by Diana Palmer
“You don’t wear dirty T-shirts, either,” she replied, feeling sad because he’d mentioned marrying. Maybe there was another woman in his life, besides Kirry.
He chuckled. “Not unless I’m working in the garage.” He came around the table after he’d put the dishes in the sink and took her gently by the shoulders, his expression somber. “We’ve never discussed personal issues. I know less about you than a stranger does. Do you like children? Do you want to have them? Or is a career primary in your life right now?”
The questions were vaguely terrifying. He was going from total indifference to intent scrutiny, and it was too soon. Her face took on a hunted look.
“Never mind,” he said quickly, when he saw that. “Don’t worry about the question. It isn’t important.”
She relaxed, but only a little. “I…love children,” she faltered. “I like working, or I would if I had a challenging job. But that doesn’t mean I’d want to put off having a family if I got married. My mother worked while I was growing up, but she was always there when I needed her, and she never put her job before her family. Neither would I.” She searched his eyes, thinking how beautiful a shade of green they were, and about little children with them. Her expression went dreamy. “Fame and fortune may sound enticing, but they wouldn’t make up for having people love you.” She shrugged. “I guess that sounds corny.”
“Actually, it sounds very mature.” He bent and drew his mouth gently over her lips, a whisper of contact that didn’t demand anything. “I feel the same way.”
“You do?” She was unconsciously reaching up to him, trying to prolong the contact. It was unsettling that his lightest touch could send her reeling like this. She wanted more. She wanted him to crush her in his arms and kiss her blind.
He nibbled her upper lip slowly. “It isn’t enough, is it?”
“Well…no…”
His arms drew her up, against the steely length of his body, and his mouth opened her lips to a kiss that was consuming with its heat. She moaned helplessly, clinging to him.
He lifted his mouth a breath away. His voice was strained when he spoke. “Do you have any idea what those little noises do to me?” he groaned.
“Noises?” she asked, oblivious, as she stared at his mouth.
“Never mind.” He kissed her again, devouring her soft lips. The sounds she made drugged him. He was measuring the distance from the kitchen to her bedroom when he realized how fast things were progressing.
He drew back, and held her away from him, his jaw taut with an attempt at control.
“Alexander,” she whispered, her voice pleading as she looked up at him with misty soft eyes.
“I almost never get women pregnant on Monday, but this could be an exception,” he said in a choked tone.
Her eyes widened like saucers as she realized what he was saying.
He burst out laughing at her expression. He moved back even more. “I only carry identification and twenty dollars on me when I jog,” he confessed. “The other things I keep in my wallet are still in it, at my apartment,” he added, his tone blatantly expressive.
She divined what he was intimating and she flushed. She pushed back straggly hair from her face as she searched for her composure.
“Of course, a lot of modern women keep their own supply,” he drawled. “I expect you have a box full in your medicine cabinet.”
She flushed even more, and now she was glaring at him.
He chuckled, amused. “Your parents were very strict,” he recalled. “And deeply religious. You still have those old attitudes about premarital sex, don’t you?”
She nodded, grimacing.
“Don’t apologize,” he said wistfully. “In ten minutes or so, the ache will ease and I can actually stand up straight…God, Jodie!” he burst out laughing at her horrified expression. “I’m kidding!”
“You’re a terrible man,” she moaned.
“No, I’m just normal,” he replied. “I’d love nothing better than a few hours in bed with you, but I’m not enough of a scoundrel to seduce you. Besides all that—” he sighed “—your conscience would kill both of us.”
“Rub it in.”
He shrugged. “You’d be surprised how many women at my office abstain, and make no bones about it to eligible bachelors who want to take them out,” he said, and he smiled tenderly at her. “We tend to think of them as rugged individualists with the good sense not to take chances.” He leaned forward. “And there are actually a couple of the younger male agents who feel the same way!”
“You’re kidding!”
He shook his head, smiling. “Maybe it’s a trend. You know, back in the early twentieth century, most women and men went to their weddings chaste. A man with a bad reputation was as untouchable as a woman with one.”
“I’ll bet you never told a woman in your life that you were going to abstain,” she murmured wickedly.
He didn’t smile back. He studied her for a long moment. “I’m telling you that I am. For the foreseeable future.”
She didn’t know how to take that, and it showed.
“I’m not in your class as a novice,” he confessed, “but I’m no rake, either. I don’t find other women desirable lately. Just you.” He shrugged. “Careful, it may be contagious.”
She laughed. Her whole face lit up. She was beautiful.
He drew her against him and kissed her, very briefly, before he moved away again. “We should go,” he said. “I have a meeting at the office at ten. Then we could have lunch.”
“Okay,” she said. She felt lighthearted. Overwhelmed. She started toward the door and then stopped. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Shoot.”
“Are you staking out my company because you’re investigating Brody for drug smuggling?”
He gave her an old, wise look. “You’re sharp, Jodie. I’ll have to watch what I say around you.”
“That means you’re not going to tell me. Right?”
He chuckled. “Right.” He led the way into the hall and then waited for her to lock her door behind them.
She slipped the key into her pocket.
“No ID?” he mused as they went downstairs and started jogging down the sparsely occupied sidewalk.
“Just the key and five dollars, in case I need money for a bottle of water or something,” she confessed.
He sighed, not even showing the strain as they moved quickly along. “One of our forensic reconstruction artists is always lecturing us on carrying identification. She says that it’s easier to have something on you that will identify you, so that she doesn’t have to take your skull and model clay to do a reconstruction of your face. She helps solve a lot of murder victims’ identities, but she has plenty that she can’t identify. The faces haunt her, she says.”
“I watched a program about forensic reconstruction on educational television two weeks ago.”
“I know the one you mean. I saw it, too. That was our artist,” he said with traces of pride in his deep voice. “She’s a wonder.”
“I guess it wouldn’t hurt to carry my driver’s license around with me,” she murmured.
He didn’t say another word, but he grinned to himself.
The meeting was a drug task force formed of a special agent from the Houston FBI office, a Houston police detective who specialized in local gangs, a Texas Ranger from Company A, an agent from the U.S. Customs Service and a sheriff’s deputy from Harris County who headed her department’s drug unit.
They sat down in a conference room in the nearest Houston police station to discuss intelligence.
“We’ve got a good lead on the new division chief of the Culebra cartel in Mexico,” Alexander announced when it was his turn to speak. “We know that he has somebody on his payroll from Ritter Oil Corporation, and that he’s funneling drugs through a warehouse where oil regulators and drilling equipment are kept before they’re shipped out all over the southwest. Since the parking lot of that warehouse is locked by a key code
, the division chief has to have someone on the inside.”
“Do we know how it’s being moved and when?” the FBI agent asked.
Alexander had suspicions, but no concrete evidence. “Waiting for final word on when. But we do have an informant, a young man who got cold feet and came to U.S. Customs with information about the drug smuggling. I interviewed the young man, with help from Customs,” he added, nodding with a smile at the petite brunette customs official at the table with them.
“That would be me,” she said with a grin.
“The informant says that a shipment of processed cocaine is on the way here, one of the biggest in several years. It was shipped from the Guajira Peninsula in Colombia to Central America and transshipped by plane to an isolated landing site in rural Mexico. From there it was carried to a warehouse in Mexico City owned by a subsidiary of an oil company here in Houston. It was reboxed with legitimate oil processing equipment manufactured in Europe, in boxes with false bottoms. It was shipped legally to the oil company’s district office in Galveston where it was inspected briefly and passed through customs.”
“The oil company is one that’s never been involved in any illegal activity,” the customs representative said wistfully, “so the agent didn’t look for hidden contraband.”
“To continue,” Alexander said, “it’s going to be shipped into the Houston warehouse via the Houston Ship Canal as domestic inventory from Galveston.”
“Which means, no more customs inspections,” the Texas Ranger said.
“Exactly,” Alexander agreed.
The brunette customs agent shook her head. “A few shipments get by our inspectors, but not many. We have contacts everywhere, too, and one of those tipped us off about the young man who was willing to inform on the perpetrators of an incoming cocaine shipment,” she told the others. “So we saved our bacon.”
“You had the contacts I gave you, don’t forget,” the blond lieutenant of detectives from Houston reminded her with a smile, as she adjusted her collar.
“Do we even have a suspect?” the customs agent asked.
Alexander nodded. “I’ve got someone on the inside at Ritter Oil, and I’m watching a potential suspect. I don’t have enough evidence yet to make an accusation, but I hope to get it, and soon. I’m doing this undercover, so this information is to be kept in this room. I’ve put it out that we have another company, Thorn Oil, under surveillance, as a cover story. Under no circumstances are any of you to discuss any of this meeting, even with another DEA agent—especially with another DEA agent—until further notice. That’s essential.”
The police lieutenant gave him a pointed look. “Can I ask why?”
“Because the oil corporation isn’t the only entity that’s harboring an inside informant,” Alexander replied flatly. “And that’s all I feel comfortable saying.”
“You can count on us,” the Texas Ranger assured him. “We won’t blow your cover. The person you’re watching, can you tell us why you’re watching him?”
“In order to use that warehouse for storage purposes, the drug lord has to have access to it,” Alexander explained. “I’m betting he has some sort of access to the locked gate and that he’s paying the night watchman to look the other way.”
“That would make sense,” the customs agent agreed grimly. “These people know how little law enforcement personnel make. They can easily afford to offer a poorly paid night watchman a six figure ‘donation’ to just turn his head at the appropriate time.”
“That much money would tempt even a law-abiding citizen,” Alexander agreed. “But more than that, very often there’s a need that compromises integrity. A sheriff in another state had a wife dying of cancer and no insurance. He got fifty thousand dollars for not noticing a shipment of drugs coming into his county.”
“They catch him?” the policewoman asked.
“Yes. He wasn’t very good at being a crook. He confessed, before he was even suspected of being involved.”
“How many people in your agency know about this?” the deputy sheriff asked Alexander.
“Nobody, at the moment,” he replied. “It has to stay that way, until we make the bust. I’ll depend on all of you to back me up. The mules working for the new drug lord carry automatic weapons and they’ve killed so many people down in Mexico that they won’t hesitate to waste anyone who gets in their way.”
“Good thing the president of Mexico isn’t intimidated by them,” the customs agent said with a grin. “He’s done more to attack drug trafficking than any president before him.”
“He’s a good egg,” Alexander agreed. “Let’s hope we can shut down this operation before any more kids go down.”
“Amen to that,” the FBI agent said solemnly.
Alexander showed up at Jodie’s office feeling more optimistic than he had for weeks. He was close to an arrest, but the next few days would be critical. After their meeting, the task force had gleaned information from the informant that the drug shipment was coming into Houston the following week. He had to be alert, and he had to spend a lot of time at Jodie’s office so that he didn’t miss anything.
He took her out to lunch, but he was preoccupied.
“You’re onto something,” she guessed.
He nodded, smiling. “Something big. How would you like to be part of a surveillance?”
“Me? Wow. Can I have a gun?”
He glared at her. “No.”
She shrugged. “Okay. But don’t expect me to save your life without one.”
“Not giving you one might save my life,” he said pointedly.
She ignored the jibe. “Surveillance?” she prodded. “Of what?”
“You’ll find out when we go, and not a word to anybody.”
“Okay,” she agreed. “How do you do surveillance?”
“We sit in a parked car and drink coffee and wish we were watching television,” he said honestly. “It gets incredibly boring. Not so much if we have a companion. That’s where you come in,” he added with a grin. “We can sit in the car and neck and nobody will guess we’re spying on them.”
“In a Jaguar,” she murmured. “Sure, nobody will notice us in one of those!”
He gave her a long look. “We’ll be in a law enforcement vehicle, undercover.”
“Right. In a car with government license plates, four antennae and those little round hubcaps…”
“Will you stop?” he groaned.
“Sorry!” She grinned at him over her coffee. “But I like the necking part.”
He pursed his lips and gave her a wicked grin. “So do I.”
She laughed a little self-consciously and finished her lunch.
They were on the way back to his Jaguar when his DEA agent, Kennedy, drove up. He got out of his car and approached them with a big smile.
“Hi, Cobb! How’s it going?” he asked.
“Couldn’t be better,” Alexander told him complacently. “What’s new?”
“Oh, nothing, I’m still working on that smuggling ring.” He glanced at Alexander curiously. “Heard anything about a new drug task force?”
“Just rumors,” Alexander assured him, and noticed a faint reaction from the other man. “Nothing definite. I’ll let you know if I hear anything.”
“Thanks.” Kennedy shrugged. “There are always rumors.”
“Do you have anybody at Thorn Oil, just in case?” Alexander asked him pointedly.
Kennedy cleared his throat and laughed. “Nobody at all. Why?”
“No reason. No reason at all. Enjoy your lunch.”
“Sure. I never see you at staff meetings lately,” he added. “You got something undercover going on?”
Alexander deliberately tugged Jodie close against his side and gave her a look that could have warmed coffee. “Something,” he said, with a smile in Kennedy’s direction. “See you.”
“Yeah. See you!”
Kennedy walked on toward the restaurant, a little distracted.
Jodie waite
d until they were closed up in Alexander’s car before she spoke. “You didn’t tell him anything truthful,” she remarked.
“Kennedy’s got a loose tongue,” he told her as he cranked the car. “You don’t tell him anything you don’t want repeated. Honest to God, he’s worse than Margie!”
“So that’s it,” she said, laughing. “I just wondered. Isn’t it odd that he seems to show up at places where we eat a lot?”
“Plenty of the guys eat where we do,” he replied lazily. “We know where the good food is.”
“You really do,” she had to admit. “That steak was wonderful!”
“Glad you liked it.”
“I could cook for you, sometime,” she offered, and then flushed at her own boldness.
“After I wind up this case, I’ll let you,” he said, with a warm smile. “Meanwhile, I’ve got a lot of work to do.”
She wondered about that statement after he left her at the office. She was still puzzling over it when she walked right into Brody when she got off the elevator at her floor.
“Oh, sorry!” she exclaimed, only then noticing that Cara was with him. “Hello,” she greeted the woman as she stopped to punch her time card before entering the cubicle area.
Cara wasn’t inclined to be polite. She gave Jodie a cold look and turned back to Brody. “I don’t understand why you can’t do me this one little favor,” she muttered. “It isn’t as if I ask you often for anything.”
“Yes, but dear, it’s an odd place to leave your car. There are garages…”
“My car is very expensive,” she pointed out, her faint accent growing in intensity, like the anger in her black eyes. “All I require is for you to let me in, only that.”
Jodie’s ears perked up. She pretended to have trouble getting her card into the time clock, and hummed deliberately to herself, although not so loudly that she couldn’t hear what the other two people were saying.
“Company rules…” he began.
“Rules, rules! You are to be an executive, are you not? Do you have to ask permission for such a small thing? Or are you not man enough to make such decisions for yourself?” she added cannily.