The adrenaline rush of the morning’s chase had emptied from her system, leaving nothing but a strange, jittery fatigue. She stared at the walls. She still didn’t understand why McCrea had let her leave on her own accord. He hadn’t seemed to believe her, and yet he was content to let her go free.
Why?
He was undoubtedly a monster, a terrorist of the worst sort, a man buying an arsenal of missiles that could be used to take down commercial airplanes.
In short, he was a bad, bad dude.
And yet Evangeline couldn’t forget the comforting smell of his shirt. When he’d cornered her in the market, she’d expected to feel a sharp knife or the cold muzzle of a gun poking into her back, not the warmth of his breath on her neck.
Her body hummed at the memory.
Stop it.
She ought to smack herself for getting caught up in the masculine physicality of his presence. He’d turned the tables, morphed her from hunter to hunted. What had he called her? A little mouse? It was an accurate enough assessment. And he was an amber-eyed cat, watchful and deadly, playing with his prey. After all, he hadn’t needed to stay in that market until she’d arrived. He could have left before she’d seen him. It was as if he’d been waiting for her.
Perhaps he’d just wanted to confirm that she was following him. Well, he’d succeeded in that. But then why, when he’d trapped her in the aisle, had he touched her so intimately? Why had he chosen to speak to her like a lover instead of threatening her with bodily harm, as he’d done to Penard the night before?
She couldn’t imagine why, but for whatever reason, that criminal had caressed her when he could have harmed her. He’d been gentle when he could have been rough. He’d been attracted when he should have been repelled.
And so had she. Evangeline dropped her head into her hands. Damn it, but she’d liked the feeling of his chest against her back, and the scent of him in her nose.
Mason burst into the storeroom.
She jumped to her feet. “Do you have the meeting transcript?”
He pulled a white handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped the sweat off his brow. Evangeline couldn’t imagine Mason in a state of repose, but today he looked like he could use a nap. It brightened her mood.
She smirked. “Warm day?”
“I hadn’t noticed.” He raised an expectant eyebrow in her direction as he thumbed through a small manila file folder. He fanned his jacket, getting air to his core. “So?”
Nothing for free, she reminded herself. “I followed him to a market, where he slipped out an alley door. I could have pursued, but it seemed unwise.”
“You went inside the market?”
“I had to. Those shops have doors to the back alley. He could have vanished.”
“He vanished anyway. Going inside the store only increased your chances of being made. What did you accomplish?”
“We spoke,” she said, and hurried on when Mason’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve secured a meeting with him this evening.”
She left out the part about it being a cocktail date. Mason was old-fashioned, trained during the Cold War, and preferred his operatives to meet with potential assets in distantly parked cars and abandoned warehouses. Most of Evangeline’s assets had been found and turned in bars.
“A meeting? He’s recruitable, then?”
“He’s interested.”
Mason wasn’t so easily fooled. “In what?”
“In me,” she admitted, and crossed her arms over her chest. “I can’t say what else. But he’s intrigued enough to not have threatened me when he noticed that I was tracking him.”
“He knows you were after him?”
“Yes.”
“And last night? He knows you were in the bar, too?”
“He does.”
Mason’s lips tightened. “You’re taking unusual risks.”
“I’m getting results.”
“Your overenthusiasm will ruin this.”
“My overenthusiasm had me hanging by my toes five stories up to film that meeting this morning.” Frustrated, she pointed at the folder he held. “Do you know what they discussed, or not?”
“All you need to know is that you’re walking a very thin line, Ms. Quill. Very thin, indeed.”
“That’s how I work, Mason.” She stalked closer to him, her rubber heels thudding dully on the concrete floor. “If I cared more about getting promoted than doing my job, I could sit back and pad my record with low-level nobodies like Penard, and he’d give us shit intel until kingdom come in exchange for millions of taxpayer dollars. But I want to make a difference, not just stay alive.”
“Let’s hope you don’t have to choose between the two.”
She couldn’t disagree. “Let’s stay on this. I’ll meet him tonight, see if I can push him over to our side. Barring that, I’ll try to figure out what he’s doing with Ménellier.”
Mason lifted one graying eyebrow. “I see you have no need for my direction anymore.”
She let herself smile. “No, I still need you. Who else is going to run my flash drives through tech-ops?”
That evening, Evangeline stood across the street from the Metro Hotel, watching purple arcs of light wash the open sky behind the opera house. A prettier-than-average dusk, to be sure, but she knew she was stalling. She needed to charge across the street and into the hotel right this second if she was going to meet McCrea for drinks, as they’d planned.
Planned. What, like it was a date?
It felt more like a dare, and it could be an ambush. That foreboding explained her reluctance.
Or did it?
Denial helped no one, and as she stared at the hotel, amassing her courage, Evangeline couldn’t pretend any longer that this man was just another crook to her. Her body had responded to his touch. Her nose remembered the scent of his cologne. Her neck still sizzled with the memory of his lips.
None of that had anything to do with McCrea’s connection to Lukas Kral, and his connection to Krai should be all that mattered. Not the hunger he’d awakened, nor the confusion that came along with it. The memory of his touch should spawn nothing but disgust, but where loathing should reside was only a deep, yawning ache that she could only call desire.
Desire. For a criminal.
She should know better.
In her training at the Farm, the lesson had been hammered home: avoid romantic entanglements. History was littered with the stories of decent officers who’d fallen for an operative of a rival agency. As a result, anything more than a one-night stand had to be reported, investigated, and approved, and the joke was that nobody wanted to deal with that kind of paperwork. In reality, the process for reporting a “close and continuing relationship” was a nightmare. Some field operatives resigned from the Agency just to avoid it, if a relationship was serious enough. But most CIA officers posted to foreign stations simply lived out their sexual lives as a series of disconnected one-night stands.
A one-nighter a few years back had left her feeling sexually satisfied, but emotionally, she’d felt even emptier than before the encounter. Perhaps it was different for other people, like the seemingly stoic men she’d trained with, but for Evangeline, good sex required her to feel a certain amount of trust in her partner. To feel vulnerable but yet not be taken advantage of is one of the great pleasures of sex. The surrender of control, the ceding of power, makes the ultimate release absolute and supremely gratifying. Evangeline couldn’t make it happen in one night. She couldn’t trust that quickly and couldn’t find physical satisfaction. Worse, the attempt had only magnified how alone she truly was, for few things are lonelier than emotionless sex.
Since that night, she’d accepted that there was no one in the world she could trust with her body. No one could understand her enough, even if they knew what she did, as a fellow Agency employee might. Her world was a lie, her identity a construct. But it was all by her own design, and until she left the service, there was no answer but abstinence.
With a
mental lock on her desire, she tugged at the short hemline of her little black dress before marching across the street. The doorman swung open the glass door and she stepped into the air-conditioned lobby, her hair blown back by the change in air pressure. Standing under a crystal chandelier, she scanned the graceful assembly of Lucite, leather, and chrome.
And him. McCrea sat idly on a couch, staring out a window. His hot golden gaze traveled to her face.
God, he was beautiful, so much more than she’d allowed herself to remember.
Her breath strangled. A powerful urge to press her body against his both frightened and destabilized her, making her want to turn and run, his connections to Krai be damned. She should be capable of compartmentalizing desire. She’d never had to before, though. Up until now, it’d been easy to turn off that part of her consciousness.
But until now, she’d never met a mark who could light her on fire with a glance.
She stood her ground. She wouldn’t turn tail, not after so many years of clawing through the underworld to get to this point. She wouldn’t abandon her mission.
McCrea broke eye contact to check his watch—a sleek, gray metal thing—and she walked closer, reaching his couch in seconds. He didn’t stand. It struck her as rude, and she hoped he’d keep it up. She wanted to dislike him as much as possible, to distance herself from the sizzling effect of his lips on her neck.
“You’re late.” He brushed invisible lint off the sleeves of his black suit jacket.
“You waited.”
His left eye twitched. “Don’t get used to it.”
“I’ll do my best,” she said, happy with the heavy dose of sarcasm she managed to insert. Keep it light, she told herself. “Did you get the del Duque?”
“Chilling upstairs.” He nodded toward the oversized tote she carried. “What’s in the bag?”
“Serrano ham. Greek olives. Dried apricots. All the necessities for enjoying a glass of thirty-year-old amontillado.”
The tiniest of grins lifted the corners of his mouth. “You’ve done this before.”
“Once or twice.” The banter came easily, like they were old friends.
He took her hand. The connection was electric, like the time she’d touched a live wire when helping her father install a receptacle in their kitchen. Then, as now, she wanted to jump back, to fling her hand away from the power source.
But that would be absurd. She must play a role here. She must be the cool, calm, collected woman-in-control, even as she felt as skittish as an untrained horse.
He stood, his skin warm and refreshingly dry against her moist palm. “You know this is a bad idea.”
“Of course I do.” And she did, she truly did. The more they touched, the more they talked, the worse it would be. She flicked him a sidelong glance as they walked toward the glass elevator. What would she say if she were in control of her desire and had no fear of it or him? “But bad ideas are always the most fun.”
“I don’t even know your name.”
Hers was an alias, and she had no reason not to give it. “Evangeline. Yours?”
They reached the lift. He touched the Up button and the doors swept open, the transparent space empty inside. She entered first, uncomfortable with him at her back. She spun to face him.
“I think you know my name.” He stepped in. The doors slid shut.
“Do I?”
“McCrea.”
“First or last?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“Probably not. Which floor?”
“Fourth. That’s fifth to you Americans.”
She rolled her eyes and pressed the button. The elevator hummed, rising quickly. In the small space, they fell silent, the air between them thick and warm. She remembered the hardness of his stomach under her hands the night before, and the way he’d leaned into her at the market that morning, like he’d known how long it had been since she’d been caressed, and how vulnerable she’d be to the slightest contact.
She couldn’t trust him, mustn’t relax with him. He sensed too much about her. He couldn’t be allowed to touch her again.
The elevator slowed, leveled off. The doors hissed open, and she stepped out into the stone-tiled hallway through which she’d so recently sprinted. She let him take the lead down the hall.
He stopped in front of his room and turned, his face a mask of calm. “Last chance to run.”
She advanced toward him slowly, placing one foot in line with the other. Taking great care with the movements of her body was one way of maintaining control. “Should I be running from you?”
“Without a doubt.” He slipped his card through the door’s reader.
“But you seem like such a nice man.”
He laughed—that made twice now that she’d heard him express any kind of mirth—as he held open the door to his suite. “Now I really think you should run.”
“I’m obviously a terrible judge of character.” She slipped past him and into the large suite alight with the yellow warmth of a fading sun. The layout was familiar, with a large bed near the windows at the far end, and a seating area closer to the door. She dropped her tote bag full of groceries on a coffee table and her purse on the sofa as she strode to the French doors, which looked out over the drab backstreet. She remembered it well, having dangled over it just hours before to record his meeting with Ménellier.
“Fabulous view.”
“Indeed.” He’d followed her inside but hadn’t progressed far, lingering near the stairs that led to the loft. He stared at her and so wasn’t referring to the alley.
She shivered. Apparently, he needn’t be close to have an effect on her. She glanced around for the minifridge and found it hidden under a low shelf of highly polished wood, maybe teak, attached to the wall opposite the king-size bed. Inside its cold confines rested the tall, dark bottle of del Duque. She pulled it out. “There’s my girl,” she murmured. “Would you like a glass?” He came up behind her again like a cat, quick and quiet.
She whirled around, pressing the cold bottle between her breasts. “No. I prefer to swig expensive wine straight from the bottle, thanks.”
“Of course.” He held up a pair of tulip-shaped wineglasses. “But I do have copitas.”
“Copitas?” She blinked hard, surprised to see him holding the specific type of stemware that enhanced the aroma of good sherry. “Well, that changes everything. When did you have time to track those down?”
“Concierge service can be most obliging.”
“Ah. I suppose that’s who bought the wine, too.”
“Indeed.” He accepted the offered bottle and walked to the coffee table, where he sat and poured two glasses of sherry.
“Do you do anything for yourself?” She joined him on the small leather sofa, crossing her short legs high and tight, twisting her lower half into a helix. She liked the sense that she gave herself a hard shell, unbreakable and impenetrable.
“Only the important things.” His eyes strayed from the wine to her ankle and upward to her thigh, which she then realized was far too revealed by her manner of sitting. She adjusted her legs and his brow flickered. He dropped his attention back to the half-full glasses of pale amber liquid.
“And what’s important to a guy like you?” she asked.
“A guy like me?” He scratched at his chin, half-covering a smile. “What sort of guy am I?”
“The irritatingly obfuscating sort who answers questions with questions.” She took the glass he offered and sipped. The sherry lingered on her tongue, thin in texture but round in flavor, tasting of salted hazelnuts and buzzing with the strength of its high alcohol content. Without a whisper of sugar or fruit, thirty-year-old bone-dry sherry wasn’t the easiest wine in the world to drink, but its flavor was incomparable. She savored it.
“Is it what you expected?” he asked.
“Nothing ever is,” she said with a laugh and took another slow swallow. The alcohol began to warm her mouth and then her throat. Soon, it wo
uld heat her veins, and she’d begin to feel its effects on her judgment. Like most CIA field operatives, she drank regularly and had built up a higher-than-average tolerance to alcohol, but this stuff was strong, and she needed her full brainpower. One glass would suffice, and it should be enjoyed slowly. Poking around her tote bag, she found the snack containers and placed them on the table. “Olive?”
“Absolutely.” He opened the lid of one, inside which small green mounds glistened, but then glanced at her. “Toothpicks?”
She didn’t flinch, but what made him say that, in particular? Was it a reference to the toothpick tracker she’d dropped on him the night before? Was he trying to tell her that he’d found it? She supposed toothpicks were appropriate for eating olives, but there was the chance that he’d said the word simply to see how she’d react. So she just shrugged. “Sorry. Fingers?”
“It’s fine.” He reached for an olive. His hands were large and his fingers long, which wasn’t surprising given his height, but she couldn’t help but be distracted by their size and shape. They were beautiful, just like the rest of him.
He popped the olive into his mouth, the lightly stubbled skin around his jaw stretching as he chewed. “How do you like Marseille?” he asked, leaning back against the couch and taking another sip of sherry.
“It’s dirty, stinky, and violent. But beautiful, too, and so vibrant. So alive. I love it and hate it at the same time.”
“Why do you stay?”
“I don’t know. The good outweighs the bad, I guess. When that changes, I’ll go.”
“Back home?”
“No,” she answered, too quickly. She wondered what he’d make of that. “What about you? How do you like Marseille?”
He shrugged. “I don’t think much about it.”
He gave away nothing. She leaned back. “Then why don’t you leave?”
“I didn’t say I didn’t like it. I said I don’t think about it.”
“You don’t think about where you are?”
An Affair of Vengeance Page 7