“Thank you,” she said, a little too breathlessly. “I’m not usually this clumsy.”
“I’m going to go out on a limb and assume you aren’t much of a drinker either.”
“Is it that obvious?”
One of his arms came around her, helping her stay upright as they walked toward the steps leading to the side kitchen door. His voice shook with the laughter he couldn’t quite hold back.
“Well, now. I am a highly trained observer. But even if I were blind, the answer would still have to be yes. Yes, it is.”
She was torn between laughter and embarrassment. “Sorry about that.”
Immediately, the light teasing tone turned to one of understanding. “Don’t be. You’ve had a rough week. Everyone needs to unwind.”
The reminder sobered her up a little. A question had been niggling at the back of her mind, bothering her all evening. “What if whoever accessed my computer already got what they wanted?”
“Then you’d have nothing more to worry about.”
That would be nice. But simply because the problem was no longer hers didn’t mean it didn’t exist, and she felt responsible. Her data should have been better protected.
She frowned. It was well protected. “I can’t think of anything they might have gotten off my office PC that would be of any use.”
They stopped at the foot of the short flight of steps. He let his arm fall to his side. She wobbled a little as she started to dig in her purse for her keys.
“And…we’re back to my original theory. Maybe it’s personal,” he said.
She gave up on finding the keys and handed him her purse. “If it came down to a choice as to which would be more worth the effort, my work or me, as much as it pains me to admit it, my work is the likeliest candidate.”
“I disagree. Well,” he amended. “When you’re being all ‘Dr. Glasov’ you’re a little uptight and self-important. But you know what they say about still waters. I’m confident most men would find your depths well worth exploring.”
Moths fluttered against the yard light above the door, casting shadows that stretched into the semi-darkness beyond the carport. She hadn’t been able to find her keys because he’d been driving. He already had them in his hand.
“Do I come across as self-important?” she asked.
“I read it as insecurity.”
He was so wrong. She wasn’t insecure when it came to her work. Social situations that didn’t involve other scientists or research projects were a different story entirely. And she had no experience at all with men like Kale. “For a woman, sometimes being smart can be tough.”
“For a man, being beautiful ain’t no picnic either.”
He was making fun of her. She liked it. Scientists might be smart, but they weren’t always clever. He stretched her intellect in whole different ways. “Really? I’m sure you had no trouble getting a date for your high school prom.”
“Don’t tell me your cousin took you to yours.”
“I didn’t go to my prom. I was fourteen. It was past my bedtime.” That was another confession she wouldn’t normally have made. At the time she’d been crushed. But being smart didn’t equal maturity, and when she looked back on it, she really had been too young. Her parents had made the right decision by keeping her home.
“Fourteen?”
The way he said it made her feel like a freak. “Someone didn’t do his homework.”
Wait.
He hadn’t. She squinted at him, sobering a little faster. “Why didn’t you know that?”
There was the briefest of hesitations. If she hadn’t been looking for it, she might well have missed it.
“Because you aren’t under investigation.”
“But I’m part of it,” she said. “And a significant piece too. Which means one of two things—either you aren’t working for CSIS, or CSIS isn’t working on the information I gave you. You’ve been lying to me.”
* * *
She’d had too much to drink. He’d assumed that meant Dr. Glasov, her official persona, had checked out for the night.
He wouldn’t be making that mistake again.
They faced each other, still standing quite close. She had to tip her head so far back to glare at him that he was ready to grab her if she fell over. That light dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose was really distracting. She was cute when she was indignant. And a whole lot of fun to torment.
Because she wasn’t afraid of him anymore.
She had no idea how much that small but significant gesture of trust on her part made him feel. He was tempted to kiss her again, but knew better than to make any move as stupid as that.
“I lie for a living,” he hedged. “That’s what CSIS does.”
“You aren’t supposed to be lying to me. What’s going on?”
He tucked her purse under his arm and placed his hand over his heart. “I swear I’m not lying to you.”
“Why should I believe you?” she demanded. “You just said you lie for a living.”
A pale gray moth, delicate and light, landed in her hair. He flicked it away with a careful sweep of his fingers. “You can’t talk about your work,” he reminded her. “I can’t talk about mine either. I guess you’re going to have to trust your instincts right now.”
She held out her hand. “My instincts say to get my house keys and my laptop and tell you to sleep in your car.”
He dangled the keys above her head, an inch or so out of her reach. “You’re a mean drunk, Dr. Glasov. I was up most of last night. I spent the past five hours driving you around and waiting for you. I was really looking forward to sleeping on that fluffy pink sofa of yours, not in the backseat of my car. Besides, we’re supposed to be a couple. What will the neighbors think?”
Her gaze sharpened. “I think we should see other people.”
So-o-o tempted to kiss her… Like hell her work was the likeliest candidate for someone to be harassing her.
“Look at us. We’re having our first fight. And do you know what the first rule for couple fights is? Never go to bed angry.”
He shouldn’t push her this way, or tease her and flirt with her. She really believed he’d kissed her in the parking lot as part of their cover. She’d graduated high school at fourteen. She might be highly educated academically, but when it came to boy-girl relationships, she’d skipped the core classes. She didn’t know what the rules were. She could be too easily hurt by someone like him. He hadn’t had a serious girlfriend since college because he was never in the same city for long.
There were reasons he shouldn’t get involved with her either. His career was as important to him as hers was to her. He believed in the work he was doing. He wanted world peace.
So yeah, maybe he thought his job was a teensy bit more important than hers.
“Tell you what,” he relented. “This isn’t a conversation we should be having right now. You let me sleep on your sofa, and in the morning after we’re both better rested, we’ll have a serious talk while you’re making me breakfast.”
That would give him a few uninterrupted hours to do some discreet investigating into her background, and by investigating, he meant snooping through her personal belongings. Her mention of a Russian father hadn’t escaped his notice. He wondered how much she knew about his history. If he was Cold War era, then as a journalist, he’d most likely worked for his government. He would also have been young, and quite possibly idealistic, although Kale didn’t know enough about him or his circumstances for an accurate profile. Chances were good that he’d been some sort of spy, but given Irina’s security clearances, he’d also been debriefed and cleared by the Canadian government.
Which meant nothing. People passed those clearances every day. Irina’s career, too, would have progressed faster than her background checks could be updated. And tensions between Canada and Russia had increased in recent years. She might not find her next security clearance as easy to pass.
Her current situation
wasn’t going to help.
“Now I’m making you breakfast?” she asked, drawing his thoughts back to the matter at hand. “If you’re supposed to be my boyfriend, why shouldn’t you be making breakfast for me?”
She was arguing for the sake of it and he couldn’t let that one pass. She made it too easy. “You’d have to earn one of mine, Dr. Babe.”
“Maybe you’d have to earn one of mine too.”
He raised an eyebrow, bringing pink to her cheeks. The light above the door caught the clear, guileless green of her eyes. She sucked at this game, and although the wine could take part of the blame, it was mostly because she was the furthest thing from a casual hookup he could imagine. Dr. Glasov was all business. Irina was…sweet.
The kind of girl a guy married.
And that was the problem. He really wanted to kiss her but couldn’t come up with an excuse to do so. If he did anyway, he’d be raising expectations. She deserved better from him. He wasn’t a player.
He tossed the keys in the flat of his palm. “Why don’t we flip a coin in the morning to see which one of us has to make breakfast?”
“That’s probably best.”
It sounded like disappointment he heard, buried beneath her speedy agreement, but that might be ego on his part.
He fitted the key in the lock and hustled her into the kitchen. Even before he had time to find the light switch, she’d kicked off her shoes in the soft, murky gloom.
“If I ever take up a second career, it’s going to be designing women’s shoes,” she sighed, peering down at her bare, slender feet and wiggling her toes. “How come we can put people into space but no one has come up with comfortable heels that are both fashionable and affordable?”
“You could try wearing shoes that don’t have three-inch heels instead.”
He liked them though. They drew the eye up the length of her legs, which were no hardship to stare at, to the prim hemline of her narrow skirt. From there, his imagination took over. The red skirt cupped a very fine ass. The white T-shirt cradled more curves. The jacket that matched her skirt was in the backseat of her car, he recalled. He’d have to remember to get that for her tomorrow.
“Spoken like a man who isn’t vertically challenged.” She pulled the elastic from her hair. With a ruffle of her fingers and a shake of her head, a thick mass of caramel tresses cascaded around her shoulders.
Like that wasn’t hot. His brain drifted south.
He located the switch on the wall and the light fixture over the kitchen table blinked on.
Irina walked to the fridge. Would you like something to eat?” She glanced at him in dismay, her hand on the latch. “I never thought. Did you get any dinner? Or did you wait in the car the whole evening?”
“I ate.” He’d had a bag of potato chips and a bottle of soda. “But I won’t say no if you’re offering to make me another one of those smoked meat sandwiches. You aren’t off the hook over breakfast though. We’re still flipping that coin.”
“Duly noted.”
She got the ingredients from the fridge and the cupboard and piled them on the island while he sat at the table and watched her work. She had a way of focusing all her attention on a task, and attacking it with precision, that he enjoyed. He could well imagine what it would be like to have all that concentration leveled on him. He’d bet she was worth making breakfast for. Probably more than once, too.
She stifled a yawn with the heel of her hand. He checked his watch under the table. Barely ten o’clock on a Friday night. Irina Glasov was no party girl. Not by a long stretch of the imagination. Meanwhile, he was wide awake.
She reached to take a plate off a shelf, stretching on her bare toes, exposing a midriff that had him licking his lips as the hem of her T-shirt parted ways with the waistband of her skirt. She loaded the plate with two neatly-cut triangles and set the thick sandwich before him.
“I must seem so boring to you,” she said.
“Why would you think that?” That wasn’t at all the impression she gave him.
She shrugged, a seemingly casual motion on the surface that in reality was anything but. “I sit at a computer all day. I’m ready for bed by ten o’clock.”
Now he felt like a jerk. She’d seen him checking his watch. “Being ready for bed doesn’t make a woman boring. In fact, it makes her a whole lot more interesting to a man.”
Her eyes lost some of the haziness brought on by stress, fatigue, and too much wine with her dinner. “You like to bait me too. I’m glad I can provide entertainment on what’s got to be a very dull assignment for you.”
If there was one thing he’d figured out about her already it was that Irina had her fair share of pride. The trouble was that it was threaded through with thin veins of feminine insecurity, and without meaning to, he’d managed to offend her. She thought her intelligence was her most appealing feature. It certainly wasn’t the least of them. But even brainy women liked to know men found them attractive. Joking with her right now was the wrong path for him to be taking.
“You aren’t boring, Irina. Far from it. I enjoy teasing you because you’re so fascinating.”
Her brow furrowed as she processed his words.
She ran her fingertips along the edge of the tabletop before turning abruptly away. “You don’t have to sleep on the sofa. You can use the spare room at the end of the hall. The bed’s already made. I’ll see you in the morning. Good night.”
She didn’t believe him. Suddenly, it became very important to him that she did.
“Hang on a second.”
The chair legs sputtered against the floor as he pushed away from the table. His head hit the light fixture, sending it swinging. He steadied it with one hand. She’d left the kitchen and entered the hall that led to the back of the house by the time he caught up with her.
“Irina. Wait.”
She stopped in front of her open bedroom door, her reluctance to continue the conversation etched on her pretty features. He could tell the second Dr. Glasov took charge. Her eyebrows rose and those intriguing green eyes widened in the dim light to form an unspoken question that exuded irritation. What is it now?
He had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from saying exactly what it was that he had on his mind. With her feet and legs bare, her hair tumbled around her shoulders, and her skirt slightly askew, she couldn’t look any sexier if she tried.
Or less like a world famous computer scientist who designed nuclear weapons systems placements in aircraft. The contradictions suckered him in. How many women like this could there possibly be in the world?
So much for that plausible excuse he was lacking. He was going to kiss her without one.
They were alone in her house though, right outside her bedroom, and she didn’t know him very well. He was a lot bigger than she was and he hadn’t forgotten how nervous of him she’d been, or that alcohol played a significant part in her bravery tonight. It might be best if he kept his hands to himself.
But she made it so hard.
“You have a bit of mustard on your chin,” he lied. She lifted her fingers to her face, trying to feel where it might be. “Not there. Here.”
He bent his head and pressed his lips to the corner of her mouth, offering a soft, gentle caress. A breath of a sigh—a tiny exhalation of air—brushed his cheek in response. She shifted ever so slightly, whether by accident or design he couldn’t be sure, but either way, her mouth glided beneath his until full contact was made. She tugged on his lower lip, the tip of her tongue stroking against it.
Fireworks exploded inside his brain. He’d meant to come across as nonthreatening. To let her set the pace. Dr. Glasov, however, could kiss.
She was as attracted to him as he was to her. Of that much he was certain. While the timing wasn’t the best, and he’d never coax her into doing anything she might regret in the morning, he wasn’t about to pass up an opportunity he might regret missing either. But they each needed to be clear on what they were willing to offer. Ther
e had to be boundaries.
He planted his palms on the wall behind her, backing her up against it, not in order to pin her in place, but to keep his hands off her. He teased her lips farther open, dipping his tongue between them. Her fingers found his hips, her thumbs cuddling too close to his pelvis for comfort. In an instant, an erection strained at the fly of his jeans, begging for freedom. All his good intentions drifted away on the wave of heat flooding his groin.
He broke off the kiss. Wow. Things were moving a lot faster than he’d expected. His lungs bellowed like he’d just run ten kilometers. He couldn’t quite catch his breath. His ability to form complete sentences also seemed somewhat impaired.
He flicked one thumb across the corner of her mouth, swiping at the imaginary mustard stain. “Think I got it.”
“Thank you. I can’t imagine how it got there.”
His mouth crooked into a grin at her prim, thinly-veiled sarcasm. She was an open book. Not a simple one, granted. More a thick Russian literature translation complete with footnotes and an annotated bibliography. He liked that about her. He liked it a lot. “You’re the brains in the room. Try making an educated guess.”
She tilted her head to one side, casting him a quizzical look. “My guess is that there never was any mustard.”
“Really? Why would I lie about something like that?”
“You tell me. You’re the one who lies for a living.”
She ducked under his arm and into the bedroom, shutting the door in his face before he had a chance to respond.
He had not seen that coming.
He stared at the closed door for a long, incredulous moment, listening to her light steps as she moved around the room. Another door closed. A tap opened wide in the ensuite bathroom inside. He had no difficulty imagining her bedtime routine—the glide of a damp cloth over her skin, a brush stroking those long, silky tresses of hair.
He rapped his forehead against the door frame a few times, summoning his brain back from its southern migration.
Her Spy to Hold (Spy Games Book 2) Page 5