well, let’s just say, your buttocks will never hit the surface of this particular chair.”
Berwick slow-blinked at the man. He’d been very careful never to confide how much he coveted the seat behind that huge walnut desk, wide and long enough for two men to sleep on. He wasn’t stupid. Gift anyone that advantage, and they’d use it against you.
Just as this bastard was doing.
Fine. He’d play along—for now. But the payback of a certain Dr. Angel Treherne wasn’t the only little revenge he’d enjoy. Butters, too, would be going down hard. “Okay, but I should warn you, I don’t rate my chances with the Doc too highly,” he lied. He’d yet to meet a woman he couldn’t charm, if he put his mind to it. “She loathes me, and frankly, she doesn’t exactly ring my bell, either.” Not a lie. “How long have I got to defrost her?”
“Given your alleged sexual prowess, I expect her to be well-screwed and singing like a nightingale before that box runs out.”
Ignoring the condoms—not his brand—Berwick pushed to his feet and sauntered to the door. To extricate himself from this assignment, which had clusterfuck stamped all over it, he needed more information. The Sink—the aptly named staff canteen—was his best bet, hive that it was for whispers and shady gossip.
Opening the door, he paused on the threshold. “Always happy to oblige, Sir.”
“Excellent,” Butters smacked back. “I take it you’ve heard about the budget cuts. Fail and… Well, it’s a lonely walk to the front door and damned cold on the outside.”
He’d take cold, lonely, and unemployed over this nasty bastard’s reign of ineptitude any day, but it wasn’t permanent, so he’d deal.
Not that he planned to fail. Something stank about this whole setup, and he hadn’t spent the best part of ten years busting his behind just to watch his career flush away.
“Oh, and Berwick, after retrieving the thumb drive from Rhys Treherne…delete him.”
…
Three mugs of thick canteen coffee later, his sternum aching from too many rough chest-bumps and welcome-back man-hugs—and having learned not one damn thing further about Angel and Rhys Treherne—Berwick reclined low and deep on the battered leather sofa in the Ice Queen’s office.
Stone silent and fully aware his drilling stare and resolute muteness was tweaking the Doc’s last nerve. Good. Because he wanted that fiercely self-contained composure of hers well rattled.
“You’ve been sitting there for twenty minutes, Agent Berwick, and you have yet to say one word. May I remind you that I didn’t request this impromptu session; you did?” the Doc finally rebuked him, her pissy tone making it clear she really didn’t like him.
A laugh threatened his throat
. “Busy, are you, Doc?”
He knew no one visited the psych suite unless mandated to do so. Just as he knew that Angel Treherne filled her time filtering applications from agents wanting a shot at Black Ops, her role more HR than therapeutic.
Her eyes narrowed. Twin shards of gray ice.
He increased his slouch, crossed his ankles, and extended his legs fully.
The Doc, sitting prim and ramrod straight in an armchair opposite, immediately angled away her quite excellent, tightly clenched knees.
Judging by her frown, she must have caught his lip-twitch. So, he repeated it.
Her pen beat a more frantic tattoo against the page of her notebook. “Aside from wasting my time, Berwick, what is it you want?”
What he wanted was an explanation as to why she’d nixed his return to active duty. He grinned, instead. “You seem more piqued than usual by my silence, Doc. Pre-menstrual tension?”
No flinch. No sharp intake of breath. She didn’t even blink. But the sudden chill she threw damn near caused his balls to retract.
Then, like an assassin’s blade in the dark, she sliced. “Suffered any symptoms of impotency since your injury, Berwick?”
Perversely, his groin heated. Well, apparently, if he wasn’t going to dignify her surprising and utterly unprofessional counter-challenge with a response, his dick would. Odd, when to-date, this woman hadn’t stirred so much as an extra pulse-throb from him.
Not that she was unattractive. On the contrary, her classical beauty could launch ships. Flawless bone-structure. Complexion creamy, lustrous as a pearl. Fathomless gray eyes intent enough to make a man’s soul hum. Wide mouth. Generous lips, blush pink and ripe. Hinting at dirty.
Her demeanor though—do-not-touch frigid.
Jesus, if someone had told him a Nordic God had carved her out of ice and then had second thoughts about getting close enough to breathe some warmth into her for fear of forevermore ejaculating snowflakes, he wouldn’t have argued.
Without breaking eye contact, he vaguely imagined what she might look like with that tight French braid of hers loosened, the tips of her breasts peeking through the untidy fall of blond tresses, as she lay naked, writhing beneath his hands.