by Audrey Noire
Taking the Bait
An ARC Operatives Romance
By Audrey Noire
Copyright © 2016 Audrey Noire
EBOOK EDITION
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission of the author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages for review purposes only. This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to any person, living or dead, or any events or occurrences, is purely coincidental. The characters and story lines are created by the the author's imagination and are used fictitiously.
Cover image designed by Avery Knott at http://www.averyknott.com
DEDICATION
To the Brain Trust: Britt, Cinna, Gina, Joce, Lefty, and Rone.
As well to all the very kind folks on the Tumblrs.
Thanks for all the hilarious cat memes, and also, you know, for being there.
(Also to Agatha. I am so sorry it took me so many years, and that the first thing I published was the smuts. Okay, I’m not that sorry. The smuts are great.)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
KEEP IN TOUCH WITH AUDREY
Taking Sides – SNEAK PREVIEW
COMING SOON IN 2016
Chapter One
“You want my first mission to have me pretending to be what?!” Daria Griffin gripped the side of her chair as she stared at her boss, and then looked back down at the dossier open in front of her on the desk. She wrinkled up her nose and tried not to make a noise of distress as she wondered if she was really ready for something that required that level of acting skill. Daria had never been particularly confident in her own appearance on a good day, let alone having to pretend to be a trophy wife while undercover (although damn had she day-dreamed of being swept off her feet by billionaire-du-jour when reading those frequent eligible bachelor articles). She shot a look over at her future-partner.
Nicolai Novik’s expression was deadpan, unreadable, and a little unnerving. He was eyeing up his dossier, gaze flicking back and forth over the paper and profiles within it. He ran a hand through his dirty-blond hair and sighed, long and low. At least because English was his second language he wasn’t super-fast at reading it, since he was super-fast at pretty much everything else (including getting into the pants of the receptionists and assistants that were running all over ARC’s offices, holy wow had he burnt through ladies like Daria’d gone through funny-shaped erasers in elementary school).
There was nothing like a team made up of a nearly-dead-half-recovered ARC operative and a nameless ARC former-intern to do an undercover mission at a billionaire business convention, right? At least, Daria hoped there would be nothing like them and they wouldn’t fail and go down in a hail of bullets. Even over a year of training to be an undercover operative hadn’t exactly boosted her self-confidence, especially since in quite a few of her courses she’d only passed with middling grades.
She thought back to before she’d begun down the path towards super-secret spy work. Her supervisors had plucked her out of her internship in the labs as the ink was still drying on her degree. She’d been hustled off (‘transferred’ was the official word for it) from her tiny job paper-chasing after a kind but generally hapless bio-engineering scientist named Dr. Robert Fowler, and put through a series of rigorous tests designed to ‘assess her skills and talents’.
During the testing process there’d been no coffee-fetching test, and definitely no pop-quiz on how to scoop up great thrift-store finds. Daria had figured she’d failed miserably and would have to do the workplace walk-of-shame back to her old boss down in Lab #3b, continue her internship and hope for a good letter of recommendation from him. Not that she would have minded… Robert had been the laid-back kinda boss-guy, and she’d liked working with him even if the hours were kinda wonky.
To her great surprise though she’d passed the tests she’d been given. When she’d looked down at her acceptance and new employment contract with astonishment, Anastasia Rykov, the operative administering the majority of the testing had just raised one perfectly groomed eyebrow and said,
“What, you think ARC picks fools for interns? You were groomed for this from the start.” That had been a startling revelation.
When she’d first applied to the internship at ARC, she hadn’t realized exactly what the organization was, not really. To her, it was supposed to be an easy-credit grab in hard sciences: spend six months trailing after a scientist in a multi-national corporation lab, doing all the things he didn’t want to do like grabbing coffee, writing out his dictated notes, whatever, then graduate. Sure, the arm of ARC she’d applied to was very science-y, but it was the rest of ARC that had given her a shock when she realized how huge, and how influential they were. It’d started with little things, overhearing conversations in the lunch room about such-and-such government contract, or seeing a glimpse of military paperwork (redacted of course) slipping across her desk when she had to file reports for Robert.
Over the course of her six months she started to realize just how deep-in ARC was with a vast majority of the free world’s governments. Not that she minded, it wasn’t any of her damn business and she wasn’t the type to take her work home with her. As a lowly intern, she just kept her head down, shuffled paper, and occasionally flirted with some of the operatives who came in to see her boss. One such op named Frank Balfour, a big brawny blond guy with a slightly crooked nose, had taken a liking to her and brought her donuts and sometimes little tacky souvenirs from places she didn’t think were actually safe for American citizens to travel to. The shelf above her desk had been littered with tiny flags, miniature edifice replicas, and what she swore was a lump shellac’d moose poop that Balfour insisted was fossilized dinosaur excrement. She’d met Rykov shortly after that through Balfour, since the petite black-haired woman was his partner for most of his ‘operations’ whenever he left the country and brought Daria back tchotchkes.
Daria dragged herself back to the present and shot another look at Nicolai. His thumb was sweeping through the papers on the businessmen (and a few women) they were to be meeting with and surveilling. He had apparently bypassed the persona file on himself and on her without a comment or even raised eyebrow. Daria wished she could mirror his cool, but her anxiety and excitement was thrumming just under her skin, making her heartbeat speed up. She thought back to the first time she’d seen him, and learnt more about ARC in the process.
There had been an explosion in downtown Manhattan. It’d taken out a large government building, a library, and a small heritage apartment complex. All ARC employees (and interns) had been ordered to get back to their stations and desks and await further orders. After checking on her few friends who worked downtown, she’d left the copy room where she’d been collating reports for Robert. Walking back to the lab, she heard a commotion behind her. She’d turned and had to press herself up against a wall as a gurney surrounded by doctors and nurses went hurtling past her. On it was a young man with dirty-blond hair, groaning in pain and covered in blood, writhing on the white sheets of the medical cot. The image had stuck with her, giving her nightmares for weeks since it had looked like the kid was half-way dead and probably hadn’t made it. At least, that’s what she’d thought until she’d seen the guy a few months later, upright and most definitely alive.
“What are you staring at?” he had asked her curtly when she stopped short in the lunchroom as he sat there, a cane resting up against his leg that was out of place with his trim and muscular physique. Nicolai, she’d find out his name and a whole bunch ab
out him later, was one of the augmented humans that Dr. Fowler himself had actually been involved with, bringing his expertise on bio-genetics to make certain people more. It was one of ARC’s most coveted, most secretive pet projects, skimming right under the surface of all the work she’d been doing. She’d finally put it all together, what being augmented really was, during basic training when she’d been shoved in with a bunch of other operatives at her level and Nicolai.
In Nicolai’s case, being augmented, being more, meant fast. He was fast, faster than anything she’d ever seen. He could be at one end of the giant indoor gymnasium, and be a the other end in a few heartbeats. He was never a part of their early morning runs, he didn’t have to be since he’d make it around the track in a few seconds. Daria tried not to hate him, there were side effects to being augmented she’d been told, and not all of them were great, but when she was sweating and panting through lap five of the gym she wasn’t all that charitable. Especially because that speed extended to every inch of him- fast metabolism and the ability to eat everything and anything being just one more of his annoying augmentation perks.
“You do not mind, do you?” he asked one afternoon as they all sat down to eat. By mind he meant her food. He grabbed the last of her fries and started shovelling them into his mouth without waiting for her to answer. She stared at him and then snorted, grabbing one last fry before he could eat them all.
“That’s pretty rude,” she said, holding up the fry. He just raised an eyebrow at her, and then the fry was gone from her grip and vanishing between his lips.
“Thanks for saving it for me, Mila,” was all he said as he used the stupid nickname he’d given her on their first day of training. He watched her with a smug grin on his annoyingly-attractive face. It was patently unfair that someone had enhanced, basically super, powers or abilities, and was also way-attractive. She had kinda-maybe noticed how well he filled out the tight henley shirts he wore. She wasn’t alone in her admiration for his physique, if the heated glances some of the other junior ops were giving him. On top of that, he had a sweet accent since he’d grown up with working-class immigrant parents straight out of some Eastern European nation she’d never heard of (thanks American public education system!), and it was a party trick he liked to use it on the ladies although rarely her. Except when he called her darling in his native tongue, which always made her heart stutter. Being called darling was just as annoying in a foreign language as it was in English, and it did not help that he had a sexy-half smile that always dogged his expression whenever he was trying to get a rise out of her. Only then did she see a hint of the flirtatious behaviour he lavished on everyone.
“Whatever, Speed Racer, we gotta get back or Rykov is gonna kill me. You can outrun her, I can’t.” She picked up her lunch tray and stood.
“Ehn,” he said with a shrug, “it is not in my best interest to let you die before we even are out in the field. That would look bad on my record, yes? I will take care of you and your stubby legs. You are not so weighty. You will not slow me down.”
Before she could make an outraged noise at the insult to her height and weight, she was curvy not fat, he’d picked her up and tossed her over his shoulder. Somehow she managed to hold onto her lunch as he treated her to a high-speed run through ARC’s hallways back to the gym for afternoon drills as they’d been assigned. It had made her damn nauseous, and she’d nearly hurled what little of her fries he’d let her eat. They were moving so fast she had been barely able to breathe.
So their training had gone like that for more than a year, with Daria constantly feeling like she was coming up short against him especially, since he’d had the benefit of training before he’d been augmented. They’d become sort-of friends in that time, at least getting along well enough that when Rykov had graduated them both to junior operative status, they were being assigned their first mission together: infiltrate and conduct surveillance of some very naughty rich businessmen at one of their own high society conferences.
Which brought her back to hoping that Rykov has been right in picking her and Nicolai for the job. She hoped that her training was enough, that the last three months of intensive time spent with Rykov and Balfour had been enough to smooth out the edges of her behaviour that would make it seem like she wasn’t a monied newlywed. She also hoped that Nicolai’s training had likewise prepared him, and that he would be able to keep from sneering at the well-heeled crowds they were mingling with over the weekend. He didn’t hide his dislike for the wealthy very well.
Chapter Two
They’d arrived at the hotel earlier that day by limo, one of the executive suites already prepped for them, and their surveillance team in place in the suite next to them. Other than discreetly checking in with the team (Balfour had been the one to bring their luggage up for them, and had looked good in a bell-attendant uniform. She’d spent a moment or two or five checking out his ass, a fact he’d noticed with a cheeky wink), they’d both slipped into their roles as soon as they stepped foot out of the limo.
Nicolai was the son of a shipping magnate (his blond locks dyed a dark nut-brown, and damn did it suit his complexion, Daria had thought), she was a Brown University graduate. They’d ‘met’ at the end of her third year when he’d accompanied his father to give a key-note speech at a University event. He proposed on the day of her graduation. The ring was a bespoke champagne peach-pink cushion-cut sapphire surrounded by diamonds set in rose-gold, and damn, but she had to hand it to Balfour because the man was oddly romantic in his ring choices when he’d presented out the accoutrements of the job for them. Their wedding occurred exactly one year and three months later, and she had the pictures on her new fakey-fake Facebook profile to prove it. It had been a personal family affair on a private island frequented by high profile stars, and her dress had been a custom Vera Wang (the photo shoot for that had been a bitch: she’d been sweaty and exhausted; Nicolai had been grumpy about both having to wear a suit on the beach and not being allowed to zip around and mess up his hair). Despite their whirlwind romance, they were vaguely unhappy as he spent too many nights away working, and she was rumoured to be sleeping with her pool-boy. Scandal.
This trip was to reignite the passions of their romance, six months into a rocky-start to a marriage, or at least that was the story. It gave them an excuse to be cool with each other publicly, or overly amorous, depending on what the situation required. The main goal was to gather intelligence on a few high-profile businessmen that were attending. That’s why they’d been perfect for the job, as Balfour explained. Daria was the nubile, just-barely-debauched bored wife, and Nicolai was the arrogant young upstart who thought he knew everything but how to please a newly-wed woman. In other words as Rykov had said with a surprisingly straight face, she was the bait and Nicolai was the escape. He could get her out of there if things went south.
She eyed up the ridiculously embellished gown that was hanging from the back of the bathroom door. The thing literally cost more than she made in a month, and would turn her into some 1920’s disco ball, with it’s peach lining and sheer black mesh overlay littered with square paillette sequins and beads. Daria sighed and turned back to her mirror, setting her makeup with one last layer of powder to tamp down on her first-op jitters. Rykov had been in half an hour earlier to help her with her hair, because while Daria could do her long brown hair into lazy waves in her damned sleep, the evening conference required something a little more formal and there was no way she could yank a knit beanie down over her cowlick and call it good. She slicked another layer of crimson red lipstick on and surveyed herself critically.
“I think that is about as good as it gets,” Nicolai was behind her in an instant, the breeze of his rapid movement making her hair ruffle, his eyes meeting her reflection’s. She scowled at him in the mirror, dropping her tube of lipstick to cross an arm over her breasts even if they were contained by more layers of lace and silk than were necessary. He was standing there, bare footed in his neatly pressed s
lacks, the top button of his shirt undone and she could just barely see the divot of his collarbone. Despite his humble upbringing, he looked good in an expensive suit, especially one tailored impeccably to his body. She mentally snapped her fingers at herself.
“One? Rude. Two? You’ve got a bathroom out there, and the bedroom is my domain, not yours. That was the deal. You get the living room with the pull out couch and that crazy kitchenette with a fully-stocked vodka cooler, and I get the bedroom with the soaker tub.” She turned, folding another arm over her breasts and glared up at her ‘husband’. His eyes tumbled down her front and then he rolled them, zipping over to her dress in a blur. It irritated her like an itch she couldn’t scratch that he was constantly tapping into his augmented power even when it wasn’t necessary. If he moved by her too closely it would mess up her carefully styled hair as well.
“You were taking too long,” he complained, running a finger over the long, elegant sleeve of the dress, “and I am bored.” She huffed and stood, marching over to him although it had less effect due to the plush carpet muffling her stomping.
“Don’t touch the dress,” she ordered sharply, even as he took it down in spite of her words and held it out so she could take it. He leaned back against the door, letting it click shut under his weight as his eyes met hers. She grabbed the hanger and pointed at the door that lead to the living area of their suite. “Seriously, there’s a big flat screen and some shitty porn out there with your name on it. Go entertain yourself.”
“How am I supposed to complain of how long my pretty wife takes to get ready if I have not observed the process?” he asked, shrugging one shoulder and quirking an eyebrow. She hated that eyebrow, had learnt to hate it during training. It always meant he was in a mood, and that mood was be as annoying as possible. She turned away from him and walked to the bed, pulling the dress delicately off it’s hanger and laying it down on the bed so that she could unzip it.