“You started it by putting that strawberry in my... Never mind.”
He had moved from her knuckles to her fingertips, kissing each one. “If I was so inventive, why’d you run back to the other guy so fast?”
Her heart skidded to a virtual stop in her chest. She did not want to have this conversation about Bobby’s father. Not yet.
She smoothed her hand across the hair sprinkled across his chest. “You were Loki. You never even told me your real name.”
“You never asked.”
The cell phone, which was never far out of her reach, buzzed, and a breath hitched in her throat. “It’s him.”
Beau reached across her body and picked up the phone. He held it out to her and she grabbed it.
“Yes?”
Zendaris snarled over the phone. “Are you playing me for a fool?”
Chapter Twelve
The rosy afterglow on Deb’s cheeks faded to white. Beau’s heart slammed against his rib cage. Deb hadn’t put the phone on speaker and being out of the loop even for a second had his blood pressure going through the roof.
“Wh-what are you talking about?”
Beau poked her thigh to get her attention. She twisted her head around and her eyes widened as if she’d forgotten his existence. She blinked a few times and pressed the speaker button.
“You told Prospero, didn’t you?”
Deb choked and Beau cursed under his breath.
“I did not tell Prospero. Why would you think that? Do you really believe I’d kill an innocent man and turn around and tell Prospero about it?”
“Who said Dr. Herndon was an innocent man?”
“What are you suggesting?”
“I’m suggesting you called someone in for help.”
Deb hunched her shoulders, and he tucked the sheet around her waist. Had Zendaris spotted him?
“I didn’t call anyone in for help, least of all Prospero. The word on the street is I’m a traitor and Prospero doesn’t suffer traitors kindly.”
“Someone is shadowing you, shadowing me. I don’t like it.”
“Did you think a Prospero agent could turn and nobody would notice?” Her sharp tone filled Beau with admiration. This Deb Sinclair was finished with cowering and shaking at Zendaris’s every command.
That’s it, Deb. A good defense is a good offense.
Her attitude had thrown Zendaris off balance. He paused, and she jumped into the pause.
“If Prospero sent someone after me, it’s not another Prospero agent. Coburn doesn’t use his agents like that. If someone is on my tail, it’s a hired gun.” She formed a gun with her fingers and aimed at Beau.
“He’d better not get in the way of my plan. If he does, there will be— How do you Americans say it? A world of hurt...for everybody.”
“There’s not going to be any world of hurt. What are your plans? What do you want me to do next?”
“Break into Dr. Herndon’s house and get the anti-drone plans.”
Deb’s mouth dropped open, but Beau didn’t know why she was so surprised. They’d figured Zendaris had those plans in his sights.
She recovered quickly. “Where’s his house and is anyone watching it?”
“His house is outside of Boston, and whether or not anyone is watching the house is your problem, not mine.” He gave her the directions to Herndon’s house, which Deb scribbled on the hotel notepad on the nightstand.
She held the pen poised over the paper. “Where will I find the plans?”
“Again, your problem, Agent Sinclair, not mine.” Deb closed her eyes and rolled her lips inward as if to rein in her emotions.
If Zendaris had dared talk to him like that, he’d ram the phone down his throat over the line. But then he didn’t have a son to worry about.
“And when I secure the plans, we talk again to discuss the trade.”
“If someone doesn’t beat you to it.”
Deb set her jaw. “Nobody is going to beat me to it. The trade?”
“I’m a man of my word.” He coughed. “I think your son’s...ah, babysitter...is getting tired of the job anyway.”
“Oh?” Deb’s eyes flew to Beau’s face as she dropped the pen to the floor. “Why is that?”
“Your son hasn’t been feeling well.”
Was Zendaris telling her this news to keep her off balance? To instill urgency?
“What’s wrong with him?” Grabbing a pillow, she hugged it to her chest.
She should’ve grabbed him instead. Beau slipped a blanket over her shoulders, his arm lingering behind her back—just in case she needed something to lean on.
“I’m sure it’s nothing, but you’re a mother and you’d want to know. I have a soft spot for mothers, Deb.” He paused. “My daughter didn’t even have the chance to know her mother.”
“I’m sorry—” Beau tugged on the end of her hair “—for your daughter. Every child deserves his or her parents, both of them. What are Bobby’s symptoms?”
“I’m not a doctor, and you just killed one so get to his house and get me those plans, or your son is not going to have to worry about his symptoms.”
Zendaris ended the call and Deb looked like someone had just punched her in the gut. Zendaris had lured her in with his talk of mothers and his sob story about his wife, whose death was at his door, and then delivered his last words with a hammer.
Deb’s hands looked frozen on the phone, so Beau pried it from her fingers and gathered her in his arms like he’d wanted to do five minutes ago. He ran a hand down her stiff back. “It’s okay. You can let go now.”
Her body melted against his as a sob racked her frame. “He means it, Beau. He’ll kill Bobby if I don’t deliver those plans. What am I going to do? We’ve worked so hard to keep those plans out of his hands, but I have to save my son.”
“We’re going to do both, Deb. We have to do both.”
“Bobby’s still sick.” She covered her face with her hands. “He must feel so abandoned by me right now. He’s not feeling well and Mommy isn’t there for him. How is he ever going to recover from this?”
He grasped her wrists and pulled her hands from her face. Then he brushed his palms across her wet cheeks. “This experience is not going to scar him for life.”
“It took me a long time to get over my abandonment issues. It took a father figure like Robert. A boy needs his father.”
Beau swallowed. Did this mean she had plans to go back to Bobby’s father when this was all over?
“You’d had a child’s life of abandonment, Deb. This is two weeks out of Bobby’s life. He’s not going to remember. Once he feels his mother’s arms around him again, he’ll forget you ever left.”
“I hope you’re right.” A shudder ran through her body. She plucked a tissue from the box on the bedside table and dabbed her nose. “I’ll bet your mom never left your side when you were sick, did she?”
“My mom?” After the drama of the phone call, he began to notice the cool air on his bare skin so he burrowed back under the covers and pulled Deb along with him. “God, no. My mother was a stay-at-home mom when we were little and when we were sick, she’d hover over us with homemade chicken soup and mentholated rub and disgusting concoctions for sore throats like apple cider vinegar.”
She snuggled closer to him and curled her toes against his shins. “But you loved it, didn’t you?”
“Love isn’t the word I’d settle on. Let’s just say none of us stayed sick for long.”
“You’re just saying that.” She rubbed his chest with the heel of her hand. “You felt her love right there and you’ve been able to carry it with you everywhere. That’s the kind of love I want to give Bobby.”
“And you’re giving it to him. You’re risking everything to keep him
safe, and he feels it—” he tapped the left side of her chest “—right here.”
“Do you really think so?”
“There are different types of motherly love, and different types of mothers. How cool is it going to be for Bobby to discover someday that his mom is a kick-ass spy who battled an international arms dealer to keep him safe? I’d say that beats out homemade chicken soup any day.”
She turned her head and kissed his arm. “What an amazing thing to say. How did I ever think you were cool and aloof?”
“That’s the image I cultivated.” He tousled her long hair, which already resembled a red-hued bird’s nest. “Of course, if Coburn spreads the word that I took an assignment to protect a woman, there goes my image.”
Her long eyelashes drifted closed and fluttered over her eyes. “Mmm, I don’t know about that. The ladies will be throwing their panties at you even more than usual.”
“The ladies do not throw their panties at me.”
Her lips curved into a smile against his chest, and he lightly pinched her bottom. That made her squirm against him, so he did it again, but her breathing had deepened and her lips parted in a long sigh.
He whispered into her ear, “The only panties I want are yours.”
* * *
THE FOLLOWING DAY, Deb dug into a piece of French toast with a swirl of cinnamon and warm pecans on top. “I can’t believe we forgot to eat dinner last night.”
“Really?” Beau speared a potato on his plate and dragged it through some sticky egg yolk. “Because it seems to me that you’d skip dinner and every other meal if my stomach didn’t remind us to eat.”
“It’s the nerves. I can’t eat when I’m stressed.”
He raised one eyebrow as she smothered her French toast with syrup and flagged down the waitress for another side of bacon. “You’re obviously not stressed.”
“I don’t know what it is. I feel energized today.” She did know the reason. Part of it included Beau’s pep talk last night. He thought she was a good mom and that cut loose a heavy burden she’d been carrying on her back like a Sisyphean-sized bolder.
Maybe he’d be more willing to sign up for fatherhood once she told him about Bobby’s parentage if he believed she was a good mother. And she planned to tell him just as soon as this nightmare ended.
“It probably has to do with the fact that we’re in the homestretch here. You have your final orders from Zendaris, and we’re close to ending this.”
She held up her hands, crossing her fingers. “I hope so. Were you able to access the floor layout to Herndon’s house on the laptop before we came down here?”
“I was, and we’re in luck. The house is not that big.”
“Maybe that’s why he went to the dark side. He wants a bigger home and all the stuff that goes with it. Because if he has those anti-drone plans, he definitely crossed over to the dark side.”
“It probably also has to do with his taste in fancy women.”
“Tastes like that can get you killed.” Deb drew a line through her syrup with the tines of her fork.
“He found that out the hard way—not that the mysterious black-haired beauty at the charity ball had anything to do with his death.”
“Do you think that’s how Zendaris decided to use me once he got his hands on Bobby? He knew Dr. Herndon’s proclivities?”
“He would’ve formulated a different plan if it had been Cade Stark’s son he kidnapped.”
“It wasn’t Cade’s son. He was able to keep his son safe.”
“By eventually going to Europe. Aren’t his wife and child still there?”
She plucked a pecan from her French toast and sucked it into her mouth. “You are good. That information is supposed to be top secret.”
“So is the layout of Dr. Herndon’s house, but I managed to get a source to send it to me.”
“After breakfast we go up to the room and hash out a plan for entry?”
“For entry and search. The plans could be anywhere in the house. What format do you think they’re in?”
“They were in a computer file, but I doubt Herndon left them on his computer. A skilled hacker can get into any computer, which Prospero found out when we first had the plans.”
He waved the waitress over for more coffee. “They could be on a thumb drive or a CD, or he could’ve just printed them out. Will you know what they look like?”
“Oh, yeah.” She bit into her last piece of bacon with a crunch and offered the rest to Beau, who took it. “When Cade first stole the plans from Zendaris, we were all briefed on what they contained, if not the particulars. That’s why I think Zendaris is using me to do his dirty work instead of one of his usual goons—that and his thirst for revenge.”
Beau leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his impressive chest. “Don’t let him pull at your heartstrings over his dead wife, Deb. Men like Zendaris aren’t sentimental. They may think they love their wives and children, but they put them in harm’s way every day of their lives. A dude like that would sacrifice Granny if it meant more power and money.”
“You’re right. All the men on my team recognized that immediately. I was the only one who felt a modicum of guilt over the fact that his wife had been killed in our raid of his factory.”
“That’s because you have a soft heart.” He reached out and dislodged a strand of hair stuck to her cheek.
She snorted. “Nobody has ever accused me of that before, including the girls at the reform school that I busted out of.”
“Tough girl.” A smile hovered on his sensuous lips.
“Are you making fun of me?”
“Not at all.” He held out his hands. “You might kick me where it counts.”
“I’d never do that.” The thought of doing damage to any of Beau’s beautiful parts caused her to cringe.
“There’s a soft side to Deb Sinclair, and obviously Robert Elder saw that.”
Her nose tingled. “Robert had to sandpaper away a bunch of layers to find it, and the process wasn’t always pretty. He was a marine, so he was into that tough love.”
Beau hunched forward, cupping his mouth with one hand. “So am I. In addition to the blindfold, I have some furry handcuffs.”
She kicked his foot under the table as all those aforementioned soft spots started to melt. “That was not a blindfold. That was my T-shirt.”
“More coffee, sir?” The prim waitress’s gaze darted back and forth between the two of them as if waiting for one of them to sprout horns—probably Beau.
“Yes, please, ma’am.”
His wicked grin had spread over his face, and the waitress blushed to the roots of her severely restrained hair.
When she spun around, rather too quickly, Deb kicked him again. “You’re a bad boy.”
“I do have those fuzzy cuffs if you want to use them.”
“I think we need to get our minds out of the gutter and into Dr. Herndon’s bedroom—uh, house.”
Pushing back from the table, he winked and dropped several bills on the table.
Deb tapped the money. “That’s an awfully big tip.”
“She earned it. Her ears are going to be burning for hours.”
Back in the hotel room, Beau brought up the plans for Dr. Herndon’s house, and they hunched over the table together reviewing the layout. They drew green lines to several possible entrances to the house and red lines for quick escape routes.
“If anyone is staking out the house, let me take care of him...or her.”
Deb’s red pencil went off the table. “We’re not going to leave any dead bodies behind this time, are we?”
“Not unless it’s self-defense. Someone shoots at me, I’m going to shoot back. It’s second nature.”
“Great.” She rubbed out the pen
cil line with the tip of her finger. “What if there’s someone on the property? He’s not threatening you, but he’s blocking our access to Herndon’s house?”
“I have a dart gun in my arsenal. Sometimes it’s deadly and sometimes it’s not. That will be a not situation.”
Deb took a few steadying breaths. “If we get the plans, do I tell Zendaris? Lie? How far do we take this?”
“Far enough to get Bobby back—without compromising national security.”
“You make it sound so easy, Loki.”
“Anything worth having is hard, Deb. Didn’t you just say something like that last night? Worth the risk? If this isn’t worth the risk, I don’t know what is.”
She nodded. Beau always knew the right words to say. Didn’t he ever stumble and fall? Didn’t he ever have regrets? Didn’t he ever have fears? Could she trust a man like that?
Of course, he just might regret their one-night stand when she got around to telling him about Bobby. It would break her heart if he did, but she’d have to face it. And then she’d move on.
She’d decided that giving Bobby a father had to become a priority. No more declining blind dates or brushing off the flirtations of various men at the gym, the grocery store, friends’ parties.
No more daydreams about Loki—or night dreams.
She’d reveled in every second and sensation of their lovemaking last night, knowing they might not come together again. She’d have to stop comparing every man she met to Beau. It wasn’t fair to the men, her or Bobby.
He needed a father, not some illusion. Not some spy on a pedestal. If Beau wanted nothing more to do with her or Bobby at the end of this game, she’d stuff her feelings down and form a relationship with someone who could be there for her and her son. Someone who could be there when the guns stopped blazing and the cars stopped screeching.
She could do it. Anything worth having was hard.
Dropping her pencil, she yawned. “I think I’m going to take a nap before lunch and finalizing these plans.”
“Oh, no, you’re not.”
She snapped her mouth shut. “Excuse me?”
“We have a mission tonight. Your strength and agility just might save your life—and mine.” He threw one of his T-shirts at her. “We’re going to the gym to work out.”
Harlequin Intrigue November 2013 - Bundle 2 of 2 Page 33