Ruthless

by HelenKay Dimon

  The laugh still rumbled through her even after he stopped talking. She tried to think of one thing about him that turned her off and couldn’t come up with anything. From his looks to the emotional depth hinted at behind those eyes and in his words, she got sucked in.

  After all those months of keeping her life commitment free. All those other guys who stuck around but meant nothing. She finally found someone who challenged and excited her. She just wished the danger he walked into so willingly didn’t scare her so much.

  But that didn’t mean they couldn’t have a moment.

  She rested her cheek against his shoulder and inhaled the scent of soap on his skin. “Have I thanked you?”

  He shrugged. “That’s not necessary.”

  She knew he’d say that. Her head dropped, inching closer to his collarbone and that delicious spot, the dip where bones met muscle at the base of his neck. “Oh, Pax, ignoring my compliments makes it very hard to seduce you.”

  He leaned back and looked down at her, the smile softer but possibly deeper, and those eyes darkened and so appealing. “Is that what’s happening?”

  She wanted to say yes. She could have said yes and been telling the truth. The bed, the room, the heat bounced between them. It didn’t take a genius to figure out where they were headed.

  “Not quite, but I am trying to get you to kiss me as you promised earlier.” She lifted her head as she said it, making sure to drop her lips right below his.

  “You could just ask.”

  His whispered words blew across her lips. “I was kind of hoping I didn’t have to.

  “So we’re clear—” he rubbed his thumb along her bottom lip “—I want to almost every second of the day. I see you and my brain misfires. To protect you I should step back, maybe let Joel take over, but the idea of someone else being with you, touching you, is more than I can tolerate.”

  Her hand played with the scruff on the tip of his chin. “I wouldn’t let anyone else touch me.”

  “What about me?”

  “You can touch me as much as you want.” She whispered the response because it felt right to let the words dance softly off her tongue.

  After that his mouth dipped and his lips slipped over hers. Heat beat off her body and blood rushed to her head. Sensations walloped her—dizziness, elation. She craved his touch and wrapped her arms around his neck to pull him in closer.

  The light touch of a firm mouth morphed into a blinding kiss. The gentle brush of lips against lips gave way to a devouring need. His mouth slanted and his hands roamed. Palms pressed against her back as his lips traveled over hers.

  His body surrounded her, slipped over hers. Air rushed out of her and she couldn’t draw enough in, but she didn’t care.

  Before she knew what was happening, her back hit the mattress and his firm body hovered over hers. The kiss set off explosions throughout her body. Her skin heated and her nails dug into his shirt.

  One hand speared through his hair as his mouth pressed against hers and their tongues met. She recognized the pounding she heard as a kick up in their breathing. If her heart hammered any harder, she’d need an ambulance.

  The kiss went on forever but didn’t last nearly long enough. When he lifted his head for air, she balked and found his mouth again. His palm spread over her bare stomach, and her fingers inched under the band of his tee.

  She was ten seconds away from begging him to strip off her shirt when a door banged in the hallway.

  They both jumped. Pax jackknifed to a sitting position and she bounced on the bed, shifting just outside of his grip. The sudden separation left her skin cold and her mind reeling. She could actually feel her head spin as the wonderful, sexy tension dissipated.

  “What was that?” She nearly panted out the words.

  The bed creaked as Pax shifted his weight. “If I had to guess, I’d say Connor.”

  The anger in Pax’s voice had her blinking even as she tried to understand the sentence. “What?”

  “I think he’s warning me to use my head.”

  Sitting next to him, she slipped a hand over Pax’s back, loving the ripple of his muscles underneath, and then wrapped the other arm around his stomach. “He cares if we’re together?”

  Pax’s hand brushed up and down her bare arm. “Only if it means we’re not safe.”

  “Am I safe with you?”

  He faced her then, all traces of fury gone. “Always.”

  “Well, then—”

  “And to prove it I’m going to be a gentleman and leave.” He finished the vow with a quick kiss on her mouth.

  She wanted more but he’d pulled back and away. Not at all what she wanted. “We seem to be experiencing a communication issue.”

  He opened his mouth and closed it twice before finally getting a word out. “Not at all, but you need rest.”

  She was all for the chivalry thing, but this might be too much. “Really?”

  “But tomorrow...”

  The promise hung right there. She could see it in the soft shine of his eyes and quirk of his mouth. “Yes?”

  With one final kiss—this one lingered longer and held a touch of teasing—he stood up. “Get some sleep and you’ll find out.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Pax came downstairs just after six the next morning. The sun already beamed in the window by the front door, casting shadows across the hardwood entry floor. He took a sharp turn at the bottom of the stairs and went through the sliding doors into what he always thought of as the War Room. The news played on one of the television screens and a police scanner buzzed in the background.

  Joel already sat at the bank of computers, tapping on a keyboard and scanning the screens in front of him as he typed. A pile of papers from Sean’s box sat next to his left hand and more were scattered at his feet.

  Between his messed-up hair and rumpled clothing, Pax wondered if Joel bothered to sleep last night. It was quite possible he hadn’t moved from that chair since Pax left him six hours ago.

  Connor was a different story. Dress shirt and pants—check. Hair combed and watch in place—check. If the man slept Pax didn’t think it was for very long. He bounced up every morning looking as if he could walk into an important meeting at the Pentagon. And sometimes he did just that.

  Munching on toast and downing a cup of coffee, Connor walked around the table and grabbed the newspaper off the edge of Joel’s workstation. From the pot, it looked as if he carried his second or third cup.

  Caffeine fueled the man, and since he had Corcoran running with little trouble and just the right amount of oversight, Pax didn’t argue with the method.

  “You crash here?” he asked Joel.

  “I used the couch. Made more sense than running back and forth to my place.” Joel glanced away from the screen for more than his usual second. “Where did you sleep, or am I too young and impressionable to know?”

  “Feel free to shut up.”

  “Hey, if it’s easier for me to make it up in my head, say the word and I’ll start.”

  Sometimes the limited sleep and a prolonged lack of female influence had the conversation dipping into the junior-high level. Pax was grateful Kelsey stayed upstairs and missed this part. “Third floor. I was up there alone.”

  Connor snorted. “Not for lack of trying.”

  Which brought up another complaint. “Subtle and well-timed door slam, by the way. You’ll be great if you ever have teen girls.”

  “It’s my house.” Connor didn’t lift his head but he smiled.

  “Any reason for the angry-father routine other than the obvious explanation that you’re watching over me?”

  “You’re a big boy and your love life only matters to the extent it creeps into the office.”

  A slow anger snuck up on Pax
out of nowhere. “Which never happens.”

  “Until now,” Joel mumbled without turning around.

  “For the record, I’m not watching you. I’m watching over Kelsey.” Connor blew on his coffee and then gulped half of it down. “Is she still sleeping?”

  Thinking about her in bed, the mattress and those little shorts...yeah, that was the last place Pax wanted his mind wandering unchecked this morning. Not at work. Not now. Certainly not in front of his friends.

  He reached for a clean mug on the tray in the middle of the table. “I want her to get as much rest as possible. Yesterday was a fairly rotten day for us, and we’re trained. Supposedly we are accustomed to this stuff, but she isn’t. She’s a civilian and I don’t want to lose sight of that because she happens to have a fighter streak that rivals ours.”

  Connor dropped the newspaper on the table and poured Pax a mug before refilling his own. “Point taken.”

  “You conceded that argument kind of fast.” Which Pax knew from experience meant bad news would slam into him any second.

  “It’s early.” Connor made the dry statement before taking his seat at the head of the table.

  That put Joel and Connor at one end and Pax on the other. Something about the setup reminded him of being called to the principal’s office as a kid. Back then pulling a fire alarm struck him as a challenge. Thank goodness he’d gotten smarter as he aged or he’d likely be in a prison cell.

  “Since you’re down here instead of upstairs where it’s more interesting and clearly need to find something to do to keep your mind off the woman upstairs—” Connor turned the pages of the paper with an annoying slowness “—you may as well know we have a new problem.”

  And here we go.

  Joel spun his chair around to sit next to Connor and face Pax head-on. “A big problem.”

  “You really need to stop saying stuff like that.” Pax looked at the plate of doughnuts and muffins in front of him, wanting to ignore Joel’s newest issue.

  “Sorry, but it’s unavoidable,” Joel said, sounding the exact opposite of sorry.

  The crinkling sound of the paper as Connor refolded it ripped through Pax’s brain. If they wanted his attention, they had it. He dropped the doughnut and stood with his hands at his back and legs apart, braced for whatever was about to come.

  “Tell Pax before the nosiness kills him.” Connor put his hand over the top of the oversized mug Jana bought him one year as a joke and which he’d used ever since. A file slid down the table with a whoosh and landed exactly in front of Pax. Joel nodded, satisfaction obvious on his face that he managed to spin the papers that far and complete the landing. “Someone tapped your personnel file.”

  Pax’s hand stopped halfway to the file. “What?”

  “You’re been investigated, or at the very least checked out.” Joel put a second file in front of Connor, who didn’t even open it.

  For someone in Pax’s position, the news spelled disaster. He no longer worked in black ops under false names, with limited contacts and constant moving around. Those days had ended when he’d left government service and thrown in with Connor.

  But his current position required a certain level of confidentiality. People couldn’t know background information on him or where he lived, which at the moment, with his boat gone, amounted to right upstairs in the crash pad.

  That’s why having his boat ownership uncovered in his last active job proved such a mess. A mole related to the NCIS case had uncovered the title information, tracked him down and almost blown up Davis and Lara in the process. Finding out someone new had started excavating and bumped into his file ticked Pax off.

  “How exactly did that happen? This stuff is supposed to be sealed.” Pax scowled at Joel. “By you.”

  “I’m the temporary tech guy, but I see your point.”

  “It’s bad for all of us, Pax. Not just you.” Connor opened the cover of the file and then closed it again without reading a word. “We all have confidential files. Even if someone broke into the DOD database and found your name, that’s all the information the person could get.”

  Pax used to buy that. He knew Connor still did, but Pax had reason to be skeptical. “I have a thousand pieces of a blown-up boat and a bullet in my thigh that suggest otherwise.”

  The release of all private information, any information, required a top-secret clearance. Even then, the person checking had to be read into the specific program and have a need to know. Not just anyone could go tripping through. Their files were purposely hard to locate, and anyone who did wasn’t just stumbling around for fun. But that didn’t mean Pax trusted everything to work as planned.

  Joel stuttered a bit while glancing back and forth between Pax and Connor, but he got the words out. “Tracing the breach back to its source, someone did a facial recognition search on you and landed on your government file. That means the person had access to high-level recognition software.”

  Connor shook his head as if he were reasoning it all out. “We’re talking about someone with clearance and skills. Someone who could get in and out without raising a flag.”

  Before Pax could ask a million questions about his identity being compromised and what that would mean for the caseload, Joel spoke again, this time much louder until his voice carried over them all. “Before you both panic, though I think I’m a second too late, the person looking only got as far as your sealed file. The security held. Everything worked as it was supposed to.”

  The knot in Pax’s gut didn’t untie. “You’re sure?”

  “There was nothing to see, but DOD has a program that flashes us a warning whenever anyone comes checking up on us. Without that we wouldn’t even know. It’s an extra layer meant to make us feel more confident, not cause unnecessary panic.”

  No one had ever accused Pax of panic before. Before the anger could fester and explode, Pax tramped it back down again. He was willing to chalk the entire conversation up to Joel’s lack of sleep and Pax’s stupid injury that refused to heal.

  The leg made the others wary. He understood the concern, but he wasn’t the type to get injured and then hide in the house, and it was time for all of them to deal with that fact. “The worry feels necessary to me since it was my file.”

  Connor held out a hand to stop whatever had Joel leaning forward. “I think what Joel means is, we now have a warning system, though it is true we also have a problem because someone was checking on you and we can’t ignore that.”

  When the bad news came, it sure seemed to come in waves. Just once Pax wanted an easy case with a simple answer. This wasn’t it. He tried to imagine when “this” had happened. Never that he could recall.

  “Okay, so someone tripped this warning program, right?” Pax despised this part of the job. The constant scrutiny. The checking and rechecking. The reality that he forfeited privacy when he decided to serve his country.

  “Yes.” Joel reached behind him and dragged his wireless keyboard onto the conference table in front of him.

  It wasn’t like Joel to give a quick answer, not when it came to this stuff. The sudden lack of eye contact raised a red flag for Pax. “Can we trace it back to the actual person behind the facial recognition check?”

  “Not quite that far.” Joel tapped on the keys as lines of code scrolled across one of the screens behind him. “The guy has cover and knows how to go undetected.”

  “But you did find him. You detected him.”

  Joel glanced up with a smile. “Because I’m better and I will trace the file breach back to someone, though I think we all have an idea where this started.”

  Connor nodded. “Exactly. Ground zero is the coffee shop. You were there every day but you happened to be out on the street in front of it with Kelsey right before the file breach occurred.”

  With that Pax’s next breath wheezed out
of his lungs. “You’re not saying that she—”

  “He’s saying the person following her spied you out in the open, likely on the sidewalk, and decided to investigate.” Connor didn’t say “don’t be ridiculous,” but the vibe was there under his words.

  “By now they’ve seen the confidential warning on the file. It’s not subtle. See for yourself.” A few more taps and the monitor on the top right of the panel blinked to life.

  Joel and Connor spun around to look at the screen. Pax’s face, or a slightly younger version, with a black bar stamped Confidential across it filled the screen. “If the person looking has any sense or experience, he’ll know he stumbled onto something big.”

  “DOD was notified when we were,” Connor said.

  “Since when?” Pax wasn’t clear on when they’d added all these levels of security, but he was grateful for whatever redundancies and fail-safes were in place.

  Joel raised his hand. “That was the deal. I wanted the warning as a precaution. DOD only agreed to the install after I gave them the program to use with their other files. They also threw around allegations of ‘hacking’ but I ignored that.”

  “You forgot to mention that part to me,” Connor said.

  Joel shrugged. “Point is our contact should be calling Connor within the next fifteen minutes to report all of this. Connor here gets to act surprised.”

  “Why does everyone look as if their favorite puppy died?” Kelsey asked the question from the doorway to the main entry. She wore the same pajama shorts but hid most of them under an oversized sweatshirt pulled over the tiny sleep top.

  Pax had to fight the urge to carry her upstairs and finish the kissing they’d started last night. “Apparently someone has a photo of me and is doing a search through my work file.”

  She let her head fall back against the wood. “And you think this is related to Sean?”

  “Don’t you?”

  She huffed and shook her head. Did the whole men-are-so-clueless repertoire as she walked into the room and stopped next to Pax’s chair. “Not to state the obvious, but you have other cases. I’m guessing you have enemies.”