Hot As Ice

by Merline Lovelace

  Although Mackenzie didn't regret shedding her ex, she did occasionally mourn lack of anything re­motely resembling libidinous activity in her life. If only there was some way to filter out their annoying little quirks, men would definitely have a few uses.

  "You were right about one thing," she murmured to Diana. "The Iceman's in incredible physical con­dition. No wonder you decided to, er, maintain pos­itive surveillance last night."

  "Last night was a mistake."

  The total lack of inflection in her friend's voice spoke volumes.

  "Oh, no! You're not going to tell me Major Stone forgot how to use all that glorious man-muscle those forty years he was asleep, are you?"

  "No, but I forgot a few pertinent issues. For one thing, the man's just come out of a semi-permanent deep freeze. For another, he hadn't yet decided he could trust me with this business about his flight gear." She hesitated, then lifted her shoulders in a shrug that didn't quite disguise her anger and self-disgust. "Evidently I convinced him with my per­formance in bed."

  "Ouch!"

  "Yeah," Diana bit out. "Ouch."

  The communications team finished rigging both active and passive defenses twenty minutes later.

  ''The passive systems are mostly for intrusion de­tection," Mackenzie informed Diana and the major. "We've set up infrared sensors that will activate a silent alarm."

  Pointing to what looked like an ordinary light switch, she explained how the system worked. "When tripped by someone approaching the unit, the alarm sends a pulsing vibration through the sit­ting room, the bedroom, and the bathroom. You turn it on and off with this switch to allow access by maids, room service, whoever. John, go outside and activate the sensors so they can feel the pulse."

  The rippling sensation that traveled up Diana's bare arms a few moments later felt like a gentle whirlpool, without the warm water.

  "We've also placed eight high resolution cameras in strategic positions inside and outside the cot­tage." Picking up the TV remote, Mackenzie dem­onstrated the visual sweep. "You hit channel sixty-one to run through all eight cameras, channel sixty-two to freeze at a particular location."

  A single click of the remote brought images of astonishing color and clarity to life. Like tulips opening and closing their petals, they faded on and off the screen in five-second intervals. There was the crushed shell path bordered in brilliant scarlet hibiscus. The Golden Hawk sitting in solitary splen­dor in the small parking space. The weathered teak-wood deck suspended high over the dazzling Pa­cific. The chintz-filled sitting room. The king-sized bed.

  Remembering all too vividly what had occurred in that bed scant hours ago, Diana asked for quick clarification. "Do the surveillance cameras feed only to this TV?"

  "This one and the one in the bedroom. They also transmit digital signals by satellite to the control center." Mackenzie assumed a carefully neutral ex­pression. "If at any time you require privacy, you can interrupt the signals. Just hit channel 62."

  "Right."

  "Now for the active defenses..."

  Charlie kept his back propped against the wall and his arms crossed as the long-legged brunette with the tangle of wires draped around her neck went on to demonstrate a grab bag of defenses. Each was strategically placed to stun, temporarily blind, or otherwise incapacitate any uninvited and un­wanted guests.

  With each passing moment, he felt more and more like he'd stepped right onto the set of a science fiction movie. Godzilla meets the Martian Invaders. Although he had to admit the ray guns and space ships in the grainy, black-and-white horror films that used to scare the dickens out of moviegoers in his day couldn't hold a candle to this stuff!

  Pulsing waves. Infrared beams. Ultrahigh fre­quency, directed-energy nerve blockers. Holy cow!

  The brunette had blithely assured Diana and Charlie that she'd fed their bio-signatures into the profile cache—whatever the hell that was. Suppos­edly, their movements inside the cottage wouldn't trigger the lasers and nerve guns. Even if Charlie had understood one word in every three she tossed out, her airy assurances would have done little to ease the anger coiled around his gut.

  He was a test pilot. He'd defied gravity, beat all the odds. Wrung the kinks out of the most advanced aircraft of his day, for God's sake! Yet the suppos­edly sophisticated systems that drove his planes were crude and primitive compared to this space-aged technology.

  That alone was enough to twist him into knots...if Diana's revelation that she'd been as­signed to protect him hadn't already done the trick.

  Charlie wasn't a fool. He respected talent and ability when he saw it. More to the point, he'd come to manhood during a war that had convulsed the whole world, a war in which ordinary men and women were called upon to perform the most ex­traordinary deeds. Women's Air Service Pilots had ferried every aircraft in the U.S. inventory across the Atlantic to the Allies, often without fighter es­cort. American WACs and WAVEs served in every theater of the war. Female aces like the White Rose of Russia had racked up an impressive number of kills in defense of the Motherland. And later, during the Korean conflict, nurses had served under the most unimaginable conditions at or near the front.

  But none of the women who'd served during these conflicts had been ordered to take the offen­sive. Or climbed into the cockpit of a fighter to fly cover for their male counterparts. Knowing this shadowy agency Diana worked for had sent her to do just that blasted Charlie's ingrained, inbred no­tions about the role of the sexes all to hell. Knowing she'd played him like a cheap violin didn't go down any easier, either.

  "That's it," the curvaceous brunette said after a final demo. "Oh, except for the material you re­quested on the early U-2 cadre. The chief wrangled access to CIA's archives, but they've been dragging their feet producing the reports we requested. I'll e-mail them to you as soon as they release them." "Thanks."

  With a nod to Charlie, the brunette and her assis­tant hefted their handy-dandy, whiz-bang tool kits and departed the premises.

  Diana saw them out, then bent one leg under her and plopped down on the sofa. Her linen slacks made a pale pool against the splashy plaid. Wind and salt spray had pinked her nose and churned her hair into a wild tangle, but she didn't appear partic­ularly bothered by either. Charlie made no move to break the silence that spun out between them. This was her show. Let her do the explaining.

  To his disgust, she didn't attempt to explain a damned thing. In a cool voice that scraped along his nerves like nails on a chalkboard, she simply stated her case.

  "The fact that I work for the government doesn't change anything."

  "The fact that you didn't bother to tell me you work for the government changes everything."

  "How?"

  "How do you think? I take off on a mission and wake up forty-five years later. From the first mo­ment I opened my eyes, you were right there, of­fering your friendship, holding my hand, leaving me so hungry for you I could hardly walk upright. Through it all, you neglect to mention that you're just following orders."

  Her chin tipped. "We'd better get one thing straight, right here, right now. My orders do not include having sex with you."

  The blunt reply poured oil on the fire already smoldering in Charlie's gut. Is that how she cate­gorized what happened last night? They'd had sex? He might have used similar terms in a locker room when joking around with the guys, but not with a woman. And definitely not with Diana.

  There was no way he would classify their joining as mere sex. Diana Remington had turned him in­side out. He'd never made love with anyone so open, so eager. He could almost hear her gasp, feel her muscles tightening around his aching shaft as she spasmed with pleasure.

  They might have been driven by mindless lust the first time. Maybe even the second. But by the third, her movements had become as slow and languorous as his, her groans deep and wrenching. Diana couldn't have prevented that last, volcanic explosion if she'd wanted to, any more than he could have kept from digging his hands in her hair, tipp
ing her head back, and claiming her mouth at the same time he emptied himself into her body.

  Both mollified and irritatingly, instantly aroused by the memory of how she'd all but come apart in his arms, he rapped out a curt request. "Maybe you'd better tell me just what your orders do in­clude."

  She looked him straight in the eye. ''To get close to you and gain your confidence. Ultimately, to find out what happened to you and your aircraft all those years ago."

  She didn't pull any punches, he'd give her that. Despite his simmering anger, Charlie found himself wanting to believe her.

  "The president needed to know if the Soviets shot your plane down, as they did Gary Powers's in 1960," she said coolly. "He hoped to avoid another international outcry over U.S. spy planes violating other nation's airspace, like the one that occurred after the Powers incident. At the same time, he was worried that certain ultra right-wing radical groups in the United States could use you as a rallying point to revive the Cold War. There's still a lot of anti-Soviet sentiment left over from those days."

  Those days. Suddenly, Charlie felt as though he'd stepped right out of an ancient history book. And to tell the truth, he still harbored one heck of a case of anti-Soviet sentiment. He couldn't get his mind around the notion that they weren't the bad guys any more.

  "Well, you accomplished half your mission," he remarked sardonically. "We still don't know what happened to my aircraft, but you certainly got close to me."

  "Yes," she agreed with a shrug, "I passed the test."

  "What test?"

  She looked away, but not before he caught the spark of anger darkening her eyes. Where the heck did that come from? He was the one who'd been played like a fish.

  “What test?'' he asked again.

  She glanced back, her expression now carefully bland. "Look, it's okay. Evidently we both got our signals crossed. You thought I seduced you on or­ders, and I thought you wanted me as much as I wanted you. I only realized this morning that having sex constituted the final test before you decided you could trust me enough to..."

  "That's the biggest bunch of crap I've heard in forty-five years!"

  Stiffening, she sent him an icy glare. "I beg your pardon?"

  "What we did last night went beyond mere sex, and you damned well know it." Shoving away from the wall, Charlie stalked across the gray carpet. ''As for wanting you..."

  If he hadn't been so riled...

  If she hadn't thrown him for a loop with the busi­ness of working for the government...

  If his whole blasted world hadn't turned upside down, he might not have used quite so much force when he wrapped his fingers around her wrist and yanked her off the sofa.

  Two seconds later, he was flat on his back.

  Chapter 11

  Charlie hit the carpet butt-first.

  Diana hadn't intended to take him down. She cer­tainly hadn't planned to reverse his hold on her wrist, duck under his arm and flip him head over heels. She simply reacted to his aggression and her own banked anger.

  "I told you before," she reminded him coolly, "these kind of caveman tactics went out with the poodle skirt."

  She had a moment, a mere moment, to savor the look of owlish surprise on his face before his hand whipped out and knocked her feet out from under her.

  She could have broken her fall, could have gone into a tuck and roll and regained her feet before he scrambled to his, but she figured one hundred and twenty plus pounds of deadweight landing square on Charlie's midsection might get his attention once and for all.

  Her calculations failed to take into consideration reflexes honed by years in the cockpit of high-performance test aircraft. She was still on her way down when Charlie sucked in a swift breath, con­tracted his stomach muscles, and hardened her des­ignated landing site. Diana's bottom bounced off what felt like a solid concrete slab. The next instant, she was flat on her back.

  "Watch it, buster," she warned when he strad­dled her thighs and pinned her wrists to the gray plush. "I don't want to hurt you."

  "Think you could?"

  "Given your present position, my knee has the potential to become a lethal weapon."

  To Diana's considerable relief, he relaxed his grip on her wrists. She really didn't want to hurt him. He neglected, however, to remove his weight from her thighs. Planting his palms on the floor beside her head, he tossed her earlier words right back at her.

  "We'd better get one thing straight, right here, right now, Remington. I didn't take you to bed last night as some kind of perverted test."

  "Really? Then maybe you'll explain why you waited until this morning to tell me that your flight suit disintegrated in midair."

  "I planned to tell you yesterday, when we left Harry's house, but needed to think a few things through. Then, after we got here, other matters took priority."

  Which was a polite way of saying the front door had barely closed behind them before they'd ended up on the carpet only a few feet from where they now sprawled.

  "I wanted you so badly," he admitted, "I could hardly walk straight, let alone think straight. Last night, my number one goal was to get you naked and horizontal."

  Well, that was honest enough! Diana thought about admitting she been driven by exactly the same goal, but settled for a small shrug.

  "All right, maybe I wasn't thinking very straight last night, either. This morning's a different story, Charlie."

  The tension that had snapped and cracked be­tween them eased. So did the weight pinning her thighs to the carpet. Squirming upright, Diana tucked her knees under her. He waited until she'd gotten comfortable to pick up the knotty thread of their conversation.

  "So that's why you decided we should switch to hands-off mode this morning? You thought I'd told you about the disintegration of my flight gear as a bonus for your performance in bed last night?"

  She grimaced at the phrasing, but couldn't deny that was exactly what she'd thought. “Yes, in part."

  "What's the other part?"

  "I also honestly believe we should slow down. We've let this...this attraction between us heat up to the flash point. We need to cool off, give you time to find your balance again before..."

  "Before you toss me on my head?" he cut in dryly.

  There was no way Diana intended to apologize for that. "I got your attention, didn't I?"

  "Yeah, you did." He leveled a long, considering look at her. "You're good at this spy business, aren't you?"

  She wasn't going to apologize for that, either. "We prefer to call it undercover operations these days, and yes, I am. If you have a problem with what I do, Charlie, I suggest you get over it."

  He snapped his fingers. "Just like that?"

  "Just like that."

  Her clear green eyes held his. Their challenge was unmistakable. Charlie nursed his bruised pride, try­ing to work past the idea that Diana had been as­signed to protect him, when everything in him said it should be the other way around. It would take some doing, but he'd give it his best shot.

  "I'll tell you what. I'll try to stop acting like a fifties jerk if you stop pretending we can put the brakes on this attraction, as you call it, between us."

  "Charlie, listen to me..."

  "No, you listen for a change. I told you this morning, I can't flip whatever it is I'm feeling for you on and off like a light switch."

  "That's just the problem! You don't know what you're feeling. Neither do I."

  "I know it's more than just sex, Diana."

  He waited with a show of deliberate patience.

  "All right, it's more than just sex."

  Thrusting her fingers through her hair, she shot him a helpless glance. The fact that she couldn't flip her feelings on and off, either, acted like a balm to his lacerated pride. His anger fizzled, not dying completely, but losing enough of its heat for him to listen patiently while she ran through a litany of arguments.

  "I was the first person you saw when you woke up. I was also the one who broke the news
that you'd skipped a few years of your life. And you... You became a personal challenge, Charlie. I lost my scientific objectivity somewhere around my second or third day at the recovery site. Despite the read­ings, despite the lack of protein generation, I refused to give up on you. It's natural that we should de­velop a...a bond."

  "You think so?"

  "I know so."

  "I've got news for you, babe. When I woke up and you fed me the crazy story about being on ice all those years, my first thought was that you were part of some crazy Commie plot. I was sure you were trying to scramble my brain."

  "But once you got past that?"

  He thought of a half-dozen quick comebacks, but none of them made it past his lips. Instead, he found himself uttering the plain, unvarnished truth.

  "By the time I got past that, I was already hooked."

  The fight went out of her. Her mouth closed, opened. A ragged murmur escaped. "Oh, boy." "Yeah. Oh, boy."

  Lifting his hands, he cupped her face. His thumb grazed a slow path along her lower lip.

  "You're right in one respect, Remington. I did latch onto you. You became my lifeline, a beacon to guide me through an uncharted sea. Even when I wasn't sure I could trust you, I held on for dear life."

  His thumb made another slow pass. Diana's breath caught as he bent and grazed her lips with his own. When he raised his head again, his rueful half smile started an ache in her heart.

  "I'm not sure I could let go now if I wanted to."

  She almost melted on the spot. Only the counter­arguments churning in her mind kept her from flinging her arms around his neck and taking him down once again.

  "Oh, Charlie, don't you see? What you're expe­riencing could be classified as an intense situational dependency. The same emotional dependency hos­tages sometimes feel for their kidnappers."

  A smile lit his eyes. ''Come on, blondie. Do you really think I can't tell the difference between des­peration and desire?"