by Lucy Monroe
“YOU LIKE TO WATCH FOOTBALL?”
“Sunshine, I’m from Texas. Of course I like to watch football.”
“And drink beer.”
“I could bring my own.”
Somehow as they’d been talking, they had also been moving closer together and now their bodies were practically touching. Beth stared up into Ethan’s face and forgot what she was about to say. How had he gotten so close? Had he been the one to move…or had she? Oh, gosh…she was not going to survive this assignment. She just knew she wasn’t.
“Ethan?” Her voice came out a breathy whisper.
No good. She sounded like she was issuing invitations, and she wasn’t. Was she?
Satisfaction Guaranteed
Lucy Monroe
KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.
http://www.kensingtonbooks.com
For Jack and Van because out of your marriage came one of the greatest gifts in my life…my husband. I love you both. And, Vannie…if you recognize certain things about a feisty Vietnamese lady character in this book, what can I say? You are a true inspiration. While no character is ever patterned wholly after a real person, there are people in my life who embody the things I admire most and those elements are bound to show up in my books. Hugs and much love to you both.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Epilogue
Chapter 1
When the subjects of Beth Whitney’s favorite fantasy and worst living nightmare walked through the office door together, the day from hell took a nosedive.
And really, that shouldn’t be possible. Only Beth’s shocked vision was telling her that it was. In Technicolor.
It wasn’t bad enough that she’d woken extra early to avoid the alarm clock only to discover that rather than sleeping like good kittens, Mozart and Beethoven had spent the night shredding the perfect silk drapes she’d installed on her condo’s living room window only a month ago. The toaster had burned her bagel, and her mom had called with yet another candidate in her campaign to rejuvenate Beth’s nonexistent love life. All before eight-thirty A.M., and her arrival at work hadn’t improved a thing.
Her in-box had been filled with the usual urgent requests, but two messages had sent her head spinning. They were hiring a new agent and her boss wanted the new recruit’s office ready by early afternoon. And Ethan Crane was back from his latest assignment and working out of the home office for the foreseeable future. Which meant that she was back to catching glimpses of him that sparked erotic fantasies no good girl would admit to…even to her very best friend. Even to her cat.
And he would tease her…just like he always did, making her notice him. Upping feelings she’d rather pretend did not exist and none of which she would ever allow herself to act on. Not only was the man way out of her league, but he was all wrong for her. He was an agent. He was also too sexy for words and the one man she didn’t think would balk at her most secret daydreams.
She balked at them though.
They scared her to death. Almost as much as he did. And there he was.
Maybe she should have let her mom fix her up with Mr. Eligible. Beth needed some kind of diversion to stop her body reacting so strongly to Ethan’s presence.
The only problem was, no other man measured up. Not even her worst waking nightmare. If seeing her former fiancé for the first time in three years could not tamp down her body’s response to Ethan, nothing would.
Following the two men and wearing a look of benign benevolence she knew was a better cover than sand camouflage in the desert was her father. He was also her boss, which was why she didn’t leap from her chair and demand to know why in the heck he hadn’t seen fit to warn her of Alan’s arrival.
Okay, so it wasn’t as disturbing as Ethan’s, but her dad had no way of knowing that. For all he knew, seeing her former fiancé for the first time in years was shredding her wounded heart. She almost laughed at the image that thought provoked. Her dad was neither maudlin, nor poetic.
She would settle for marginally sensitive, but that seemed a far off dream, too.
All three men were talking and didn’t notice her reaction to their arrival. Thank goodness. Her dad saw far too much as it was. She managed to school her expression into a cool smile just as Ethan’s green gaze landed on her.
Even mentally prepared for it, her heart ran wild and the secret desires she’d been fighting since coming to work for her father nearly two years ago pooled low in her belly.
However, she managed to keep her breathing and her voice relatively even as she said, “Good afternoon, gentlemen. Ethan, you have two critical messages on your voicemail and a follow-up on e-mail. I assume you had your phone off during lunch?”
The subject of her most private fantasies smiled in a way that always sent shivers to interesting, if embarrassing, places. “We didn’t want to be interrupted.”
Darn.
“I assume I’ve got a few messages that can’t wait either.” Her dad’s faintly narrowed gray gaze said he’d noted her slight in dealing with Ethan’s stuff first.
Good. She’d meant to annoy him. Not unduly. She was a professional after all, but there was no way that he could not know that he should have warned her that he was bringing Alan Hyatt into the office. Only as usual, he’d ignored her feelings and done things his own way, no doubt with some scheme in mind. He never did anything without a plan, but whatever it was, she had no intention of falling in with it.
She and Alan were done. Period.
A man who stood you up at the altar did not deserve second chances. And if her dad could not see that then he was blinder than she’d always believed. A man that vision impaired shouldn’t even have a license to drive. And she’d tell him that, too, when she got a chance.
Right now, she would do her best to project professional decorum. “Yes, Mr. Whitney. You have several messages, but the most pressing is probably the one from the White House.”
His jaw clenched. He hated it when she called him that. He agreed she couldn’t call him “Dad” in the office, but he insisted she at least use “Whit” like the agents did. When she called him “Sir,” he knew she was annoyed. When she called him “Mr. Whitney,” he knew he was in deep trouble.
His eyes were acknowledging that truth now. Smart man.
“I’ll leave you to show Alan to his new office while I go take care of it then,” he said.
“He’s working here?” she asked, her composure cracking slightly as the reality of why the other man was with her father sank in. “He’s the new agent?”
“That’s right,” her dad affirmed with subtle punitive relish. “I’m sure you’ll do a fine job of making him feel welcome.”
She’d make someone feel welcome…like the State Department’s internal auditor…in her dad’s private files. Her eyes glittered with promise her dad chose to ignore as he bid the two agents a good afternoon and headed to his own office.
Oh, he was so going to hear about this later.
“If you’re busy, I can show Hyatt his new digs,” Ethan offered as the silence stretched on after her dad’s hasty exit.
She looked up at him and then at Alan, her usually quick thought processes sluggish in the face o
f a situation she’d never, ever, not in a million years and a day, expected to face. Her dad had hired the man who had humiliated her in front of friends, family, and political hangers-on.
“Are you too busy, Beth?” Alan asked, his dark eyes probing, his tone implying more to the words than was on the surface.
He was tall, dark, and dangerously attractive. He knew it too, but for a while she had been someone special to him and vice versa. If he really was going to be working for The Goddard Project (TGP), then she would have to learn how to deal with his daily presence. She might as well start now.
Besides…it might be a good idea to set a few things straight. She didn’t know what her dad had told Alan about her, but whatever it was, she wanted him to know the truth.
Their past would stay in the past.
She smiled at Ethan, though her jaw felt like cracking from the effort. “Thanks, but it’s fine. This is part of my job. And you have phone messages to answer.”
Ethan nodded, but didn’t turn to go immediately. His green gaze was locked on her with disturbing intensity, as if he was trying to see inside of her to that place she kept hidden from everyone else. She couldn’t imagine why. As far as she knew, the sandy-haired, to-die-for good-looking agent considered her a talking piece of office furniture.
And that was exactly the way she wanted it, too. “Did you need anything else?”
Ethan shook his head and turned to leave, no indication of discomfort at being caught staring in his manner. His tall, muscle-toned frame moved off down the corridor with easy grace she both admired and envied. The man was too confident for words. And too much of everything else besides.
“Do you two have something going on?” Alan asked.
Beth’s gaze jerked back to him. “Me and Mr. Cool? I don’t think so. You, of all people, should know I don’t date agents.”
“Anymore.”
“You were an exception I lived to regret.”
“I’d rather you regretted walking away.”
She stood up, unwilling to rehash the past in such a public setting. “Well, I don’t. Sorry.”
He sighed. “People make mistakes, Beth.”
“And most of us try to learn from them. I certainly learned from mine.” She started walking toward the office that had been prepared for the new agent. For him. And darn it all anyway, her dad had known that. “Come on. I’ll show you your space and explain the computer system and pass codes.”
He didn’t reply, but he did follow her.
Once they were in the office, she showed him his graphic interface computer.
“Everything is biometrically coded. Once your fingerprint is logged into the system, you can change the computer so only you have access.”
She pressed her finger over an electronic eye on his desk and a flat screen rose into view. “Right now, I have access to your system, but it doesn’t have to stay that way.”
She touched the screen and the log-in box appeared in the center. “All computer systems have a triple security level access. Your fingerprint brings up the screen and then you log into the basic operating system with a password that changes daily.” She typed in the password on the keyboard that had appeared when she touched the screen. “To get into your personal programs and files, there is another password that you can change as frequently as you feel the need, though the agency suggests doing so at least weekly.”
“Do the other agents have you coded into their systems for access? Does Ethan Crane?”
“Most of them do, but some don’t,” she said, ignoring his reference to Ethan. She didn’t know why he was fixating on the other agent, but she wasn’t going there. She did enough fixating of her own in that direction. “I don’t care either way. The accessibility of your system to me is mostly for your convenience, not mine.”
He touched the screen with his finger and the application he’d brushed over opened up. Another touch and a picture on the screen zoomed to twice its size. “Holy shit. It’s completely touch interactive.”
“It gets better.” She touched some things on the screen and a holographic three-dimensional model of one of their latest lab gadgets appeared in front of the screen. She dismantled it before his eyes by touching the right places on the mirror image on the screen. “You can go 3-D with any graphic with the capability.”
“Incredible.”
“It will probably be another year or so before even the screen is available on the consumer market and longer than that for the holographic imagery to make it to market, but we have access to some of the world’s most advanced technology.”
“So do the bad guys…or so I’ve been told.”
“Right. That’s the point of our organization. To stop technological advancement making it into the wrong hands.”
“Your dad told me The Goddard Project was put together during World War II when it was discovered that civilian scientists who our own State Department were ignoring were being spied on by our enemies.”
“And their technological advances were being taken advantage of while we dismissed them as crackpots.”
“Like Robert Goddard.”
“Yes. His rocket propulsion concept made it into German hands without his knowledge and we didn’t even have a clue until our own military spied on their experiments.”
“That’s when we started taking rocketry seriously.”
“And a host of other things.”
“Hence the name The Goddard Project?”
“Didn’t Dad tell you that?”
“We were discussing my first case actually.” Alan leaned back against the desk, crossing his long legs, encased in slacks, at the ankles. “He told me you’d be happy to fill in the blanks on the background of the organization.”
Of course he had. She was going to kill him. “There isn’t much more to tell. TGP never got disbanded, but it stayed ultra top secret over the decades. Unlike a lot of agencies, it never got top-heavy with political brass either. I find it amazing that in a town like D.C. the secrecy thing has remained so strong. Our funding comes from the State Department, but almost no one knows we exist.”
“I sure as hell didn’t.”
“Which just goes to show that the FBI doesn’t know everything.”
His lips quirked. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Don’t feel badly. Until I got clearance to work for him, I thought my dad just worked for the State Department. I’d never even heard the initials TGP. I don’t know if my mom knows to this day what agency her husband works for.”
“And you haven’t told her?”
“No way. We sign an airtight privacy policy before we get briefed to work for the agency.”
“I know.”
“Yes, of course. Anyway, I keep my word.”
“I do, too, honey. When I can…”
“You would die rather than give up state secrets, I know.”
“I’d die for some other things, too.”
“The past is over, Alan. Please don’t bring it up again and please don’t call me honey. We’re coworkers now. Nothing more.” Three years ago, the way he was looking at her would have melted her bones, but she didn’t feel anything anymore.
Nothing at all and she was really glad. Fantasizing about Ethan had been good for something. She had to stifle the grin that thought brought.
“I’m sorry about what happened, you know.”
“You said so at the time and I believed you, I really did.” She sighed. She guessed it had to be said once more and with feeling. “But I also knew that if you could stand me up at the altar for the sake of a case, there would be a lot more situations in which I’d come a poor second to your job. I wouldn’t have tolerated that very well. For both our sakes, I’m glad I realized that in time.”
“It could have been good, damn it.”
“No. I’m not forbearing like my mother. I would have insisted on coming first sometimes…most times if you want the truth. You could never have given me that.”
&nbs
p; He ran his hands through dark hair cut short to FBI standards. “What I do is important.”
“I’m not denying that. I’m really not, but the relationship between a man and woman is important, too. Face it, there just wasn’t any hope for us.”
He sighed. “I didn’t want to believe that then and I don’t like it now, but I can see you still mean it.”
“You haven’t spent three years pining, I know you haven’t.”
“No.” He smiled, his eyes acknowledging the hit. She was sure he’d had a much more active love life in the past three years than she had. “But I’ve never felt the same about another woman and I spent that time wondering what could have been.”
“Nothing good. Nothing truly permanent. Not even if we had gotten married.” She’d never even shared her deepest fantasies with this man.
Fantasies she sensed Ethan would understand and maybe even get into, but ones she doubted Alan would have taken seriously or been willing to act out.
When she’d realized that, she’d also realized that she’d held a lot of herself back from him. Lack of trust because he was an agent…or just a man? She’d never decided which, but it didn’t matter. He hadn’t loved her enough to put her first and she hadn’t loved him enough to tolerate his job or trust him with her innermost being.
They were actually pretty lucky they hadn’t ended up married. They would have hurt each other. She was sure of it.
“If you say so.” He stuck his hand out. “Friends?”
She smiled and shook the proffered hand. “Friends.”
She finished explaining the computer system and how to access central agency intelligence to him, then took him on a tour of the facility. He was impressed with the gadgets lab. All the agents were. Men and women alike, they didn’t get recruited for TGP unless they were well versed in and enamored of the high-tech world.