Dangerous to Hold

by Merline Lovelace

  Fighting the ache that intensified with each pulse of the tiny blue vein at the side of her forehead, he stilled his movements.

  “Alexandra?”

  The dark lashes lifted.

  “I think you ought to know that massaging Wily Willie’s aches and pains never gave me a whole set of my own.”

  It didn’t take her long to catch his meaning. Eyes wide, she tugged her leg out of his hold.

  As her warm flesh slid from his palm, Nate cursed the sense of loss that shot through him. Settling back against the stone wall, he raised one leg to ease the tight constriction in his jeans and rested his arm across his knee.

  With Alex watching him warily, he repeated a silent, savage litany.

  This woman was his target.

  She was the focus of his mission.

  He was here to locate a small black box and extract it from her. Not the shuddering, shimmering surrender he was beginning to want with a need that was fast threatening to overwhelm both his common sense and his self-restraint.

  Christ! He had to get himself under control.

  Forcing his eyes and his thoughts away from the woman sitting two heartbeats away, he made himself focus on the mission. He’d made a little progress this morning, but not much. With Katerina and Anya and the others as willing, if unwitting, accomplices, he’d pretty well searched the entire camp. If Alex had the damn thing in her possession, he was willing to bet it wasn’t hidden in any of the goathide tents.

  A frustration he didn’t allow to show grabbed at his gut. It was two parts physical and one part professional, with a whole lot of personal thrown in. The agent in him didn’t like the fact that his progress was so slow. As a man, he was finding the fact that Alex couldn’t bring herself to trust him harder and harder to deal with.

  As he settled back against the stone wall, Nate hoped to hell Maggie wasn’t running into as many complications on her end of this mission as he seemed to be.

  Chapter 9

  Oh, Lord, Maggie thought with an inner groan. As if this operation weren’t complicated enough!

  Reaching across the table, she eased a cloudy, half-full glass out of Richard’s shaky grasp.

  “But we’re not fin… We haven’t finush…” He blinked owlishly. “We’re not done with the toasts.”

  “I’m sure President Cherkoff will understand if we don’t salute the rest of the nations represented on the UN team. At least not until they arrive tomorrow.”

  She set the glass out of Richard’s reach and glanced at the man with the shock of silver hair and the gray, almost opaque eyes. Those eyes had sent an inexplicable shiver along Maggie’s nerves when the White Wolf of Balminsk received them a half hour ago.

  “We’ve been traveling for three days,” she offered as a polite excuse. “We haven’t slept in anything other than a vertical position in all that time. We must seek out our beds.”

  President Cherkoff curled a lip in derision, as if in recognition of the fact that Dr. Richard Worthington would be horizontal soon enough, with or without the benefit of a bed.

  Maggie stiffened at the look, although she had to admit, if only to herself, that Richard was rather the worse for wear. She hadn’t needed his ingenious aside to know that he’d never tasted vodka before. When the first shot hit the back of his throat, his brown eyes had rounded until they resembled one of Vasili’s threadbare truck tires. His Adam’s apple had worked furiously, but, to give him his due, he’d swallowed the raw liquor with only a faint, gasping choke.

  Unfortunately, with each of the interminable toasts their host insisted on, Richard had managed to get the vitriolic alcohol down a little more easily. In the process, he seemed to have lost the use of his vocal cords. Maggie should’ve had the foresight to warn him to sip the darn stuff instead of letting himself be pressured into following their host’s example and throwing it down his throat.

  “One last salute,” Cherkoff ordered in heavily accented English. “Then my son will show you to your quarters.”

  It was a test. A crude one, admittedly, but a test nonetheless. Maggie recognized that fact as readily as Major Nikolas Cherkoff, who stood just behind his father. The livid scar slashing across the major’s cheek twitched once, then was still.

  Richard stretched across the table to retrieve his glass. The clear liquid sloshed over his shaky hand as he raised it shoulder-high.

  “To the work that has brought you here,” the White Wolf rasped. “May it achieve what we wish of it.”

  Since Cherkoff had made no secret of the fact that he bitterly resented the UN’s interference in the affairs of Balminsk, Maggie wondered exactly what results he wished the team would achieve. She’d been briefed in detail about Cherkoff’s reluctant compliance with the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. Only the fact that his country teetered on the brink of collapse had forced him to comply with the START provisions at all.

  Once part of the breadbasket of the Soviet Union, Balminsk was now an economic basket case. During their ride across the high, fertile plains, Maggie had learned from Vasili that the huge combines that had once moved through endless wheat fields in long, zigzagging rows had fallen into disrepair, with no replacement parts to be had. The rich black chernozem soil now lay fallow and unplanted.

  As they drove through the deserted, echoing capital, Maggie had seen only empty store windows and equally empty streets. A casual query to Major Cherkoff had elicited the flat response that prices in this small country now doubled every four weeks. A month’s salary wouldn’t cover the cost of one winter boot…if there was one to be bought.

  From her briefings, Maggie knew most experts blamed Balminsk’s problems on President Cherkoff’s mismanagement and the unceasing war he’d conducted with his hated enemy, the old headman of Karistan. Unlike Karistan, however, Balminsk had at last ceded to economic pressures.

  In return for promises of substantial aid, Cherkoff had agreed to allow the UN to inspect and dismantle the missiles occupying the silos on the Balminsk side of the border. But the old hard-line Communist wasn’t happy about it. Not at all.

  Even Richard sensed the hostility emanating from the ramrod-stiff man across the table. Blinking to clear his glazed eyes, he lofted his glass higher.

  “To…to the work that brought us here.”

  Throwing back his head, Richard tossed down the rest of the vodka. He swallowed with a gurgling sort of gasp, blinked rapidly several times, then turned to look at Maggie.

  As did the White Wolf of Balminsk.

  And Major Nikolas Cherkoff.

  Suppressing a sigh, Maggie pushed her thick, black-framed lenses back up the bridge of her nose with one forefinger and lifted her half-full glass. She downed the colorless liquid in two swallows, set the glass back on the table and gave the president a polite smile.

  Behind that smile, liquid fire scorched her throat, already searing from the cautious sips she’d taken after each toast. Raw heat shot from her stomach to her lungs to her eyelids and back again, while her nerve endings went up in flames. Yet Maggie’s bland smile gave no hint of how desperately she wanted to grab the water carafe sitting beside the vodka bottle and pour its contents down her throat.

  The White Wolf bared his teeth in response and waved a curt dismissal.

  With Richard stumbling behind her, Maggie followed the major from the dank reception room. Once out of the president’s line of sight, she slipped two fingers under her glasses to wipe away the moisture that had collected at the corners of her eyes. Dragging in quick, shallow breaths, she brought her rioting senses under control and began to take careful note of her surroundings.

  From the outside, Balminsk’s presidential palace had appeared a magical place of odd-shaped buildings, high turrets and colorful, onion-shaped domes. Inside, however, long strips of paint peeled from the ceilings and brown water stains discolored the walls. The cavernous reception room they’d been shown into boasted ornate carved pillars and moldings, but the gilt that had once decorated them was
chipped and more verdigris than gold. The empty rooms they now walked through hadn’t withstood the passage of time any better. Maggie’s boots thumped against bare, sadly damaged parquet floors and sent echoes down the deserted corridors.

  After a number of convoluted turns, the major stopped in front of a set of doors guarded by an individual wearing a motley assortment of uniform items and a lethal-looking Uzi over one shoulder. At Cherkoff’s nod, the guard threw open the doors and stood to one side.

  “It is not the St. Regis,” Nikolas said, “but I hope you will be comfortable here. There are enough rooms for the rest of your team members when they arrive.”

  Richard mumbled something inaudible and tripped inside. Maggie paused on the threshold, tilting her head to study the major’s lean face. Just when had this enigmatic, scarred man been inside that venerable landmark, the St. Regis?

  “I spent two years in New York City,” he said in answer to her unspoken question. “As military chargé with the Soviet consulate.”

  Before Maggie could comment on that interesting bit of information, he bowed in an old-fashioned gesture totally at odds with his rather sinister appearance.

  “Sleep well, Dr. St. Clare.”

  Maggie stepped inside the suite of rooms. The door closed behind her, and she heard the faint murmur of voices as the major issued orders to the guard to stay at his post.

  Her eyes thoughtful, she strolled across a small vestibule lined with an array of doors. In the first room she peered into, a magnificent nineteenth-century sleigh bed in black walnut stood in solitary splendor in the middle of the floor. Her battered metal suitcase was set beside it. There wasn’t another stick of furniture to be seen. No chair, no wardrobe, and nothing that even faintly resembled a sink. After a quick search through several other similarly sparse rooms, she finally located Richard.

  He was standing in an odd, five-sided room, staring out a window that showed only the wall of an opposite wing and the gathering darkness.

  Tugging off her heavy glasses, Maggie slipped them into her shirt pocket. “Richard, have you discovered the bathroom yet?”

  “N-no.”

  Her heavily penciled brows drew together at his mumbled response. “Are you all right? Can I get you something? I think I have some Bromo-Seltzer in my bag.”

  He hunched his shoulders. “No. Thanks.”

  “Richard, if you’re going to throw up, I wish you’d find the bathroom first.”

  “I—I’m not going to throw up.”

  Maggie sighed. Crossing the dusty parquet floor, she gave his shoulder a consoling pat.

  “Look, you don’t have to be embarrassed or macho about this. That was pretty potent stuff you chug-a-lugged back there. I’m not surprised it’s making you sick.”

  “It…it’s not making me sick…exactly.”

  “Then what?” Maggie tugged at his shoulder. “Richard, for heaven’s sake, turn around. Let me look at you.”

  “No, I don’t think I should.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s…not…a good idea.”

  Alarmed at the low, almost panicky note in his voice, Maggie took a firm grip on his arm and swung him around. He stood rigid and unmoving, his brown eyes pinned on the blank space just over her left shoulder.

  Frowning, she searched his face. His dark hair straggled down over his forehead, and he was a little green about the gills, but he didn’t look ill enough to explain his unnatural rigidity or the way he kept swallowing convulsively. Unless…unless the damned White Wolf of Balminsk had slipped something other than vodka into his glass.

  “Richard, what’s the matter?” Maggie asked sharply. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “It’s not an unexpected physiological reaction,” he said through stiff lips.

  “What is?” She shook his arm. “Tell me what you’re feeling!”

  “In…in clinical terms?”

  “In any terms!” she shouted.

  He swallowed again, then forced himself to meet her eyes. “I—I’m aroused.”

  “You’re what?” Involuntarily, Maggie stepped back. Her gaze dropped, and then her jaw.

  Dr. Richard Worthington was most definitely aroused. To a rather astonishing degree.

  “I’m sorry…” His handsome young face was flaming. “It’s the vodka. Apparently alcohol has a stimulating and quite unexpected effect on my endocrine system.”

  Maggie dragged her stunned gaze away from his runaway endocrines. Wetting her lips, she tried to ease his embarrassment with a smile.

  “Gee, thanks. And here I thought it might have been this road-dust cologne I’ve been wearing for the last six hours.”

  His agonized expression deepened. “Actually, you have a very delicate scent, one that agitates my olfactory sense.”

  “Richard, I was kidding!”

  “I’m not. I find you very excitatory. Sexually speaking, that is. Er, all of you.”

  Maggie gaped at him. She was wearing boots that gave her the grace and resonance of a bull moose making his way through the north woods. Her pants were so stiff and baggy, not even the roughnecks on her father’s crew would have pulled them on to wade through an oil spill. The heavy, figure-flattening T-shirt under her scratchy wool shirt just about zeroed out her natural attributes, and there was enough charcoal on her eyebrows to start a good-size campfire. Yet this young man was staring at her with a slowly gathering masculine warmth in his brown eyes that made her feel as though the artists at Glamour Shots had just worked their magic with her.

  It was Maggie’s turn to swallow. “I think we need to talk about this.”

  “Not if it makes you feel uncomfortable,” Richard replied with a quiet dignity.

  It wasn’t making her feel uncomfortable, Maggie thought wryly. She wasn’t the one with a bead of sweat trickling down the side of her neck and the endocrine system working double overtime.

  Although it obviously took some effort, he managed a small, tight smile. “You don’t have to worry. I won’t attempt anything Neanderthal. But you must know how I feel about you.”

  Astounded at his mastery over a vodka-filled stomach and rampaging hormones, Maggie shook her head.

  “Well, no, as a matter of fact. I don’t.”

  He lifted one hand and traced the line of her cheek with a gentle finger, gliding over the semitattoo on the side of her jaw.

  “I think you shine with an inner beauty few women possess, Dr. St. Clare…Megan. A beauty that comes from the heart. I’ve seen you swallow your impatience with me time and again these last few days. You’ve never once undermined my authority with the team, or let the delays and inconveniences bother you. I’ve heard you laugh in that delightful way you have when the others were simmering with irritation, and seen your eyes sparkle with a joy of life that makes my breath catch. You’re a kind person, Megan, and a very beautiful woman. And I’m sure you’re a most proficient geologist,” he tacked on.

  Kindness wasn’t exactly high on the list of most desired qualities in an OMEGA agent. And, in Richard’s case, at least, beauty was definitely in the eye of the beholder.

  But Maggie sighed and let her chin rest in his warm palm. That was the longest, most coherent string of sentences she’d heard the young physicist put together at one time, and probably the sweetest compliment she’d ever receive in her life.

  “Just how many women have you really known, Richard?” she asked softly. “Outside the laboratory, I mean?”

  The shy smile that made him seem so much younger than his years tugged at his lips. “Aside from my mother? One, really. And I didn’t particularly impress her, either. In fact, I’ve only heard from her once in the three years since we met. But that doesn’t mean I don’t fully appreciate what I feel for you.”

  Maggie didn’t make the mistake of dismissing his emotions lightly. For all his seeming ineptitude, Richard was a highly intelligent man. And one whose self-restraint she had to admire. She doubted she’d exhibit the same rigid control after sev
eral glasses of potent vodka if she was locked in a room with, say…

  Unbidden, Adam Ridgeway’s slate blue eyes and lean, aristocratic face filled her mind. Maggie pulled her chin free of Richard’s light hold, frowning at the sudden wild leaping of her pulse. She must have been more affected by that one glass of raw alcohol than she’d thought.

  “We’ll talk about this tomorrow, after the vodka has worked its way through your, ah, system.”

  “Megan…”

  “Get some sleep, Richard. The rest of the team should arrive early in the morning. When they do, you’ll want to update them on your meeting with Cherkoff and review the schedule for our first day on-site.”

  He accepted her reminder of his responsibilities with good grace and stood quietly as she left.

  With a silent shake of her head, Maggie made her way to her own room. Good grief. She’d better make sure Richard avoided any more ceremonial toasts. That rather spectacular display of his endocrine system would definitely rank among the more vivid memories she’d take away from this particular mission, but it wasn’t one she wanted him to repeat on a frequent basis. Not when she needed to focus all her concentration on nuclear missiles and hostile, hungry wolves.

  Maggie stopped just inside the threshold to her room and eyed the thick, feather-filled comforter piled atop the curved bed. Imagining how wonderful it would be to sink down into that fluffy mound, she sighed. Later, she promised herself. Later, she would strip down to her T-shirt and panties and lose herself in that cloud of softness.

  Right now, however, she had a mission to conduct.

  Closing the door to her room, she sat on the edge of the bed and punched Cowboy’s code into her wristwatch. While she waited for him to respond, she opened the suitcase and rummaged through her possessions. By the time she’d tugged off the plaid shirt and bulky pants and pulled on a black turtleneck and slacks, Nate still hadn’t returned her signal. Grinning, Maggie wondered if he was having difficulty slipping away from a potential bride who wanted to inspect his plumbing.