“Dean Taggert’s a badass former street cop with a temper.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
“Jackie has an attitude.”
Sam grinned. “Also not a surprise.”
“Mulrooney is a bit of a blowhard. Brandon’s a wild card.”
“And Alec?”
“The circumstances surrounding his shooting were… less than ideal.”
Sam rolled her eyes. “Especially for him. Getting shot and all.”
The woman was absolutely right, and Lily agreed with her. There was simply no way to explain bureau politics, that Alec’s survival might have been viewed with skepticism because the other agent had not survived. It wasn’t fair, especially now that she knew more about what had really happened. No more than what had happened to Wyatt was fair. It was just the way things went in an agency made powerful by J. Edgar Hoover, the king of intrigue himself.
“What about you? What’s your story?”
Lily wrapped her arms around one upraised leg, staring down at her own knee. “I’m a little too emotional.”
“Considering I’ve felt like screaming, crying, or punching someone since just about the minute you guys showed up in my life, I can see where that would be a problem.”
Unable to resist Sam’s sarcasm, Lily had to smile. She seldom spent time with anyone outside of the office these days, and had forgotten, since Laura’s death, how much she enjoyed simply hanging out and talking with another woman. As much as she liked Jackie Stokes, the other agent was older, and in a different place. Lily honestly couldn’t remember the last time she’d gone for a girls’ night out, or indulged in a man-griping session with a single woman her own age.
It had been at least two years ago; that was certain. Before Zach’s life had intersected with a monster’s.
The dark thoughts immediately pulled the smile from her lips and the good humor from her heart. Sam eyed her curiously, but before she could ask anything, Lily’s cell phone rang. Seeing Anspaugh’s name, she took a deep breath and answered.
“Where are you? What the hell’s this message you left, that you might have a problem?”
“Sorry, Anspaugh. Something came up. I’m at a hotel in the city. I have to stay with a witness all night.”
“Damn it, Lil, we need you!”
She bit back an annoyed don’t call me that response and said, “You guys know what you’re doing. It’s not like the suspect is going to realize a man is typing rather than a woman. None of us are children.”
“Yeah, but you can make it sound more legit; I know you can. Just that shit about knowing whether a real boy would call himself Peter Pan. I wouldn’ta thought of that, and you did.”
She didn’t know that Anspaugh had the sense to know a boy wouldn’t call himself Cinderella.
“And if the son of a bitch suddenly asks for a voice chat, you’ve got a whole lot better chance of pulling that off.”
Lily blew out an impatient breath. “I in no way sound like an eleven-year-old girl.”
“Well, you sure as hell sound more like one than me or my guys do.”
Closing her eyes, she rubbed at the inside corners of them with her fingers, trying to figure out a way to give everyone what they needed. “Look, if I can work something out, I’ll let you know, all right? Otherwise, you’re just going to have to proceed without me. I’m sorry.”
When she opened them, she saw Sam waving and mouthing something from the other side of the room. Lily covered the mouthpiece with her hand and raised a brow.
“I can stay here by myself,” the other woman insisted in a loud whisper. “You don’t have to babysit me; it’s not like anybody in the known universe knows where I am.”
Lily was shaking her head before the other woman finished speaking. “If I leave my assigned position, I would not only lose my job; I would deserve to.”
Sam opened her mouth to persist, then closed it again, realizing Lily was right and not arguing it. A woman of common sense, this one, which made Lily like her even more.
“Look, if you’re sitting on a witness,” Anspaugh was saying, “why don’t we swap? I’ll send one of my guys over to keep watch; you come do this, and you’ll be back there in two or three hours, tops.”
She waffled. It made sense. She wouldn’t be leaving Sam with anyone other than another FBI agent.
“Come on, I know you want this guy as bad as we do.”
“Yeah, I do.”
“He’s been on this site for weeks. No telling how many kids he’s already been in contact with. Christ, for all we know, he’s already molested some of them.”
Lily felt the blood drain from her face. Anspaugh definitely knew which buttons to push.
“Let me think about it…”
“We don’t have time for you to think about it,” he said, his belligerence showing.
She kept cool. “Then the answer is no.”
Anspaugh breathed heavily through the phone, his anger a living thing. Men like him didn’t like being told no. One more reason Lily wanted to finish this double life and stop working with the man. Because sooner or later, she knew, he was going to ask her a more personal question, and would like hearing no even less.
“Would you just think about it?” he asked, every word bitten out from what sounded like a rigidly clenched jaw. “If you’re in the city, I can have a car pick you up within a half hour. It’s only seven twenty. If you can swing it anytime before nine, call me, okay?”
“Fine.”
He disconnected without another word.
“Problem?”
“Another case,” she admitted, shaking her head and wondering how on earth she’d gotten herself into this situation.
“Why would you need to talk like a little girl?”
Reaching into her purse and pulling out a bottle of aspirin, Lily popped a couple of them to ward off the headache building in her temples. Then she admitted, “I’ve been helping another team try to capture a sexual predator.”
“Sick bastards.”
“Yeah. This one is especially bad.” At least, if they were indeed on the trail of Lovesprettyboys, he was. Whatever else he had or hadn’t done, the degenerate had definitely tried to set up the pay-per-view murder of a little kid.
She looked at the door, wondering if she dared take Anspaugh up on his offer to have someone replace her. He was a supervisor, requesting her assistance, providing another agent to cover her. It was a legitimate solution.
Somehow, though, she sensed Wyatt wouldn’t see it that way.
Besides, she didn’t totally trust Anspaugh. He had such a big chip on his shoulder about her boss, she couldn’t count on him to send over somebody really good to protect Sam.
No. She couldn’t do it. If Anspaugh called back, she’d just have to make it clear she was not abandoning her post. Hopefully they could string Peter Pan along, get him on the line, and tomorrow she would be there to help reel him in.
It wasn’t an ideal solution for her, personally, but it was the professional one. She owed Wyatt her loyalty. And she owed Samantha Dalton the best protection she could give her, not a pass-off to someone she didn’t even know, who had no idea of the kind of crazy man who was after her.
“It’ll work out,” she mumbled, talking more to herself.
“If you say so.”
When a knock suddenly sounded on the door to the suite, Lily leaped up, gesturing for Sam to remain quiet. She skirted the wall, not approaching the entrance head-on. They had not ordered any food; no one was supposed to know they were here. Sam hadn’t even contacted her family members, who, she said, were used to her being out of touch and wouldn’t miss her.
Her hand on her service weapon, Lily moved to the peephole, looked out, and saw a familiar face. “It’s okay,” she said, reaching for the handle.
Definitely okay. As she opened the door, she nodded in decision. Because a solution to her problem had just landed in her lap.
She was going.
&n
bsp; Alec didn’t seem too happy about playing babysitter. He’d agreed, when Lily had asked him to step in for a couple of hours, but he sure wasn’t smiling about it. Sam had the feeling he wished one of his fellow agents had been the one to swing by the hotel with a suitcase of clothes and toiletries from her apartment.
She knew why. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be around her. She suspected the problem was that he did, a little too much. And he didn’t entirely trust himself to be alone with her in an anonymous hotel room.
Which was why, since Agent Fletcher had departed a half hour ago,Alec had been sitting on a chair by the window, far from the couch where she sat. His very posture discouraging conversation, he’d spent his time looking out at the cityscape. He’d answered a few questions-mainly confirming that they found nothing suspicious in her apartment-but beyond that had managed only a few comments asking whether she was hungry and if the room was too cold.
Finally, she’d had enough of it. “Would you please stop acting like you’re afraid I’m going to jump on you?”
He jerked his head to stare at her over his shoulder. “Excuse me?”
“For heaven’s sake, Alec, you’re sitting over there with an invisible chastity belt wrapped around yourself, as if you’re in need of protection. Like you have to be stern and pissy to keep the horny divorcée from tempting you into letting down your guard while on duty.”
He half coughed, or might have laughed. “Horny divorcée?”
Sam stood and crossed to the window, staring down at him. The lamplight didn’t extend far into this corner of the room. His face was bathed in shadow, so she couldn’t tell if those sensual lips were smiling or those amazing green eyes glinted with humor.
“I get it, okay?” she said. She wrapped her arms around herself, surprised by how much cooler the room was over here. “Despite what happened last night, this thing between us isn’t going anywhere else until the case is over. I’m not Eve. I know I can’t seduce you, and I’m not going to try.”
He slowly rose to stand before her, so close she felt the warmth of his body and the brush of his clothes against her own. The chill permeating the glass windows was suddenly banished, pure heat washing over her. His voice thick, he admitted, “It’s because you could that I’ve been staying put over here.”
She managed a weak whisper. “Could?”
“Seduce me,” he admitted. He lifted a hand, brushing the tips of his fingers across her cheek, sliding them into her hair. The touch was simple, restrained, nonsexual, but also loaded with possibility. She could tilt her face into his palm, kiss the pulse point at his wrist, whisper a plea for an even more intimate touch.
“You could make me forget what I’m doing here tonight and what the stakes are.”
“Really?” she asked. Part of her reacted with pure excitement, knowing she could make something happen between them tonight if she pushed it. Another with pure feminine pleasure that this amazing man genuinely wanted her.
“Yeah. Really.”
“I’m not much into the seduction game,” she whispered, “and I know I should retreat to my separate corner and let you keep this barrier in place. But I can’t deny a big part of me just doesn’t want to.”
“Ditto.”
A helpless moan emerged from the back of her throat when he touched her neck, sliding the side of his thumb against the vulnerable flesh beneath her earlobe. Sam closed her eyes, remembering what it felt like to have a man’s hands on her body. Acknowledging how much she’d missed it.
It had been so long. A year since her divorce, months before that since she’d realized how thoroughly her husband had betrayed her and had cut him out of her life. She’d grown cold and hard. Her nerve endings had dulled, her skin desensitized during all that time without any type of human connection.
All those sensations came roaring back with a vengeance, warmth turning into fire, want becoming desperate need.
“This has never happened to me before,” she said, unable to resist lifting one hand to his chest, running her fingers as lightly there as he was on her neck. “I mean, something this physical, this soon.”
She wondered if he could say the same. Alec’s innate charm and the glimpses of flirtatiousness she’d witnessed said he had a lot of experience with women. But his tension and aloofness also said that part of his life might have changed when he’d nearly died.
“It’s not just physical,” he admitted, not sounding exactly happy about it. “I want you, but I also like you, Sam. I think I could like you a lot. I don’t want anything to happen to you, especially not on my watch.”
She understood. He wasn’t stopping her, wasn’t pushing her away. With a few more whispers, the soft press of her mouth on his throat, perhaps, she could probably have what she wanted. What they both wanted.
Tempting. Oh, God, so tempting.
“So would you do me a favor?” he asked, even as he leaned down, his face so close to hers they exchanged breaths that further dispersed the chill. “Would you walk back over there and sit down?” He didn’t give her a chance to answer. Instead, he leaned even closer, until that last sliver of space between them disappeared and their lips touched.
No frenzied, frantic kiss like last night, this was a soft caress, a gentle plea. Even a promise that there would be more to come, later. When the time was right.
He lifted his mouth from hers far enough to whisper, “Please?”
Breathless and every bit as aroused by his tenderness as she’d been by his hunger the night before, she still somehow managed to nod. “Okay.”
“Thank you.”
On shaky legs, she retreated. Part of her should have resented that he’d done the unimaginable and kissed her before shooing her away. Another recognized that he’d been unable to stop himself, any more than she’d been able to refuse.
Resuming their previous positions, they descended into silence for a few minutes. She could think only how lucky it was that they were in a two-room suite. If there had been a big, king-size bed between them, she didn’t know that she could have come down off of red alert back to just orange.
Finally, when she felt like she could speak without sounding as though she hadn’t drawn breath in twenty minutes, she said, “I could probably use something to eat now, if that’s okay.”
He nodded, glad for the distraction. “Yeah, sure. Check out the room service menu.” Glancing at his watch, he added, “Maybe we should order something for Lily, too.”
“Do you think she’ll be back so soon? What if this creep shows up and wants to talk?”
Alec, who had walked to the desk to retrieve a leather-encased room service menu, tilted his head in confusion. “What creep?”
“This pedophile she’s after.”
He still appeared puzzled.
“I guess it’s another case you guys are working on? She said she was going into a chat room posing as a little girl to try to lure a pedophile.”
With a frown, he admitted, “Doesn’t sound like something Blackstone’s team is supposed to be dealing with.”
“Don’t you mean your team?”
Sheepish, he nodded. “Right. I guess I’m just not used to that yet.”
Again, she wondered about the reason for his transfer. He had never come out and said exactly why he had taken it, but from the few things he had let drop, and Lily’s brief comments earlier tonight, she sensed the topic was a sticky one.
Things had been sticky enough tonight. So she avoided even going there.
“Why wouldn’t your group work on a pedophile case? Isn’t that exactly what the Cyber Action Teams do?”
“Not this one. Their-our focus is a little narrower. We look at murders with an Internet connection.”
“Oh.” She blew out a soft breath. “Then this pedophile, he must be someone who…”
“Yeah, he must.”
Though the idea that a sick degenerate was out there trying to find a child to molest and kill filled her with revulsion, Sam didn’t
ask any more questions. She was in an odd position: a civilian, yet so wrapped up in an investigation she’d started feeling right at home with the investigators. She wasn’t one of them, however, and had no business being inquisitive.
Nor was she sure she really wanted to know any additional details. The one ugly corner of the world she had been sucked into was enough. She didn’t want to visit any more of them if she could help it.
Taking the menu, she glanced over it, told Alec what she wanted, and watched him call in an order. The tension eased, the simple act of deciding on dinner cutting through some of the physical awareness. It wasn’t gone, merely banked for now, set aside to deal with at a more appropriate time.
And that turned out to be a good thing. Because their evening together stretched out a lot longer than either of them had anticipated. A whole lot longer.
“It’s eleven o’clock; where the hell is she?” Alec asked later that night. They had expected to see Agent Fletcher back by nine and had easily filled the first couple of hours with dinner and some casual conversation, back-and-forth chitchat more appropriate to a first date than a night at a safe house.
Of course, given the tension simmering between them, they had moved far beyond first-date territory. At least, her first-date territory, though it had been so long since she’d had any kind of date, she couldn’t be sure.
“Isn’t this good news? I mean, doesn’t it mean she was successful in trying to get the guy she’s after to talk to her?”
“I suppose,” he said, not sounding convinced. The tension that had slipped away over the last couple of hours had eased back, evidenced by the tense set of his jaw and the stiffness of his shoulders.
“Still no answer on her cell phone?” she asked as she watched him try to call again, then slam the phone shut.
“No.” He ran a frustrated hand through his hair. “I don’t like this.”
“I’m okay staying by myself, really.”
He looked at her as if she’d said something utterly ridiculous. “I mean, I’m worried about Fletcher.”
“Oh.” Noting the lines on his brow as his frown deepened, she knew he meant it. He wasn’t frustrated about having to sit here with her and pretend they hadn’t kissed a couple of hours ago. He was genuinely concerned about his colleague. Which increased her concern about the other woman, too.
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