"We’re having sex until we’re out of each other’s system.”
Lucy is what the “Agency” made her: deadly, ruthless and calculating. It’s stripped away much of the girl she used to be, but fear and lust remain. Troy inspires both. He always has—even when he hijacked Lucy’s life and gave it to a shadowy government agency operating outside the law.
In a world where every day is an op and every op could be your last, there’s no room for emotion. Whatever gets you through—the training, the thrills, the sex—you take and are grateful.
Even as fellow agents are culled by unknown assassins, Lucy and Troy remain locked in a breathless clinch of deception, distrust and desire. At any moment, one could be tasked to kill the other, and at the Agency, protocol rules. And cancellation is forever.
About the Author
Kris Rafferty was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the youngest of a family of three girls and one boy. After earning a degree in theater arts from the University of Massachusetts in Boston, she married her college sweetheart, traveled the country and started writing books. Three children and a Pomeranian–Shih Tzu mutt later, she plays classical piano and is a third degree black belt in Parker Kenpo Karate. She loves summer road trips, warm-water oceans and running until she drops. She reads everything, but always comes back to romance.
Books by Kris Rafferty
Harlequin Intrigue Noir
The Seduction of Lucy
Call Me Tiffany
The Seduction of Lucy
Kris Rafferty
To Wayne and Betty Flood
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter One
Lucy was finding it hard to keep her shit together. She shook her bobbed hair forward, hiding her emotions. Raven was gut shot, bleeding out on the gurney as Lucy straddled her hips, attempting to stem the hemorrhaging. The metallic tang of blood worked its way down her sinuses.
She wanted to hide.
She’d felt that way for five years, with varying degrees of intensity, but now was a particularly low point. She was the crew leader, responsible for Raven, for all of them. The least of her responsibilities was keeping her crew alive. There would be consequences and there was no shrugging out from underneath that reality. Lucy was living on borrowed time.
The driver was flooring it, hurrying to get inside the Agency gates, but it was too late for Raven. Her eyes had glazed over and her body had stopped fighting to live. She was dying and they all knew it.
The rest of her op crew sat in silence on the benches lining the inside of the transport truck, each of them dealing with the likelihood of Raven’s death.
Cat’s white-blond hair had Raven’s blood on it. She’d been the first to reach her and the first to put pressure on the wound. Cat was fighting shock.
Phil had tuned out, pulling her cap low over her cropped blond hair. She looked as if she were nodding off to sleep, but her shaking hand and the tension in her body told another story.
Patrice, the newest recruit on Lucy’s crew, wouldn’t even look at her and Raven. She just wrapped her finger round and round a stray auburn curl, avoiding the grisly tableau on the gurney. She and Raven were too intimately posed, too gruesomely painted, for Patrice’s sensibilities. Lucy knew she’d harden with time or crack under the pressure, but odds were even which, because death was more likely than either.
A heavy pall of shock and unwilling acceptance hung over them all. It could have been any of them on the gurney, but today it was Raven. Their turn was coming, she thought, and they knew it, but not today. Not this op.
It was small comfort.
They’d completed their op and were headed for pickup when Raven went down. The shooter came out of nowhere, past their defenses. Then Lucy saw him, and she didn’t think. Her training kicked in and it was over before she could second-guess herself. She’d slit the bastard’s throat and saw it in her mind’s eye with perfect clarity and retention. She’d tapped off his first slash of his knife, checked his elbow and missed with her first stab, but when he pushed her off him, he gave her the borrowed force she needed to slice his throat left to right.
She’d killed him too soon. There were unanswered questions.
Lucy shook her head, dispelling such thoughts. She had other things to worry about. They’d cancel her when she got back to base. Dead. There was no coming back from that.
“She’s dead, Lucy.” Patrice was still wrapping her finger around that stray auburn curl. To the crew, Raven had morphed from a crewmate to a harbinger of things to come.
“Not yet, dammit,” Lucy said.
Patrice was looking at them as if they were already dead. Lucy studied the women, saw they knew what was coming, but didn’t know what to say. The transport truck came to an abrupt stop, forcing Lucy to say the words while she still had the chance.
“It’s been an honor working with you.” Cat flinched, Phil didn’t respond, and Patrice began to shake. She’d toughen up, Lucy thought. She couldn’t worry about Patrice now.
The van’s large doors opened with metal grating metal and then locked into place with an echoed boom, triggering her crew into action. Phil grabbed the gurney’s side, Cat opposite her, while Patrice pushed from the end. They shuttled Raven, with Lucy still straddling her, out of the transport. Controlled chaos met the agents as medics hauled Lucy to the ground. IVs were replaced, and Raven was rushed out of sight.
Lucy’s legs shook, and blood tickled her fingertips as it dripped off her onto the floor. She waited, listening for the siren announcing an agent had died during an op. She couldn’t remember the last time one had sounded and cursed the bad luck that she was the crew leader that broke the streak.
Movement from the corner of her eye caught her attention. Troy.
Her nemesis. Her ex-lover. Her boss.
Just seeing him shocked Lucy out of her stillness. Tall, expensively dressed in black, his broad chest stretched his sweater. He looked furious and ready to rain down a shitload of recriminations on her, but her traitorous heart pushed all that aside. She wanted him to hold her, to lie to her, to tell her everything was going to be all right.
Troy was good at lying to Lucy.
She turned to her crew. “Get out of here.” Lucy found their hesitation touching. This was probably the last time they’d see her. Canceled agents faded away, mostly because they were sensible enough not to develop relationships. She and her crew weren’t that smart.
Lucy’s stomach tightened and she had the damnedest suspicion her jaw was about to quiver. “Go,” she said, brooking no disobedience. The three women faded into the crowd without a word.
Lucy forced herself to analyze Troy’s demeanor, the tension he carried in his frame, the miniscule narrowing of his lids over his gorgeous blue eyes. A spike of fear weakened her knees. She knew what he represented, what he would take, and it was almost too much to bear.
“Report.” He ignored the chaos around them.
He knows everything, she thought, and he wants to see if my story matches the satellite surveillance. It was a test and Lucy wasn’t up for it. She’d loved him once, and now, with the siren about to announce an agent down, she refused to die in a puddle of weak-kneed wishes that things were different. She walked away, heading for her quarters.
Troy fell into step beside her.
“I’m not in the mood to humor you.” He was the deputy administrator for the Agency. Troy humored no one.
The elevators were up ahead. All she wanted was to get to her quarters, five floors down, and mourn Raven in private. Necessity made her skilled at hiding her emotions, but an agent was dying, and it was different when you knew them, more personal and harder to scrub off. She couldn’t stop shaking. She kept thinking about her crewmate, her friend, dying in some other part of the facility. Lucy thought it would be a shame if she broke into sobs now, allowing weakness to be her peers’ last impression of her, but it galled her that she wasn’t supposed to care. None of them were supposed to care.
When she was a recruit and swaths of them were dying around her in training, during trial ops, it had been hard to care. Eighty-percent mortality rate until recruits made agent status at year two. There was no room in a recruit’s life for anything other than trying to survive. Lucy had gotten comfortable as a crew leader. People continued to die around her, but they weren’t her people.
Well, now it was.
She’d broken the cardinal rule of crew leaders—she’d allowed a crew member to die, and though she’d proved her value to the Agency every day for five years, today she’d failed.
She slammed her hand on the elevator’s down call button, leaving a bloody print behind. The sight of it sent another tremor through her and her stomach rebelled.
“Shit, Lucy.” He scanned the area in a surreptitious manner. “Pull it together.” She wanted to punch him and the only thing stopping her was the ten agents he could have crashing on her head, all with the lift of his brow. He smirked, as if reading her mind. “We can have this debrief in your quarters if you’re looking for action, or maybe you’re looking for company.”
His words put everything into perspective. This was Troy, her boss, the man who’d seduced her, whom she had loved, who had betrayed her and made this world her life. He’d turned her into a tool at the mercy of the Agency and taught her to distrust love, to harden herself against hope. He’d taught her how to hate and how to use it. She’d become an expert in letting it simmer, bubbling and brewing, and when she had nothing left, to use that sweet rage to survive.
Company? She wanted to kill him.
The last time she and Troy had slept together, he’d rolled over and handed her to the Agency goons to live or die as a recruit.
She lifted her chin to meet his gaze. He was still angry, but now he had a slumberous look about him, as if he were also remembering the last time they’d had sex. It had been phenomenal. She shivered, hating that even enraged she could remember how his hands could make her feel. She had to get away from him, couldn’t let him see that he still affected her.
“Look at me.” She lifted her hands, dripping with Raven’s blood.
Troy assessed her body. “Any of that blood yours?”
She shook her head, emotion making it impossible to speak.
The squeaky wheel of a maintenance worker’s bucket caught both their attention. The man mopped up her bloody footprints using a strong disinfectant. Troy indicated her uniform and gear. “Strip. You’re wasting everyone’s time.”
He didn’t have to ask twice. She unzipped the jumpsuit, kicked off her boots and was left standing in her tiny pink lace panties and a wisp of a matching bra. When she noticed they too were soaked in blood, she shivered and ripped them off with violent tugs. Shaken, she stood naked in the hall. She searched his face for a hint of amusement, promising herself she’d coldcock him if she found any, but he was unmoved.
The maintenance guy was enthralled by the sight. Troy pulled his black sweater over his head, revealing his muscular chest. Lucy’s eyes sought out his scars—healed knife wounds, three bullet wounds and a silvery webwork of healed road rash along his ribs. She’d run her fingers over these scars five years ago, kissed them with sympathy. He was every bit as handsome and fine of form as he’d been when she’d had mind-blowing sex with him all those years ago, bargaining for her life, coming up short.
Well, her career at the Agency was over now.
Her mum already thought she was buried; all that was left was for Lucy to die. She was surprised the siren hadn’t sounded already. It would be fitting if Lucy’s death sentence came as she stood naked, covered in blood, in front of Troy and the rest of the Agency—she’d entered it that way.
Troy handed her his sweater and she slipped it over her head. Its softness fell to her thighs, smelling of him, radiating warmth. She stepped out of the circle of her defiled gear and kicked the clothes toward the gawking maintenance man.
“Send it to forensics.” Her glare wiped the smirk off his face, and replaced it with a look of fear. He knew it was best not to piss off someone who killed for a living. He bagged and tagged her gear.
“Report.” Troy studied every flicker of emotion on her face.
“We were ambushed,” Lucy said.
“At what point?”
“After we completed the op, in the woods.” She saw his shoulders relax. “I eliminated the shooter, but was unable to ascertain who he worked for.”
He lifted a brow. “Unable?” Troy sussed out the weakness of her explanation. He didn’t believe she couldn’t take the shooter alive. He was wrong. She’d tried. The shooter had parried her first slash, meant to disable. She’d fought harder, and realized he was her match. When she realized she was losing, that this was her final moment alive, she took a chance, exposed her ribs to get through his defenses. He’d died clutching his throat, his surprise equal to her own. Relief had set in, but was short-lived as she realized there would be no interrogating him.
Lucy remained silent, keeping that information to herself. The siren hadn’t blared over the intercom system, so Raven still lived. There was no upside to telling Troy something he didn’t want to hear.
The elevator arrived. He signaled her to follow him onto it but remained silent. When they both got off on her floor, she was afraid she’d break down in front of him. He’d ferret information from her as she emotionally bled in his arms and then he’d drop her, leaving her to face her fate alone like he did before. She deserved more in the last moments of her life, but didn’t see a way to avoid it.
He entered her unlocked quarters. No one bothered with locks. When rooms housed trained, drug-wired killers, people didn’t snoop, and there was no lock an agent couldn’t pick. She stayed in the hall, staring, wondering if she could get him out of her room and continue whatever he had in mind in the hall. She didn’t want to follow him inside and see him near her bed, dredging up memories.
“Lucy.” One word, barked with impatience. He couldn’t even give her this one thing. He had to take everything. She stalked into the room. “Have a drink of water,” he said, offering her the glass of drug-laced water she’d left on her bedside table. “You’ll feel better.”
Her eyes dropped to his bare chest. His heavy muscles and lack of body fat created a work of art. She resented that his outside appearance didn’t reflect his black soul. By rights he should be the picture of Dorian Gray, not the personification. She turned away, knowing he was right. She needed it. Her fix. She gulped down the water and gradually her muscles released tension and strength replaced weakness as nucleic acid polymers replaced the damaged cells in her body.
“Shower and dress.” He leaned against the closed door as if he needed to keep Lucy contained. What did he think she was going to do? Run? She glared at the empty glass. The drugs were all the leash the Agency needed. “There’s not much time,” he said, “and we need to talk.”
There was nothing to talk about, she thought, stripping off his sweater and dropping it to the floor. It didn’t occur to her that he’d turn away. Modesty was a habit she’d lost after five years. Skin was skin. Yet she burned under his gaze as she walked into the bathroom, stepping into the shower and turning on the hot spray. Through the glass shower door she watched him move to lean against the bathroom’s entrance and pretended not to see the blatant arousal
breaking the line of his pants. It sent a shock of desire through her, belly to breasts. She hated that he could affect her so, hated that her body ignored what her mind could never forgive, but she was ecstatic that he still desired her, because he couldn’t have her. It was her one revenge.
She struggled to project indifference, maintaining eye contact as she used a large soapy sponge to scrub Raven’s blood off her shoulders, breasts, her belly and thighs. She grew more conflicted as the moments stretched, and her desire spiked. How could either of them think of sex when Raven was dying? She fought the trembling of her body as the water stimulated her skin, running the length of her like a lover’s caress.
Troy opened the shower stall door, his expression giving nothing away. He turned off the tap. “Time’s up.” Lucy clutched the offered towel to her chest, blaming her trembling on the cool air. He turned away, stepping into her bedroom. “Barrett’s waiting.”
Constance Barrett, Troy’s boss, ran the Agency, or rather ruled it like a fiefdom—with little oversight and an iron fist. It was her protocol that Lucy had broken when she’d allowed Raven to get shot, and her decree that crew leaders died if they lost an agent on an op.
And she was waiting for Lucy.
She finished drying her body, feeling numb as she stepped into her silk undergarments. Other than her trembling hands, she gave no indication of upset as she slipped on her paper-thin black wool pencil skirt and her black cashmere crewneck sweater. She didn’t wobble once as she stepped into her three-inch leopard-print silk heels. She slicked back her sopping hair. A quick stain of red on her lips, a pinch of her cheeks, and she was presentable.
Whom was she kidding? She looked hot.
When within the walls of the Agency, she made it her prime directive to look as tempting as possible. She knew Troy considered her cannon fodder, but he still wanted her, and that gave her endless opportunities to make him regret what he’d done, what they’d lost. She’d always planned to find a lover to replace him, maybe dangle that information to torture him, but it had never happened. After Troy, she’d been unable to trust enough to let someone close.
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