Smoke and Shadows

by Victoria Paige

  Marissa nodded. “I don’t mind the cuffs and spanking though.”

  And just like that, he was ready to take her again. “Oh, believe me, sweetheart, I don’t mind either. Not at all.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The drive back to the city was uneventful. However, observing how Viktor morphed back into the cold, calculating leader of AGS was fascinating. He was on the phone the majority of the time, just as she was on her laptop. Satellite service was spotty so she would take the occasion to ruminate about what had happened in the last twelve hours.

  She.

  Was.

  Conflicted.

  Viktor had fucked her over the kitchen counter. Like the previous evening, there was an urgency in his touch, in the way he drove inside her. He was always the dominant one during sex. She could count the few times he’d allowed her to be on top. And she was fine with it. But was she really enough for him? She didn’t think she would be the type to go deviant. She was thankful that Viktor didn’t want to share her. She didn’t like to share or be shared. And though Morgan painted an interesting picture of two men inside her at the same time, her stomach churned, not because she thought it was revolting, but at that moment, she couldn’t imagine another man’s touch except Viktor’s. It was an all-consuming need. She craved his touch, and only his.

  But therein lay the conflict for her. Her independent nature was rebelling. She could take his dominance in bed, but somehow the control was spilling into their relationship. She was more stubborn than most women, she’d admit to that, but it was only because her overbearing father made her that way. One had to be strong not to be trampled by one Trenton Cole III. He was a ruthless businessman, and a cold domineering father. In the end, he couldn’t control those closest to him because his children had inherited his own dominant streak. That side of Marissa was now screaming at her relationship with Viktor. She was falling in love with him, probably already was in love with him, and that was suppressing her own controlling nature. But how long before they would clash and end up hurting each other?

  “Don’t think about it.” He was off the phone and had glanced briefly at her.

  Marissa huffed and looked out the window.

  “Iz.” The tone quiet, but commanding.

  She gave up on the scenery and turned her gaze to take in his strong profile. What was she so scared of?

  “I know I dumped some serious shit on you back there at the safe house,” Viktor said, keeping his eyes on the road. “With our jobs at our respective organizations, our relationship dynamics could be quite complicated.”

  No shit, Sherlock, Marissa thought snidely.

  “We can’t overthink this, Marissa,” Viktor said, a rough-edge honed his voice. “Duty and responsibility versus what we feel for each other, there’s bound to be conflicting interests.” He cut her another brief look. “I can feel the resentment sliding off you. We’re facing a challenge ahead with the nerve gas. We’re going to disagree. I’m not going to want you to take risks, and if I have my way, you’re going to feel diminished because I want to protect you. I get that. It’s a delicate balance. Hell, I see that fight between Maia and Jack all the time.”

  “What are you trying to say then?”

  “You’re a strong woman—”

  “Don’t patronize me, Viktor—”

  “I’m not. It’s the truth because that’s one of the things I love about you,” Viktor paused. Marissa suspected he wasn’t quite ready to say the L word again, but he added, “You have no idea how much I admire your intelligence and your courage even if the danger you put yourself in makes my teeth hurt. I’ve accepted that’s who you are and it’s your job. But I can’t turn off my instinct to protect you or be worried about you.”

  “Or be pissed at me.”

  Viktor chuckled. “Or be pissed at you.”

  “You seem to be in control where your agents are concerned. I wish you’d show more faith in me to take care of myself like you do with Maia. I know I’m not in her caliber, but I do manage,” Marissa said quietly.

  There was a pronounced silence before Viktor finally spoke. His voice was flat and cautious. “Maia and I have a complicated understanding. I trained her when she was very young. I think with as many missions that have gone south where either of us thought the other was dead, we’ve accepted we’re living on borrowed time. We’ve kind of accepted that sooner or later one of us is going to bite the dust.”

  “That. Is. Sick!” Marissa exclaimed.

  “Things have changed,” Viktor qualified. “Maia has something she wants to live for more than her job.”

  “Jack.”

  “Yes.”

  Marissa didn’t want to ask the next obvious question. She feigned a yawn, rested her head back, closed her eyes and mumbled, “Happy for them.”

  Viktor’s big hand closed over hers, linking their fingers. He raised them and kissed the back of her hand.

  They spent the rest of the trip in silence.

  She felt like a coward.

  They arrived at AGS later that afternoon, and the place was crawling with construction workers and Guardians. As usual, she and Viktor maintained an impersonal distance and he was walking slightly ahead when Tim motioned to him with a phone in his hand.

  Viktor muttered an excuse and took the call in his office.

  John Edmunds from Marissa’s team on the South Africa zee bomb mission, intercepted her and slung an arm around her shoulder. He lowered his head and whispered conspiratorially, “Thank fucking Christ you’re here. Some of us were contemplating knocking Viktor unconscious because he was in a shit mood the past few days.”

  “AGS did get attacked and you’ve lost a couple of people,” Marissa pointed out. “I wouldn’t be in a chipper mood either.”

  “Viktor can compartmentalize stuff like that. But his woman missing? Unchartered territory,” Edmunds murmured. “The only reason Burns still has his head is because Viktor has become more sympathetic lately. The loss of Holly has hit all of us hard. We’ve noticed changes in him, Ms. Cole. He seems almost human, and we know it’s because he has you. But hell, next time you two have a falling out, don’t take the entire world with you.”

  “Duly noted,” Marissa responded. She knew Edmunds wasn’t blaming her, but was simply reiterating the consequences of their relationship.

  “Marissa!”

  It was Maia. The redhead came up to her and tucked her arm in Marissa’s, pulling her away from Edmunds. “Thank God, you’re back.”

  Marissa exhaled in resignation. Somehow, she knew she would be getting the third-degree about disappearing again.

  *****

  “I don’t like the plan.” Viktor paced the length of the briefing room. Marissa was in a chair getting a makeover from their CIA cover specialist who had just taken off the cast from her face.

  “You already agreed to it,” Marissa replied, picking at the residue from her skin. She hated this part of the process, but the CIA destroyed facial casts after each mission, so she had to do this all over again. “Stop vacillating.”

  They hadn’t found Owen Reed, but they’d gone through the list of members of his unit that were dishonorably discharged for the Afghanistan massacre. Henry Logan lived in Bluefield, WV near the abandoned mine where they had found Jack. Logan disappeared with no forwarding address the day after Jack was rescued. Two of the other men from the unit, Garett Fletcher and Morris Tyrell, owned a dive bar in Chesapeake, WV, near the capital of Charleston. Satellite images showed a small town with rows of houses amid acres of grassy land. The AGS tandem of Manning and Edmunds ran separate reconnaissance missions in the past two days disguised as truck drivers passing through the I-64 artery. There was a truck stop near the bar, which made it a popular watering hole for locals as well as transients.

  “You think you can pull off this disguise,” Viktor scoffed. “You were a primary target. Owen Reed will make you in no time.”

  The cover specialist, only known as Dolores, snor
ted. “Your confidence in the CIA is quite charming.” Touching Marissa’s head of glossy, dark brown hair, she said. “I’d hate to frost these strands.”

  “You are not touching her hair,” Viktor barked.

  Dolores glared at Viktor, and her man glared right back. “If she’s going to pull off skanky waitress at a dive bar in West Virginia, she needs streaks of awful highlights and big hair.”

  Turning back to Marissa, Dolores added, “We’re going to change your nose a bit.” She looked down at the cast. “Make it a bit thicker. We’ve gone through makeup on how to make this all blend in, right?”

  “I’ve done this before,” Marissa assured the cover specialist.

  Dolores took out a needle and syringe and brought it near her upper lips. Viktor was a blur of motion as he knocked the apparatus out of Dolores’s hands.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Viktor thundered.

  “That’s it!” Dolores screeched. “Either you tell this big oaf to step out or we do this at Langley.”

  Marissa massaged her temples, feeling the onset of a headache. “Give us a minute, Dee.” The CIA cover artist glowered one last time at Viktor before exiting the room.

  “I could send in a different agent,” Viktor said before she could get in a word. “I’ve got two who can pull this off. When we talked about altering your appearance, it was prosthetics, makeup and contacts. Getting lip injections wasn’t part of the plan, and neither was dyeing your hair.”

  Marissa waited patiently for Viktor’s tirade to end. “First of all, I’m not dyeing my hair. They’re called highlights. Second, the lip injections we use don’t last. So I get nice, big pouty lips for only two weeks.”

  “Dye, highlights, they’re all fucking the same to me, and I like your lips the way they are,” Viktor argued. His face mottled with rage. “And I’ll be damned before every drunk Tom, Dick, and Harry take a look at your plumped-up kissers imagining them wrapped around their cock.”

  Marissa’s jaw slackened before it snapped shut. She was finally getting an idea of where Viktor’s head was. “Let me get this straight, big guy. Are you against me going undercover because Reed might recognize me or because you’re jealous of guys who are imagining my mouth on them—”

  “Or pinching your ass,” Viktor finished.

  She eyed him contemplatively. “If we have to work together on this, Viktor, I can’t have you interfering.”

  “That sounds like an ultimatum, sweetheart,” Viktor said quietly, his face draining of emotion. Blank mask. She had not seen that for a while, but every time he went all stoic, it was like going two steps forward, one-step back. But she had to nip this in the bud. This wasn’t the first time he’d manipulated their mission, so he could watch her back. And Yeager was starting to notice, so she volunteered to go undercover in the dive bar in West Virginia.

  “Take it however you want,” Marissa retorted. “Now. I want Dee to be comfortable and I need to get this shit done. So I’m asking you to leave the room, and send Dee back in here. I’d appreciate it if you’d leave us alone.”

  Viktor’s eyes turned glacial, and his jaw worked convulsively as if he had something more to say. In the end, he nodded slightly, turned around and stalked out the door.

  *****

  “Two Coors Light, Jerry.” Marissa hopped on the lone empty seat at the bar, smiling at the bartender before casting a furtive look at the new customers who just came in. It had been four days since she had started at Fletcher’s Bar and Grill and she had not seen hide nor hair out of Garett Fletcher or his friend Morris Tyrell. So much for being hands-on owners. What Marissa discovered from Fletcher's girlfriend, Sheila, who happened to be the manager, was that he took off suddenly for a week. Getting a position as a waitress wasn’t serendipity. It was a precisely orchestrated scheme. After doing reconnaissance for two days, Edmunds and Manning figured out which waitress would hurt the operations of the bar if she disappeared. So they took her into custody. Marissa walked in all dressed up in tight jeans, low-neck t-shirt, and cheap tall boots and applied for the job.

  A harried Sheila shoved a bar apron at her and muttered, “If you can start tonight, the job is yours.”

  Marissa kept her alias as Olivia West, and managed to impress Sheila that night. This was actually her third time working undercover in restaurant service; although, this was the first time she had to dress up as a skanky waitress. She had also once gone the stripper route in Eastern Europe. Thankfully, Tyrell and Fletcher didn’t own a strip joint. Otherwise, she suspected, Viktor would never let her take the job.

  “Here you go, peaches.” Jerry handed her the beer. She collected her order, and made her way to her section of the restaurant and set the beer in front of her two customers. One was a man dressed in a sheepskin jacket, weighing about three-hundred pounds, with a red puffy face, which probably meant his liver was overworked. The other man was reed thin under his wool jacket, a beard covering a sallow face, and with rotting, yellowing teeth, he gave her a toothy smile—he was probably a smoker and a drunk, too.

  “Anything else I can get for you? Your burgers should be out in five minutes.” Marissa maintained her distance. She’d had her share of ‘handsy’ customers, and, hated to think that Viktor was right.

  “What’s the rush, sugar?” sheepskin jacket guy said. “Big John here can take care of you.” He patted a pudgy thigh that was definitely pushing the constraints of his denims.

  “Busy night, sweetie,” she replied. “Holler if you guys need anything.” And she quickly retreated to the front of the house. She parried several advances all through the night, but thankfully, the rest of her customers weren’t as disgusting as those first two.

  At about 11:30 p.m., when the bar was hopping and the kitchen was winding down, two men—one wearing a fleeced-denim jacket and the other wearing a leather coat—walked into Fletcher’s Bar. Marissa managed to hide her surprise when she recognized Morris Tyrell and Garett Fletcher. Fletcher was of medium height, a bit taller than Marissa, but very stocky. Judging from his barrel-like torso, the man had let go of his trim-muscled self as an Army Ranger and had let a few too many beers give him a slight paunch to his belly. Tyrell wasn’t a big guy and was about Marissa’s height of five-five, and appeared unhealthily lanky. He had the look of a substance abuser.

  Grabbing her tequila shot orders, she walked back to her table when Fletcher stepped in front of her. Marissa didn’t like his leer as he studied her from head to toe.

  “You the new girl?” his gruff voice asked.

  “Yes, I am,” she replied. “Olivia.”

  “Sheila did good,” Fletcher declared. “Me and Tyrell here would like some dinner. Get us a pitcher of Bud.” He pointed to an empty table. “We’re sitting over there.”

  *****

  Marissa watched the two men stagger out of the bar. It was 1:00 a.m. and she had cashed out half an hour ago and moved her clunker of a car into the wooded area of the parking lot. Both Fletcher and Tyrell had pinched her butt the entire night. She bore the indignity, but was really sorry that Sheila had to witness the asshole behavior from her boyfriend. How could the other woman take it and not give him shit? It was none of Marissa’s business, and she should remain detached, but when Sheila apologized for Fletcher's behavior to her, she couldn’t keep quiet any longer.

  “Seriously, Sheila, you can do better than this,” Marissa hissed. “Why do you put up with him? You’re the one running the place. He needs you more than you need him. I doubt if he knows anything about managing the bar.”

  “I love him,” Sheila whispered. “Always have. He wasn’t always like this. When the Army kicked him out, he changed.”

  Marissa closed her eyes. And when the CIA fucked him over. Damn it.

  “I’m sorry,” Marissa said. “It’s not my place to judge. Especially since I’ve been here only a couple of days.”

  “So glad I hired you,” Sheila said. “The last girl, Candy, she’s a good waitress, but she wants Garett. I
know they were sleeping together. At least, she’s up and left him. But you be careful, Olivia. Garett and Tyrell, they’ve got their eyes on you.”

  Marissa’s mind had wandered off to informing AGS to interrogate Candy, who they had in their bunker, about anything Garett might have told her, but her mind snapped back with Sheila’s warning. “What do you mean?”

  “Garett and Tyrell like their kicks with women. That’s how I know Garett loves me, in a way, because he doesn’t share me. But I know that’s what they had with Candy, and with her gone, they’d be looking for a replacement.”

  Oh, God, Marissa thought. This was the second ménage discussion she was having in a span of a week.

  She followed them now. The men were using one vehicle, Fletcher was driving. He dropped Tyrell off at a typical ranch-style house. Given the size of Tyrell’s residence, it couldn’t be the likely place for storing chemical weapons.

  She knew Fletcher lived up this road, and if ever he was working with Reed, his expansive ranch-style house on about ten acres of land would be the more conceivable location for the nerve gas canisters. There was also another structure about seventy feet from the main house.

  Watching Fletcher's car turn into the long driveway, Marissa drove past the house, and made a U-turn a mile up, and headed back to her motel. When she got to the motel parking lot, she took out her cell phone and made a call to Tim.

  “It’s about time you called,” the analyst said.

  “In case you didn’t know, I have a day job.”

  Tim chuckled. “So, what do you have for me, girl?”

  “The packages are in,” Marissa said. “I want you to keep an eye out for any comings and goings on their properties.”

  “Roger that.”

  Marissa ended the call. Because of the less than secure connection, she kept communication brief. She had only talked to Viktor once since the time she arrived in Chesapeake, WV. Her man had not made another comment about her appearance when she showed him her final look. But his eyes said it all. And so did his actions. Spurred by a mixture of lust and anger, he took her savagely the night before she left for her assignment. Marissa blushed as she remembered how Viktor fucked her on the hood of the car after they had pulled into the garage. He bent her over the Charger, shoved her jeans down, nudged her underwear aside, and drove into her.