He sat closer, feathering her hair behind her ear with gentle, clever fingers. “Why not? Do you want to be somewhere else right now?”
Yeah—naked in his bed again with his warm, hard body inside hers. “Well, this place is pretty nice.”
A muscle in his jaw twitched, and before she could talk herself out of it, she leaned in to kiss him.
He kissed her back, teasing and pulling, molding his mouth to hers while heat arrowed down her spine. Sam tangled her fingers into his hair, moaning softly as his mouth made promises she hoped his body would keep.
“You taste like a garden,” he murmured, lifting her onto his lap.
Beneath her thighs she could feel him already, hard and ready. “It’s the cucumbers.”
“No, it’s you,” he corrected with a low chuckle, running a hand up under her shirt to cup her breast.
Sam gasped as his fingers crept beneath her bra to glide across her nipple. Jesus. They’d spent the night doing this, and had only been out of bed for five or six hours, and already she craved his touch, his caress, his heat again. When his tongue and lips found the base of her jaw she went boneless, sinking into his embrace.
He pulled off the loose shirt and the tank top she wore under it, tossing them onto the floor behind them. Her bra followed a moment later, and both his hands went to work, fingers rubbing and gently tugging.
“I hope to hell you have body armor with you,” she moaned, pulling his shirt from his trousers and undoing the buttons.
“I actually put some in my wallet this morning,” he returned, laughter in his voice. “I haven’t done that since college.”
“Smart boy.”
His cell phone rang. “Shit.”
There was no question about whether he would answer it or not. Sam merely turned her attention to kissing his throat as he pulled the phone free and flipped it open.
“Addison.”
She felt the muscles tense across his chest, and lifted her head. His face had gone still, all of his attention focused on the other end of the phone. For a long moment he said nothing. Then his gaze met hers.
“She should hear it from you,” he said, and handed the phone to her. “Walter,” he said, his voice low and hard.
Her heart jumped as she lifted the receiver to her ear. “Stoney?”
“Hey, darlin’. I tried O’Hannon’s phone again this morning, and a cop answered it. He wouldn’t give me any details, and I had to hang up before they traced my call, but Sean O’Hannon’s dead.”
Sam took a breath. She didn’t like Sean O’Hannon—never had, and never would. But he had worked in her realm and was one of her kind. And he’d been involved, somehow, with the Trojan tablet. “Do you have any idea how it happened?”
“The cop—bobby, whatever they call ’em there—said an explosion. That’s all I know.” He was silent for a moment. “Sam, I’m gonna disappear for a few days. I’m thinking you should do the same.”
Rick slid his arms around her, not in passion now, but in comfort. She leaned her head against his shoulder. “Be careful,” she said. “You call me at this number as soon as you can and let me know you made it.”
“That number?” he repeated, the tone of his voice changing a little. “So you’re staying with the rich guy?”
“If I don’t, I’ll steal his cell phone,” she answered, though that was only for Stoney’s benefit. She wasn’t going anywhere.
“Fair enough. Keep your head down, baby.”
“You, too.”
The phone clicked dead, and she handed it back to Rick. He put it on the worktable, keeping his arms around her and slowly rocking back and forth. Why was it, she wondered, when in reality it couldn’t possibly make the least bit of difference, that she felt so safe in his arms? She drew another slow, deep breath, trying to collect her thoughts, and her emotions. God, she’d been so hot for him a moment ago.
“We should tell Castillo,” she suggested, and felt his approving nod against her cheek. “But only that I knew O’Hannon, and that he had expressed an interest in Trojan tablets and now he’s dead. Not that Stoney had anything to do with anything.”
“Stoney who?” he agreed, his low voice reverberating against her shoulder.
“I, um, should get dressed,” she said, becoming very conscious that she was naked from the waist up.
“I suppose so. For now.” Holding her a little away from him, he kissed her again, long and slow and deep. “You’re certain you’re all right?”
“Yeah. My little band of bad guys seems to be shrinking at an alarming rate, but hey, it’s all part of the excitement of the job, right?”
“Right.” He hugged her again, then helped her off his lap and back to her feet so she could gather up her bra and shirts. “Why don’t you see if you can narrow down the location of the other two tablets a little, and I’ll get on the phone with Castillo. It’s”—and he looked at his watch—a Rolex, of course—“eight at night in London, so I’ll give Sarah a call at home.”
Sam paused. “Sarah?”
“My secretary.” A small, wicked grin touched his sensuous mouth. “She’s very loyal, and sensitive to all my needs.”
“I bet.”
What did she care? She’d only known him a few days, and in a few days more they would go their separate ways, and she’d never set eyes on him again, except as the subject of a special on E! or something. As Partino had intimated, she hadn’t been his first, and she certainly wouldn’t be his last.
He caught her arm as she pulled on her loose shirt over the tank. “I’m a rather single-minded individual, Samantha. And I’ve already told you, you have my attention.”
“I’m not jealous, Addison.” She took her seat again. “You’re fun. Now move it. I’m busy.” Ha. That would show him. He hadn’t been her first, either.
“Fun,” he said slowly, not moving from his stance behind her. “I’m fun.”
“Yes. Go away and buy an island or something.”
Before she could finish her smirk he yanked her chair, tilting it back on two legs. She flailed, trying to keep her balance, while he leaned over to look down at her upturned face. “Telling me what to do is a good way to convince me to do the opposite, just to spite you,” he murmured, and covered her mouth with his in an upside-down kiss that curled her toes.
“Point taken,” she managed, grabbing on to the edge of the table to pull herself upright again.
“Not yet, but you’ll take it soon,” he whispered, and strolled out of the room, whistling.
“Shit,” she muttered, shivering, and went back to the book.
As he finished his conversation with Frank Castillo and hung up his office phone, Richard realized that he hadn’t informed Samantha they would be dining out that evening. Well, it would undoubtedly cause an argument, and considering the day she’d had so far, he’d give her a bit more time to recover herself.
Castillo had been highly interested in the demise of Sean O’Hannon, though if anything it made more trouble for the police where Danté Partino was concerned. With a death in England, Partino had likely had a very limited role in this mess, if any at all.
He sat there, gazing out over his garden and pond. When he’d flown in from Stuttgart last week, he’d intended to buy a television station, spend a day or two relaxing with Tom Donner and his family, arrange for Danté to ship the tablet to the British Museum, and with a handful of business detours follow it back so he could stay a few weeks at his main house in Devon.
Instead he’d nearly been blown up, had the tablet stolen, missed the deadline on WNBT, gotten Tom thrown into his pool, and met Samantha Jellicoe.
Of course there were additional highlights: dead thieves, mysterious tails, Sam nearly getting killed in the room he’d given her, fake tablets, a man he’d known and trusted for ten years arrested, and some really fine sex.
Samantha had called him “fun.” While he had no personal objection to the term, he knew what she meant by it, and that was what he di
dn’t like. “Fun” meant something you did for an afternoon or while you had nothing better to do.
That should have been perfectly agreeable to him—but it wasn’t. In the American vernacular, it pissed him off. He still wanted her in his bed, in his arms. And if he wasn’t finished with her, she wasn’t allowed to be finished with him.
Whichever body part he was thinking with, though, he was well aware that there was more to this than the vertical and horizontal maneuverings of the two of them. O’Hannon’s death meant that for certain someone else was involved. As far as he could tell, the number of people who had something to do with the tablet for one reason or other was at least six: Samantha, Stoney, DeVore, Partino, O’Hannon, and whoever had killed O’Hannon.
“Why?” he muttered to himself. Yes, it was rare and valuable, but so were a great many other things. Why this one, why here, why now?
Someone knocked at his door. “Come in,” he called, then remembered that he’d locked it for his phone call to Castillo. He started to rise, but the door swung open before he could get to his feet.
“Okay,” Samantha said, pocketing something that looked like a paper clip, “tablet number one is in the possession of Gustav Harving in Hamburg. Number two belongs to the Arutani family in Istanbul, but apparently there are several prominent families by that name.”
“Good enough for a start. I’ll call Sarah. We should actually be able to do this through completely legitimate connections.”
She gave a brief smile. “That’ll be a nice change, won’t it?”
He had a few other things he needed to go over with his secretary, but he preferred to discuss them without Samantha being present. “Do you have plans for this afternoon?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she answered, her voice rich with sarcasm. “Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla. How about you?”
With a chuckle, he rose. “Might I join you? You can explain the finer points of giant monster warfare to me.”
“Sure.” She shrugged, studying his expression. “You want me to leave you alone now, right? Just sit around and not do anything?”
“And stay out of trouble,” he added. “I need to make a few more phone calls. I won’t be long.”
“I’ll be in my room, then.”
She turned on her heel, but he caught up to her, sliding a hand down her arm. “I thought we might go out for dinner again tonight,” he said, wondering how she would react to what he was about to tell her. Damn, she kept him on his toes.
“Okay. Won’t Hans be hurt, though? He does worship me, and I was hoping for an ice sculpture carved in my likeness.”
“It’d melt in a second flat. And Hans will survive.” Richard kissed her cheek. “I’ll call Kate and confirm.”
She stiffened. “Kate? Kate who?”
“Kate Donner. Tom’s wife. They’ve invited us over for dinner.”
Her expression folded into a comical mix of horror and disbelief. “You’re kidding me, right?”
“Nope. We’re to be there at seven.”
Sam backed toward the door. “No way. Forget it. I am not doing the domestic.”
“It’s just one evening,” he cajoled, advancing as she retreated, in their own private version of the double-dare tango. “The Donners are just about my only venture into the domestic, as you call it. I happen to enjoy it.”
“I’ll tell you what,” she returned, running a hand down his chest. “We stay here, and you can have your way with me.”
Richard grinned. “I intend to do that anyway, when we return.” He kissed her again, this time on her warm and soft mouth. “You like new experiences,” he said. “This’ll be one for you.”
With a grimace she unlocked his door and pulled it open again. “Fine. But only because I owe you, Brit.”
“Thanks, Yank.”
Nineteen
Sunday, 5:48 p.m.
Samantha could hear the soft whir of her father spinning in his grave. By no stretch of the imagination would Martin Jellicoe have been able to picture his daughter preparing for a date with Richard Addison—at an attorney’s house, of all things. He wouldn’t see any profit in it, and even worse, he would happily point out that the venture had the high likelihood of a negative outcome for her.
She had her own reservations, but they were more along the lines of just how deeply she was becoming involved with this man. Sex was one thing; and supremely pleasurable as it had been, it had also put Rick firmly on her side. She’d be an idiot not to make good use of that and not to be flattered by it. But dating him was a whole different matter. It wasn’t just her looking after her own best interests; it was becoming entangled, meeting his friends, passing herself off as what—his girlfriend? His lover?
Her heart beginning to pound, Sam dug into her closet of borrowed clothes. “What the hell am I supposed to wear?”
From the sitting room she could hear Rick laughing at her. “Wear whatever you want. But Godzilla’s attacking the mechanical one. I thought you said Godzilla was always bad.”
Picking a sundress, she walked to the bedroom door. “No, I said he was best when he was bad. How does this look?” She held up the short red and yellow dress.
He craned his neck to look over the back of the couch. “It’s nice. But—”
She scowled. “But what?”
“The scratches and cuts on your back will show.”
Crap. With the antiseptic Dr. Klemm had given her, the cuts had stopped hurting, and she kept forgetting about them. “What are you going to wear?”
“What I’ve got on.”
“But you look nice.”
“Thank you. I’ll spill something on my shirt, if you like.”
He was teasing her again, as he had been from the moment he realized that the idea of dining with Tom and Kate Donner unsettled her. She’d agreed to go, though, partly because he’d intimated that she was a coward if she refused, but mostly because after he’d charged to her rescue with the grenades that morning, she’d felt like she owed him something.
“Found anything?” Rick asked, leaning into the closet.
“Go back and tell me what’s happening,” she said. “I’ll show you what I find.”
“Something in green would be nice. In honor of Godzilla.”
“Get back to the couch, fella.”
He raised his hands in mock surrender. “All right, all right.”
Despite herself she was chuckling, which in itself was frightening. She couldn’t be that connected to him yet, that seeing him happy made her happy.
This new life was so strange—and so tempting. She shook herself, pulling another summery dress off its hanger and shutting the closet door so she could try it on without him commenting on it. She needed to stop being distracted by the soft pleasures of this life. In her line of work, softness equaled imprisonment—or death. Work. She was working, trying to figure out what was going on.
And while she might still have a halfhearted question or two about Donner’s involvement, she had none regarding Danté Partino’s. When the cops had carted off the estate manager, they’d also taken boxes of paperwork from his office. For such a prissy man, he’d kept a cluttered work area, but she hadn’t commented on that. Rather, she intended to visit it later tonight to see what might be left. If that failed, finding out where Partino lived should be simple enough. Since Rick had taken the tracking down of the other two tablets out of her hands, she needed to do something. Sitting on her ass drove her crazy, and she wasn’t about to forget that someone seemed to want her dead. As opposed to Addison, who just wanted her.
“Okay, how’s this?” she asked, putting a firm clamp on her nerves. She would fit in tonight, because that was what she did. If not for Addison’s irritating ability to decipher exactly what she was thinking and feeling, she would count this evening as an easy job. Okay, fairly easy.
“You did pick green,” he said, standing again.
“It has short sleeves and a high back,” she explained patiently. “If you think I
look like the monster who ate Tokyo, though, I’ll go change again.”
“You don’t look like Godzilla,” he returned, the warm smile lighting his lean, handsome face. “You look great.”
Sam blew out her breath. “Good. Now for hair and makeup.”
“You don’t need any.”
“Good answer, but I’m not asking for flattery. I want to look…nice. Like for normal people. I assume Mrs. Donner is normal, anyway. I know Harvard isn’t.”
“You got on Tom’s bad side, since he thinks people occasionally try to take advantage of me. He really is fairly normal—though my experience in that area is rather limited.”
“Mine, too.” The big battle between the Godzillas was heating up, so she took the seat beside Rick on the couch. Makeup could wait until Tokyo was saved. “May I make a guess?” she asked after a moment, slanting him a look.
He was still gazing at her. “Of course.”
“No one takes advantage of you, do they? Ever.”
“Nope.”
“But your friend Peter Wallis did.”
His jaw clenched. “There’s one exception to every rule, I suppose.”
“Just one?” she returned.
“You’re talking about Danté, I presume?”
She’d meant Donner, but nodded anyway. “You trusted him.”
“I did, but it’s not the same. I’ve known him for a while, but he’s not in the same category as Peter. And because of Peter, I choose my friends carefully these days, Sam. I’ve been disappointed once. It won’t happen again.”
She met his gaze again. “So which category am I in?”
Gray eyes touched hers. “You’re a whole new category, I’m afraid.” He ran a hand slowly up her thigh. “A very interesting one.”
Heat began at the point of contact and slid up her leg. “Okay, another question.”
“You’re making me miss the movie, Yank.”
She ignored the protest; he obviously had no true appreciation of campy monster movies. “You’ve been sitting on this couch with me for half an hour, and you’re being a perfect gentleman.”
“Ah. You mean why aren’t we naked and making passionate love to one another?”
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