No Strings Attached

by Susan Andersen - No Strings Attached

  He stepped up and lowered his head until they were nose to nose, making her aware of the heat pumping off his still-naked chest. She had to inhale through her mouth to keep from smelling the devastating soap and water and warm, male skin scent of him. She jerked her chin up to show him he wasn’t getting to her.

  And looked straight into his angry, hot-eyed stare.

  “You and I have never been just a fling,” he said flatly. “We weren’t seven years ago, and we sure as shit aren’t now. I freely admit I tried to convince myself that’s all it was, but I was full of it. It wasn’t just sex for me—and, bebe, it wasn’t for you, either.”

  “You don’t talk for me,” she snapped. “Because I’m in it strictly for the sex.” Oh, God, Tasha, so much for your Honesty is the Best Policy credo. Even as she abhorred the fact that she was lying through her teeth, however, she stiffened her spine, looked him squarely in the eye and did it all over again. “And that is all I’m in it for.”

  His head reared back, and he slowly straightened. He looked her up and down. Inch by thorough inch.

  Then it was his turn to pin her in the infrared beam of an assessing gaze. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “You’re scared.”

  “What?” She took a large step back. Made a rude noise. “The hell you say.”

  He nodded sagely. “I know—blows me away, too. After everything I’ve learned about the way you built your pizzeria, from the ground up all by yourself, after watching you show your employees how to run a business with honesty and integrity and seeing what a kick-ass friend you are to the people you care for—damn, Tasha.” He shook his head. Looked at her as if she’d sorely disappointed him. “I gotta say, I never expected this. Because the last thing I ever thought I’d hear myself say about you is that you’re a coward.”

  She felt the condemnation like an electric current right down to the soles of her feet. But before she could assure herself that it was for the best, that it was better to let him find her a big disappointment, better to just let him go, for God’s sake, now rather than after he’d upended her entire life and she was in so deep that she would never recover, a loud knock sounded at the door.

  Tasha latched on to the interruption like a woman tossed a line as the cliff’s edge she stood on crumbled beneath her feet. But she kept her heartfelt gratitude to herself. Outwardly, she merely raised her eyebrows. “Are you expecting company?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “I suppose it could be Max or Jake, since neither is big on calling before they come over. But I don’t have plans to get together with them. So ignore it—whoever it is can go away. You and I aren’t done.”

  “Oh, we are definitely done.” Dear God, they so were—she didn’t think she could do this one moment longer without imploding.

  No. That type of thinking was for the pampered girls who’d grown up on the town’s mountain-and-water-view cliffs. Women like her sucked it up. No man brings me to my knees.

  Hiding her pain and confusion, she raised her eyebrows at him. “Go put on a shirt. I’ll let in whoever it is, then get out of your hair.” And without awaiting his response, she strode, head held high, to answer the door.

  Damn glad, she assured herself, for any excuse to call a halt to this whole frigging fiasco.

  * * *

  STEWING, LUC STALKED down to the bedroom end of the studio.

  But as his gaze swept the area in search of his ivory crewneck sweater, he had to admit that maybe Tasha had a legitimate reason for not trusting his declaration of love. Because, Jesus, Bradshaw, really? Maybe he’d be willing to stay?

  Not five minutes before they’d gotten into it, he had planned to tell her he was 99 percent sure he intended to stay in Razor Bay. But her reaction to his I love you had slapped him back a step. Had made him wonder: Did he want to stay if she didn’t want him?

  His immediate knee-jerk reaction had been a resounding hell, no! So, sue him, he’d backpedaled. Covered his ass—and in the process protected his pride.

  He located his sweater where he’d tossed it on the floor when Tash had dropped to her knees in front of him earlier. Swiftly erasing the image from his mind—particularly what she’d done in the wake of it—he swept the garment up, gave it a brisk snap to knock off the evergreen needles and leaf bits he must have tracked in from the deck, then pulled it on over his head and thrust his arms through the armholes.

  He’d straightened its fit and was pushing his sleeves up his forearms when he heard Tasha’s perplexed “Mr. Paulson?”

  He froze, then double-timed it back to the main part of the studio.

  “How did you know where to find me?” she asked the man in the doorway.

  “I wasn’t looking for you,” his SAC said with his usual impatient get-with-the-program delivery. “I’m looking for Agent Bradshaw.” He pushed past her into the apartment.

  Luc watched Tasha blink, then turn to look at the man she clearly knew in a different context. “How do you know Luc?”

  “He’s not a mister, Tash,” Luc informed her, coming up to stand by her side. “This is Special Agent in Charge Jeff Paulson. My SAC.”

  “Your...boss?” She looked between the two men, then concentrated her attention on him. “Not an embassy worker?” Her eyes narrowed. “Because he’s sure as hell the same man who bailed me out of jail seven years ago.” Getting right up in Luc’s face, she snapped, “You want to tell me how your relationship with this man relates to what happened to me in the Bahamas back then?”

  “Do you mind?” Paulson interrupted with brusque annoyance, clearly irritated at having his agenda usurped. But before he could add anything, she whirled to face him.

  “Yes,” she snapped. “I do—I very much mind. So why don’t you just shut up and sit down?”

  Delighted with her, Luc almost grinned. The girl had serious cojones; in the entire testosterone-driven DEA, he didn’t know a single person who talked to his SAC in that tone of voice.

  Paulson wasn’t similarly amused, if the way he bristled and drew himself militarily erect was anything to go by. “Do you have any idea who you’re dealing with, young lady?”

  “A goddamn liar, for starters, Mr. Paulson of the United States embassy. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you knew I was in jail all along. That you could have prevented that or, at the very least, gotten me out a helluva lot sooner than you did.” She whirled back on Luc. “How about you, hotshot? Did you know, too, that I was being held on trumped-up charges in that damn dark cell?”

  He opened his mouth to say, “Dammit, Tasha, we’ve been over this—you know I didn’t!” But Paulson, who wasn’t known for his forbearance at the best of times, stepped in front of him, facing her.

  “Look, lady,” he said. “Forget about that—it’s immaterial.”

  “Immaterial to whom?” she snapped. “It happens to be pretty damn relevant to me.”

  “To the United States government!” he roared. “It is unimportant and of no goddamn consequence to the government. We don’t have time for your little hissy fit. The important thing here is the job that needs to be done. And the fact that your government requires Agent Bradshaw’s expertise now.”

  Then, as though she had ceased to exist, he looked past her to Luc. “I need you. Wheels up in ten.”

  Luc watched the color drain from Tasha’s face, but before he could tell Paulson where he could stuff his wheels up, she tore her gaze from his SAC’s face and gave him a look that nailed his feet to the floor.

  It held not one iota of the warmth he associated with her.

  “Well,” she said. “This sounds painfully familiar. Second verse, same as the first.”

  Then, dismissing him with an about-face that would have done a soldier proud, she strode out into the hall through his still-open front door. She didn’t bother to close it behind her. A second later, before he could so much as draw breath to set his feet in gear, the exterior door opened, then clicked shut behind her.

  Softly, he clo
sed the door to the now-empty hallway. He sucked in a deep breath and exhaled it...then turned back to his SAC.

  And saw red when he saw the older man tapping his foot and consulting his watch. He closed the distance between them. “You lied to me.”

  Paulson shot another irritated glance at his watch. “We don’t have time for this.”

  “Make time.” If his voice was flat...well, it merely reflected the way he felt at this moment. Angry. Bitter. Betrayed. This was a conversation that was long overdue, and he was in no damn mood to allow the other man to continue dodging it. “You lied to me, and when I discovered that and wanted an explanation, you avoided me.”

  “Avoided you? Hell,” Paulson snapped, his voice frigid, “I was on a much-needed vacation.”

  “Excuse me if I don’t show you a whole lot of sympathy. Remember my last real vacation, sir? It was seven years ago—and you didn’t hesitate to interrupt it.”

  “You were needed. Just as you’re needed now.”

  When Luc merely looked at him, Paulson gave him an arrogant-eyed stare. “I’m here, aren’t I? I have many talents, but being a mind reader isn’t one of them. I had no way of knowing you wanted to talk to me until I got back.”

  “Oh, bullshit!” He was sick and tired of his SAC’s prevarications. It had become painfully evident that when it came to this man, the truth was an extremely stretchable commodity. “I told your admin I needed to talk to you, and I made it clear that it was urgent. You and I both know that Jackie is nothing if not efficient. So cut the crap.”

  The SAC blew out a put-upon breath. “I wanted to avoid this very conversation.”

  “Yeah? And which one is that, exactly? The one where I want to know why you lied to me back then and why you’re still lying to me now?”

  “No,” the older man snapped. “The one where you blow up a spotless thirteen-year career in the DEA over a goddamn piece of as—”

  Luc took the giant step forward that put him squarely in his SAC’s face. “You better think long and hard before you finish that thought, sir. I have never hit a member of my team in that spotless thirteen-year career you think I should be so proud of. But that’s damn well going to change if you keep going down this track.”

  He stepped back. “Tasha is not a piece of ass to me, and she never was,” he said flatly, then gave the special agent in charge a searching look. “But you knew that, didn’t you? You could tell by something in my manner when I tried to get back to her that night, and you didn’t like it, so you arranged to have her thrown in jail while you got me out of the country and back to the job that you deemed more important.”

  “It was more important!”

  “You don’t get to decide what’s important to me!” he snarled, losing his cool completely for the first, the only, time in his entire so-called unblemished career. “It’s my fucking life, not yours!”

  He might not have spoken, so thoroughly did Paulson ignore his statement. Instead his superior went back to the charge Luc had leveled at him. “I didn’t arrange for Riordan’s arrest,” he said dismissively. “That was the Bahamians’ decision. I simply took advantage of it for a day or two before I arranged for her release.” As if that settled the matter, he looked at his watch again. “Now, grab your bag. You’re needed in Juárez, Mexico.” He headed for the door.

  “No.”

  The other man halted, then slowly turned to face Luc, his eyes colder than an Arctic night. “What did you say?”

  “I said no. I’m not going to Juárez.”

  “You are treading a very fine line here, Bradshaw. You might want to think a moment before you tank your career. Because I’m about five minutes from firing your ass. I’d hate to do it, but—”

  Luc considered it for about twenty seconds. Did he want to shit-can up his career? For thirteen years he had loved the hell out of this job.

  He sure didn’t love the way he’d been lied to, though, or the dishonorable way that Tasha had been treated at the hands of his department. It made him question what other times he’d been given false intel. And looking deep inside himself, he realized that, when it came to this job, the thrill was gone.

  “I’m serious.” Paulson interrupted his lightning-fast rumination. “Like I said, I would really hate to fire you.”

  You can’t hate it all that much if you’re not even willing to give me a full minute to think about it.

  Luc smiled at the older man and guessed by the way Paulson took a step back that it didn’t come across real friendly. But his voice was mild when he said, “Then let me save you the trouble of having to do something you’d hate.”

  A satisfied smile began to spread across the SAC’s face, and Luc was more than happy to dispel it. “I tender my resignation, sir. My letter will be emailed to your office this afternoon.”

  “What? You can’t just quit!”

  “Yeah. I can.” Stepping past his heretofore special agent in charge, he opened the door—then looked Paulson in the eye.

  “I recommend you don’t let this hit you in the ass on your way out.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “COWARD, MY ASS,” Tasha snapped. Rain lashed the windows out in the restaurant, but she’d started the fire in the pizza oven with apple wood from the stack in the built-in on the south wall, and it was beginning to take the chill off the kitchen. Or maybe, considering she was hauling her final load of wood back to the oven to fill the small space beneath its floor, she was warming up because she hadn’t stopped moving since she’d come downstairs.

  But that wasn’t the point. “When a woman hears a whole lot of maybes regarding something that can affect her future,” she muttered, “she’s smart to show a little caution.”

  But you do understand that he never knew you were in that Bahamian jail until you told him, right?

  “Oh, shut up,” she mumbled to her mouthy conscience. But, yes, fine, she did know that. She might have questioned it in the heat of discovering that Luc’s boss had known damn well she’d been incarcerated. But the truth was, she knew Luc wasn’t the kind of man who would tell her one thing when something entirely different had actually taken place.

  She gave herself an impatient shake. Dammit, she didn’t have time to think about that right now. She needed to sauté the onions and garlic, then dice the fire-roasted tomatoes and pull together her spices so she could get her sauce on. She liked to simmer it for a nice long while before the lunch crowd arrived.

  Because while that trade tended to be light this time of year, Fridays were always busier than the other weekdays. And of course the kids would start pouring into Bella T’s as soon as the school bus rolled into town.

  Thoughts of the teens almost made her smile. The kids that frequented Bella T’s were generally interesting, and Tiffany had been sharing the after-school-rush talk in the dining room with her. These days it was all about who was going to wear what for Halloween next week. She’d gotten a kick all this week out of hearing about the various costumes they were putting together. Teenagers could be wicked inventive.

  Today, however—well, she wished she could feel more enthused, but she simply couldn’t drum up the interest. She just felt...numb inside. Or maybe sad. Or pissed off.

  She preferred the latter to the neediness of the first two options. But regardless what specific emotion was chewing at her craw, she’d get over it. Hell, she’d get over herself. Just give her a few hours. Or a day or so.

  Or a millennium.

  The sauce, Riordan. Forget everything else and just focus on the sauce.

  She was adding kosher salt, basil and oregano to her stockpot when Jeremy let himself in the back door a short while later.

  “Hey,” he said and shook like a wet dog before shedding his coat and tossing it on a hook above the wood box. “It smells great in here.” He flashed her a big grin. “Okay, it always smells good in here. But your sauce when it’s just made? That’s extra killer on a day like today.”

  The smile she mustered up
was several kilowatts shy of her usual wattage, and to direct the teen’s attention away from that fact, she tilted her chin toward the work table Jeremy had co-opted as his own. She’d piled vegetables on it next to the precariously stacked lidded pots they used to keep the toppings fresh between use. “You wanna get started on the slice and dice?”

  A slight frown puckered his brow as he studied her, but all he said was “Sure.”

  “Excellent.” Seeing the sauce finally begin to produce bubbles that popped on the surface, she gave it a good stir, eased down the gas flame beneath the stockpot and went back to thinking about Luc as she reached for a lid. Her fingers had barely touched its cool stainless curve when her hand made a weird spasmodic movement.

  And instead of picking it up to seat the lid atop the pot, she knocked it to the floor.

  “Son of a fucking bitch!” She stared at it as it clanged off the leg of her workstation and skittered across the floor. It was all she could do not to chase the damn thing down to give it an enraged kick.

  “Whoa!” Jeremy gave her a concerned look, and she wanted to kick him, too.

  No! No, of course she didn’t want to harm a great kid whose only crime was to look at her sideways.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she lied between clenched teeth. “I’m dandy.”

  He simply stared at her, and she shifted uncomfortably. “Okay, I’m not sure what I am, exactly,” she admitted. “But I do know that I don’t wanna talk about it right now, all right?”

  “Sure. But if you change your mind...” Despite trailing off without completing his sentence, the way he studied her for another interminable moment said loud and clear that he would listen. When she didn’t reply, however, he finally turned back to his chore.

  She picked up the lid, washed it off and placed it carefully atop the pot. Then, after looking around to see what needed doing next and realizing it was the sausage, she decided she didn’t trust herself to cook something that would produce hot grease. Face it, her head wasn’t 100 percent in the game today.